The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,144
shore, their magic and hearts carved away, so there was no sustenance for the flock in the feasting? I called my sister’s children to me when my own were lost, hoping to see their beloved faces on the wings of the wind, and all I found was weeping, because they weren’t there. Was that fair? When did you become so concerned with fairness?”
“When people kept pushing me into situations that demanded I figure out how to be a hero,” I said. “It’s not fair. The Selkies here aren’t the ones who killed your children. Most of them wouldn’t have any idea how to hold the knives. They’re scared and confused and they don’t want to give up everything they’ve ever known for the sake of a single day’s repayment, but they’re not your enemies. They’re your descendants. Sort of. Technically.” They belonged to her as much as the Roane had, as much as the scarce surviving Roane still did. They were her creations and her responsibility.
“Whether or not it’s fair is beside the point,” said the Luidaeg. “I said I’d do this. That means I have to do this. That’s the way it works for me. I can’t lie, and breaking my word on purpose would make me a liar. Do you want to see what happens to me if I try to break my geas? Because I don’t. I’ve . . . I’ve seen it before, and there was no point in you saving my life if you’re going to make me throw it away on some wild fit of idealism. Do you understand? I don’t have a choice. There’s no reason for us to have this conversation. It can’t change anything.”
“It doesn’t have to change everything, but I think we can change something,” I said doggedly. “I ran with Devin for years, remember?”
The Luidaeg lifted an eyebrow. “Okay, I’m used to following your wild and slightly ridiculous leaps of logic—sometimes I even enjoy them—but this one is losing me. Why does your criminal past make a damn bit of difference here?”
“Devin carved out a place for the changelings in the Mists when the Queen was actively anti-changeling, when no one wanted to give us the time of day.” When me being knighted had been the scandal of the century, despite the service I’d performed for that same Queen—and despite who my mother was. If I needed any proof that prejudice was unthinking and irrational, it was that. Too many people had known Amandine was Firstborn. I should have been treated like a princess, and instead I’d been a pariah. “He didn’t do it by lying, not all the time, not to everyone. Liars get caught. He did it by twisting the truth until it screamed, but never lying.”
The Luidaeg was ageless, immortal, and had been cursed for centuries with an inability to lie. How did she not already know this? But she was looking at me with a blankly inquisitive expression on her face, like nothing I was saying made any sense to her.
“Look,” I said, desperately, “you joke. You say things that aren’t flat statements of truth. You must have learned how to do that after you were geased. Right?”
“When Titania laid the binding on my tongue, it took me years to be able to answer anything more complex than a yes-or-no question,” she said slowly. “I couldn’t even say my name unless I was in the presence of the Roane, because I didn’t know what it was. I could lie to them. I could tell them my name was ‘mother’ in whatever language I liked, and my breath didn’t stop, and my senses didn’t dim. They were the ones who carried my name back to me, until I could say I was the Luidaeg, the sea witch, that I was Antigone of Albany, and that I was not going to forgive Titania for what she’d done. Not then. Not ever.”
I started to speak. She wasn’t done.
“She was the one who told the sister I can’t name to put those knives into the hands of my children’s killers. She was the one who wanted to see the children of Maeve wiped from the world. It’s her fault my babies are dead. And I won’t forgive her. I can’t forgive her. Not while she still binds me, because she forbade me to be a liar, and it was in honesty that I pledged to hate her until the stars went cold, and it’s with honesty that I hate