“I . . .” I hesitated, trying to figure out my answer. Finally, slowly, I nodded. “I’m here.”
“Good girl.” She reached into the pocket of her overalls, producing a small cut-glass bottle filled with a cherry-red liquid that glittered in the light, catching it and flinging it back in prismatic shards. She held it out to me. “I want you to drink this.”
“What is it?” I asked, already taking the bottle and worrying at the stopper. When the Luidaeg tells me to drink something, I’ve found it easier to just agree. Maybe this explains the amount of time I’ve spent transformed into something I’m not or marooned on roads that were never supposed to be accessible to me, but it’s also the reason I’ve managed to survive for as long as I have. There are worse allies to have in my corner than the sea witch.
“It’s something that will make you feel better.”
I gave her a sidelong look. “Because refusing to tell me what I’m drinking is the way to calm me down.”
“It’s already working, if you’re being sarcastic,” she said. “Drink.”
Arguing with the Luidaeg is like arguing with a mountain: in the end, all you wind up with is a sore throat and an implacable landmark. Only in the case of the Luidaeg, she might wind up turning you into a toad for your impertinence. I drank.
It tasted like cherry syrup mixed with steak sauce—not a pleasant combination—and although it was cold, it sent a wave of warmth through my body, relaxing my limbs and draining the tension from my back and shoulders. I slumped further into the cushions, blinking, as the Luidaeg reached over and plucked the vial from my suddenly limp fingers.
“The paralysis will pass,” she said pleasantly. “Not that you were moving that much before, but this way I know you’ll hold still and listen to me, with the added bonus of helping you regenerate some of the blood you’ve lost.”
“’S not lost,” I managed, through lips that didn’t want to cooperate. “Know exactly where it is.”
“Again, sarcasm. You’re still in there.” She touched my arm. “I’m glad.”
The concern in her eyes was clear enough that my own eyes started to burn with tears. I tried to turn my face away. I couldn’t move. She had locked me into facing her, and despite her insistence that Gillian was alive—despite her inability to lie—it felt like I was standing at the edge of a very high cliff, waiting to step off into nothingness.
“You’re going to start asking questions and demanding proof in a second, and I’d like this to be over before that happens, so let’s go,” she said. “Yes, she’s alive. I want you to understand what a miracle that is, all right? I want you to comprehend how impossible it is for your daughter to still be a part of this world. When my sister created elf-shot, she did it to curry favor with our parents—‘look, see, we don’t have to kill each other anymore. Aren’t I clever? Aren’t I the absolute best?’”
Her voice spiked on the word “best,” becoming the sound of glass breaking. She paused, catching her breath. When she continued, she sounded calmer . . . and sadder.
“It didn’t have to be fatal to changelings. That was her little extra twist, her way to make sure that when there was a war, only the ‘right’ people would come off the battlefield. We can’t go to war the way we used to when the world was younger, when there was more space for us both in and out of Faerie. Back before we decided to go into hiding from the humans, we could fill valleys and cover mountains, and every kingdom with changeling citizens would send them to the frontlines, because why shouldn’t they? A changeling couldn’t be a landholder or a noble or an alchemist or a court seer, but they could take an arrow like any pureblood. And if they didn’t come back, after my sister’s work was done, that added a sense of . . . of reality to the wars. A hundred fatalities were a hundred fatalities. Never mind that the hundred bodies you’d buried were the hundred you never wanted in the first place.”
I frowned, and managed to ask, “What does . . . ?”
“Peace, October.” She touched my arm again. “I’m getting there. Please let me get there. I need you to understand what happened here today.”
I couldn’t nod, but I could stop fighting to speak and lean into the cushions. She smiled a little, clearly seeing this for the acquiescence it was.
“In order to make elf-shot fatal to changelings, she had to make it fatal to mortals. One follows the other. And that would have been enough, but she also wanted it to hurt, October, she wanted it to hurt so badly, because how dare we? How dare we bring humanity into our world, in however dilute a form? How dare we waste love that should have been reserved for better things on finite creatures? She never had a lot of love in her to spare. She didn’t understand how the rest of us could spend it so freely. She never understood a lot of things. So she didn’t just make a poison. She made a work of art.” The Luidaeg paused. “It kills changelings and it kills humans. But it kills changelings because it attacks everything in them that’s mortal, while the parts of them that are fae struggle to fight back, to go peacefully to sleep as the potion intends. It takes its time. That’s why changing the blood allowed your mother to save you and allowed you to save Gillian the first time she was elf-shot. The potion moves so slowly that any half-competent blood-worker can challenge it in a changeling. Even my sister had her favorites. Even my sister understood the value of being able to save a grandchild whose parents had never intended for them to be there. Changelings happened early in Faerie, and they kept happening, and she needed to be able to save them. Humans . . . ”
The Luidaeg paused again. This time when she continued, her voice was harder. “Humans have always been disposable, and she had no interest in being called upon to save them. Elf-shot was designed to look for traces of fae blood and, upon failing to find them, to rip through the body as quickly as possible. To shred and tear and destroy. Her ideal would be a world in which it was literally impossible to cure elf-shot poisoning in a human, because there wouldn’t be time. Did you ever wonder why I never cured elf-shot? Why none of the people who’ve come to me across the centuries ever thought to say ‘oh, sea witch, why don’t you give me a way to wake my loved ones from their enchanted sleep’?”
