One Salt Sea

TWO

MAY AND SYLVESTER WERE IN THE HALL playing one of May’s favorite games, “spot the bogey.” This involved staring fixedly at the rafters, waiting for the ceiling to move. I will never understand the things my former Fetch finds fun.

Bogeys are shapeshifting mischief-makers that infest abandoned places, like attics, old castles, and Goldengreen, which sat empty for almost two years before I claimed it. The bogeys were there when I opened the doors. Trying to make them leave was more trouble than it was worth, and so we’d come to a weird sort of peace instead, one where they didn’t scare the crap out of the residents, and I didn’t let the residents beat them to death with bricks.

Sylvester looked down as Quentin and I approached. “May was reminding me of some of the more . . . interesting . . . changes you’ve made.” He smiled. “I do believe them to be improvements.”

I smiled back. “That’s good. So do I.”

Goldengreen was in disrepair when I inherited it, but Sylvester never saw it that way. He probably remembered it the way Evening liked presenting it to people—perfect and static—and not as the crumbling shell it became.

It wasn’t a crumbling shell anymore. It was just a little chaotic sometimes. Case in point: a flock of pixies burst from the kitchen, flying in tight formation as they held up the edges of a red-and-white-checked dish towel. The wind of their passage ruffled my hair. The four of us scattered, and I ducked just before one of the stragglers could kick me in the forehead.

Marcia came barreling after the pixies, waving a broom over her head and shouting, “Come back, you filthy little pests! Thieves!” Her eyes widened when she saw us, and she came skidding to a halt, a guilty look on her face. She tried to hide the broom behind her back, enhancing the ridiculousness of the moment. “Uh, hi, Toby. May. Quentin. Um. Your Grace.”

“Hey, Marcia,” I said, amused. “What did they steal this time?” Pixies will steal anything that’s not nailed down, and the ones in Goldengreen seem to see Marcia as a form of entertainment. They know she’ll never catch them with her broom. As for Marcia, I think she’s playing with the pixies as much as they’re playing with her. She’ll just never admit it.

“Two loaves of bread and my good dish towel.”

“You’d better hurry before they shred the towel for loincloths.”

“I know. Sorry about this. Lunch is served.” She bobbed an awkward curtsy and took off running, following the trail of glittering pixie-sweat hanging in the air.

I turned to the others. “Well?” I asked. “Anybody hungry?”

“Starving,” said Quentin. He led the way into the kitchen, where a meal of cold chicken, tossed salad, and apple cake was waiting for us on the worktable. One definite advantage to having my own knowe: I was eating better, since Marcia seemed to have an almost preternatural ability to know when she’d be able to shove a fork into my hand, and her fae blood is just strong enough to grant her some basic hearth magic—like preparing meals at triple speed. Coffee is still a primary part of my diet, but it no longer has to play the role of multiple food groups.

May’s phone rang while we were eating, and she waved a distracted good-bye before running out of the knowe to meet her girlfriend in the museum parking lot outside the mortal entrance. Sylvester, Quentin, and I finished our lunch in comfortable silence.

I was in an excellent mood by the time I escorted Quentin and Sylvester out of Goldengreen. It was a crisp, dry night. The air tasted like summer, and the sky was free of clouds, leaving the stars to glitter brilliantly against the darkness. We were having the sort of June that people write bad love songs about, all perfect weather and clear skies. Nights like this reminded me why I love living in the Bay Area.

A lone cloud skidded in front of the moon, briefly hiding its face, and I shuddered. It had been less than a year since I was held captive in Blind Michael’s lands, being groomed to take his wife’s place and become his new consort. He’d been dead for almost eight months. I killed him. That didn’t make the memory of him sit any easier.

Sylvester’s vehicle for the evening was a classic Cadillac, painted a dark blue that almost blended with the shadows at the parking lot’s edge. Not that the museum’s human employees would have been able to see the car if it were bright red and parked in the rose garden—Sylvester’s don’t-look-here spells are things of beauty. He hugged me, saying, “You’re doing well. Soon, we can start the real lessons.”

