The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,16

a lot of them, but the more I learn about her, the more even the good ones wind up tainted as I realize what she was to me. Still, I remember her waking me early on Moving Days, with scones and jam and bowls of berries in sweet cream. I remember her taking me around the tower grounds, telling the stories of travel, the migratory fae, the way we used to wander the worlds, until one by one, our Firstborn put down roots and wove themselves a homeland. Sometimes we’d go to watch the pixies in flight, but we’d always wind up inside, and spend the bulk of the day cleaning everything we could reach before moving our beds from one side of the room to the other, symbolically renewing the spaces where we lived, making them seem new again.

Those had been good days. Maybe the best days, as I measured the interactions between my mother and me. I lay in my bed three days before the end of April, Tybalt snuggled against me, his breath slow and even and peaceful, and wondered whether whatever the Luidaeg had planned for us was going to result in ruining those last few happy memories of my mother.

If I don’t have a lot of fond memories of my mother, I have even fewer illusions about her. Most of them died a long time ago, and I can’t say I was necessarily sorry to see them go. But it would be nice to still believe she had occasionally cared about me, even if it was only in the way a farmer cares about the dog who herds the sheep back into their barn at the end of the day. Maybe I’d never been anything more than useful to her. Given how much I did know, I wanted that to be enough. Oberon’s eyes, I wanted that to be enough.

My elderly Siamese cats, Cagney and Lacy, were curled up on my pillow, keeping me solidly between them and Tybalt. They liked having him around in much the way I imagined they would have liked having a tame lion around: a larger predator that wasn’t interested in eating them kept them at least a little bit safer, but that was no real guarantee that tomorrow, the lion wouldn’t decide it wanted a meal of domesticated feline. They were technically subjects of the Court of Cats—all cats belong to the Court of Cats—but they weren’t fae, and they couldn’t reason with him the way a fae cat would have.

Cagney purred and pressed herself against my head. Lacey did the same. I closed my eyes, trying to convince myself I could go back to sleep. It didn’t work. I’d gone to bed shortly after dawn, and while it had only been about seven hours, part of me was all too aware that midnight was approaching fast. Once the clock struck twelve . . .

We didn’t have any carriages to turn back into pumpkins, but there were going to be some uncomfortable transformations all the same. Nothing was going to stop them now, short of another kidnapping or murder, and I wasn’t actually sure either of those would be enough to get me out of this. The Luidaeg had been waiting centuries for the chance to avenge her children. She wasn’t going to let something that someone else could handle force her to wait any longer.

“I know you’re awake, little fish,” said Tybalt softly. “Would you like to discuss what’s troubling you, or would you prefer to play at slumber?”

I winced. “How long have you been awake?”

“Not long,” said Tybalt. He ran a hand across my hair. The cats made small grumbling noises and got up, prowling down to settle at the foot of the bed, well away from any potential activity.

“Are you lying?” I rolled onto my side, so we were almost nose-to-nose.

Tybalt smiled. “Small untruths between lovers are not necessarily lies; sometimes they can be considered a form of kindness.”

I considered this and sighed. “Right. Kindness. I’m . . . I’m all right, I think. This is a good thing. We’re bringing back the Roane. We could use a little prophecy in our lives right now. Maybe if we hadn’t lost them, we wouldn’t have been caught flat-footed when Janet broke Maeve’s last Ride, and things wouldn’t be so messed up.”

“Ah, but if not for Janet, your mother would never have been born, and if not for your mother, you would never have been born, and perhaps