The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,146

cloak when it was too well-worn at the seams, and that cloak might go on to become a doublet, a vest, a jerkin. Nothing was thrown away until its time was over.”

“Yes, people know how to sew,” said the Luidaeg, with more confusion than impatience. “It’s sort of vital if you don’t have magic and don’t want to be naked all the time.”

“But if you asked someone who wore a vest made from a cloak made from a gown if their vest had been used in the production of Romeo and Juliet, they would tell you ‘yes,’ and proudly, because their vest had been used in that production, merely in another form.”

“I genuinely hope that you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting; that whole ‘intestines into eels’ thing is still on the table,” said the Luidaeg.

“It wasn’t that specific when you said it,” I said.

“I like your style.”

I kept my eyes on Tybalt, puzzling through what he’d said. Then I turned to the Luidaeg, and asked, “Where did the Swanmays come from?”

She looked suddenly, inexplicably tired. “They’re descended from Aiofe of the White Wings. Another of my sisters. As far as I know, no one’s seen her in centuries. She doesn’t have some mystical stockpile of feather cloaks to hand out; Swanmays are born with their wings wrapped around their shoulders, where they can be easily set aside.”

“Were they the first skinshifters?”

Slowly, the Luidaeg nodded. “Yes. They were born first, and then the Artio came after.”

“When were the Ravens born?”

“They weren’t.”

For the first time since we’d entered the room, Quentin spoke. “That doesn’t make sense,” he objected. “We live with a Raven-maid.”

“The first of them weren’t born.” The Luidaeg was speaking more slowly, like each word was an effort. I wondered how many older prohibitions against speech, either magical or personal, Titania’s geas was overcoming. “Aoife had a sister, born at the same time. Aine. And Aine didn’t like people touching her. Ever. At all. Aine wanted her own descendant line, but the thought of getting pregnant, of being with someone in that way, for long enough to conceive, was repugnant. So she and Aoife pooled their thoughts and their strength, and they wove a cloak of raven’s feathers to match the cloaks of swan’s feathers that Aoife’s children wore. They made the Ravens. Their wings are proof of a sister’s love and a mother’s determination.”

“You used that working to breathe life back into the skins of the Roane,” I said.

The Luidaeg nodded.

“But you did it alone. Selkies aren’t born holding their skins; they have to depend on the skins they’re offered. Why?”

“Because my sister—my sister, my eldest sister, who I foolishly thought might care about me—had just orchestrated the destruction of my entire world, and I didn’t trust anyone,” snapped the Luidaeg. The blackness was entirely gone from her eyes. Even her pupils were green, the color of kelp in deep water. I couldn’t help feeling like this might be the closest I’d ever come to seeing the real Antigone. “I poured everything I had into those skins, so one day I could stand here with the answer to resurrecting my children. So I could bring them home. That’s all a mother wants. To bring them home.” Her voice broke on the last word, turning hollow.

“My mother hadn’t been born yet.”

“No.”

“You had no way of knowing I’d be born.”

“No. Only something one of my daughters had said to me. That it was all right to be scared when I was lonely, because the answer would always come, given time.”

That felt more like the sort of thing a massage therapist would have cross-stitched and hanging on their wall than a good reason to create and then destroy an entire fae race. I decided not to say so. It wasn’t going to make things any better.

“What if you had help?” I asked carefully. “What if another Firstborn was willing to help you do what Aoife and Aine did? To make more cloaks, only out of sealskin, not feathers? They’d still be the skins of your children. There’d just be . . . more of them, like there should have been all along. The Roane haven’t been making more Roane, because there are too few of them to successfully regenerate their race, and they haven’t been making more Selkies, because there were only so many skins to go around.”

“Nice thought, but we don’t ha—” The Luidaeg stopped in the middle of the word, looking briefly like she was struggling for air,