I was still groaning theatrically when he and Quentin got into the car and drove off, leaving me to walk to my battered old Volkswagen Bug alone. I performed my usual check of the back before unlocking the door. Call me paranoid, but I only needed to find one assassin lurking in my car for that to become a lifetime habit.

Turning up the radio to ear-busting levels, I sang loudly—and badly—along with song after song as I drove back to my apartment. Even with traffic, I made it home in record time. The wards around my door were intact, meaning that my night might stay decent. Miracles never cease.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” I chanted. “With thorny stings and other things that make it a bad place to go.” I snapped my fingers. The wards dissolved, leaving the scent of copper hanging in the air. Piece of cake.

Wards are easier for me these days, since they’re constructed and removed with brute force, and I hit harder than I used to, magically speaking. Sure, sometimes my spells go horribly wrong and things get scorched, but it’s better than a ten-a-day Tylenol habit, right? I was never that attached to my security deposit, anyway.

Spike and the cats mobbed my ankles the second I got inside, meowing and chirping irritation over some perceived indignity. “Settle down, guys,” I said, laughing as I squirmed out of my jacket. “I’ll feed you in a second.”

“Actually, I think they’re upset because I’m here.” The Luidaeg stood, dropping May’s new Entertainment Weekly on the coffee table as she stepped away from the couch. “They don’t seem to like me.”

I froze and stared at her, my jacket slipping out of my suddenly nerveless fingers and falling to the floor with a thump. I’ve always known that my wards wouldn’t stop anything big, but I’d never seen proof before.

The Luidaeg watched me levelly, waiting for the shock to fade. Finally, unsteadily, I said, “Luidaeg. You’re . . . here.”

“Good catch. You should go into detective work.” Her amused tone was underscored with bleakness, like she was making jokes because it was easier than screaming. Somehow, that was even scarier than finding her in my apartment.

The Luidaeg isn’t scary on the surface—most days she looks more human than I do, like the sort of plainly pretty woman you probably pass on the street every day. She stands about five-six, tan verging into sunburned, with freckles on her nose and the ghosts of old acne scars on her cheeks. Today she was wearing battered khaki pants and a gas station employee’s shirt with a nametag that read “Annie,” and her curly, shoulder-length black hair was pulled into pigtails tied off with electrical tape.

Her eyes were brown. That was encouraging, anyway. The Luidaeg’s appearance is unnervingly variable. The more irritated she gets, the more her humanity slips, usually starting with her eyes. When the Luidaeg’s eyes go strange, I look for an escape route.

The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow. “Is there something you need to do before you can pay attention to me?”

That was my chance to take control of the situation. I pounced on it. “I need coffee,” I said, picking up my jacket and hanging it on the coat rack. “Can I get you anything?”

“Coffee’s fine. Do you have any sour cream?” The Luidaeg followed me to the kitchen and sat down at the table, pushing a pile of junk mail out of the way. Spike and the cats followed her.

“I think so.” I grabbed the half-full pot of coffee from the warmer and filled two mugs. I’ve always belonged to the school of thought that says coffee improves with age. Give me a pot of three-day-old diner coffee, and I’ll prove that sleep is an unnecessary luxury.

“I’ll take mine with salt and a spoonful of sour cream,” said the Luidaeg. She gave the cats a thoughtful look. They looked back, unblinking. She nodded. “I thought so. You can go. Nothing I have to say is yours to repeat.”

The cats didn’t move.

The Luidaeg raised an eyebrow, asking, “Do you really think your King will hurt you worse than I will?”

That got through. Cagney and Lacey bolted from the room, their ears pressed flat and their tails sticking straight up in the air.

Spike stayed where it was, eyeing her warily. The Luidaeg smiled. “You can stay. Your loyalties have shifted.” She glanced toward me. “You know the fleabags are spying for Tybalt, don’t you?”

“I’ve been assuming.” I opened the fridge, rummaging until I found a container of sour cream. May and Jazz both like to cook, and with Jazz spending more and more time at the apartment, our fridge has been acquiring actual food. I never knew there were so many kinds of bread. Or that you needed so many knives for purposes beyond stabbing people. “Is that why you made them leave?”

