The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,15

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.

Days ticked by, and plans were made as we inched toward Moving Day. May first had a lot of power and significance once, back in the days of the Three. There was a time when they’d formed a stable triad, keeping Faerie safe and secure. But something had changed. Whatever it was had happened early on, before changelings existed, before the Firstborn had children of their own, and it had resulted in Oberon splitting his time between two very different Courts. That was when the Divided Courts earned their name. Starting with their split, on May first, Oberon would kiss Maeve good-bye and return to Titania’s bower. On November first, he’d repeat the trip in reverse.

Of course, that all ended when the Three disappeared. Moving Day has been symbolic for centuries. The smaller inhabitants of Faerie, the pixies and the bogeys and the so-called “monsters,” still respected Moving Days. Even the ones who didn’t necessarily pack up and go would at least rearrange their nests and shift their belongings in symbolic recognition. The larger fae, however, the ones who liked to pretend we didn’t miss the Three, or that we hadn’t been affected by the dwindling of the First in their absence, mostly ignore the significance of the holidays. They’ve been reduced to excuses for feasts and grand celebrations in the modern world, Beltane Balls and Samhain revels, and no one really talks about what those days originally meant, to us or to anyone.

I don’t have many fond memories of my mother these days. I never had