Page 24 of The Unkindest Tide

The Duchy of Ships wasn’t designed to provide its citizens with huge homes, and Pete seemed content to live by the rules she set for everyone else, leaving her with one room that was large enough to serve as social area, kitchen, and bedroom, all at the same time. A decadently soft-looking bed was centered on one wall, and Dean was sprawled in the middle of it, still dead to the world. Somewhat worryingly so, given that he hadn’t woken up when Tybalt and Quentin had picked him up from the dock, or during the walk back to Pete’s quarters. Marcia and Poppy were off to find the canteen and get him some restorative soup. Also, I privately thought, to reduce the number of bodies in the room.

Gillian was gone as well, swept away by the rapidly-growing Selkie contingent, who had surrounded her while I’d still been trying to get Quentin to calm down about his unconscious boyfriend. When I’d looked up, she’d been walking away, and she hadn’t looked back.

Still, Pete was a decent hostess, and she hadn’t shown any signs of transforming us into anything unpleasant, which was about all I asked for in one of the Firstborn. My standards may be low, but hey. They’ve earned it.

“Sorry about that,” said Pete, waving her mug of ale toward the unconscious Dean. At least it wasn’t rum. That would have been too on the nose, and it was way too soon for us to start seriously drinking. She pursed her lips in a small frown. “I sort of overload my descendants until they get used to me. The Merrow are usually so busy running things under the waves that they never come up to visit the Duchy, and so I don’t have to remember to hide from them.”

“Is that why you go by ‘Pete’?” I asked.

“That, and ‘Amphitrite’ isn’t exactly what I’d call a modern name,” she said. “It doesn’t roll trippingly off the tongue the way it did five thousand years ago. I like to move with the times. Keeps me from seeming like a stagnant old fuddy-duddy who needs to be undermined and overthrown.”

“Is there anyone around here who could undermine and overthrow you?” asked Quentin.

She fixed him with an amused stare. He met it, looking genuinely curious. To my surprise, she was the first to look away, swinging her attention to the Luidaeg as she asked, “How much time have you spent desensitizing this kid to the idea that gods walk among us?”

“I don’t know,” said the Luidaeg. “A lot. He follows Toby around, and she’s not great for nurturing a sense of self-preservation.”

“Ah, yes. The famous October.” Pete turned to me, and for the first time, I felt the full weight of her regard. Her eyes were startlingly like the Luidaeg’s, deep and drowning and comprised of what felt like countless layers of clear water combining into darkness. “Amandine’s youngest. Is Amy the only sibling we have standing who’s still having kids?”

“She hasn’t had one since October, but so far as I know, yes,” said the Luidaeg.

“We’re all supposed to be gone now, you see, lies and legends and bones at the bottom of the sea,” said Pete, still looking at me. “We agreed, when our parents disappeared. We’re too big. We’re like hurricanes surrounded in skin, storms that walk the world and do more damage than we intend to. Our wars shook Faerie when Dad and the Moms were here to rein us in, and without them, we could have ruined everything. So we withdrew. We stopped telling people who we were. We’re oddities and demons now, sea witches and dark lords of the fen, but we’re not Firstborn. The word carries too much weight. And that means we couldn’t exactly go around having kids, since they’d give the game away.”

“Our sister had one, shortly after Amy had August,” said the Luidaeg.

“Wait, what?” I asked.

“Dawn,” said the Luidaeg shortly, her attention still mostly on Pete. “I think she wanted to prove she was still stronger than the baby of the family.”

“Eira.” Pete’s lip curled in disgust. “If there’s one thing I truly regret, it’s that I share a mother with her, and not with you. Not that I don’t love my mother, may she remain missing until the stars fall from the sky, but who wants to sit at the family table and admit they’re the full sibling of the biggest bitch to ever walk the world?”

“About that,” I said. The Luidaeg turned to look at me. Having the full attention of two Firstborn was a bit much, even for me, but I refused to back down. “I thought, well. I thought Titania’s children and Maeve’s children didn’t, you know. Get along.”

“We don’t, usually,” said Pete. “Mom encouraged her kids to be conquerors and kings. She wanted us to carve out empires in her name, and if we could do our carving through the bodies of our half-siblings, all the better, because it meant there’d be less competition. She wasn’t exactly what I’d call ‘nurturing.’ More ‘bloody-minded and dedicated to the idea that one day she’d be seen as the one true Queen of Faerie.’”

“She sounds like a nice lady,” I said, as carefully as I could.

The Luidaeg snorted. “She sounds like nothing of the sort.”

“Anyway, the ocean is mostly Maeve’s domain, what with her being the source of water magic and all, and I was Titania’s first child who actually took to the depths. Like a fish, some might say.” Pete took another sip of ale. “Mom saw me as a chance to start undermining Maeve’s interests, and hey, it might have worked, if not for the part where my full siblings treated me like some sort of unwanted spindrift washed up on their shores. I was wet, which meant I was less than they were, so they felt free to act like it. Whereas Maeve’s children . . .” She faltered, looking to the Luidaeg.

“We didn’t know at first,” said the Luidaeg. “My mother wasn’t a megalomaniacal bitch who thinks of her kids as useful pieces in a century-spanning game of chess, but that didn’t make her a great communicator, and sometimes she’d make children out of random stuff when Dad was away. When Pete showed up, she was just this skinny kid with kelp in her hair and fish guts in her teeth, and we all assumed Mom had fallen in love with the story of a shipwreck or something. It wouldn’t have been the first time. When we realized she was one of Titania’s get, it was too late; we were already fond of her.”

“Good thing, too,” said Pete, a look of deep melancholy settling over her face. “Maeve’s children were my brothers and sisters, too—most of them, anyway, the ones who didn’t have shipwrecks or stories for fathers—and they were kind to me, and they were dying. If I hadn’t been their little curiosity, I think they might have killed me, just to even the scales a bit.”

“Which would have been a pity, since I like most of the Merrow I’ve met,” I said. “Although speaking of Merrow, you want to explain why Dean’s still asleep?” I was starting to get nervous about that. He’d never been prone to fainting, and from the pinched, worried look on Quentin’s face, he was going to say something stupid if his boyfriend didn’t wake up soon.

“Sorry,” said Pete unrepentantly. “The Merrow think I’m dead. Most of them, anyway. The few who realize I’m still up here do their best to pretend I’m not, because if they admitted I was alive, they’d have to listen to me, and I’d tell them to stop tormenting the rest of the ocean to make my mother happy. Titania can go hang as far as I’m concerned.”

“That doesn’t explain why he won’t wake up,” said Quentin.

Pete gave him a thoughtful look. “You’re a prickly little spirit,” she said. “No merry wanderer of the night. What family line are you from?”

Quentin’s worry melted into an even deeper discomfort. “I’m not supposed to say,” he said. “I’m on blind fosterage.”

“Right now the only family line that matters is mine,” I said, before he could dig his way any deeper into the hole. “He’s my squire, I’m responsible for him, please don’t turn him into a school of sardines or anything else that makes it difficult for me to finish his training.”

“Presumptuous thing, aren’t you?” asked Pete. At least she sounded amused. “Your half-breed is unconscious because he wasn’t prepared to look upon my glory. Merrow tend to respond like that when they see me without warning. Or they get really, really pissed and try to kill me. It’s almost always one of the two. Does Eira know about him? Is it just killing her to know that one of her precious Daoine Sidhe went and lowered themselves to sport with a fish? Please tell me she knows. I’ll forgive you for being annoying if you do.”