The Unkindest Tide (October Daye #13) - Seanan McGuire Page 0,52

it always easy to keep them?”

The child shook their head.

“Well, then. So I have to talk to all the grown-ups, your mother and the man who was just talking to me and all the grown-ups, and they have to talk to me, and together we’re going to figure out what happens next. These are my friends, October,” she gestured to me, “and Tybalt. They don’t get to decide what happens because they’re not Selkies, but they get to help make sure everything is as fair as it can be.”

The child studied her face carefully before asking, “Does that mean you don’t hate us?”

The Luidaeg sighed. I tensed.

The Selkies—and, I suppose, the Roane—are the only people the Luidaeg can lie to. They’re her descendant race, and powerful as Titania is, or was, she’s not powerful enough to get between a Firstborn and their children. But she couldn’t lie to Tybalt, or to me, and we were standing right there. Whatever she said, we’d hear her. Would that be enough to bring Titania’s geas into play?

Would that even make a difference?

“Sweetheart, I don’t know you,” she said. “You haven’t been alive long enough to make any choices you might regret. No matter how long you live, things are never going to be as simple as they are right now ever again. So run. Run and play and try to forget that I’m here. Everything will be complicated soon enough.”

The child wrinkled their nose. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m the motherfucking sea witch. I don’t have to answer your question.”

The child’s eyes widened. “You said a swear.”

“Again, sea witch. I’m allowed.”

The child nodded, apparently satisfied, before turning and wandering off down the beach. The Luidaeg straightened, giving me a challenging look.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said. “You’re good with kids.”

“I can’t stand them.” She smoothed her dress with the heels of her hands, not looking up as she continued, “I haven’t been able to since my own went and died on me. So many children in the world, and not one of them is mine. It’s not fair.”

I bit my lip, and said nothing.

It’s not entirely clear how the Firstborn create their descendant races, not even to me. Supposedly, every time they take a lover, they have the potential to create a new facet of Faerie, but it can’t be that straightforward. August and I have different fathers and the same Firstborn mother, and we’re both Dóchas Sidhe. The Luidaeg has never identified all her children by name, but there must have been at least a dozen of them, if not more. There’s no other way for the Roane to have been as well-established as they were by the time Evening decided to arrange for their destruction. It seemed a little unreasonable to assume they had all had the same father.

Maybe if the Luidaeg had gone out and gotten pregnant again as soon as Evening instigated the slaughter of her children, the Roane would have been with us all along. Or maybe she would have created something entirely new. I didn’t know, and something about that lack of knowledge worried me. There was a piece I didn’t have yet. I’ve learned, to my regret, that missing pieces now almost always mean pain later.

This wasn’t the time to dwell on it. The doors on several of the Cape Cod houses opened and a line of Selkies appeared, walking across the sand toward us. The scattered people who’d still been wandering the sands vanished into other houses, pausing only long enough to snatch up any children who happened to be out in the open. I took a deep breath and braced myself.

That was a wise decision. The Luidaeg raised her head as the Selkies approached, and her eyes were dark as the depths of the ocean, and her skin was underscored with a faint bluish tint, like she’d somehow managed to drown on dry land while I’d been standing right next to her. Even her bones had shifted, rising too close to the surface of the skin. She was unspeakable, a deepwater dream of drowning and despair, and her skin radiated cold.

I didn’t know her with this face. But I recognized my friend in the downturned corners of her mouth and the tension of her shoulders, and I didn’t pull away.

Three women and two men walked at the head of the group of approaching Selkies. I recognized Elizabeth Ryan and Mathias Lefebvre. The other three were strangers. All five stopped some distance away, forming a loosely