The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,42
I can see where that probably sucks if you’re someone who’s been waiting to receive a skin from a parent or grandparent or whatever, but those skins never really belonged to the Selkies. They belonged to the Roane. When the Selkies agreed to carry them, they did it knowing this was the way things were going to end.”
“And they don’t get to pretend they forgot,” said the Luidaeg, seamlessly picking up the explanation. “I’ve been there, Pete. Every time a Selkie parent passes a skin, at least on the West Coast, they’ve done it with me watching over them. This entire generation saw me on the shore, judging them for what they’d chosen. They know about the promise their ancestors made, about the blood on their hands. They know how my babies died. They take their skins with full understanding of the blessing and the bargain, and they don’t get to say they didn’t know, because they knew. They did this knowing that one day, there’d be a price to pay. I can’t lie, because of your mother, and I told them this was coming. I’m not going to say I’m sorry that price fell to this generation. It always sucks to be the one who catches the bill.”
“Yes, it does,” said Pete. She was talking to the Luidaeg, but her eyes were on me, deep and cold and surprisingly sympathetic. “It’s terrible to be the one who has to set things right when you didn’t play any part in breaking them.”
She sighed then, and it was like some terrible tension snapped, leaving the room smaller and less dangerous. Tybalt relaxed. Quentin frowned, looking between Pete and me, trying to understand what had just happened.
“You can do what you came here for, so long as there’s no fae blood shed in my waters,” said Pete. “I maintain a safe harbor for the people with nowhere else to go. And I’ll be wanting some faerie ointment from you, and the promise of more. Some among those families may want to stay here. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve never known anything else.”
“I’m a better brewer than you anyway,” said the Luidaeg.
Pete punched her in the shoulder, and she laughed, and for a moment, they were just a pair of siblings seeing each other again after a long and not entirely voluntary separation. It was odd seeing the Luidaeg with a family member she didn’t hate. There was no love lost between her and Eira—probably even less now that Eira had successfully killed her once, not counting on my occasional, unpredictable ability to exhaust myself by raising the dead—and while I hadn’t actually seen her with my mother, from the way she talked about Mom, I didn’t expect them to be braiding each other’s hair.
The door banged open. Every head in the room, except for Dean’s, swung around. Marcia, standing in the doorway, flushed a bright, embarrassed red. She was holding a tray in her hands, which explained the force with which the door had hit the wall; she must have bumped it open with her hip.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had to find the canteen, and then I had to explain what I wanted, and then I had to go through this long, irritating process of barter, and—”
Pete groaned. “They didn’t just give you the stuff when you said it was for my account?”
Marcia blinked, eyes wide and worried. “You didn’t tell me it was on your account.”
“I’m the reason the lad won’t wake up. It seems only fair I should pay to bring him back to the world of the living.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Anyway, it didn’t cost me much once I’d made people understand what I wanted, just some pennies and a ribbon from my hair—none of my actual hair, I cleaned that off before I handed it over.” Marcia looked briefly smug about that. “I know better than to give people bits of me that they could use against me later. I’m no fool.”
“Yet here you are, on a floating structure in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by beings who could send you to the depths in an instant,” said Pete, rising from her chair. “That seems a little foolish to me.”
“Foolishness and bravery look a lot alike if you’re not paying close enough attention,” said Marcia. She watched nervously as Pete approached, but stood her ground; only her white-knuckled grasp on the tray betrayed how difficult that was.
I wanted to applaud for her. Marcia’s always been reasonably unflappable,