Page 87 of The Unkindest Tide

For a long, seemingly endless moment, the Luidaeg was silent. I held my breath, counting the seconds. If I hit twenty, I thought it might be a good idea to run. The sea witch might extend me more patience than she did most, but it wasn’t limitless, and when it evaporated, I was going to be left high and dry and stranded on the cliffs of her regard.

Finally, in a low voice, she asked, “What would you have me do?”

And I told her.

TWENTY-THREE

WE BEGAN WITH ISLA’S skin. She’d died without formally passing it along: currently, technically, it had no owner, not even René, who hadn’t been allowed to take it. Marcia carried it into Pete’s receiving room, which seemed larger and eerier without its gathered crowds. Every sound we made echoed up into the rafters, bouncing back and forth between walls and windows until it became the insensate roaring of the sea, stripped of meaning and nuance.

Pete was there when the rest of us arrived, standing behind a vast round table that looked like it might have started life as a tall ship’s lookout, only to be pulled down from the mast and pressed into a different sort of service. She was back in her pirate’s attire, hat perched on her head, weight resting on her fingertips as she leaned against the table’s surface. She looked at us gravely, studying each of us in turn, before she settled on the Luidaeg, back in white samite, her hair a tempest of black curls that sometimes seemed to flash silver, like they mirrored the ceaseless swirl of an angry sea.

“Annie,” Pete said, voice barely louder than a sigh. “What stars do you steer by?”

The Luidaeg somehow mustered a smile. “They haven’t bound me or tricked me or anything of the sort, I swear. They just convinced me to try another way.”

“Another way.” Pete gave the rest of us a dubious look. “Centuries I spent asking you to find a way to talk yourself out of doing this, and these people, these little, temporary people,” her eyes flicked over me and Marcia on the word “temporary,” like it was the kindest way she could find to remind the Luidaeg that we were mortal, “managed to do it in less than a week’s time? I’m dubious. You’ll forgive me for that.”

“I’ve forgiven you for worse,” said the Luidaeg. “Please, Amphitrite. Because you’re my sister, and my friend, and because I didn’t argue when I let you exile me, help me now. Help me find out whether this is the way forward, or only another anchor to weigh me down.”

“You know what it’ll cost if you fail.”

The Luidaeg nodded. “I do. I don’t know why, Dad help me, but I’ve decided it might be worth it. To know. To know whether I’m about to make myself into the monster they’ve all wanted me to become.”

Pete nodded, expression grave. Marcia stepped forward, putting the willow basket on the table. Its contents sloshed faintly, and my stomach lurched. This was a dead creature’s hide, a skin passed who knew how many times over, and there was no blood left in it. This kind of death existed away from and outside of my sphere as one of the Dóchas Sidhe—but it was also exactly the sort of thing Faerie had made my mother—and by extension, me—to do. It was a spell, tangled and ancient and intricate as anything. Age couldn’t change its essential nature.

Marcia started to step back. The Luidaeg’s hand lashed out, quick as a striking snake, and latched around Marcia’s wrist. Marcia squeaked, and froze.

“Weren’t you tempted?” asked the Luidaeg. “A Selkie’s skin, no witnesses, and all the sea standing ready to welcome you home. I’ve seen the way you stand in the shallows, looking toward the deeps. Weren’t you tempted?”

“No,” said Marcia. She met the Luidaeg’s eyes and didn’t flinch. “I have other paths to walk, and other roads to run. I can’t do them wrapped in a sealskin that isn’t mine. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the woman who died, and for the people who died before her, all the way back to the boy who died to make the skin in the first place. But me being sorry doesn’t give me the right to take what isn’t mine.”

“Ah,” breathed the Luidaeg. She let go of Marcia’s wrist. Marcia danced back, out of her grasp. The Luidaeg didn’t seem to notice. She was busy opening the basket, sliding her hands into the oil it contained, and pulling out the sealskin I’d found tangled in the kelp beneath the Duchy of Ships.

“His name was Beathan,” she said. “He was my grandson. He was strong and clever and bold and not always good about making the right choices. Most of the futures he saw had to do with fishing. He kept his family fed. He was a good provider. He would . . . I’m sure he’d rather be alive right now than be a part of what we’re to do here, but he would approve of this, I think, if he were asked. He would understand that he was saving people.”

She pulled the skin fully out of the basket and stretched it out across the table, where it clung, gleaming, to the wood. She looked at Pete, and then at me.

“I’ve never done this before,” she said.

“I don’t think anyone has,” I said. “Can you turn the skin over? I want to see the magic inside it.” The top was a shining pelt, sleek and smooth and perfect as if it had just been cut away from the back of the boy who’d grown it. The spell had to be anchored to the leather. It was the only thing that made sense. I’d touched Connor’s skin a hundred times while he was wearing it, and never heard the tempting promises Isla’s skin had made when it was hanging across my arms.

The Luidaeg and Pete exchanged a look before carefully, oh-so-carefully, grasping the opposite ends of the skin and turning it so that the burnished leather underside was toward the ceiling. It looked perfectly ordinary, the sort of thing that could have come out of any hunter’s stockpile.

Wordlessly, I held my hand out toward Tybalt. He sighed, and the next thing I knew, his claws were drawing hot lines of pain across my palm, splitting the skin. The deepest wound was at the heel of my hand. I brought it to my lips as quickly as I could, and was rewarded with a hot gout of blood, filling my mouth, overwhelming my senses with the taste of cut grass and copper. I could taste the ghost of the Luidaeg’s magic there as well, and that was fine; under the circumstances, that was almost ideal.

I blinked and the magic appeared on the leather like a map, or a fishing net of delicate lines older than any modern nation, any mortal dynasty. They were clearly of the Luidaeg’s making, but they were infused with an ageless anger and a deep, unspeakable grief.

As if in a dream, I leaned forward and rested my fingertips on the air above the skin, the taste of blood still clinging to my lips. The wounds on my hand had already healed. Tybalt would have to hurt me again if I needed more blood.

“There are four places you can cut without breaking the bond between the working and the weave,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. “No more than that. Divided further, the spell would fail, and it would just be so much dead fur. I can show you where to cut, but I don’t have the power to make the cuts myself. They’d seal over.” So much of the magic was dedicated to preserving the skins, maintaining the immortality that had been theirs by right when they’d been living, vital parts of Faerie, and not memorials to commemorate the lost. Anything short of massive trauma wouldn’t be enough to break the spell or destroy the skin.

In that, we were the same. Both of us had been created by the Firstborn—me in a slightly more standard manner—and both of us were essentially indestructible.

“Four cuts, five skins,” sighed the Luidaeg. She touched the skin with the tips of her fingers. “My brave, beautiful boy. Let’s see whether we’re gambling everything on the right tide or the wrong one. Let’s see whether you get to rest.”

“Where?” asked Pete.

I touched the skin where the spell was thinnest, in four places. Pete nodded, and I stepped back from the table. Tybalt was there, to put an arm around my waist and draw me close. Quentin and Marcia stood nearby, seeking comfort in proximity. All of us were silent, aware that we were present for something that no one had seen in centuries, that maybe no one had ever seen at all. Two Firstborn, a daughter of Maeve and a daughter of Titania, working together to change the world.