Page 56 of The Unkindest Tide

“Oh,” said Peter. Any potential protest he might have made was cut off a beat later, when a rope ladder dropped from the side of the ship and splashed down right in front of us.

“Come on up if you’re coming!” shouted Poppy, leaning over the side and waving enthusiastically. “You’ve missed buckets and buckets of nonsense!”

Of that I had absolutely no doubt. “You go first,” I said, to Peter. “Kirsi, go up with him, make sure he doesn’t lose his grip or something.”

“Of course,” she said. The Cephali guided Peter to the ladder, wrapping the tip of one tentacle delicately around his wrist and guiding it to the lowest rung. He gave her an amused look and began pulling himself up, at first by upper body strength alone, and then, as his magic shimmered around him, putting his legs into it.

I waited until he was about halfway up, Kirsi pacing him on the hull, before I nudged Quentin. “Go on,” I said. “Get moving.”

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’m pretty sure that, as your knight, I’m literally obligated to stay down here until I’m sure you’re not going to fall,” I said. “Call it acclimation therapy. Maybe if I float in the middle of the ocean for long enough, I’ll be able to enjoy hot tubs again.”

Quentin snorted and began climbing. I watched carefully. To be honest, my reluctance to go before him had also been born partially from the desire to see how he managed the transition between shapes. The Luidaeg’s spell gave us some of the instincts and abilities of the Merrow, but it hadn’t come with an instruction manual: while I knew how to change my fins into feet when I was sitting with my butt solidly on dry land, I had no idea how I was supposed to accomplish the same feat while totally surrounded by water.

The last time this happened, I’d been able to get Danny to pull me onto the dock before I tried to change. That wasn’t going to work now. No docks, and no convenient, long-armed Bridge Trolls to haul me out of harm’s way. I was going to have to manage this one for myself.

Quentin struggled for the first few rungs, his fishy lower body dangling as he hauled himself laboriously hand over hand. Then there was a shimmer, and he was placing one foot after the other, scrambling nimbly after the rest of our party.

“Everyone is good at this but me,” I grumbled, and started for the ladder. Then I stopped.

Something white was floating in the water near the hull, almost hidden by the shadow of one of the many pylons holding the Duchy in place.

It would have been easy to dismiss whatever it was as a trick of the light, or—if it was something real—as some piece of meaningless flotsam, a dead fish maybe, or a piece of torn-off fishing net. I wanted it to be one of those things. I wanted it to be something I could ignore.

Instead, I ducked my head under the water, so I wouldn’t be able to hear my friends calling me back, and swam toward the thing that shouldn’t have been there. I was hoping, still, that it would be nothing; it would be a bit of trash, a bit of foam, anything but what my long years of experience were starting to whisper to me.

Underwater, the scene shifted. Light moves differently in a Summerlands sea than it does in a mortal one, and even the shadows cast by the Duchy couldn’t turn the waves darker than a bright gloaming, like a summer twilight. I swam forward, and what I’d taken for a barnacle-encrusted piece of the foundation eddied in the water, becoming clearer. The white thing I’d seen floating was a starfish shape attached to an elegant stem, pale in the shadows, raised in an arch above a moon-shaped circle, crowned with waterweeds that had no discernable color.

Then I blinked, and the scarecrow construct of slices of the sea became a woman, wilted, wound about with the shroud of her own sundress, eyes closed and skin softened by the water that had invaded every inch of her. She was barefoot, wearing nothing but several yards of patterned cotton that tangled around her motionless legs.

Isla Chase. Leader of the Selkies of Belle Fleuve.

Drowned.

She was dead: there could be no question of that. Living women don’t hang like statues in freezing water, their chests motionless, their arms moved by the tides around them. But she was a Selkie, and Selkies don’t drown. They need to breathe, sure, but the water cares for them, in a way the Luidaeg can’t, and it tries its best to be kind. I remembered Connor talking about the sea back when we’d been lovers, when he’d stretched the length of himself out next to me in my bed, his webbed fingers playing in my hair, his toes running up and down my calves.

“Selkies know everything there is to know about drowning,” he’d said. “Back in the days when sailors still thought it was a clever idea to steal our skins, we got really good at making sure they understood that they weren’t supposed to do that. One dead sailor could teach a whole fishing community to leave the seals alone. But we don’t drown. When one of us falls into the water, we wash up on the shore. Maybe we’ll be bruised, maybe we’ll be battered, but we’ll be breathing. Every time. Always.”

I couldn’t remember why we’d been having that conversation—probably because I’d had another nightmare about my days in the pond, when the water had been above, below, and everywhere, when drowning would have been a mercy—but I could remember the wistful look in his eyes when he’d talked about his own inability to drown. Like he couldn’t have imagined any better end for himself.

He’d died on dry land. Isla Chase hadn’t.

Her body was secured to the pylon with a length of fishing net, so tangled that I couldn’t tell whether she’d been tied there or simply drifted into position after someone had tossed her body overboard. I swam as close as I dared, circling her with deft flicks of my tail, and couldn’t see any knots. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad one. Whether her body had been disposed of here on purpose or whether she’d been thrown overboard somewhere else, the message she was sending was the same:

Isla had been murdered.

I turned and swam back to where I’d been a few seconds before. When I broke the surface, Quentin, Peter, and Poppy were all staring at me over the edge, while Helmi and the other Cephali stuck to the side of the ship, watching me warily.

“Where did you go?” called Quentin. “Is something wrong?”

I opened my mouth. Then I froze.

Captain Pete had sailed away rather than allow her presence to complicate the process of returning the Roane to these waters. Dianda was under arrest, and for the moment at least, her usurping brother was the ranking Undersea noble onboard. Dean’s title wasn’t in question, but his authority in these waters, this far away from land, certainly was. Involving Nolan would mean saying I thought the Mists had some sort of claim over this floating domain, so far from the shore. So who did I call? Isla Chase was dead. There was no question about that. But as for the question of who had killed her, well . . .

The Luidaeg had given the Selkies permission to assault and rob each other. Isla could have committed suicide after having her skin stolen. This didn’t have to be murder. Would the Luidaeg even want me to investigate? Or would she want me to leave it alone, and let the Selkies handle their own problems, at least until the moment when they ceased to exist in their current form and became Roane, forever?

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t think it matters what she wants,” I muttered. Hearing my own voice made me feel a little better about what I was about to do. Not much. Not enough. Going against the assumed wishes of one of the Firstborn was the sort of thing only a fool would do.