The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,119

sway me toward the sea. I shuddered, a bigger motion that made its small twitches easier to dismiss as my own bone-deep chill. I can heal from practically anything. I still get cold.

René’s face immediately sobered. He took a step toward me, one hand partially outstretched. He hesitated then, looking at my face. “May I?” he asked.

“I’d prefer it if you did, as long as you understand that if you try to run, Tybalt will chase you down and make you stop,” I said. “It keeps talking to me. Do Selkie skins always talk?”

Tybalt grinned, putting teeth—literally—behind my threat.

René cast an anxious glance at the dockhands, who were working the pulley, ostentatiously ignoring us. He looked back to me. “Talk, no,” he said, gently taking the skin from my hands. “Some can form words, but most can’t at this point. They’re worn smooth, like driftglass, like stones in the sea. The elders say their elders could converse with the spirits of their skins, but if that’s true, and not just some foolish fancy, that time passed very long ago. Before my mother’s mother’s mother swam the seas.”

Meaning the Luidaeg had been draping the Selkies in ghosts all this time. Hungry ghosts, no less, who wanted the chance to live again, no matter how limited their form. I shivered, this time not from the cold. What did the night-haunts make of the Selkies? They were wrapped in magically preserved slivers of the Roane, who had faded from the flocks centuries ago—but when they’d been lifted up on autumnal wings, had they done so with fleshless faces, flensed and left to rot?

It was a chilling thought. I didn’t like it, and so I shunted it aside. “René, I know you want to pass Isla’s skin, but I need to ask you not to do that,” I said. “It has to stay with us until this is settled. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to let my sister’s skin out of my hands,” he said reluctantly. “I’d trade it for Isla, alive and human and here, but since I can’t have that, I don’t want to let it go. And yet . . . I think you’re right. It wouldn’t be safe with me. Too many people are desperate, for their children, their loved ones, all the ones who’d been content to wait when they thought that waiting could be fruitful.”

“I understand,” I said—and I did, I really did. To be a changeling is to be something like to a Selkie, inside and outside Faerie at the same time. The hope chests offer us a way to cross that line and become fae forever, if that’s what we want. That’s what they were created to do, and that’s the reason they’ve all been locked away, hidden from the people who need them most. We’re not seen as worthy, and part of that supposed unworthiness comes from the fact that we have to fight for everything we get. Faerie has never given us anything freely.

I took a step back, so I could see all three of my traveling companions at the same time. “We’ll take you, and the skin, to our quarters. There’s always someone there, and we’re traveling under the Luidaeg’s protection. No one will interfere with us.” I pitched my voice a bit louder than necessary, to be sure the dockhands would hear me. From the way their shoulders tightened, they did. Good.

It wasn’t that I thought they were necessarily dishonest. I didn’t know them well enough for that. It was simply that we were out in the open, and there was no way to be sure we hadn’t been listened in on. Once we got the skin home, we could keep it safe until things were settled.

And we could let René see his sister’s body.

“Do you know how to get to the visitor’s apartments from here?” I asked.

René shook his head. “Selkies have their own space. We don’t travel deeper into the duchy when we don’t have to.”

“I know the way,” said Tybalt. I blinked at him. He smirked, although the expression lacked his usual heat. “I had plenty of time to explore while you and your boy wonder were off playing at being merfolk. Follow me.”

He turned on his heel and started walking, a little faster than normal, but not so fast that I couldn’t keep up. He was annoyed, not actively angry. That was fine. Annoyed, I could work with. Angry meant yelling and apologies and pain, and I was way