The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,112

never comes back with unexpected corpses.”

“That’s not encouraging,” said Mathias . . . but he let go of René’s arm. The other man rose, turned back, and bent to press a kiss to Mathias’ forehead, lingering there for a long moment.

“I’ll come back to you,” he said softly, voice so low and intimate that I felt almost like I was intruding. Only almost. Their farewell was important; so was the dead woman.

“See to it,” said Mathias.

René nodded and walked over to join the rest of us. There was nothing left to say, and so we simply left. We had work to do.

SIXTEEN

THE BEACH WAS STILL deserted. I paused, frowning.

“René, your sister—you lived with her at some point, right? After you’d both received your skins?” Most fae have extremely low birthrates, a consequence of being functionally immortal. If we bred the way humans do, we would have overrun the world centuries ago, leaving no room for anything else. Sometimes I think that might have been better. Most of the time, I think we would have just come up with different ways of ruining absolutely everything.

René nodded. “Her skin was worn by our mother; my skin was worn by our grandfather. There’s a tradition in our family of marrying kin who were never offered a skin of their own. That way, we never lose sight of the fact that mortality comes for us all. That’s why I had to leave for Beacon’s Home when I fell in love with Mathias. He wasn’t clan leader yet—he wasn’t even sure he was in the running—but he couldn’t come to live with me, because by my clan’s rules, we couldn’t have been married. We were both Selkies, and that simply wasn’t done, especially not by the old chief’s son.”

“Okay, the family history is nice, but irrelevant to my actual question. Can you describe the scent of your sister’s magic? In as much detail as possible, please.” I’d never had the chance to smell Isla in the act of spellcasting. The scent might linger on her sealskin, but I wouldn’t know that for sure until I found the person who’d stolen it.

“Chicory and phlox,” said René. “It’s a lot like mine. Here.” He held out his hand, brow furrowing as he whistled a few notes of a song that sounded distinctly similar to the sort of weird maritime folk that Quentin sometimes decided to blast in the middle of the day. That’s the real connection between folk music and the fae: it’s easier to whistle than heavy metal.

The smell of chicory and cypress filled the air as the space above his palm transitioned from perfect clarity to cloudy gray, finally becoming a black-and-white image of a younger Isla, laughing as she spun on the bare toes of one foot, her other foot held out at a stabilizing angle. She wasn’t particularly graceful. Selkies never are. But there was a joy to her that had been absent the one time I’d seen her alive, a lightness that spoke to the way she saw her place in the world.

“Everyone thought I was going to take over when Mom passed her skin along,” said René, eyes on the spinning specter of his sister. “I’d been a Selkie for almost five years before Isla was chosen. I’d carried myself with dignity and pride. But then Mathias happened, and there was no way for us to be together and me to lead the clan, so I stepped aside, and Isla had to change her plans.”

“That sucks,” said Quentin softly. His eyes were on the spinning Selkie woman, and I didn’t know how to read the expression on his face. We’d been together long enough that I could usually tell what he was thinking, but now . . .

He had a sister in Toronto. Penthea, second in line for the throne. If he chose to step aside for some reason, he’d be doing to her what René had accidentally done to Isla. For the first time, I saw why his parents might be concerned about his attachment to the Mists. After all, we were the ones with the power to turn a prince’s head.

“Yeah.” René closed his hand. The dancing figure of Isla disappeared as he looked at me. “Did that give you what you needed?”

“I guess we’re going to find out,” I said, and closed my eyes, taking a deep breath.

What felt like hundreds of magical traces struck me at the same time, and I staggered. Tybalt was there to catch