“He’ll get the details soon enough. I don’t feel any need to stroke the man’s ego by telling him things he doesn’t need to know yet.”

“Right.” I put the sour cream and one of the mugs in front of the Luidaeg, indicating the salt shaker with a wave of my hand, and turned to start fixing my own coffee. “So why are you here? You haven’t exactly been social lately.” That was putting it mildly. I’d seen the Luidaeg exactly once since Lily got sick, when I went to her and demanded to know what I really was. She’d put a name to my mother’s bloodline—Dóchas Sidhe—and then she’d kicked me out.

She wasn’t there when I was pardoned. She didn’t answer her phone, and when I went looking for her apartment, I couldn’t find it. Now she was in my kitchen, and maybe I’m paranoid, but I didn’t trust the situation one bit.

“Getting down to business already?” She poured salt into her coffee. “Are you going to ask how I’ve been?”

“Why should I?” I finished sugaring my own coffee and sat down in front of her. “It’s not like you’ve been terribly concerned with my well-being since Mom played with my genetic code.”

“So you’re being sulky, is that it?” The Luidaeg shook her head. “You didn’t need me, Toby. There was nothing I could have done that you weren’t already doing. I knew Sylvester would take care of you.”

“That makes it okay for you to just disappear?”

“You have no idea what I’ve been doing since you last saw me.”

“Should I care?” I realized the answer was probably “yes” as soon as the words left my mouth. They don’t come much bigger or badder than the Luidaeg. If she’d been too busy to deal with me, it wasn’t because she’d been vacationing at Disney World.

“About something nasty enough to keep me distracted? Yes, October, you should care, if only because you don’t like people breaking your toys.” The Luidaeg touched the surface of her coffee with the tip of one finger, watching the ripples spread through the liquid. “You owe me.”

I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting . . . but that wasn’t it. “What?”

“You owe me.” She raised her head. “I showed you the way to my brother’s lands, twice; I broke his Ride for you, and I helped you kill him, if only by getting you there. I did it because you asked, but I don’t work free. I don’t even work cheap. I told you that. You said you didn’t care.” The color was draining from her eyes, leaving them as pale and unforgiving as sea foam. “There are debts between us, October, daughter of Amandine, and it’s time for you to start paying your bill.”

I stiffened. “We were never friends, were we? You were just protecting your investment.”

“This isn’t the time. Believe me, I wish I could sit here and argue about your deluded ideals of friendship, but I can’t. The hour is far too late.” She picked up her coffee. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here. I had things to take care of that were a little more important than a few problems I knew you could handle without me.”

I stared at her. A few problems? Lily died. So did more than a dozen Cait Sidhe. I nearly died, and my survival meant giving up everything I’d believed I was. Unable to stop myself, I demanded, “What the fuck could you have been doing that was more important than being here?”

There was something satisfying about using human profanity on someone as inhuman as the Luidaeg—even if she wasn’t above using human profanity herself, from time to time. My brief flare of satisfaction died when she implacably answered, “I’ve been trying to prevent a war.”

It took a moment to find my voice again. Half-stammering, I asked, “Prevent a war? What war?”

Fae society divides itself along feudal lines—kings and queens, dukes and duchesses and knights and ladies and all the other things mortals romanticize and call “chivalry”—but we don’t go to war without a reason. As far as I knew, no one was currently invading anyone else. Even Dreamer’s Glass, with its paranoid, expansionistic Duchess, was quiet; they were too busy waiting for Tamed Lightning to explode to bother harassing the rest of us. There was always the possibility one of the other Kingdoms had decided to invade, but raising an army to threaten a throne is a tricky business that requires time, troops, and a lot of resources. We couldn’t have missed movement on that sort of scale.

“How much do you know about the Undersea?”

“What, we’re about to be attacked by mermaids?”

The Luidaeg looked at me flatly.

I realized she was serious.

