The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,102
Annie, stood before a council of my fellows and said there’d be no punishment for anyone who wanted to steal a skin. You didn’t seem overly concerned about the children then. You just stood there and let her do it.”
“She’s the sea witch, Liz. It’s not like I exactly have a lot of leverage with her.”
Her laugh was low and bitter and more than a little inebriated. The drink in her hand was far from her first. “You have more leverage than any of the rest of us do, and substantially more than you think. She needs you, liar’s daughter, or she’ll never be rid of my kind. So yeah, you could have said something.”
“She said the children were exempt.”
“Because they don’t have skins to steal, for the most part,” said Liz. “Doesn’t mean it won’t hurt them to see their futures stolen, or to see their families attacked. Just because no one attacks them, that doesn’t mean they’re going to get out of this unscathed. You could have said something, and you didn’t. You cared more about your own hide than you did about theirs.” She laughed again, wildly this time. “Hide. What a good word for this mess. We should all be doing it, in order to save it.”
“Okay, so she’s discovered the joy of homonyms and it’s a little creepy,” said Quentin.
Tybalt shot him a fond look. “My lady love has ruined you for courtly matters.”
“I wasn’t trying to,” I said, and focused on Liz. “Liz—Elizabeth—I need you to listen to me, please. It’s important that you listen to me. When was the last time you saw Isla?”
“Isla Chase? Oh, that would be shortly after she tried to stab me in the shoulder so she could knock me down and peel the sealskin from my body. Clumsy scag.” Elizabeth sipped her drink, trying to look nonchalant. “I kicked her in the groin and ran. Most of us are hiding in our homes, if we made it clear of the fray. Things aren’t really bad, not yet. The deadline is still far enough away that most are biding their time, waiting for the rest to get here. Newcomers will be easy targets for the rest of us, right? Show up late, don’t get all the information, lose. Lose big time. Mostly, right now, it’s people looking to settle scores, and people going after the easy targets. The weak. The unaffiliated. No one’s taking care of them.”
There seemed to be a stone stuck in my throat. Something about the way she looked at me when she said the word “weak” was setting off alarm bells in the back of my mind. “And Gillian?”
“See, she’s the reason I would have expected you to say more than you did when Annie decided to put a bounty out on my entire clan—and not only because those skins my darling love traded for your daughter’s education are what kicked off this whole mess.” Liz’s lip curled as she lowered her glass. “If I were a more vengeful woman, I would have left that girl standing on the sand when I pulled the rest of my people to safety. You’re lucky I take my responsibilities seriously. You’re lucky one of us knows what it means to be a mother.”
Tybalt took a step forward, toward her. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Out of everyone in the world—everyone except for me, and May, who remembered being Gillian’s mother even if she never had been—Tybalt understood the best how much it had killed me to let her go, even when she’d been demanding I do exactly that.
I caught his arm, preventing him from going any further. Liz looked at him impassively, either too drunk or too resigned to her fate to be concerned about the fury in his eyes.
“Go ahead,” she said. “It’s not like you’d be casting my clan into chaos. Hundreds of years of governing ourselves, keeping ourselves safe and tucked away and not violating the laws of either Faerie or humanity, and this is how it ends. No more need for Selkie clans, not when there aren’t any Selkies anymore.”
I forced myself to take a breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth, focusing on how much we needed Liz to help us voluntarily, and not how much I wanted to punch her in the face. It wasn’t easy. Quentin looked as furious as Tybalt, but he was channeling it into a perfect stillness, one that spoke of his