Page 57 of The Unkindest Tide

A fool, or a hero. The two are so often indistinguishable, after all.

Raising my voice to be heard above the waves, I called, “I have a dead body down here. I need you to lower some kind of net, and I need you to do it quickly because this water’s getting cold.”

Quentin’s eyes widened without actually telegraphing any sense of shock. If anything, he looked resigned. “Right,” he said. “Just . . . wait there, okay?”

I hung suspended in the sea, my temporary fins holding me upright, and watched as my squire stepped away from the rail. My only company was a dead woman—and Oberon forgive me for my heroism, but I was going to find out how she’d died.

FOURTEEN

ISLA’S BODY SPRAWLED LIFELESS on the deck, somehow looking smaller than she had either in life or in the water. Without the waves to lift her limbs and support her head, she was limp, motionless. Without the waves to keep her up, she couldn’t help falling.

The strand of glass beads braided in her hair was broken; half of them were missing. There was something unutterably sad about that. Someone had put them there, whether Isla herself or a loved one. Someone had thought she mattered enough to adorn her before she came here, to the middle of the ocean, to die. She was wearing a sundress and she had glass beads tied in her hair, and that was all she had: her sealskin was gone.

I crouched down, feeling my knees protest the gesture. The old damage that used to make certain things difficult for me had long since healed; this was a new protest, born from the still too-limber joints of my artificially Merrow form. The spell would wear off soon. Until it did, I’d have to live with gills in my throat and the occasional twinge from a skeleton that was no longer sure it loved the land the way it always had before.

Gently, I lifted one of Isla’s hands and uncurled her clenched fingers. Her skin was soft and spongy from the water it had absorbed. It would trickle from her for hours, maybe even days, if the night-haunts didn’t come to carry her away. Which, I noted with regret, they didn’t even have to do. There were no webs between her fingers. They would come anyway. Her blood still held memories for them to carry.

No webs between her fingers, but there were bruises on her wrists. This hadn’t been a suicide.

“She died human,” I said, making no effort to keep the sadness from my voice. If I couldn’t be sad over a needless death, a fae death, I was one step closer to becoming the monster I had never wanted to be. “Someone stole her skin and then they threw her overboard.”

There were no obvious signs of injury. If she’d been human when she went into the water, she had drowned, the same way any human could have drowned if thrown into a sea that was unwelcoming to mortal kind.

The night-haunts would have come for her as soon as she’d washed up on shore. With their filmy wings and delicate bodies, they couldn’t have come for her in the water; they would have been bogged down and drowned. That was something, at least. We were still dealing with the original Isla, and would be until we left her body alone for the night-haunts to collect. She could still tell us her secrets.

I drew my knife, ignoring Peter’s voice asking shrilly what I was intending to do, and sliced the flesh of her right wrist. It was a shallow wound, and I was lucky, according to some definitions of the term: she hadn’t been dead long enough for her blood to fully settle.

“I hate this part,” I said, and bowed my head, and drank.

I came to, flat on my back, with the others standing around me in a circle. Peter looked terrified. The Cephali looked bemused. Quentin looked like he couldn’t decide between the two states, and so had settled on furious as the best way to split the difference.

“You just drowned,” he informed me, voice a little too shrill. “On the deck. With no water. You drowned.”

“That explains why my throat hurts,” I muttered, sitting up and coughing. A little more water was dislodged by the movement, and ran down my chin to soak into my shirt. I grimaced. “Okay, one, that’s disgusting, and two, I don’t think I can ride Isla Chase’s blood.”

“What was your first clue?” asked Quentin, voice still too shrill.

“The drowning was too traumatic for her, and for me. It’s blocking out everything else.” I looked at the body. “I could wait and try to talk to the night-haunts, but they’ve asked me to stop doing that, and I don’t have what I’d need to make a safe summoning ritual. The risk is too great. I’m sorry. I should be braver.”

“I think I’m glad you’re not,” said Quentin. He took a short, sharp breath through his nose. “What do we do now?”

Go the hell home and let the Luidaeg deal with this, I thought, and stood. Aloud, I said, “We find out who did this. Whoever it was has to pay.”

“Pay how?” asked Peter. He was showing far too much interest in the body, watching it with an avid fascination that was barely balanced by Quentin’s restraint. It was true that he’d grown up in a more militant part of Faerie, but still. Childhoods in the Undersea were clearly very different. “It’s only against the Law to kill purebloods, and sometimes not even that.”

I opened my mouth, prepared to answer. Then I froze, really thinking about his question.

The Law, Oberon’s Law, is very simple: no one kills purebloods. Not changelings, not other purebloods, and certainly not humans, not unless they feel like finding out how cruel Faerie can be when it comes to devising punishments for people with no one to speak for them. There are exceptions, like wartime, or like the deal the Cait Sidhe made with Oberon when it came to their fights for succession. The Cait Sidhe are allowed to kill each other, providing they can come up with an explanation that satisfies their Kings and Queens. The denizens of the Undersea are allowed to kill each other, as long as they declare a state of war before they draw their weapons. Anyone’s allowed to kill a changeling, any time they want to, without necessarily facing any consequences.

And anyone can kill a human. Humans have even less protection under the Law than changelings do. At least we’re a part of Faerie. Humans are . . . in the eyes of many purebloods, humans are livestock. They’re animals, here to die, and so helping them along the way to their inevitable destination is not a big deal.

Isla was human when someone pushed her over the rail. Isla was human when she hit the water. In the eyes of Faerie, the only thing her killer had done wrong was an act of theft.

I stood where I was, looking at her body and swallowing the bile that threatened to rise up in the back of my throat. I hadn’t lost my lunch at a crime scene since the supposed death of Evening Winterrose. I certainly wasn’t going to do it now.

The scent of pennyroyal and musk reached me a heartbeat before Tybalt did, giving me sufficient warning that I didn’t tense or pull away when an arm slid around my waist, pulling me close. I might normally have objected to that sort of distraction while I was looking at a body, but under the circumstances, I welcomed it, letting my head sag to the side until it rested against Tybalt’s shoulder. I allowed my knees to buckle a bit at the same time, not enough so as to drop me on my ass, but enough to take some of the tension off. I knew he wouldn’t let me fall.

“She was a fair lady,” he said, eyes on Isla. “We met her on the beach, did we not?”