The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,34

when discussed in the open air, and not every resident of the Undersea can breathe beneath the waves.” The Luidaeg indicated the Duchy with a sweep of her hands. “We claim sailors and their lovers, merchants and those who find no peace on land, and we keep them as safe as storm and sky allow. Here, they can be home. And here, we can discuss things on somewhat neutral ground. We’re technically in Leucothea, since the closest mortal cognate is the Pacific Ocean, which means we’re in Dianda’s waters, if you squint. Queen Palatyne has, quite wisely, ceded rulership of the Duchy of Ships to the Duchy of Ships. The people who live here make their own law, maintain their own order, and don’t cause problems for the Crown, which means Queen Palatyne can mostly pretend they don’t exist, sparing her from needing to justify all these air-breathers to her more traditionalist subjects.”

“Ugh.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I hate politics.”

“If you didn’t, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to make you deal with them.”

I glared at her. She smirked, and looked like she was about to say something when the ship gave a mighty lurch and a pair of vast, red-shaded tentacles reached out of the water, wrapping around the ropes that had been prepared for docking.

Screaming would have been the sensible thing to do. Gillian, Poppy, and Quentin certainly thought so, although their screams had widely different qualities. Gillian sounded terrified. Poppy sounded delighted, like a kid on her first roller coaster. Quentin was somewhere in the middle, although his scream faded into puzzled silence as he realized none of the sailors looked concerned. They were tossing more ropes to the tentacles, which seemed to be guiding us ever closer to the ramshackle conglomeration of ships, docks, and gangplanks.

I shot the Luidaeg a sharp look. “Not funny.”

“Pretty funny,” she said. She blinked, and her eyes were no longer blue. They were green, like shards of broken bottle rolling across the bottom of the sea, like light reflecting through kelp. I’ve always wondered if that was the true color of her eyes, assuming anything can be said to be “true” when it’s referring to a shapeshifter’s appearance.

“Not hiding anymore?” I asked quietly.

“No.” She shook her head, eyes on the rapidly approaching Duchy. “If the Selkies die here, Cousin Annie dies with them. She was never anything but a useful reflection, a face in the water. I loved being her. I loved the freedom of knowing people weren’t listening to every word I said, waiting for the moment when malice turned into murder. I loved just . . . being. When you’re as old as I am, when you have as few friends left as I do, there’s something beautiful about just being. I was playing pretend but I was never lying to them. It was a loophole, you know? A way for me to breathe. And now it’s over.”

The Luidaeg chuckled, and the sound was dry and mirthless, bones rattling in a forgotten cave. “I can never have my children back. I’ll never be a mother again. I’ll be a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, and so on, for a dozen generations, but I’ll never look someone in the eyes and know that the ocean they carry inside of them remembers the ocean I carry inside of me. My sister stole that. And I’ve been stealing it from the Selkies since the day I made them. I trapped them between worlds. They don’t get to see their grandchildren born to the waters; they pass their skins, they die, they end. For the sake of my children and for the sake of the Selkies themselves, we’re going to make that stop. No more Selkies. Not even Cousin Annie.”

I wanted to say something. My throat was dry and my lips wouldn’t move, and so I put my hand on her shoulder, pretending not to see the surprise and relief in her eyes when she glanced at me, and we sailed the rest of the way into the artificial harbor of the Duchy of Ships, pulled along by the vast tentacles of the great beast that had us in its embrace.

As soon as the hull came to rest against the dock, the tentacles withdrew, vanishing into the water without a sound. Rodrick barked orders that his sailors rushed to obey. I paused.

“Luidaeg,” I said. “That man, Rodrick. He said he wasn’t the captain, that he sailed at the captain’s grace.