Page 76 of The Unkindest Tide

“Except, again, he involved her children. Can you honestly tell me you’d forgive any Cait Sidhe who endangered our kids in an ordinary dominance challenge?”

Tybalt froze. For a long moment, he stared at me, eyes wide and strangely, painfully hopeful. Finally, he asked, in a small voice, “You would consider having children with me?”

I managed, barely, to suppress my wince. It helped that I still felt shaky from blood loss, which made most of my responses a little sluggish. “I don’t think this is the time for that conversation, do you?”

“No. No, of course not. I simply . . .” He kept looking at me, hope still bright and visible in his eyes. “I never thought you would want that with me.”

We were in an unstable Court of Cats. An enraged Merrow was stalking the Duchy of Ships, and since we still didn’t know his exact motives, we had no way of knowing whether he was going to try taking his fury out on our friends and loved ones. Somewhere on the nearby sea, two Firstborn were deciding whether or not they were going to come back and help us. This wasn’t just not the time for a serious talk about our relationship, this was practically the textbook definition of the worst time possible.

But there’d been a time, not that long ago, when I’d been afraid I was losing Tybalt forever, thanks to my mother’s unwanted interference in our relationship. Faerie doesn’t have anything as sensible as a modern conception of therapy; every inch of ground Tybalt had gained back, he’d gained by leaning on his friends and trusting that we were telling him the truth when we said that we still loved him, treasured him, and wanted him to be a part of our lives. And yeah, a lot of that heavy lifting fell to me, as the woman who was planning to marry him. Whether or not this was a good time didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that he was vulnerable, and had been for quite some time.

What mattered was that he was mine.

“Not right this second, no,” I said. “But once we’re married? Once Raj is the King of Dreaming Cats, and you’re free to be my husband and figure out what you want to do with your days? I think yeah. Yeah, I do. If you do.”

This was not the time or the place for this conversation. But Tybalt’s face lit up, suddenly relieved, relaxed, rejoicing, and I knew there had never been a better time, or a better place, for any of this.

“They’ll be amazing,” he said. “You’ll see. Any child of ours could be nothing less.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “Now can we focus? Please?”

“My apologies.” Tybalt cleared his throat, getting himself back on task. “So you’re posing the theory that Torin acted, not because he desired Saltmist, or to undermine his sister, but because he wished to . . . what?”

“Distract us,” I said. “Which I guess means keep us from focusing on the Selkies. But why would someone from the Undersea want us not to focus on the Selkies? They’re a security risk. They always have been. They have human friends, human family members, their skins can be stolen—and they’re not like Swanmays or Raven-maids. If someone puts on a Selkie skin, they change. That’s a huge gap in our ability to stay secret.”

“Rayseline stole a Selkie skin. She didn’t change.”

“No one ever said she used it. If she had . . . it was a mask for her, but she never asked it for transformation.”

“She infiltrated Saltmist.”

“There are other ways of breathing water.”

Raven-maids and Raven-men transform using feathered cloaks. They’re born with them, coming into the world with bands of pinfeathers set into a strip of leather tied somewhere around their bodies. They can be caught like any other skinshifter, and if someone takes their cloak away—in Jazz’s case, the cloak is more of a hair ornament, but the concept holds—they’re functionally mostly human until they get it back. The keyword there is “mostly.” A Raven without a cloak is still immortal. They won’t age or die of natural causes. They don’t need fairy ointment to see the traceries of Faerie moving around them. They can handle iron, and I’ve always assumed that’s both why they exist, and why they’re largely confined to the Oversky: when a piece of iron finds its way into the Cloud Kingdoms, they need someone who can get rid of it. Having people who can put their fae natures on and off like a, well, cloak of feathers . . . that’s useful.

But if a human or a changeling found a Raven-maid’s cloak and tied it in their own hair or slung it around their own shoulders, they wouldn’t become fae. They’d just be thieves and earn the undying enmity of the skies. Selkies worked differently, because Selkies hadn’t occurred naturally. They’d been created. The rules weren’t the same.

They were a security risk. What Rayseline had done to get into Saltmist proved that. I couldn’t imagine any pureblood in a position of power looking at them and thinking things were fine as they were. Killing them had been out of the question in the beginning, because they belonged to the Luidaeg, and then as that information had been lost or forcibly forgotten, the Selkies had been incorporated, rightly or wrongly, into the Law. But now the Luidaeg was ready to clean up her own mess, and someone was trying to stop us by creating complication after complication to make it impossible to follow through.

“Why would anyone object to bringing back the Roane?” I asked.

Tybalt sat upright, eyes widening. Then, slowly, he said, “I’ve met Roane before. They’re rare, but not extinct, and I had some dealings with the Undersea when I was younger. The first I ever met was a woman named Naia, who came to the Court of Londinium to warn the populace of a terrible fire that was to come. She could see no way for it to be turned aside, and the potential loss of life was great enough that she was willing to leave the Undersea to bring us a warning we couldn’t easily ignore.”

“Like Mary,” I said. “The Roane woman who came to see me when the Lorden boys were missing. The one who worked for Dianda and Patrick.” A stab of guilt lanced through me. I hadn’t even thought to look for Mary when I’d been in Saltmist. All my attention had been focused on finding Peter.

“It’s said the Roane could foresee everything except their own destruction; that death was the one true mystery the world had to offer them,” said Tybalt. “We came here so that you and the Luidaeg could return them to the seas in the numbers they once knew.”

I stared at him in slow-dawning horror, the pieces of the puzzle slotting neatly into place around me. “Someone wants to make sure the Roane don’t come back.”

He nodded. “I can see no other answer. Can you?”

“Nope.” I stood. “Come on. Let’s go ruin someone’s day.”

“Do you know whose?” he asked.

“I’m pretty sure I’ll figure it out when people start trying to kill me. Again.”

Tybalt rolled his eyes, but took my hands, and we stepped together into shadows.