Page 70 of The Unkindest Tide

Meaning the Luidaeg had been draping the Selkies in ghosts all this time. Hungry ghosts, no less, who wanted the chance to live again, no matter how limited their form. I shivered, this time not from the cold. What did the night-haunts make of the Selkies? They were wrapped in magically preserved slivers of the Roane, who had faded from the flocks centuries ago—but when they’d been lifted up on autumnal wings, had they done so with fleshless faces, flensed and left to rot?

It was a chilling thought. I didn’t like it, and so I shunted it aside. “René, I know you want to pass Isla’s skin, but I need to ask you not to do that,” I said. “It has to stay with us until this is settled. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to let my sister’s skin out of my hands,” he said reluctantly. “I’d trade it for Isla, alive and human and here, but since I can’t have that, I don’t want to let it go. And yet . . . I think you’re right. It wouldn’t be safe with me. Too many people are desperate, for their children, their loved ones, all the ones who’d been content to wait when they thought that waiting could be fruitful.”

“I understand,” I said—and I did, I really did. To be a changeling is to be something like to a Selkie, inside and outside Faerie at the same time. The hope chests offer us a way to cross that line and become fae forever, if that’s what we want. That’s what they were created to do, and that’s the reason they’ve all been locked away, hidden from the people who need them most. We’re not seen as worthy, and part of that supposed unworthiness comes from the fact that we have to fight for everything we get. Faerie has never given us anything freely.

I took a step back, so I could see all three of my traveling companions at the same time. “We’ll take you, and the skin, to our quarters. There’s always someone there, and we’re traveling under the Luidaeg’s protection. No one will interfere with us.” I pitched my voice a bit louder than necessary, to be sure the dockhands would hear me. From the way their shoulders tightened, they did. Good.

It wasn’t that I thought they were necessarily dishonest. I didn’t know them well enough for that. It was simply that we were out in the open, and there was no way to be sure we hadn’t been listened in on. Once we got the skin home, we could keep it safe until things were settled.

And we could let René see his sister’s body.

“Do you know how to get to the visitor’s apartments from here?” I asked.

René shook his head. “Selkies have their own space. We don’t travel deeper into the duchy when we don’t have to.”

“I know the way,” said Tybalt. I blinked at him. He smirked, although the expression lacked his usual heat. “I had plenty of time to explore while you and your boy wonder were off playing at being merfolk. Follow me.”

He turned on his heel and started walking, a little faster than normal, but not so fast that I couldn’t keep up. He was annoyed, not actively angry. That was fine. Annoyed, I could work with. Angry meant yelling and apologies and pain, and I was way too tired for that.

We walked through the Duchy of Ships in a ragged line, fixed on our destination, trying to ignore the way people pointed and whispered behind their hands. Whatever temporary “ignore them, they’re strangers” field we’d started with, we’d lost it somewhere between rescuing the son of an imprisoned Merrow Duchess and pulling a drowned woman from the sea.

Tybalt glanced my way, annoyance melting into a far more welcome wry amusement. “I see your reputation is spreading. You have fans again.”

“I never asked for fans,” I said, walking faster, as if that would be enough to shift me out from under the weight of all those staring eyes.

“Yet you charm everyone you meet in the same unfaltering manner,” he said. “It seems difficult to believe that it is entirely accidental.”

I hit him in the arm. He laughed, and things were, if not okay again, at least a little better.

The door to our courtyard appeared ahead of us like a beacon, offering the promise of safe harbor. We kept going until we could smell the fresh green scents of our private garden, and hear the sound of voices. Patrick, and Peter, both talking loudly enough that I could tell them apart even before we were close enough for me to pick out words.

“—not the land, Father! You can’t keep thinking of it like it is!”

“We don’t have an army right now, Peter. You have to slow down.”

“Mother has been imprisoned!”

“Does it help at all if I say the sea witch is working on it, and is just as annoyed as the rest of us?” I stepped around the edge of the courtyard.

Patrick and Peter, who had both frozen in place at the sound of my voice, turned to look at me. They were virtually nose-to-nose, Patrick towering almost a foot over his son, yet still seeming somehow evenly matched. Dean and Marcia were off to one side. Neither of them made any effort to hide their relief at my appearance. Cassandra and Nolan were on the other side, looking utterly, profoundly confused. I guess suddenly being dropped into Undersea politics without a primer would do that.

“And where’s Poppy?” I asked.

“She’s in her apartment with the—with the thing you found,” said Dean, haltingly.

“The body,” I said. “You mean she’s with the body.”

He nodded, looking like he was about to be sick. Getting that boy out of the Undersea was the best thing I ever did. He was a good Count, thoughtful and patient and fair. Staying in Saltmist would have eaten him alive.

I turned to René. “We can take you to your sister momentarily,” I said. “Will your traditions allow you to leave the skin with her body until this is resolved? Even if the night-haunts come for her, they won’t touch the skin.” If they’d been able to find sustenance in Selkie skins, all chance of the resurrection of the Roane would have been eliminated ages ago.

Looking sick, René shook his head. “The skin can’t be given to the dead,” he said. “The magic won’t allow it. Some of the first Selkies tried to have their skins buried with them, thinking that was a way to break the bargain, and their children and siblings found those skins draped over chairs at the kitchen table the next day.”

“Delightful.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “René, may I introduce you to Duke Patrick Lorden of Saltmist, his son, Peter Lorden, Count Dean Lorden of Goldengreen, his Seneschal, Marcia, and Crown Prince in the Mists Nolan Windermere, and his ‘please don’t cause a diplomatic incident because you don’t understand what’s happening’ Cassandra Brown.”

“I feel I may have just been insulted,” said Nolan, sounding puzzled.