One Salt Sea

THIRTY-ONE

“GILLIAN!” I SCREAMED HER NAME so hard it hurt my throat, and kept screaming it as I ran back across the room to drop to my knees beside her. Only the fact that I hadn’t finished cutting the rope was keeping her in the chair; her body was completely limp, and my fumbling attempts to find a pulse did nothing. If she was alive, I couldn’t tell.

“October.” The Luidaeg’s voice was pitched low and gentle. That just made it harder for me to breathe. She only sounded like that when things were really bad.

I shook my head, cupping Gillian’s face in my hands and lifting it until her closed eyes were pointed toward me. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. Open your eyes, okay? I’ll take you home, if you’ll open your eyes . . .”

“October, you have to get the arrow out.”

“What?” I twisted around to glare fiercely at the Luidaeg. “That’s the worst thing I could do. We need a healer before we take the arrow out. We need—”

“She’s been elf-shot. The longer you leave it in her, the less chance she has.” The Luidaeg moved around to my left. “She’s too human for this. If you want her to have any hope at all of surviving, you need to take the arrow out.”

“She can’t die,” I whispered. “She’s my daughter.”

“Death doesn’t care.” The Luidaeg’s words hit me like a blow. She was right. Oberon damn her, she was right.

I let go of Gillian’s head, bracing a shaking hand against her shoulder. “I’m sorry, baby,” I whispered, and grabbed the shaft of the arrow with my other hand, pulling hard.

Gilly moaned as the arrow came free. It was a soft, sighing sound, more like a whimper than a genuine cry of pain, but it was there. I stiffened, arrow slipping from my nerveless fingers to clatter on the floor.

“Gilly . . . ?” I whispered.

“Changelings can’t survive elf-shot,” said the Luidaeg. The sympathy in her tone was almost buried under a calm, commanding practicality. “It didn’t have to be that way, but my eldest sister took it upon herself to improve the original design, and she had her own opinions about such things.”

“Shut up,” I snapped, raising my head and glaring at her. “She’s going to be fine. She has to be.”

“That’s up to you, October.” The Luidaeg knelt, putting a hand on my shoulder. I tried to shrug it off. She tightened her fingers, keeping me where I was. “You can do for her what your mother did for you. You can give her a chance. If you change her blood—”

“No.” I shook my head, tears threatening to blind me. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”

“That’s never stopped you before. If you change the blood, you’ll burn away the poison.” She clucked her tongue, gesturing to the chair. Quentin stepped into view, my bloody knife in his hand. He moved to crouch behind Gillian. I heard him saw through the rope, and then she was pitching forward into my waiting arms. There was no tension to her at all. It was like holding something that was already dead.

“I can’t,” I whispered again, too terrified to think of anything else. If I tried, if I failed . . . “Where’s my mother? I want my mother.”

“Amandine isn’t coming to save you this time. This time, you have to save yourself.” The Luidaeg stood, taking her hand away from my shoulder. “Do it, October, or say good-bye to your daughter. Those are your choices.”

I took a shuddering breath before raising my head, looking around the room until I saw Tybalt crouching next to Connor’s fallen . . . next to Connor. He had his hand resting lightly on the Selkie’s arm, and was watching me with grave, sorrow-filled eyes.

I had to make a decision. I had to choose. Oberon forgive me, but I made my decision based on who needed me more. Connor would be fine when he woke up. I’d just have to wait for him until then. “Get over here,” I said, as firmly as I could. “Help me get her comfortable.”

Tybalt nodded, and rose, and came. Quentin was close behind him. The four of us working together stretched Gillian out on a relatively clean patch of floor, using our sweaters and jackets to provide a degree of padding. I folded my own leather jacket into a pillow, sliding it under her head. She didn’t moan again. For all the signs of life she’d shown since the arrow was removed, it might have already been too late.

I looked to the Luidaeg. “You said I could do what my mother did. What did she do? What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, voice soft. “My sister’s ways aren’t mine. I don’t know how her line works its magic.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” I held my hand out to Quentin. “Give me my knife.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, biting his lip. “It’s all gory.”

“And I’m going to get it gorier. Please.”

He nodded, holding it out to me hilt-first. I took it, not bothering to wipe it clean before laying the blade across the inside of one wrist.

“Wait.” The Luidaeg grabbed my arm before I could start cutting. I looked up to see her offering her own wrist. “You’re going to need more power than you have on your own.”

