The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,94

by upper body strength alone, and then, as his magic shimmered around him, putting his legs into it.

I waited until he was about halfway up, Kirsi pacing him on the hull, before I nudged Quentin. “Go on,” I said. “Get moving.”

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’m pretty sure that, as your knight, I’m literally obligated to stay down here until I’m sure you’re not going to fall,” I said. “Call it acclimation therapy. Maybe if I float in the middle of the ocean for long enough, I’ll be able to enjoy hot tubs again.”

Quentin snorted and began climbing. I watched carefully. To be honest, my reluctance to go before him had also been born partially from the desire to see how he managed the transition between shapes. The Luidaeg’s spell gave us some of the instincts and abilities of the Merrow, but it hadn’t come with an instruction manual: while I knew how to change my fins into feet when I was sitting with my butt solidly on dry land, I had no idea how I was supposed to accomplish the same feat while totally surrounded by water.

The last time this happened, I’d been able to get Danny to pull me onto the dock before I tried to change. That wasn’t going to work now. No docks, and no convenient, long-armed Bridge Trolls to haul me out of harm’s way. I was going to have to manage this one for myself.

Quentin struggled for the first few rungs, his fishy lower body dangling as he hauled himself laboriously hand over hand. Then there was a shimmer, and he was placing one foot after the other, scrambling nimbly after the rest of our party.

“Everyone is good at this but me,” I grumbled, and started for the ladder. Then I stopped.

Something white was floating in the water near the hull, almost hidden by the shadow of one of the many pylons holding the Duchy in place.

It would have been easy to dismiss whatever it was as a trick of the light, or—if it was something real—as some piece of meaningless flotsam, a dead fish maybe, or a piece of torn-off fishing net. I wanted it to be one of those things. I wanted it to be something I could ignore.

Instead, I ducked my head under the water, so I wouldn’t be able to hear my friends calling me back, and swam toward the thing that shouldn’t have been there. I was hoping, still, that it would be nothing; it would be a bit of trash, a bit of foam, anything but what my long years of experience were starting to whisper to me.

Underwater, the scene shifted. Light moves differently in a Summerlands sea than it does in a mortal one, and even the shadows cast by the Duchy couldn’t turn the waves darker than a bright gloaming, like a summer twilight. I swam forward, and what I’d taken for a barnacle-encrusted piece of the foundation eddied in the water, becoming clearer. The white thing I’d seen floating was a starfish shape attached to an elegant stem, pale in the shadows, raised in an arch above a moon-shaped circle, crowned with waterweeds that had no discernable color.

Then I blinked, and the scarecrow construct of slices of the sea became a woman, wilted, wound about with the shroud of her own sundress, eyes closed and skin softened by the water that had invaded every inch of her. She was barefoot, wearing nothing but several yards of patterned cotton that tangled around her motionless legs.

Isla Chase. Leader of the Selkies of Belle Fleuve.

Drowned.

She was dead: there could be no question of that. Living women don’t hang like statues in freezing water, their chests motionless, their arms moved by the tides around them. But she was a Selkie, and Selkies don’t drown. They need to breathe, sure, but the water cares for them, in a way the Luidaeg can’t, and it tries its best to be kind. I remembered Connor talking about the sea back when we’d been lovers, when he’d stretched the length of himself out next to me in my bed, his webbed fingers playing in my hair, his toes running up and down my calves.

“Selkies know everything there is to know about drowning,” he’d said. “Back in the days when sailors still thought it was a clever idea to steal our skins, we got really good at making sure they understood that they weren’t supposed to do that. One dead sailor could teach a whole