The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,149
stepped back from the table. Tybalt was there, to put an arm around my waist and draw me close. Quentin and Marcia stood nearby, seeking comfort in proximity. All of us were silent, aware that we were present for something that no one had seen in centuries, that maybe no one had ever seen at all. Two Firstborn, a daughter of Maeve and a daughter of Titania, working together to change the world.
Magic gathered in the corners of the room, gently at first, like a wave lapping at the shore, and then with more and more strength, until it was everywhere, until we were drowning in it. I leaned against Tybalt and struggled to keep breathing as the magic chased the air from the room. The Luidaeg and Pete bent over the skin, their movements silent and precise and nowhere near as fascinating as the magic they were generating. I closed my eyes and inhaled.
The Luidaeg’s magic was familiar to me, more familiar than it had any right to be. It smelled of brackish water, of the point where sea meets shore, where freshwater blends with salt. It smelled like peat and moss and loam, like blooming bog myrtle and sweet bluebell. Its complexity was dizzying, and enough to remind me that Faerie gets simpler with every generation. Most of us only have two elements to our magic. She had an entire world.
Pete’s magic was softer, gentler and crueler at the same time, because it wasn’t a cudgel, wasn’t a hammer: it was a knife slipped between the ribs and into a lung, it was a blade in the dark that cut and cut and never stopped slicing. It smelled like clean sea air immediately before a storm, wind and wave and ozone and impending doom. It smelled like driftwood, bleached bone-dry on the shore, and like sand bathed in moonlight, like ambergris and mist. Half those things shouldn’t have been scents, but I knew them all the same, and as I breathed, they blended with the Luidaeg’s magic, tying complicated knots all around the room.
The Luidaeg moaned when she made the first cut in her grandson’s skin. It was the sound of something dying. Pete hummed in wordless encouragement, and it was the sound of that same thing rising from the depths of the sea, coming back to life, coming home. I opened my eyes again. It was the only way to keep myself from being overwhelmed.
I could have stayed there forever, bathed in the painful radiance of their magic. I could have turned and run and never looked back. In the end, I needed to do neither of those things. In the end, the Luidaeg dropped her knife and put her hands over her face. Pete stepped back.
Five sealskins lay on the table, each shining, perfect, and as large as the original. They weren’t quite identical; their spots and striations had apparently spread out from the piece of Beathan’s skin that had been used to make them, creating five subtle but genuine variations.
“Come on, Annie,” said Pete gently. “Let’s go see if these work.”
The Luidaeg nodded, and said nothing.
We walked together through the Duchy of Ships. The Luidaeg carried Marcia’s basket, now containing all five skins, against her chest, keeping her eyes fixed on the dim, distant line of the horizon. Nolan and Cassandra met us at the start of the shopping district. The Lordens didn’t. Their ties to the Undersea were too strong: this wasn’t for them to see. This was for the Luidaeg, and the few people she was willing to share it with, and for the Roane, who had been lost for so very long.
It was hard not to wonder whether the Roane had seen this moment. Whether some of them might have wept over the sight of their mother, their grandmother, walking with a basket clutched in her arms, her shoulders bowed by the weight of centuries they hadn’t been able to set aside. The future can always be changed. There’s never once been a prophecy that couldn’t be somehow undermined or averted. Why hadn’t the Roane set their own deaths aside?
What about this moment had been worth losing so very much?
The Selkie clan leaders were waiting when we reached the artificial beach. René stood alongside the others, his hand clasped in Mathias’. I was glad to see that. One way or another, they were going to find a way through this. They had to.