The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,95
fishing community to leave the seals alone. But we don’t drown. When one of us falls into the water, we wash up on the shore. Maybe we’ll be bruised, maybe we’ll be battered, but we’ll be breathing. Every time. Always.”
I couldn’t remember why we’d been having that conversation—probably because I’d had another nightmare about my days in the pond, when the water had been above, below, and everywhere, when drowning would have been a mercy—but I could remember the wistful look in his eyes when he’d talked about his own inability to drown. Like he couldn’t have imagined any better end for himself.
He’d died on dry land. Isla Chase hadn’t.
Her body was secured to the pylon with a length of fishing net, so tangled that I couldn’t tell whether she’d been tied there or simply drifted into position after someone had tossed her body overboard. I swam as close as I dared, circling her with deft flicks of my tail, and couldn’t see any knots. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad one. Whether her body had been disposed of here on purpose or whether she’d been thrown overboard somewhere else, the message she was sending was the same:
Isla had been murdered.
I turned and swam back to where I’d been a few seconds before. When I broke the surface, Quentin, Peter, and Poppy were all staring at me over the edge, while Helmi and the other Cephali stuck to the side of the ship, watching me warily.
“Where did you go?” called Quentin. “Is something wrong?”
I opened my mouth. Then I froze.
Captain Pete had sailed away rather than allow her presence to complicate the process of returning the Roane to these waters. Dianda was under arrest, and for the moment at least, her usurping brother was the ranking Undersea noble onboard. Dean’s title wasn’t in question, but his authority in these waters, this far away from land, certainly was. Involving Nolan would mean saying I thought the Mists had some sort of claim over this floating domain, so far from the shore. So who did I call? Isla Chase was dead. There was no question about that. But as for the question of who had killed her, well . . .
The Luidaeg had given the Selkies permission to assault and rob each other. Isla could have committed suicide after having her skin stolen. This didn’t have to be murder. Would the Luidaeg even want me to investigate? Or would she want me to leave it alone, and let the Selkies handle their own problems, at least until the moment when they ceased to exist in their current form and became Roane, forever?
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think it matters what she wants,” I muttered. Hearing my own voice made me feel a little better about what I was about to do. Not much. Not enough. Going against the assumed wishes of one of the Firstborn was the sort of thing only a fool would do.
A fool, or a hero. The two are so often indistinguishable, after all.
Raising my voice to be heard above the waves, I called, “I have a dead body down here. I need you to lower some kind of net, and I need you to do it quickly because this water’s getting cold.”
Quentin’s eyes widened without actually telegraphing any sense of shock. If anything, he looked resigned. “Right,” he said. “Just . . . wait there, okay?”
I hung suspended in the sea, my temporary fins holding me upright, and watched as my squire stepped away from the rail. My only company was a dead woman—and Oberon forgive me for my heroism, but I was going to find out how she’d died.
FOURTEEN
ISLA’S BODY SPRAWLED LIFELESS on the deck, somehow looking smaller than she had either in life or in the water. Without the waves to lift her limbs and support her head, she was limp, motionless. Without the waves to keep her up, she couldn’t help falling.
The strand of glass beads braided in her hair was broken; half of them were missing. There was something unutterably sad about that. Someone had put them there, whether Isla herself or a loved one. Someone had thought she mattered enough to adorn her before she came here, to the middle of the ocean, to die. She was wearing a sundress and she had glass beads tied in her hair, and that was all she had: her sealskin was gone.