Page 31 of The Unkindest Tide

Mathias scrambled to his feet, the sealskin still resting on his hands. The Luidaeg looked at him flatly, more of those dark threads curling through her irises, chasing away the green.

“Leave,” she snapped.

For a moment, I thought he was going to argue with her. For a moment, I thought I was going to find out whether she’d been right when she said that any of us would stand calmly by and watch her commit a murder. Then he backed away, taking three long, quick steps, before turning and running toward the row of neat little Cape Cod-style houses. He didn’t look back.

We had gathered a small crowd while he was speaking, Selkies and Selkie-kin pausing in whatever they’d been doing before we came in order to drift closer and listen in as hard as they could. The Luidaeg turned to look at them, and they paled and fled, some following Mathias, others simply retreating along the artificial beach. All but one.

That one—a child, maybe six years old, dressed in a shapeless tunic, with pale blonde hair cut in a pageboy bob—approached the three of us, head cocked curiously to the side.

“Are you really the Lady?” they asked.

The Luidaeg nodded. “I am.”

“My mother says the Lady bound Merlin in a tree for a thousand years because he was mean to her.”

The corner of the Luidaeg’s mouth twitched. “That’s not quite how it happened, but you should listen to your mother. Mothers have many clever things to say, if you listen closely.”

“She says we came here because the Lady is tired of there being Selkies, and she wants the Selkies to stop.” The child looked at us solemnly. “Is that so?”

“Almost.” The Luidaeg crouched, putting herself on a level with the child. The dark lines vanished from her eyes between one blink and the next, leaving them a clear, untroubled green. She looked heartbreakingly at ease. She must have been one hell of a mother. “I’m here because a very long time ago, the first Selkies made me a promise, and it’s time for that promise to be kept. Do you ever make promises?”

The child nodded.

“Is 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.