Page 9 of The Unkindest Tide

“It’s still something happening in the future. It’s just that the future has a date on it.” The Luidaeg turned to Dean. “Tell your mother the sea witch is calling in the Selkies’ debt. She may or may not know what that means, but she’ll want to be there, since it’s going to be happening in her waters.”

“I’ve never even heard of the Duchy of Ships,” protested Dean, awe apparently forgotten in the face of his confusion. That, or my general air of disrespect was rubbing off on him. Sweet Titania, I hoped not. “How can it be in my mother’s waters if I’ve never heard of it?”

“Ask your mother,” said the Luidaeg, not unkindly. “I’ll send word to the Queen in the Mists. It’s an old protocol, but I suppose this as good a time to observe it as ever.”

“Which protocol?” I asked.

Surprisingly, it was Tybalt who answered. “When one of the Firstborn performs a major working within a royal protectorate, it is considered only polite that they should warn the local regents, to prevent accidental interference in their business. It was most commonly used when Rides were to be declared.”

The Luidaeg nodded. “And this is a sort of Ride, if you cock your head and squint. So I’ll handle telling your queen, and spare you trying to explain it to her without spilling secrets that aren’t yours to tell. The origin of the Selkies has always been kept quiet, for their sake as much as for my own. My sister doesn’t get the satisfaction of knowing that people feel sorry for me because of what happened to my kids.” She glanced back to me. “You’re taking this better than I expected. I’m proud of you.”

I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Slowly, the Luidaeg blinked. Then, in a careful tone, she asked, “You haven’t put together what this means yet, have you?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “Why would I—”

And I stopped.

Gillian—my daughter, my baby girl, born one-quarter Dóchas Sidhe, turned human by my own hand, turned Selkie to save her life—was wearing one of the stolen skins of the Luidaeg’s children, and she couldn’t take it off for a hundred years, or she would die. The Luidaeg was preparing to use me to offer a choice to all the other Selkies: they could be permanently bound to their skins, making them Roane, fae forever, and shutting their mortal families on the other side of an impassable chasm, or they could pass those skins on and die human, letting their children secure an eternity in the sea.

Gillian wasn’t going to have that choice. Time after time, Gillian’s choices had been taken away from her, and while I’d never done it to her on purpose, I had always, over and over again, been the architect of her loss. If she wanted to live, she would have to change one more time, from Selkie to Roane . . . and this time, there’d be no going back.

The Luidaeg nodded gravely. “There,” she said, and there was no satisfaction in her tone. “You finally get it. I’m going to let you decide what you want to tell her, and—Toby? This may not mean much yet, but I’m genuinely sorry we didn’t take care of this sooner, so you wouldn’t have to tell her at all.”

Part of me wanted to say not to be silly; if we’d taken care of this sooner, before the false Queen of the Mists had stabbed Gillian with elf-shot and left us with no choice but to turn her fae to save her life, there wouldn’t have been a Selkie skin to tie around my daughter’s shoulders. She would have died, and something inside of me would have broken beyond repair.

The rest of me wanted to scream and keep screaming, possibly forever.

The Luidaeg offered me a small, sad smile as she picked up her plate of nachos. “And with that, I think it’s time for me to go,” she said. “Nice seeing you all; I’m sure I’ll see many of you on May first. Quentin, visit me more, or you’re going to find something unpleasant in your bed one morning.”

“Okay, Luidaeg,” he said.

She walked out of the dining room. A moment later, I heard the front door open and close. I leaned against Tybalt, closing my eyes.

“Well, damn,” I said, and that seemed to summarize the situation perfectly, because no one said anything else. We just stood there, a small, silent cluster, and waited for the world to start making sense again.

We were going to be waiting for a while.

THREE

THIS IS THE TROUBLE with time. No matter how much you think you have, it always passes faster than you expect. The Luidaeg had come to me at the beginning of March to tell me I had a job to do on Moving Day. We had all looked at the calendar, me included; had looked at the almost two months between the ask and the action, and thought we’d have plenty of time to deal with things.

There’s no such thing as “plenty of time.” We’d sliced those two months up and devoured them one piece at a time, spending their precious hours on shopping and cleaning, doing odd jobs for Arden and dodging uncomfortable questions from everyone who knew enough about my debts to the Luidaeg to ask them.

Only May, oddly enough, didn’t have any questions. Only May had looked away when I tried, haltingly, to explain what was going to happen, and said, in a subdued tone, “Well, it’s about time this came to an end. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t come with you. I don’t like being in open waters.”

I could have pressed the subject. I chose not to. We all have our secrets, and if May currently has more secrets from me than I have from her, I’m sure that will change with time. Our shared memories end at the moment of her transformation from night-haunt into Fetch. Gradually, they’ll become less and less of who I am now, and I think we’ll both be happier if we’re in the habit of letting each other hold our tongues by then.

Arden had been somewhat less sanguine about the situation. Arden had, in fact, spent most of an evening shouting at me. Surreally, that had been an almost comforting reaction. Arden Windermere, daughter of Gilad Windermere, rightful Queen in the Mists, had been denied her throne for more than a century by Evening Winterrose and the imposter Queen. When I’d first convinced her to take up her birthright, Arden had been fairly sure she’d never be able to live up to her family name, much less do her job correctly.

Watching her berate me for being willing to take orders from one of the Firstborn, I was fairly sure Arden was going to be fine. She was learning the limits of her responsibility. She had her brother back, and while Nolan wasn’t ready to formally take up his position as her heir, just having him around had already proven to be a steadying, stabilizing influence on her.

Going with the Luidaeg to the Duchy of Ships wasn’t the sort of thing that ought to be life-threatening—although Quentin was happy to remind me that I could make a trip to the movies life-threatening when I really tried—but even if something went wrong and we all wound up lost at sea for a year, Arden would be able to keep going without me. She didn’t need a hero. She had a household, and a demesne, and she was going to be okay.

I was trying not to think too much about that whole “lost at sea” possibility. I don’t like water. As in, “I take showers, not baths, and the one time Tybalt offered to take me to the hot tubs for a romantic evening, I damn near had a panic attack.” I blame it on spending fourteen years as a fish, since I certainly didn’t have any issues with water before that happened.

Sadly, knowing where trauma comes from doesn’t magically heal it. Only time and effort can do that. The fact that I was even able to consider getting on a boat said a lot about how much I’d recovered since that initial injury; as long as I didn’t drown or something, this trip would probably help me to recover even more.