Page 76 of Night and Silence

The room was small and round, as befitted a room at the top of a tower. The windows looked out on the San Francisco shoreline from an angle that I knew for a fact matched nothing in the part of the city where the Luidaeg’s apartment was located. There didn’t seem to be enough light pollution out there, as if the windows were somehow pointed at the past. Stranger things have happened in Faerie, and I knew that. I also knew that I was stalling. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my eyes away from the window and considered the rest of the room.

The furniture was old, heavy oak that should have seemed like it was too much for the space, but it was saved by the combination of its own delicate carving and the gauzy curtains that softened and blunted the walls. A wardrobe; a dresser; a desk; a bed. The curtains around the bed were thicker, allowing the occupant to shut out the better part of the light, and they were drawn, transforming her into an outline that could as easily have been a pile of pillows in a comedy as my daughter. My heart hammered. My head spun. I took a step forward.

That first step seemed to break the seal on the rest of them. It wasn’t easy to move, but it was possible, and once I’d done it, the next step came a little easier, and the one after that, and the one after that, until I was standing next to the bed. I pulled the curtains aside, and there she was. My girl. My Gillian.

The Luidaeg had changed her clothes, dressing her in a simple blue sweater and a pair of dark pants. I should have been annoyed, but all I could manage was gratitude. I wasn’t sure my heart could have handled seeing my daughter soaked in her own blood. Her chest rose and fell in a slow, easy rhythm, the breathing of someone sunk into a deep slumber.

There was a seal’s pelt draped around her shoulders, burnished silver dotted with patches of deeper gray. She would be beautiful in the water, like all the Selkies were, like Connor had been. I put a hand over my mouth, smothering any sound I might have made. Elf-shot had taken my Selkie lover from me, reduced him to so much meat for the night-haunts to claim. And now elf-shot had, however unintentionally, given my Selkie daughter back to me.

The signs of her renewed fae heritage weren’t in her face yet, but they would be. Her eyes would darken; her ears would take on subtle points. Maybe she’d have spots in her hair like Connor had, or speckled rosettes ghosting along the skin of her back and arms. The change would come on slowly, keeping pace with her ability to disguise herself from human eyes.

Not for the first time since I’d learned the true origin of the Selkies, I thought the Luidaeg had been kinder to them than she’d had any cause to be. She needed them to keep the skins of her dead children alive, yes, but she could have punished them far more severely than she had. In her own way, she still loved them. In her own way, she still tried.

I knelt, taking one of Gillian’s hands in mine, and paused at the first real sign of change. A thin membrane of skin had formed at the base of her fingers, connecting each of them about halfway to the first knuckle.

“It’s a good thing you weren’t studying to be a surgeon,” I murmured, and laughed unsteadily. Somehow my laughter turned into tears, great, racking sobs that rose up from my toes and traveled through my body in waves. I bent forward, forehead to the mattress, and wept.

A hand touched the crown of my head. I sat up with a start.

Gillian’s eyes were open. The edges of her pupils were beginning to bleed black into the foggy blue of her irises, washing the color away, making it something else for her to mourn. I wondered, for an instant, whether she would ever be able to look at her recolored eyes without hating me a little, the way I hated my own mother for changing me to save me. Then the moment passed, and I was staring at my daughter, and she was staring back at me, and there were no illusions between us. No illusions at all.

“M . . .” she started, and stopped, swallowing the syllable. It was such a familiar gesture that it ached. She tried again: “Toby?”

“Hi,” I whispered.

“I . . . your ears.” Her eyes widened as she struggled not to stare. “I thought I dreamt it. I thought I dreamt . . .” She started to shiver, sitting upright and clutching the blankets over her chest. “This is a dream. I am dreaming right now.”

“You’re not, honey. I’m sorry, but you’re awake.” I stood, taking a step back and giving her as much space as I could without leaving the room. “This is all really happening.”

“No, it’s not. This can’t be happening.” She clutched the blanket tighter. The motion caused her fingers to brush against the edge of the sealskin wrapped around her shoulders. She flinched away from it, and my heart broke.

Hearts are resilient. They can heal over and over again. That’s the good part. The bad part is that having a resilient heart means it can be broken so many times that it feels like it should never recover, like it should be nothing but a pile of shards in my chest. I forced myself to keep breathing as I took another step back, putting even more distance between us. Making it clear that I wasn’t trying to pressure her.

“Gillian . . .” I stopped. What was I supposed to say? That she’d lost her humanity, but it was okay, she still had her life? How well had that line worked on me? I was more human than my own changeling daughter, now. A Selkie is either a Selkie or they’re not, and if she set her skin aside, she wouldn’t be a Selkie anymore. She’d just be a dead girl.

“That woman, that awful woman, she stabbed me.” Gillian looked down at her hands and flinched again at the sight of the webs between her fingers. She closed her eyes, looking at nothing as she continued, “She stabbed me with an arrow and I thought I was going to die, and why can’t I remember what she looked like? She nearly killed me. Why can’t I remember?”

“She’s a pureblood, and humans have trouble looking at the fae,” I said. “You were too human before. Your head couldn’t handle looking at what she really was.” The false Queen’s beauty had always been the kind that tore people down, rather than building them up. Looking at a pureblood as a human or a thin-blooded changeling could be dangerous, because the mortal mind was never intended to behold things that far outside the natural world.

Gillian froze. I reviewed my words and winced as I realized what I’d said wrong.

“What do you mean, I was too human before?” she asked.

I counted carefully to ten before I replied with a question of my own: “What did they tell you when they woke you up?”

Gillian opened her eyes. The black had progressed in just those few seconds, slithering across the blue like smoke, clouding and concealing it. Soon enough, it would be gone forever. “The other woman, the one with the green eyes, she made me drink this stuff that tasted like seawater, and then she said, um.” She paused before reciting, “‘This isn’t a perfect solution, and I’m sorry, but you deserve better, and so does your mother, and some debts are too old to ever be paid.’ Then she tied this thing around my shoulders and told me to go to sleep again, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I wasn’t even tired, and I fell asleep.”

“That was the Luidaeg,” I said. “You may hear people call her the sea witch. She needed you to sleep so you could get used to the skin.”

“The . . . skin?”

Oh, oak and ash, I didn’t have the vocabulary for this. Maybe no one did. The Luidaeg had told the Selkies what they were going to be and then they had told their children, but the knowledge had been passed, over and over again within a closed loop, parent telling child, everyone expecting it. This was new. I took a deep breath.

“Faeries are real,” I said. “Fairy tales get a lot of things wrong, but faeries are real, and when you were born, you were part-faerie, because I was half-faerie. Do you remember a few years ago, when the woman with the red hair snatched you from your bedroom?”

Gillian’s face tightened. “I have nightmares about it.”

“Do you remember the dream you had, before the police found you and brought you home?”