“You can’t be serious.”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me, waiting. I took her hand, pulling it toward me, and ran my knife down the skin of her wrist. I cut deeply enough to bleed her, but not so deep as to do any permanent damage; I’ve gotten pretty good at gauging my cuts over the last few years. Her blood welled to the surface, silver-red and glittering like the sea.

The Luidaeg nodded, motioning for me to continue. I closed my eyes, raising her wrist to my mouth, and drank.

Most blood magic involves the blood of the dead, or at least the blood of the missing. It’s very rare for a spell to require drinking directly from the source, unless the spell includes the transfer of another’s power. The Luidaeg’s blood was colder than I expected, cold enough that I was able to take several mouthfuls before I realized that the taste was changing, going from the normal sharp copper of blood to the sweet sharpness of frost covering the fens, the distant hint of loam, the smell of bonfires in the autumn night—

I jerked myself out of her memory and dropped her hand at the same time, taking a gasping breath. Suddenly, all the spilled blood in the room was singing to me, not just of what the wounded were, but of who they were. Rayseline’s blood smelled of roses and frost, of fox-fur and longing, a little girl so lost she couldn’t find her way home. Connor smelled like sweet eucalyptus and hot, dry sand, golden afternoons and laughter. The Goblins, strangely, smelled like baking cookies and burnt popcorn. And Gillian . . .

Gillian’s blood smelled like terror and confusion. The hint of Dóchas Sidhe I’d caught before was stronger now, easier to identify; it smelled like fresh-cut grass and blooming primroses. The smell made my heart hurt. That was what her magic would have smelled like, if I’d been part of her life, if I’d been there to teach her what she was.

I didn’t need to cut her; the wound in her shoulder was still bleeding. I sliced my own wrist shallowly, adding the smell of my own blood to the dizzying mixture. “Don’t watch this,” I said, and lowered my mouth to her shoulder without looking to see whether the others listened to me. I didn’t have time to care.

Gillian’s blood filled my mouth, the poisonous bite of elf-shot running through it like rot lurking under the skin of an apple. It was too diluted to hurt me. My mostlyhuman daughter was another story. The crackle of my magic rising around us was almost audible, and the cut-grass-and-copper smell of it was stronger than it had ever been before, sharpening until the metallic tang that always accompanied my spellcasting sweetened into the near-twin of my mother’s bloody signature.

I closed my eyes, focusing on the magic. Please, I thought, putting everything I had into the word. Please, Gillian. Let me help you.

“Help me with what, Mom?”

I opened my eyes. I was standing in the middle of a wide green field. The sky overhead was a bright, flawless blue. The taste of blood still filled my mouth, and if I really focused, I could see the shallowing where I fought for my daughter’s life, but for the moment, this scene was just as real as that one.

Gillian stood about ten yards away from me, her bare toes digging nervously in the grass. She was unhurt, and her eyes were open. The breeze blowing by ruffled her hair and the primrose-patterned pink sundress she was wearing.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said. “Am I asleep? Is this a dream?”

“It can be.” I took a step forward, moving slowly, so as not to frighten her. “Honey, we don’t have much time. I need to talk to you about something.”

Her brow knotted briefly, a frown twisting her mouth. “Is it about why you left us? Because if it’s not, I don’t know that I want to hear it.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“Everything’s a choice.”

Her words were truer than she could have known. I flinched. “I didn’t know what I was choosing when I did it. I didn’t find out until it was too late.”

“Why did you do it?” Her frown cleared, replaced by an aching confusion that I knew all too clearly. She looked more like the little girl I remembered in that moment than she’d ever looked before, and it hurt my heart. “We needed you, and you left. Where did you go?”

I took a breath. “Your Uncle Sylvester asked me to do him a favor. It wasn’t supposed to take more than a few hours.”

“It took my whole life.”

“Mine, too.” I took another step toward her. “Gillian, believe me, if there’d been any way for me to come home to you, any way, I would have done it. I would have given anything to come back to you faster than I did. I couldn’t. I tried, and I couldn’t. I came as soon as I could.”

“It wasn’t soon enough.” There was no anger in her voice. Just resignation. “Am I dying?”

“What? No! No, you’re not dying. Don’t even think that, Gilly.”

“Then what’s going on, Mom? Where are we? Why do you look like that?” She gestured toward my ears, and I realized that in this liminal place that was real and not real at the same time, she could see me as I really was.

