Page 69 of The Unkindest Tide

As if in answer to my thoughts, the water grew colder around me, like it wanted me to remember that this was not my natural environment. My gills stung in my throat, feeling less like a part of my anatomy and more like an injury that was somehow refusing to heal. I swam faster, conscious of the need not to outpace my guides, but equally conscious of the fact that if I reverted to my normal shape while I was submerged, I could be in a whole new world of trouble.

Please, Maeve, I don’t ask for much, but I’ve heard your daughter call on you: please, let me reach the nets, I thought.

Ships began appearing in the water up ahead, some large and stately, ready to take on cargos of both material and passengers, others small and swift and low to the water. I could pull myself into one of those smaller ships, if I really needed to. I might, depending on what happened next. I could see the nets René had mentioned now, long systems of ropes and pulleys helping the individual fishermen bring their catches up to the level of the dock itself. Taking a deep breath, I ducked under the water and swam as fast as I could toward my goal.

I was almost there when the spell wore off.

It began with a tingling at the tips of my flukes, spreading through my scales until, with a wrenching, shuddering sensation that was distressingly akin to being sliced in half, my tail split in two, transforming back into legs. I kept kicking, less effectively now. My gills sealed over and my lungs began burning, alerting me in no uncertain terms to the fact that they desperately wanted air. I kept swimming. It was all I could do.

The Selkie skin draped over my arm seemed to sing even louder now, promising hope, promising harbor, promising—most importantly of all—freedom from the threat of drowning. All I had to do was put it on and the burning would stop. All I had to do was put it on and the water would welcome me as a friend and confidant, as a part of its greater self, and all my troubles would go away.

That’s not true, I thought fiercely, still swimming. The water was colder now that I had a less maritime metabolism. It was biting into my skin, seeming to burrow all the way down into my bones. It was getting harder to keep thrashing. My troubles wouldn’t go away. I’d just wind up with all new troubles.

But oh, it was tempting. I wouldn’t have to remake the Roane and destroy Selkie culture for the Luidaeg’s sake: I wouldn’t be able to. She’d have to talk August around, and good luck with that, since Mom was currently protecting her older daughter like she’d never been willing to protect me. I could learn the things that Selkies knew. People would stop asking me to be a hero, because I wouldn’t be Oberon’s anymore. Gillian and I would be the same. For the first time in her life, she’d have a mother who was actually exactly like she was, a mother who wouldn’t keep disappearing.

Of course, I’d need to break that nasty habit I had of getting covered in blood every time I turned around, but I’d gone years with nothing more than a few flesh wounds. It was only since I’d come back from the pond that I’d developed a tendency to ruin my favorite jeans with bloodstains. I could do better. I could be better.

The sealskin was getting better at tempting me. I shoved those brutally appealing thoughts away and kept swimming. What’s an ocean but a bigger pond? No, thank you. I was not choosing to run away from my responsibilities only to return to a larger version of the prison I’d fought so hard to escape.

My lungs were still burning and I knew I was going to take an involuntary breath soon. I started to turn toward the surface, and stopped as my flailing hand struck something rough and fibrous. The net. I’d reached the net.

Slinging the sealskin over my arm, where it continued to murmur wordless enticements to me, I put my fingers through the netting and began pulling myself up, hand over hand. Fish thronged inside the net, packed together until they could barely do more than twitch and flop. The feeling of their cold, scaled sides against my skin almost made me lose my grip in disgust. I pushed the feeling aside and kept climbing.

My head broke the surface and I took a huge, greedy gulp of air, filling my lungs with what felt like equal parts oxygen and seafoam. I coughed and wheezed, trying to clear the spray out of my throat as I climbed. Somewhere above me, a voice shouted dismay and displeasure at my ascent. I ignored it and kept climbing. What were they going to do, stab me when I reached the dock? Fine. Whatever. I’ve been stabbed before, by better people than some confused deckhand who doesn’t know what to do with a half-drowned hero.

Tybalt, Quentin, and René were waiting at the top of the net. René was engaged in a vigorous argument with several of the people who’d been working the pulley, shouting at them in a dizzying mixture of French and English that I couldn’t even dream of following. Not that I would have had the chance. Tybalt grabbed me as soon as my feet were on the dock, pulling me into a tight, unyielding embrace.

“Never, never do that to me again,” he hissed, lips up against my ear, creating a shell of semi-privacy for the two of us to occupy. “Bleed if you must. I know you’ll recover from that.”

“I recover from drowning, too,” I protested, but didn’t pull away or ask him to let go. He was warm and dry—or had been dry, before he’d put his hands on me—and most of all, solid. Real.

I hadn’t realized how long I’d gone without an anchor before I’d found one. Life was so much easier when I wasn’t constantly afraid that I was on the verge of drifting away.

“Do you recover from being swept out to sea, gnawn upon by sharks, drowned again, trapped in a discarded fishing net, and prisoned at the bottom of the ocean for a hundred years? Because even if you do, I fear my heart could not.” He thrust me out to arm’s length. His pupils had expanded to their widest point, wiping away all but the thinnest sliver of green. “Do not do this to me again, October. Do not. I can lose . . . so many things. I can’t lose you. I would, unquestionably, fail to survive it.”

Silence fell. I turned to see René and the dockhands staring at us. Quentin, for his part, had rolled his eyes skyward so hard that I suspected there was a good chance they were going to roll clean out of his head.

“Is he always like that?” asked René.

I nodded. “Most of the time. Sometimes he gets flowery and overblown, but I don’t mind. It’s sort of soothing at this point, you know?”

“Ostie,” muttered René. “They should offer the man in shops to inspire our husbands to be better.”

“Please, no,” said Quentin. “I’ll jump into the ocean if we start acquiring extra Tybalts.”

“You don’t appreciate the finer things in life,” said Tybalt.

“I appreciate not watching five of you fight over one of Toby,” Quentin countered.

That was an image worth revisiting later, and at length. Right now, however . . . “I have Isla’s skin,” I said. It seemed to shiver in my hands, like it was protesting the lost opportunity to sway me toward the sea. I shuddered, a bigger motion that made its small twitches easier to dismiss as my own bone-deep chill. I can heal from practically anything. I still get cold.

René’s face immediately sobered. He took a step toward me, one hand partially outstretched. He hesitated then, looking at my face. “May I?” he asked.

“I’d prefer it if you did, as long as you understand that if you try to run, Tybalt will chase you down and make you stop,” I said. “It keeps talking to me. Do Selkie skins always talk?”

Tybalt grinned, putting teeth—literally—behind my threat.

René cast an anxious glance at the dockhands, who were working the pulley, ostentatiously ignoring us. He looked back to me. “Talk, no,” he said, gently taking the skin from my hands. “Some can form words, but most can’t at this point. They’re worn smooth, like driftglass, like stones in the sea. The elders say their elders could converse with the spirits of their skins, but if that’s true, and not just some foolish fancy, that time passed very long ago. Before my mother’s mother’s mother swam the seas.”