I took a deep breath and managed to nod, very slightly. Her answering nod was deeper.
“It’s because they did ask me. And I couldn’t do it. There aren’t many limits on what I can accomplish if I’m being paid, but that is one of them. I can’t counteract my sister’s work, any of it. I could never have been the one to unmake elf-shot. So when you sent your lover to me with your child dying in his arms, I didn’t have a cure that would work for her, human child that she was. The alchemist’s cure couldn’t work without something fae to latch onto.”
I closed my eyes. She’d been lying to me after all, somehow breaking all the rules in an attempt to be kind. I should have been expecting it. I should have known we’d never make it through this intact.
She touched my arm. “She was dying, and there was nothing I could do, and then I stopped thinking about what was possible and started thinking about what was right. Letting her die wasn’t right. She’s family. You’re only my niece—not much, compared to all the siblings and children I’ve buried—but it’s been a long time since I’ve had even that much. You’re my niece and she’s your child and letting her die was wrong. I don’t like to be wrong.”
I opened my eyes and stared at her. The feeling was coming back into my limbs, accompanied by a new strength, as if I hadn’t been bleeding for most of the day. I sat up, resisting the urge to grab and shake the most powerful individual I knew. “What are you saying?”
“My youngest daughter’s name was Firtha.” The Luidaeg looked at me with calm, steady eyes. “She was clever and cunning, and she died without having children of her own because my sister—my damned sister—put knives in the hands of humans and told them they could find their route to immortality through the bodies of my babies. Unlike me
, she can lie. She was hoping to kill my children and see me kill the humans who wore their pelts in my rage, so she could paint me extinguisher of my own descendant line. She knew there’d be no immortality for the killers of the Roane. But I am . . . I’m not nice, October. I was never made to be nice. I’ve still tried, all the long days of my life, to be kind when I can. I have striven for mercy. I was merciful. I was . . . perhaps more merciful than anyone knew.”
She turned her face away, looking out the window on the other side of the room, the window that showed a ceaseless view of the surging tide. “My sister’s patsies killed my children, and their children killed them, when they came home with bloody hands and sealskins thrown across their shoulders. The children of my children’s killers saw their own deaths in the blood running down their parents’ backs, and they tried to save themselves. My sister thought I would be unable to show enough kindness to find my way to cruelty. She thought I’d kill them. And instead, I kept them, as many of them as I could. But there were . . . losses, especially in the first years, when the Selkies were still learning what it meant to be what they had become. The man who wore my Firtha’s skin broke his own neck jumping from a cliff. The woman who inherited the skin was caught and killed by human fishermen. The girl who inherited from her chose not to have children at all, so when she died, there was no one waiting for the skin to pass to them. It came back to me, instead. A few of them have, over the years. A few of them have come home.” The Luidaeg looked back to me. “Do you understand?”
This time, the numbness in my lips and tongue had nothing to do with any potions. “She has no fae blood left in her,” I said. “What you’re saying . . . it’s impossible.”
“I’m the sea witch. The ocean in my veins and the ocean in yours is so similar as to be identical. I can’t do what you can do, because the blood all looks the same to me. Such small adjustments are beyond what I can narrow my magic to achieve. But when I poured the blood price of my children into their skins, I wasn’t doing anything narrow, anything small. I was refusing the remaking of the world. So, no, it’s not impossible. It’s not easy. It’s well within my power.”
My mouth felt like a desert. My head spun. “She’s . . . she’s really alive?”
The Luidaeg rolled her eyes. “Mom’s teeth, didn’t I say that to begin with? You know I can’t lie. You’re lucky I don’t get insulted and turn you into a coral reef for the next thirty years. Yes, she’s really alive. She’s not the same. She can’t be the same for at least a century, which is going to put a crimp in any plans she had for a human life, but she’s alive. That’s more than anyone else could have done.”
I burst into tears. I wanted to ask for details, to ask where she was, to ask anything that wouldn’t run the risk of offending the Luidaeg, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was sit on the couch and sob brokenly, my vision going blurry and my chest going tight.
Then arms surrounded me, pulling me close, and the Luidaeg’s voice was in my ear, whispering, “Shh, Toby, shhh, it’s all right. You can cry for her without mourning for her now. It’s going to be all right.”
The tears, now that they’d been set free, refused to stop coming. They were a hot flood of misery, and I was being swept away. I grabbed hold of the Luidaeg’s sheltering arms and held on for dear life, trusting her to be my rock against the terrible tide.
Lips still pressed against the curve of my ear, she said softly, “When you feel better, when you’re ready to stop crying and start coping, I need you to remember this: you are still in my debt for so many, many things, but you are not in my debt for this. You didn’t ask me to save her. Even your kitty didn’t speak the words. I saved her because I know what it is to bury a child—a hundred times over, I know—and because I’m selfish, Toby, I’m so much more selfish than any of you ever give me credit for. I would have swallowed the sea if they’d let me. I wanted someone who could carry Firtha’s skin into the world again, and you gave me that. You owe me for every favor I’ve ever done you. You owe me nothing for your daughter.”
