The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,51
rest of us, because their waters are so close to your own.” He met her eyes and somehow didn’t flinch. “Elizabeth Ryan has come into possession of eighteen of the Lost Skins. She increases the size of her clan, and guarantees Faerie to eighteen of her family, while the rest of us receive no such bounty. So I approach you, Lady, to ask you do the same for the other clans, who have always done our best to keep our side of the ancient bargain, who have lived and died knowing we did so solely at your discretion. The bargain comes due. Let us save our children, as we were unable to save yours.”
“Elizabeth Ryan received those skins for doing me a favor outside the scope of the bargain between the Selkies and the sea witch,” said the Luidaeg. “How many children do you think I had, Mathias? How many grandchildren? How many Roane would you hope were slaughtered, if it means you can drape their physical remains around the shoulders of your own descendants and mark them for immortality? You’re lucky I don’t rip the skin from your shoulders merely for suggesting it.”
Mathias said nothing. Instead, he dropped to his knees in the sand, reaching up and tugging the knot resting at the hollow of his throat, where I would normally have expected a tie to be. It came easily undone, and he pulled the sealskin from beneath his jacket, holding it out to the Luidaeg with shaking hands.
This time, she raised both eyebrows. “You think this impresses me?” she asked. “You think I can be impressed by an offer to return something that has always been mine? Your gesture isn’t ‘grand’ so much as it’s misguided. Be grateful I don’t find it insulting.”
“Lady, please,” he said, in a low voice. “I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to make amends for a loss you suffered centuries before my birth, knowing it was futile. I have asked you for nothing. I have sought to be beneath your notice. I have devoted myself to you. Please, please, I beg. If there is anything to be done, if there are any more skins held in secret, please. Give me only the gift you have given to Elizabeth Ryan. Let me save my clan.”
“Get up,” she said, and her voice was low and tight and unreadable, even to me.
Mathias scrambled to his feet, the sealskin still resting on his hands. The Luidaeg looked at him flatly, more of those dark threads curling through her irises, chasing away the green.
“Leave,” she snapped.
For a moment, I thought he was going to argue with her. For a moment, I thought I was going to find out whether she’d been right when she said that any of us would stand calmly by and watch her commit a murder. Then he backed away, taking three long, quick steps, before turning and running toward the row of neat little Cape Cod-style houses. He didn’t look back.
We had gathered a small crowd while he was speaking, Selkies and Selkie-kin pausing in whatever they’d been doing before we came in order to drift closer and listen in as hard as they could. The Luidaeg turned to look at them, and they paled and fled, some following Mathias, others simply retreating along the artificial beach. All but one.
That one—a child, maybe six years old, dressed in a shapeless tunic, with pale blonde hair cut in a pageboy bob—approached the three of us, head cocked curiously to the side.
“Are you really the Lady?” they asked.
The Luidaeg nodded. “I am.”
“My mother says the Lady bound Merlin in a tree for a thousand years because he was mean to her.”
The corner of the Luidaeg’s mouth twitched. “That’s not quite how it happened, but you should listen to your mother. Mothers have many clever things to say, if you listen closely.”
“She says we came here because the Lady is tired of there being Selkies, and she wants the Selkies to stop.” The child looked at us solemnly. “Is that so?”
“Almost.” The Luidaeg crouched, putting herself on a level with the child. The dark lines vanished from her eyes between one blink and the next, leaving them a clear, untroubled green. She looked heartbreakingly at ease. She must have been one hell of a mother. “I’m here because a very long time ago, the first Selkies made me a promise, and it’s time for that promise to be kept. Do you ever make promises?”