Humans inhabit just one level of the world: the land. They can travel through the air and sea, but being unable to fly or breathe water puts a damper on long-term habitation. The fae don’t share their limitations. There are Kingdoms under the ocean and high in the clouds, thriving outside the range of mortal eyes . . . and most fae eyes, if we’re being honest. Land fae rarely go to the trouble of visiting the Undersea, and the majority of the winged races are too weak to reach the Cloud Kingdoms. We may be everywhere, but that doesn’t keep us from being divided by environment.

“Is it so difficult to believe? The land poisons their waters and kills their people. The Undersea has never dealt with humans when they didn’t want to, and they don’t understand why the land fae have let the humans get so out of control. They’re in a state of mild annoyance about ninety percent of the time. Not actively pissed—hence the lack of annual invasion—but annoyed.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“In small words? Somebody’s been harassing the Duchess of Saltmist and her family. You know Saltmist?”

“That’s Connor’s home Duchy.” He technically hails from the Selkie fiefdom of Roan Rathad in Half Moon Bay, but Roan Rathad answers to Saltmist, which stretches the length of the Northern California shoreline. It was Saltmist that decided he was expendable enough to be sold into a diplomatic marriage with Rayseline Torquill. I’d never met its Duchess. I couldn’t say I had much respect for her decision-making skills.

“It’s a coastal fiefdom, with holdings in both land and sea, although it’s primarily aquatic,” said the Luidaeg, in a calm, “you should already know this” tone. “Duchess Lorden has been regent there for the last two hundred years.”

“Merrow?” I guessed. Merrow are to the sea as Daoine Sidhe are to the land, only without the blood magic, and with a tendency to summon storms when annoyed. Oh, and fins, although they can have legs when they want to. Little Mermaid, eat your heart out.

“Yes.” The Luidaeg sipped her coffee. “She was a contemporary of King Gilad’s. He worked to maintain ties with the Undersea. The current Queen . . . doesn’t.”

I was starting to feel like I’d missed a whole series of memos. “King Gilad had open dealings with the Undersea?”

“Things were very different in this Kingdom before the 1906 quake.” Her expression turned distant. She set her coffee cup gingerly down. “The Queen of the Mists hasn’t cared to stay in Saltmist’s good graces. I doubt she believes they matter.”

“She has Sea Wight blood. Didn’t her parents teach her where she came from?”

The Luidaeg paused, looking at me levelly. Then she continued like I hadn’t spoken: “Dianda Lorden has a soft spot for land fae. Her husband’s Daoine Sidhe. He was a landless Baron before he ran off to play Ducal consort.”

“So how does he not drown?” I was interested despite my innate dislike of water. I’m pretty sure Daoine Sidhe aren’t aquatic. Someone would have told me.

“He’s married to a Merrow. They’ve had plenty of time to work something out. Sadly, there’s been some bad blood over the union, and the Lordens have been forced to cut off the majority of their relations with the land Courts.”

“Why?”

“Some people are more politically aware than kelp, Toby. Please note that I’m not including you in their number.” She sighed. “Most purebloods don’t like mixed marriages, and they especially dislike marriages that cross the realms. So when a land noble marries an Undersea Duchess . . .”

“But the Queen’s mixed, isn’t she? And my friend Mitch is part Nixie.”

“One, we don’t point fingers at kings or queens. Everyone knows the Queen of the Mists has sea-dweller blood, but nobody’s going to be gauche enough to point it out. Two, your friend is a changeling. He’s not in line for any thrones, and commoners aren’t as dangerous as legitimate heirs to noble titles. Three . . .” She hesitated, looking briefly uncertain. That was scarier than anything she could have said.

“Luidaeg?”

The sound of her name seemed to snap her out of it. She shook her head, repeating, “Three. Mixed blood can be unstable, depending on how distant the mix is. If two of Daddy’s descendants hook up, it doesn’t really matter what bloodline they’re from. If one of them decides to get it on with one of Mom’s descendants, well. There’s the potential for a lot of crazy.”

“Like changeling madness?”

“Exactly like changeling madness. We just don’t see as much of it in the mixed-bloods, because most of them either learn to hide it or get killed off. Some combinations are stable. Others, not so much. Most people aren’t happy when the nobility decides to risk it.”

