Page 25 of The Unkindest Tide

“She knows,” I said. “Dean has a little brother, too. Their parents are very happy together.”

Now Pete looked surprised. “Wait, they did it more than once? Okay, my blessings on their household, solely because it cheeses Eira off.”

“You don’t know that,” said the Luidaeg mildly.

“I’ve met our sister,” said Pete. “I do know that.” She looked around our group. “So this is your glorious crew, sailing for the unknown horizon, out to destroy the Selkies. They claim the protection of the waves, you know. I have Selkie families living here.”

“There are families everywhere,” said the Luidaeg.

“Not like this,” snapped Pete, and for a moment, her scales were darker, like stormlight on the water, and I didn’t want to look at her too closely, for fear I’d somehow drown in her mere presence. “When I say families, I mean families. Human families. Selkies who come here draped in sealskin and then set it aside, and stay, because they’re mortal but they’re not completely human. They’ve been touched by Faerie, and they can’t go back to being what they were before they held their breath and dove. So tell me, sister dearest, sister mine, why I should side with you instead of with them?”

“Because you love me and want me to be happy?” suggested the Luidaeg.

“If love alone dictated the actions of the Firstborn, our world would be a very different one,” said Pete.

“I’ll drink to that.” The Luidaeg picked up her mug and drained it in a single long pull, slamming it back down on the table and glaring at her sister. “Why should you side with me? Because you know what their ancestors did. What our sister used them to do. This is healing a wound in the world almost as old as Faerie itself.”

“That isn’t their fault,” said Pete. She sounded sympathetic. She didn’t sound like she was going to yield. Suddenly, it was very difficult to ignore the fact that we were sharing this pleasant, somewhat archaic room with two of the Firstborn, or to pretend their goals were exactly aligned with my own.

I glanced at Tybalt. He met my eyes, nodded, and shifted position slightly, so he was prepared to grab Quentin by the shoulders and haul him away if it proved necessary. Our places around the table meant he couldn’t get to us both, but he was smart—and more importantly, tactical—enough to know that of the three of us, I was the most likely to survive anything Pete and the Luidaeg wanted to sling at each other.

Did I particularly want to be the only hero standing when two of Faerie’s greatest monsters decided to go toe-to-toe? No. But I wanted the boys out of the line of fire even more. I only wished there were a way to safely extract Dean before things went sideways.

“They agreed to this consequence,” said the Luidaeg.

“No, their ancestors agreed. We’re not humans, Annie. We don’t live and die by the sins of the father, nor should we, given the amount of mischief our forebears got up to when allowed. You told a bunch of shivering children who’d just killed their own parents to allay your wrath that they weren’t done paying, and they agreed, because they were terrified. You’re terrifying, you know. Sometimes you even frighten me.”

“Then why are you arguing with me?” The Luidaeg wasn’t smiling anymore, and when she spoke, the teeth I glimpsed beyond her lips were too sharp and too plentiful to be ignored.

“Because the Selkies who live here are under my protection, and many of the Selkies who are swimming this way to answer your summons are members of the same clans; they could claim that protection for themselves, if they wanted to. If they thought to do it.” Pete leaned forward. “Tell me why letting you do what you came here to do doesn’t betray that protection. Please.”

“Because no one’s going to die,” I blurted.

They slowly turned to look at me. I forced myself not to flinch under the weight of their gaze. I was accustomed to being the full focus of a single Firstborn’s attention. Two was . . . well, it was a bit much. I could feel their anger crawling across my skin like the static charge before a storm, and I wanted nothing more than to apologize, to throw up my hands and tell them I was sorry, anything to turn that befuddled disapproval aside.

I didn’t. Instead, I squared my shoulders, raised my chin, and refused to look away.

“We’re not here to kill the Selkies, or their families,” I said. “I mean, we’re here to make it so there won’t be any more Selkies in the future, and I can see where that probably sucks if you’re someone who’s been waiting to receive a skin from a parent or grandparent or whatever, but those skins never really belonged to the Selkies. They belonged to the Roane. When the Selkies agreed to carry them, they did it knowing this was the way things were going to end.”

“And they don’t get to pretend they forgot,” said the Luidaeg, seamlessly picking up the explanation. “I’ve been there, Pete. Every time a Selkie parent passes a skin, at least on the West Coast, they’ve done it with me watching over them. This entire generation saw me on the shore, judging them for what they’d chosen. They know about the promise their ancestors made, about the blood on their hands. They know how my babies died. They take their skins with full understanding of the blessing and the bargain, and they don’t get to say they didn’t know, because they knew. They did this knowing that one day, there’d be a price to pay. I can’t lie, because of your mother, and I told them this was coming. I’m not going to say I’m sorry that price fell to this generation. It always sucks to be the one who catches the bill.”

“Yes, it does,” said Pete. She was talking to the Luidaeg, but her eyes were on me, deep and cold and surprisingly sympathetic. “It’s terrible to be the one who has to set things right when you didn’t play any part in breaking them.”

She sighed then, and it was like some terrible tension snapped, leaving the room smaller and less dangerous. Tybalt relaxed. Quentin frowned, looking between Pete and me, trying to understand what had just happened.

“You can do what you came here for, so long as there’s no fae blood shed in my waters,” said Pete. “I maintain a safe harbor for the people with nowhere else to go. And I’ll be wanting some faerie ointment from you, and the promise of more. Some among those families may want to stay here. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve never known anything else.”

“I’m a better brewer than you anyway,” said the Luidaeg.

Pete punched her in the shoulder, and she laughed, and for a moment, they were just a pair of siblings seeing each other again after a long and not entirely voluntary separation. It was odd seeing the Luidaeg with a family member she didn’t hate. There was no love lost between her and Eira—probably even less now that Eira had successfully killed her once, not counting on my occasional, unpredictable ability to exhaust myself by raising the dead—and while I hadn’t actually seen her with my mother, from the way she talked about Mom, I didn’t expect them to be braiding each other’s hair.

The door banged open. Every head in the room, except for Dean’s, swung around. Marcia, standing in the doorway, flushed a bright, embarrassed red. She was holding a tray in her hands, which explained the force with which the door had hit the wall; she must have bumped it open with her hip.

“Sorry,” she said. “I had to find the canteen, and then I had to explain what I wanted, and then I had to go through this long, irritating process of barter, and—”

Pete groaned. “They didn’t just give you the stuff when you said it was for my account?”

Marcia blinked, eyes wide and worried. “You didn’t tell me it was on your account.”