The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,77

carved with its own pattern of oceanic images, fish I didn’t recognize, sharks, sea dragons, even hippocampi. We swam on until we found the gate Patrick had told us to look for, carved with sea otters and kelp, ringed with irregularly shaped natural pearls. From one angle, it was just a ring in the water, simple, easy to swim through. From another, it was filled with a glistening mother-of-pearl film, betraying the presence of some lasting transportation gate.

I’d never seen anything like it. There are fae who can teleport, the Tuatha and the Candela. There are fae who can access otherwise impossible roads, like the Cait Sidhe and the Shadow Roads. But permanent gates? Maybe those had been possible once, when there’d been fewer humans and we’d had the space for larger workings, designed to span longer periods of time. Not anymore. Even in the Summerlands, things were too crowded, and the taint of iron was too omnipresent, clinging to everything humanity touched.

Down here, there were no humans. Pollution spread more slowly, and the dawn never reached the delicate foundations of the sealing spells. There was more time, for everything.

Quentin and I hung in the water in front of the gate for a long, solemn moment. Then we joined hands and swam through, together.

The transition was about as jarring as that of moving from the mortal world into a knowe that had been closed for years. Everything twisted around us, until it felt like we were on a roller coaster bent on separating us from our lunches and our sense of equilibrium. Even Quentin felt it; his hand tightened on mine, and when I glanced at him, he looked like he was considering the virtues of being sick. What would happen if he threw up in the middle of a bespelled gate?

I so did not want to know.

As quickly as it had started, the feeling of disorientation passed, and we emerged into warmer, brighter waters. We were closer to the coast. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did, just like I knew that the light slanting down on us from above had nothing to do with the sun, but was somehow a reflection of the health of the duchy as a whole. The king is the land in Faerie, and the Lordens had always done their best to do right by the land—or the waters—in their keeping.

Farms still spread out around us, but there were none of the airy domes, and the crops seemed to be, on the whole, both wilder and denser, forming veritable forests of sea pears and undulating kelp.

They were also utterly abandoned. No farmers tilled the soil; no farmhands gathered the ripe fruits; no children played hide-and-seek through the greenery. The fields we’d passed beneath the Duchy of Ships had been alive with the denizens of the Undersea. These were lush and healthy and ready for the harvest, and there was no one there.

Resisting the urge to draw my knife—for comfort, if nothing else—I descended through the water, gesturing for Quentin to follow. The palace stood in the distance, an elegant construct of stone and coral rising from the sea floor in gravity-defying spires and towers that would never have been possible on land. Smaller buildings clustered around the foundations, tucked safely behind lacy walls of living coral. We dipped lower and lower as we approached, until we were swimming along causeways that I suppose technically could be considered streets, although they weren’t paved; the ground was sometimes decorated, sometimes cultivated in flowering plants or elaborate playgrounds, but it wasn’t meant for walking on.

And still there were no people. I thought I saw motion in some of the windows we passed, but no one came out to either greet or attack us.

Patrick had said the people of Saltmist would have changed sides as soon as the palace was seized. I was starting to wonder how true that was. It was like we were swimming through a ghost town.

I had no idea how much time had passed since we’d gone into the water. I assumed it was about an hour, but I needed to err on the side of caution, given the circumstances. I picked up the pace, urging Quentin to do the same.

There were openings around the base of the palace, tight little tunnels designed for use by servants and household staff. Torin would never have demeaned himself to use them, or even to send his forces through them; according to Patrick, if