Page 7 of The Innocent Sleep

I took a deep breath. What I intended to do next was more a page from my lady’s playbook than my own, and shared more of her foolish bravery than my own normally measured caution. Had I been less afraid for her, I would never even have been able to consider it.

But Amphitrite was a daughter of Titania. She was Firstborn, and the Luidaeg trusted her, which meant she was unlikely to have lied to me, or to October, without good cause.

And at our wedding, she had promised us that neither we nor any of our children would ever need to fear death by water.

The drop between me and the sea only seemed to grow greater the longer I hesitated. This wasn’t going to kill me. It was, however, going to hurt: of that I had no doubt.

I could, I supposed, descend the more ordinary way and go wading, hoping Amphitrite was close enough that I would catch her attention when I inevitably began to drown. But the Firstborn I have known have always appreciated grand gestures, and my striking the water would doubtless activate whatever magic she had used to grant us her protection, calling her to my location. It was still a risk, but a calculated one, which would hopefully end in my reunion with the First among the Merrow, and not with my bones at the bottom of the sea.

And the longer I stood here trying to convince myself, the farther away Titania could be whisking my wife and unborn child. I tensed, closing my eyes against the view.

Cats, it is said, always land on our feet, which was part of the reason I leapt as a man, when the instinct to twist all four of my limbs downward to hit at the same time would be easier to fight. A Selkie I loved once, a very long time past, told me that the safest way for a man to strike the water is stiff and straight as a board, with toes pointed downward and arms flat against his sides. “Be an arrow,” he’d said, laughing at my confusion. “Strike the water like a blade.”

“Easy for you to say; when you jump in the water, you’re a seal,” I’d countered, and we had gone on in joy, under starlight, with no more thought of the fathoms below.

Well, now, the fathoms below were all that I could think of. “Amphitrite, may you be as honest as your sister,” I muttered, and leapt before my mind could catch up with my body and interfere with the command.

I dropped like a stone, fighting to arrange myself as I had been instructed when every instinct I possessed told me to flail and fight, to search for purchase in the air. The wind whipped by so fast it stung my skin, all but guaranteeing my introduction to the saltwater waves would hurt even more than I had expected it to.

Such are the actions of a desperate man. I pulled in as much air as my lungs would hold, far too aware that it might be knocked out of me upon impact, and held myself like the arrow I had once been instructed to be.

Still rigid, I hit the water, the force of my impact driving me deep below the surface. My concerns about air were, it seemed, unfounded, as consciousness left me first, slapped away by the sensation of slamming into something akin to granite. From a great enough height, even water may turn into a weapon.

Insensate, I drifted. Up or down, I do not know. For how long, I do not know. Whether I broke any essential pieces of my body when I fell, I do not know. These are the very small mercies afforded to me by that first day, that first succession of panicked, painful hours.

When I woke, it was with the taste of blood and seawater lingering in my mouth, and with something hard and cold beneath me, and white light above, filtered through some pinkish substance. I blinked, several times, trying to get my eyes to adjust, and slowly the fixture above me became clear as some sort of dangling assortment of lights caught inside large conch shells, their translucent sides filtering it.

“Oh, good, the suicidal son of a chowder head is awake,” drawled a bored, only half-familiar voice. “I suppose I can let the rest of you go back to screaming without worrying about what that’s going to do for his recovery.”

The speaker snapped their fingers as I was still trying to place why they sounded so familiar, and suddenly people were yelling. More familiar people, in both the sense of number and in my degree of familiarity.

“—out of here,” snarled Dianda. “This has to be Titania! No one else could do something this large!”

“You’re remarkably accepting of the idea that a Queen of Faerie is going out of her way to ruin our lives,” said Patrick, his voice much more tightly controlled.

“Who else could cut us off completely?” demanded Dianda. “Who else could split us so summarily from our family?”

“Not just yours,” said the first voice. “Now stop yelling before I shut you up again. And before you get any funny ideas about telling me, again, that I’m a guest in your knowe, allow me to remind you that you’re all guests in my ocean.” The voice got closer as it went on, until a shadow fell across me. “Hello, cat.”

I turned my head to face the speaker, relieved when the motion didn’t hurt. I had felt no pain since waking, but my brief memory of impact left me certain that I should be in incredible amounts of it, suffering every time I took a breath.

The woman who loomed over me smiled thinly, not offering her hand. “Glad to see you’re back in the land of the living. You know, when I gave you a fancy wedding gift, it wasn’t with the intention of you taking it for a test spin the first chance you get. A more polite response would have been to appreciate the gesture and try to avoid violent death, not to fling yourself off of a cliff.”

“My most sincere apologies, my lady Captain,” I said. “But I saw no other means of reaching you, and had dire need, which your companions seem in some part to understand.”

Amphitrite—better known as Captain Pete—sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “I get that.”

The Firstborn seem to fall into one of two camps: either they do their best to blend in with the people around them, becoming unremarkable and unassuming, until they can pass through crowds unnoticed, or they stand up bright and blazing, like memorials to the Faerie that once was. Pete fell into the second category. She was tall and statuesque, with the build of a woman born to sail the open seas and wrestle sharks for her supper. Her thighs were monuments to the sailor’s art, and her arms were so thick with muscle that I had no doubt she could have hoisted me over her head, had she cared to. Her skin was the eerie bone-white of a great white shark’s belly, so pale it gleamed, and streaked with lines of tiny, glittering scales. Gleaming opal refractions filled her long black hair, which fell almost to her waist in heavy, easy curls. She was lovely, of course, but no one could ever have mistaken her for human, or for one of her own descendants.

Expression impassive, she watched as I pushed myself up onto my elbows, levering myself into a sitting position. I didn’t hurt, and yet everything felt slightly numb, as if I had spent too much time submerged in icy water. Which perhaps I had. “Death by water” and “death by hypothermia” are not the same thing, after all.

“Why did you toss yourself off a cliff like so much chum?” asked Amphitrite. “Assume I know nothing, and don’t worry too much about telling me things I’ve already heard. I want honest answers more than I want easy ones.”

I took a deep breath. In the moment, honesty seemed like something very large to ask of me. “I was home,” I said. “With my October, and our family around us. We had—”

“Was Simon there?” interrupted Dianda.

I kept my eyes on Amphitrite, who looked annoyed by the interjection, and answered, “No. We left him at Shadowed Hills. Sylvester indicated that August was on her way to bring him back to Saltmist.”