The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,148

sorry for the woman who died, and for the people who died before her, all the way back to the boy who died to make the skin in the first place. But me being sorry doesn’t give me the right to take what isn’t mine.”

“Ah,” breathed the Luidaeg. She let go of Marcia’s wrist. Marcia danced back, out of her grasp. The Luidaeg didn’t seem to notice. She was busy opening the basket, sliding her hands into the oil it contained, and pulling out the sealskin I’d found tangled in the kelp beneath the Duchy of Ships.

“His name was Beathan,” she said. “He was my grandson. He was strong and clever and bold and not always good about making the right choices. Most of the futures he saw had to do with fishing. He kept his family fed. He was a good provider. He would . . . I’m sure he’d rather be alive right now than be a part of what we’re to do here, but he would approve of this, I think, if he were asked. He would understand that he was saving people.”

She pulled the skin fully out of the basket and stretched it out across the table, where it clung, gleaming, to the wood. She looked at Pete, and then at me.

“I’ve never done this before,” she said.

“I don’t think anyone has,” I said. “Can you turn the skin over? I want to see the magic inside it.” The top was a shining pelt, sleek and smooth and perfect as if it had just been cut away from the back of the boy who’d grown it. The spell had to be anchored to the leather. It was the only thing that made sense. I’d touched Connor’s skin a hundred times while he was wearing it, and never heard the tempting promises Isla’s skin had made when it was hanging across my arms.

The Luidaeg and Pete exchanged a look before carefully, oh-so-carefully, grasping the opposite ends of the skin and turning it so that the burnished leather underside was toward the ceiling. It looked perfectly ordinary, the sort of thing that could have come out of any hunter’s stockpile.

Wordlessly, I held my hand out toward Tybalt. He sighed, and the next thing I knew, his claws were drawing hot lines of pain across my palm, splitting the skin. The deepest wound was at the heel of my hand. I brought it to my lips as quickly as I could, and was rewarded with a hot gout of blood, filling my mouth, overwhelming my senses with the taste of cut grass and copper. I could taste the ghost of the Luidaeg’s magic there as well, and that was fine; under the circumstances, that was almost ideal.

I blinked and the magic appeared on the leather like a map, or a fishing net of delicate lines older than any modern nation, any mortal dynasty. They were clearly of the Luidaeg’s making, but they were infused with an ageless anger and a deep, unspeakable grief.

As if in a dream, I leaned forward and rested my fingertips on the air above the skin, the taste of blood still clinging to my lips. The wounds on my hand had already healed. Tybalt would have to hurt me again if I needed more blood.

“There are four places you can cut without breaking the bond between the working and the weave,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. “No more than that. Divided further, the spell would fail, and it would just be so much dead fur. I can show you where to cut, but I don’t have the power to make the cuts myself. They’d seal over.” So much of the magic was dedicated to preserving the skins, maintaining the immortality that had been theirs by right when they’d been living, vital parts of Faerie, and not memorials to commemorate the lost. Anything short of massive trauma wouldn’t be enough to break the spell or destroy the skin.

In that, we were the same. Both of us had been created by the Firstborn—me in a slightly more standard manner—and both of us were essentially indestructible.

“Four cuts, five skins,” sighed the Luidaeg. She touched the skin with the tips of her fingers. “My brave, beautiful boy. Let’s see whether we’re gambling everything on the right tide or the wrong one. Let’s see whether you get to rest.”

“Where?” asked Pete.

I touched the skin where the spell was thinnest, in four places. Pete nodded, and I