My tears, which had been tapering off, redoubled. Whatever she had asked for saving Gillian, I would have paid it without a second thought. I would have returned to the pond for another seven years; I would have put a dagger through my own heart. I had never considered that this might be something she could, or would, do for free.
The Luidaeg stroked my hair and murmured soothing words, some in English, some not, until I calmed down enough to sit up and wipe my eyes, chasing the prisms from the edges of my vision. I looked at her and blinked, swallowing a gasp.
She still looked more like a human teenager than anything else, and her eyes were still a clear driftglass green, like pieces of a broken bottle that had been tumbled by the tide. But her hair was an oil slick, filled with shifting rainbow colors painted over the black, and her clothes had changed, becoming a ruffled white shirt like a cascade of foam and a pair of dark blue hose. She quirked an eyebrow when she saw me looking.
“Yes?” she asked.
“How do you do that?” I blurted. Her eyebrow climbed higher. I continued, “The clothes thing. The false Queen always used to do that to my clothes, but even when she was part-Siren, she never should have had transformation magic like that.”
“Your brain is a fascinating place,” said the Luidaeg dryly. “It’s old sea magic. Not common on the land, I’ll grant you, although the Hamadryads might be able to teach you a thing or two.”
“So Sea Wights can do it?”
“No,” the Luidaeg admitted. “But it would have been easy enough to buy from one of the Asrai or Fuath. Easy as it is for land fae to borrow from the blood of one another, it’s a hundred times simpler for those born to the water.”
“Sometimes you talk like a riddle,” I grumbled, wiping my eyes again. “If transformation magic isn’t something native to her bloodlines, why would she be so obsessed with using it? Where’s the benefit?”
“I really hope you’re not planning to sit here and use me as a sounding board for all your half-baked theories,” said the Luidaeg blandly. “I would have thought you’d be asking to see your daughter by now. I’m tired of taking in your refugees, by the way. If this doesn’t stop happening all the damn time, I’m going to start charging you rent.”
“And I guess I’ll pay it.” I stood, my knees still wobbling like they weren’t sure they wanted to hold me up. Then I paused, looking around the empty living room. “Where’s Janet?”
“Given everything, I think I’d be justified in saying ‘hanging out with the other cockroaches,’ but no. She’s in the parlor. I wanted her to have some time to herself to think about what she’s done, and to not be under my damn feet. And thank Dad for that. If she’d been here when your kitty came running in with the littlest Carter . . .” The Luidaeg shuddered theatrically.
I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘Carter’?”
“Fae don’t have surnames,” said the Luidaeg. She looked at me like she was waiting for the other shoe to finally drop. “Why would we have a family name when the shape of our ears tells people who we’re descended from? And then there’s the issue where every member of any given descendant race is technically related to all the others but keeps marrying them anyway, and the more time we’ve spent with humans down the centuries, the less we’ve wanted to think about that. So where do the family names come from? The Torquills and the Sollys and the Lordens? Humans bring their names with them, and they leave them behind when we strip their blood away. Dad’s idea. He didn’t think it was fair to change people’s heritage and not let them keep something of where they’d come from.”
The thought of a human marrying into the Lorden family was as terrifying as it was delightful. Humans can’t generally breathe water. Then again, neither could Patrick, and Dianda was doing a reasonably good job of keeping him from drowning. “So ‘Carter’ is because . . . ?”
“Family names have chang
ed since Janet’s day. She’d be a Carter now. Place names and all that.” The Luidaeg stood. “We’re getting distracted again. Do you not want to see your daughter?”
I hesitated. Then, in a voice so small I barely recognized it as my own, I whispered, “I’m afraid to.”
“Oh, mo laochain,” she said, voice twisting around the unfamiliar syllables like a rose through a trellis. She put her arms around me and drew me close, into the sea-salt smell of her, until my face was pressed to the cool skin of her shoulder. “We’re all afraid. That’s what it is to be a mother. We’re all afraid.”
I started to cry again. She held me until I was done, and then she pulled away, her hand still grasping mine, and led me down the hallway toward my daughter.
TWENTY
THE LUIDAEG’S APARTMENT ISN’T a knowe in the traditional sense. The door is easy to find, and I’ve never had the feeling that I was crossing between worlds when coming and going. And despite all that, the more I’ve learned about her living arrangements, the more I’ve been convinced that something is going on that violates the usual laws of topology.
The layout seemed simple the first time I was there: a long hallway lined with doors, the whole thing usually cloaked in an illusion that made it seem like a polluted shore at low tide, ending in a foul-smelling living room with a kitchen off to one side. Since then, I’ve discovered a back door leading to a patch of swampland in the Summerlands and the existence of at least one additional hall connecting to a guest room. So it wasn’t as much of a surprise as it could have been when the Luidaeg opened a door to reveal a staircase winding gently upward, like something from a tower in a fairy tale. There was no way it could have been accommodated by the architecture of her actual building. As I followed her onto the steps, that didn’t seem to matter.