Page 77 of The Unkindest Tide

NINETEEN

THE COURTYARD WHERE we’d left our friends, allies, and the body of Isla Chase was in chaos. Cephali clung to the walls, waving spears and tridents in a display that was more threat than actual aggression, while Torin’s guard threw themselves against the closed gates. The man himself was nowhere to be seen. Tybalt and I stepped out of the shadows between two of the small residence structures and stopped, pausing a moment to take it all in.

“I swear on Oberon’s ass, I can’t leave you people alone for five minutes,” I said, not making any effort to keep my voice down.

Quentin, who had been shoving a trident between the bars of the gate, turned at the sound of my voice. There was a shallow cut down his left cheek, deep enough to bleed, but probably not deep enough to scar. “Toby! Where the hell have you been?” There was a beat before he added, less confidently, “Why are you covered in blood again?”

“Long story. Get away from that gate before you get hurt.” I strode forward. “Seriously, you cut your face? What’s Dean going to think of that? Where is Dean?” Only one Lorden was in evidence, Patrick, who was throwing small glass bulbs filled with violently yellow liquid over the gate and into the scrum on the other side. He was grinning nastily as he did it, and I was quite sure I didn’t want to ask what those bulbs contained. Ever.

“Poppy and Dean hauled Peter into one of the apartments and locked the door,” said Quentin. “We were letting him fight at first, only it turns out he’s skinny enough to fit between the bars, and after he nearly got grabbed, twice, we decided it was better if we kept him out of reach.”

“Good thinking.” I looked around again. Marcia was filling glass bulbs—that explained where Patrick was getting his armaments—and René had a vicious-looking wooden sword with jagged thorns running along its cutting edge. Nolan had produced a longbow from somewhere and was standing atop a table taking carefully nonfatal aim, with the air of someone who had all the time in the world to shoot the people who had shown the bad sense to disrupt his evening.

Cassandra, thankfully, was cowering on the other side of Nolan—at least until she saw me. Then, her eyes widened and she rushed from her hiding place to grab hold of my arm, jerking hard enough that it nearly knocked me over.

“Aunt Birdie! You have to stop them! You have to stop them before they do something that can’t be taken back!”

None of the attackers had ranged weapons. The only ones who’d made it over the gate were the Cephali, and they were less “fighting” and more “going through the paces of a stage combat improv class.” The Cephali in Torin’s service were clearly less than thrilled about their so-called leader. I frowned.

“What are you talking about, Cass? I mean, there’s reason to worry about Nolan putting an arrow in someone’s throat, but I’m pretty sure this is a skirmish of war right now, so he’s not going to get in too much trouble if he does.” The Undersea made the rules. We were just cheerfully exploiting them for our own ends.

Cassandra shook her head, so hard her hair whipped around her cheeks. “No, no, no. Not our people—theirs. They’re going to do something they can’t undo, and you’re going to lose your temper, and things are going to get bad when that happens. Please, you have to stop them before it’s too late.”

I hesitated. This didn’t seem like a good time to try consoling my adopted niece. But the fight was going on with or without me, and sometimes the best path through a battle is the one that doesn’t seem available. “Honey, what do you know? Did someone tell you something?”

“I—” Cassandra hesitated. Then, in a rush, she said, “I can read the future in the movement of air sometimes. I’m an aeromancer. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I really am, but Karen said not to, and she’s always been better at seeing the clear paths than I am, I’m sorry.”

Suddenly, Arden’s interest in Cassandra made a lot more sense, and I was a lot unhappier with it. “Cassie . . . are you saying you’re a soothsayer?”

“Yes.” She nodded firmly. “I am. Not the best, but I am. That’s why I knew I had to convince the Queen to send me on this trip, with or without Nolan. Bringing back the Roane changes things. It makes the future easier to see, but it also makes it more malleable. There are people who don’t want that to happen.”

“What about you?”

A glass bottle smashed against the dock; Patrick cheered. Cassandra grimaced. “I don’t think it’s mine to decide, and this has been coming for a long, long time. This is supposed to happen. Things have been broken for hundreds of years, Auntie Birdie, and the air moves too fast for me to see how the fixing ends, but I know we’re supposed to be fixing things. Nothing can be broken forever and stay stable. We have to move through this. But you, you have to stop them before they go too far.”

“Who is ‘them,’ honey?”

A rousing cheer rose from Torin’s guards. A chill swept over me, even before I heard the small, familiar voice whimpering under the shouts and jeers of the attackers.

“Sir Daye, it seems I have something that belongs to you.”

Torin’s voice was hectoring, smug. As far as he was concerned, he’d already won. The second he’d acquired the target of his little plan, he’d won.

I turned.

Torin was none the worse for wear from his encounter with Tybalt. There were a few scratches on his cheek, but he stood as tall and proud as ever, giving no sign that his injuries were slowing him down. The light from the hanging lamps around the courtyard’s walls glittered off the glass beads stitched to the breast of his doublet, a mocking mimicry of the way the light had glittered off Quentin’s scales when we’d been in the water.

One of the strands of beads had snapped down the middle. I looked at the broken, glittering line, and I finally understood. I understood everything.

He hadn’t returned alone. A hulking Cephali stood beside him, skin flashing warning bands of blue and orange. The Cephali was holding Gillian’s arms behind her back with two of his tentacles, twining them around her arms so there was no chance for her to break away. Not that she wasn’t trying. My girl was thrashing as hard as she could, a snarl on her face that I recognized all too well from my own mirror. She had never looked so much like my daughter.

She saw me and shouted, “Toby! Get these fuckers off me!”

The sound of her voice, of my name, was enough to break the paralysis that had settled over me. I strode toward the gate, aware that I was a blood-drenched nightmare of a woman and fully prepared to use it to my own advantage. I didn’t bother stopping outside of spearing range. Anyone who stuck one of their little toys into me was going to live to regret it.

“It’s obvious you have her because you think you can use her,” I snarled, eyes on Torin. “You’re wrong. Let her go.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It seems to me that she’s been plenty useful already. You’re not fighting off my people anymore, when they were only here to collect what was mine by right. What will you give me for the girl, Sir Daye? Your own hand? Your own head? Or maybe the proof of my sister’s degeneracy? Give me the boys, and I’ll return your Selkie brat.”