Page 7 of The Unkindest Tide

“Hi, yourself,” she said, pushing her plate aside. “Come give me a hug before shit gets serious. You haven’t been visiting enough recently.”

“Sorry,” he said, moving to do as he was told. “Between my lessons and Toby’s hero stuff and hanging out with Dean, there hasn’t been time for visiting old people.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. If I turned, I knew I’d see Dean Lorden, absolutely horrified by the flippant way his boyfriend was talking to the Luidaeg.

If I’m comfortable with her, Quentin adores her. She was never his childhood monster. For him, she’s always been a friend of the family, someone who helps as much as her admittedly restrictive geasa allow. That’s my fault. I’m the one who introduced them, however accidentally, and also the one who kept dragging him into her presence. But it’s been good for both of them, and I’m not sorry. There will always be a thin edge of fear in my dealings with the Luidaeg. Quentin doesn’t have that. With Quentin, she can almost be normal.

Dean, on the other hand, grew up in the Undersea, where the stories of the Luidaeg are less “scary sea witch” and more “unstoppable force of nature.” She’s the last of the oceanic Firstborn known to be alive and active, and she hasn’t been a part of the Undersea in centuries, not since Evening Winterrose arranged for the slaughter of the Roane. They were the Luidaeg’s descendant race. She still hasn’t recovered from their loss.

Like I said earlier, there’s a lot of history around here, and sometimes it doesn’t summarize very well.

The Luidaeg ruffled Quentin’s hair before letting him go. “This old person could cause a tsunami to take out this entire city if she feels neglected enough, so have some respect,” she said.

“The worst thing about that sentence is that it’s true,” I said dryly. The Luidaeg never lies. She can’t. She can talk around things, she can deflect, she can even try answering a question that hasn’t actually been asked, but she can’t lie. I took a quick look around, noting Dean in the doorway and Raj a few feet away, watching the Luidaeg with unblinking eyes. I turned back to her. “We’re all here. What do you want?”

“Are you sure?” She gestured to her nachos. “I could eat the rest of these. We could talk about things. The weather, maybe. I understand some people like to talk about the weather.”

“Luidaeg.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You didn’t come here to eat nachos. Please. What’s going on?”

“It’s time. That’s what’s going on.” She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes and tilting her face toward the ceiling, like this would be easier if she didn’t have to look at us while she explained it. “I made a promise—an ultimatum, more like—and now I need to keep it.”

My stomach sank. I knew exactly what she was talking about, and yet I still wanted to hear her say it. Maybe if she said it, it would turn out to be something different. Maybe.

Probably not.

“What do you mean?” I asked, and was proud when my voice didn’t shake.

The Luidaeg waved a hand, like she was brushing away a scrap of cobweb. “We have to deal with the Selkies. Almost three years ago, I told Elizabeth Ryan she had a year to notify the clans, and after that, their bill would come due. I didn’t specify a date. I could have, I suppose, but if I had, I would have needed to stick to it or pay the price, and honestly, I didn’t feel like taking that sort of risk.”

“What bill?” asked Quentin. He glanced at me, confusion and curiosity in his face. “I wasn’t there when you went to see the Selkies, remember? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

My stomach sank even lower. “Luidaeg . . .”

“No. They need to know, because everyone in this room is going to be touched by this, whether or not they’re directly involved.” She sat up and opened her eyes, rising from her seat so she could turn and address all of us at the same time.

Her eyes had shifted colors while they were closed, going from deep blue to pure black, a darkness that filled them completely from side to side. She had no pupils, no irises, no sclera. Just drowning darkness, as deep and pitiless as the sea itself.

“I am Antigone of Albany, known as the Luidaeg, the sea witch, and by other names, as they’ve suited those who would speak of me,” she said. “I am the daughter of Maeve and the mother of the Roane, who kept the storms, who saw the future in the tangled tides. They were beautiful, my children, and they were innocent of the great, slow, terrible war fought between my siblings and I, for we had sworn, all of us, to keep it between ourselves. We hated, how we hated, but even in our hatred, we knew this was not their fight.”

She paused, tilting her face toward the ceiling as she took a deep breath. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, if no less formal.

“People wonder sometimes why my father, who was never fond of dictating our lives and ways, set down the Law. He thought, you see, even until the day he left us, that we’d eventually find our way to peace without intervention, as he’d done before us. He was an . . . idealistic man, my father, and I hope he still is, because that’s a rare gift. Even rare gifts can cause pain, when improperly used. Some of my brothers and sisters had children with teeth and claws, who were equipped to defend themselves. Others had children who could melt into the water or fade into the sky. And I had the Roane, and they were sweet, and kind, and even seeing the future couldn’t convince them to be anything else. My father made the Law to protect the Roane and others like them from the cruel hands of Titania’s brood, who would have slain all the children of Maeve purely to make their mother smile.”

Another pause. She kept staring at the ceiling. A single tear escaped her eye, running down her cheek. It left a shimmering trail behind it, gleaming like mother-of-pearl. “One of my sisters hated me for reasons that had nothing to do with my children, and she hated my children because they saw the future and refused to share it with her. So one night, she put knives in the hands of people who saw Faerie as a land to plunder, and she told those people that if they slaughtered the Roane, they would find the secrets of immortality in the flensed skins of my sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, all the way down to the babes in their cradles. My sister looked at my descendants and saw them as sacrifices. And then she saw them sacrificed. Not all, but enough. Enough to take a thriving race to near extinction in a single night. Enough to break my heart forever.”

Dean was the first of the boys to realize what the slaughter of the Roane actually meant. He swayed in the doorway, horror and sudden nausea written in the lines of his face. Good. The others would get there, and they were good boys; they had a strong sense of right and wrong. I had faith that their reactions would mirror his.

“The children of the killers woke up the next morning—they woke up, when my children were never going to wake up again, when I was still ignorant of what had happened—and found their parents dripping with blood, wearing raw, freshly-flensed sealskins around their necks and shouting about immortality. They were going to live forever, they said. They were going to be powerful and unstoppable, just like the fae.” The Luidaeg’s lips curved in a cynical expression that could have been a smile, maybe, in another life, on another face. On her, it was the betrayed look of someone infinitely younger, infinitely softer, than the sea witch we knew and somewhat reluctantly loved.

“I guess it never occurred to them that if the fae were all that powerful and unstoppable, their knives wouldn’t have been enough to slit my children’s throats.” She shrugged, almost shuddered, like she was shaking the memory away. “The children of those killers rose up against their parents, because they knew that when I heard what had happened, my wrath would be swift and absolute. They were thinking of their children. They killed their parents to try to appease me, so that some of them might be spared.”

“Were they?” asked Quentin. His voice was very small, and very young. He sounded like the dandelion-haired boy he’d been when we first met, and not the almost-man that he’d grown into since then.

The Luidaeg lowered her head and looked at him, and there was kindness in her eyes that would have shocked most of Faerie. Not for the first time, I marveled at how such a legendary monster had become such an integral part of our strange and broken family.

“Yes, and no,” she said. “I’m not my sister. I don’t kill children. If we handed down the sins of the parents without consideration for circumstances, we’d never have parents or children again, because all the babies would be dead in their cradles, unable to learn. But I punished them. I had to. For the sake of the Roane who were still alive, for the sake of all the other descendants of Maeve . . . and yes, for the sake of my own children, whose bloodied bodies sank to the bottom of the sea to be rocked to their rest before I could get to them.”

“The Selkies,” said Raj.