“Right,” I said, feeling slightly numb as I reviewed all the mixed-bloods I could think of. Sylvester’s niece, January O’Leary, had a little bit of Tylwyth Teg blood and had been a little bit crazy. Devin was a changeling, but he was also a mixed-blood. And then there was Oleander, and Rayseline . . . “If Dianda and Patrick got married a hundred years ago, why is it a big deal now?”

“Someone’s been threatening to kill their children.”

I nearly dropped my coffee. “What?” The claim was so outrageous that I had trouble giving it credit, but the Luidaeg had never lied to me. She’s alien even among the fae, and too old to think in a way anyone less than a thousand really understands, but she wasn’t a liar.

Children are precious in Faerie, regardless of their heritage, and we don’t have enough of them to go around making threats. Blind Michael had been protected by the fact that he was Firstborn and scarier than anyone wanted to deal with. Even that wouldn’t have saved him if he’d taken his tithes more often. Offering to kill a noble’s kids is a good way to find out how many armed guards that noble can command—and how many soldiers their friends have.

“Whoever it is claims to have the Queen’s sanction. I’ve been trying to keep the Lordens from doing anything stupid, but their sons vanished this morning. Dianda and Patrick are scared. Frightened people—frightened parents—can do some incredibly destructive things.” She pulled a slate-colored abalone shell the size of a silver dollar out of the empty air, dropping it on the table between us. “Carry this; if I need you, you’ll know. The wards on my home are set to allow you. Come if you need me. I’ll be there.”

I’d been so focused on what she was saying that I’d managed to forget why she was saying it. She was calling in my debts. “What do I need to do?” I picked up the shell. It was cold to the touch.

“You need to help me stop this war.” She stood.

“Luidaeg, what do you expect me to do? It’s not like I have any experience in war prevention. Why me?”

“Who else would it be? And all I expect you to do is the best you can. That’s all I ever wanted from your mother, and all I’ve ever asked of you. There’s a gathering tomorrow night at the Queen’s Court. The Lordens are coming to demand their children back; it’s probably going to be their last attempt to prevent the war. The Queen is sending someone to insist you attend as the representative of Goldengreen. Dress nicely. Go armed.”

“Luidaeg—”

“People will die if we don’t stop this. You could be one of them. So could I. We still have to do what we can.” She turned and walked out of the kitchen. I stood, shoving the shell into my pocket, and followed her.

Cagney and Lacey were sitting in front of the door, ears flat and tails lashing. The Luidaeg stopped, looking down at them. “Tell your King he can’t save her this time. My claim comes first, however far that means she has to go.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter. They know what I mean.” She looked over her shoulder at me as she opened the door and stepped outside. “Be careful. Keep your eyes open. We don’t have time to screw around.”

“What are you—”

“Be careful,” she repeated, and closed the door.

I stared at the door for a moment, and then ran after her, wrenching it open. “Will you stop being obscure for ten seconds and explain yourself?” I demanded.

Dugan’s hand had been raised to knock. He lowered it. “Er,” he said.

I sagged, letting go of the doorknob. “Oh,” I said. “It’s you.”

Dugan Harrow worked for the Queen of the Mists. He was an untitled courtier from Deep Mists, and exactly the sort of prejudiced, arrogant bastard our system of nobility tends to encourage. The last time we “talked,” he was taking a really irritating amount of glee in carting me off to be executed.

We don’t get along.

Shaken by my distinctly nonstandard greeting, Dugan cleared his throat and asked, “May I come in?”

I gave him a weary look. “What time should I be there? Am I supposed to bring an escort?”

“I, uh . . . seven-thirty. And yes. It’s a formal event, and an escort is recommended.” Sounding unhappy, he added, “I was told to volunteer if—”

“That won’t be necessary.” I closed the door in his face, snapping the deadbolt into place with a decisive “click.” It was almost dawn; Connor might still be up if I called him soon. That would take care of the escort. As for the rest of it. . .

Missing children. The Luidaeg calling in my debts. Sometimes I wonder why I ever bother thinking life could be simple. That only happens in fairy tales.