“Honey—”

“What are you?”

It was too late to lie to her, especially with what I was about to ask. “I’m fae, Gillian. I’ve always been fae.”

“What, you mean, like an elf? Like from the movies with the Hobbits and everything?”

“Not quite, but . . . yes, like an elf.” I hesitated before adding, “You are, too.”

Gillian stared at me for a moment, brown eyes wide. Then she started to laugh. “Oh, right. Like I could be some kind of magical whatever.”

“You’re my daughter. You can be whatever you want to be.”

Bit by bit, her laughter stopped. The meadow behind her was getting misty, losing definition. I knew from my own Choice—the second one, the one Amandine led me through—that time here ran differently than it did in the real world; this was like a dream, and it could condense a great deal into a few seconds. We still didn’t have forever.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Yeah, honey. I am.” I closed the rest of the distance between us, offering her my hands. “You’ve been hurt, but it’s going to be okay. I just need you to make a decision now, and then everything can be all right again.”

“What?” Gillian looked at me nervously. Her own hands stayed by her sides. The smell of primroses was strong this close to her, all but rolling off her skin.

“Your father’s human. I’m not. Right now, you’re somewhere in the middle, and that makes you vulnerable. The thing that hurt you, it’s going to hurt you worse if you stay where you are. So I need you to decide. You can be fae, or you can be human, but you can’t be both.”

Her eyes widened. “What? I can’t . . . you can’t mean that I . . .” She stopped in the middle of her sentence, suddenly focusing on a point just past my left shoulder. I knew what I would see if I turned around. I turned around anyway.

Another Gillian was standing behind me. This one’s sundress was red, still patterned with pink primroses. Her ears were sharply pointed, and her eyes were the no-color gray of mist rolling in off the water. There were streaks of gold in her dark brown hair. There was nothing human about her, and she was beautiful.

Next to her stood a third version of my daughter, this one wearing a white sundress. She was almost identical to the girl in front of me. There was a faint, nearly indefinable difference in the shape of her face and the way she held herself, but she was close to Gillian as she’d always known herself, and she was beautiful, too.

I tore my eyes away from these possible futures, turning my attention back to my daughter as she existed in the here and now. “Gillian.” She was still staring past my shoulder, awe and horror mixing in her expression. “Gillian. You need to choose. Either of them can be you, but, honey, we don’t have time to stand here arguing about which one it’s going to be.”

“What if I get it wrong?” Gillian met my eyes, fear finally washing away her awe. “What if I want to change my mind?”

“You can’t. This is a choice you only get to make once. You’re either fae, like me, or you’re human, like your father. Please.”

She hesitated again before asking, very softly, “Which one lets me go home?”

Her words stabbed me like knives. I forced my voice to stay level as I replied, “Human. You have to be human if you want to go home. If you choose fae . . . I’m sorry, honey, but if you choose fae, you have to stay with me.”

“Forever?” she whispered.

I couldn’t bring myself to answer that. I swallowed hard, and nodded.

“I . . . I want . . .” She stopped for a long moment before saying, rapid-fire, “I want you to take it all back. I want you to have never left us. You’re magic, right? Like a Fairy Godmother? Can you do that? Can you make it so you never went away?” Even her tears smelled like primroses.

“Nobody has that much magic, baby. I’m sorry. I love you, and I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.” She kept crying as she slid her hands into mine. “I love you, Mom. I wish you’d never gone away. I want to go home now. Please let me go home now.”

“You have to say the words, Gillian. You have to tell me what you want.”

She sighed. “I want to be human. I just want to go home.”

“All right, honey. If that’s what you want, you can go home.” I let go of her hands, gathering her into a hug. It felt good, and right, and like it was everything I’d been missing since I came back from the pond. “This is going to hurt, okay? But it has to hurt if you want to go back to your dad.”

“Okay,” she said, sniffling, and buried her face against my shoulder.

I closed my eyes, the smell of grass getting stronger, the smell of copper overwhelming the primroses. Even with my eyes closed, I could see everything she was, every trace of her heritage. And I reached out, still holding her close to me, and grabbed hold of everything that wasn’t human—including the poison that was struggling to kill her. Wipe away one, wipe away the other.

Set her free.

Her screaming was the worst thing I’d ever heard—but if I stopped, she’d die, so I kept going, changing and twisting and wiping away, until the screaming stopped, giving way to silence. And I opened my eyes.