Another pause. She kept staring at the ceiling. A single tear escaped her eye, running down her cheek. It left a shimmering trail behind it, gleaming like mother-of-pearl. “One of my sisters hated me for reasons that had nothing to do with my children, and she hated my children because they saw the future and refused to share it with her. So one night, she put knives in the hands of people who saw Faerie as a land to plunder, and she told those people that if they slaughtered the Roane, they would find the secrets of immortality in the flensed skins of my sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, all the way down to the babes in their cradles. My sister looked at my descendants and saw them as sacrifices. And then she saw them sacrificed. Not all, but enough. Enough to take a thriving race to near extinction in a single night. Enough to break my heart forever.”
Dean was the first of the boys to realize what the slaughter of the Roane actually meant. He swayed in the doorway, horror and sudden nausea written in the lines of his face. Good. The others would get there, and they were good boys; they had a strong sense of right and wrong. I had faith that their reactions would mirror his.
“The children of the killers woke up the next morning—they woke up, when my children were never going to wake up again, when I was still ignorant of what had happened—and found their parents dripping with blood, wearing raw, freshly-flensed sealskins around their necks and shouting about immortality. They were going to live forever, they said. They were going to be powerful and unstoppable, just like the fae.” The Luidaeg’s lips curved in a cynical expression that could have been a smile, maybe, in another life, on another face. On her, it was the betrayed look of someone infinitely younger, infinitely softer, than the sea witch we knew and somewhat reluctantly loved.
“I guess it never occurred to them that if the fae were all that powerful and unstoppable, their knives wouldn’t have been enough to slit my children’s throats.” She shrugged, almost shuddered, like she was shaking the memory away. “The children of those killers rose up against their parents, because they knew that when I heard what had happened, my wrath would be swift and absolute. They were thinking of their children. They killed their parents to try to appease me, so that some of them might be spared.”
“Were they?” asked Quentin. His voice was very small, and very young. He sounded like the dandelion-haired boy he’d been when we first met, and not the almost-man that he’d grown into since then.
The Luidaeg lowered her head and looked at him, and there was kindness in her eyes that would have shocked most of Faerie. Not for the first time, I marveled at how such a legendary monster had become such an integral part of our strange and broken family.
“Yes, and no,” she said. “I’m not my sister. I don’t kill children. If we handed down the sins of the parents without consideration for circumstances, we’d never have parents or children again, because all the babies would be dead in their cradles, unable to learn. But I punished them. I had to. For the sake of the Roane who were still alive, for the sake of all the other descendants of Maeve . . . and yes, for the sake of my own children, whose bloodied bodies sank to the bottom of the sea to be rocked to their rest before I could get to them.”
“The Selkies,” said Raj.
The Luidaeg nodded. “The Selkies,” she confirmed. “Their skins—didn’t you ever wonder where they came from? Who had to be flensed to put such power into a pelt?”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” murmured Dean.
“The first Selkies were the ones who brought the skins of my children back to me,” said the Luidaeg. “They had blood on their hands, but they weren’t the ones to shed it, and they said they were sorry. They said they’d do anything to assuage my wrath. So I made them my own. I draped them in sealskin and set them to the sea. I made them fae and less than fae in the same breath, because their children were still human, still mortal, and if they didn’t want to suffer the way I’d suffered, they knew they would have to pass those skins along. Conditional immortality. The first generation of Selkies thought they could stand the pain. They couldn’t. They’ve been passing the skins along ever since, sacrificing the sea for the sake of their children over and over again, always waiting for the day when I would come and tell them their time was up, their penance was paid, and now it was time for them to settle the final bill.”
“Meaning what?” asked Quentin.
“Meaning a daughter of Amandine’s line has finally stepped up to do her damn job,” said the Luidaeg. She turned to face me, and her eyes remained as dark as drowning. “Meaning I didn’t give them time because I wanted to. I did it because I didn’t have a choice. A hope chest wasn’t enough. My own father’s blood magic might not have been enough, even assuming he’d be willing to intervene on my behalf—and I couldn’t count on that. I was already half-broken. I was already halfway to becoming the monster my sister wanted me to be. But they saw the future. The Roane saw the future. They saw you.”
The blood rushed out of my head, leaving me faint, and incredibly grateful for Tybalt’s closeness. He must have felt me wobble, because he slipped an arm around my waist, holding me upright.
“Oh,” I said. “Is that all?”
The Luidaeg smiled, very slightly. “Liar’s daughter, come to turn back the tide. That’s what they called you. You’re a living hope chest. You have the blood magic I’ve been waiting for. Oh, it could have been August—could even have been your mother—but neither of them stepped up. So it’s on you. I have what I need to finish this. I told Liz to spread the word, and then I tried to wait until you’d gotten comfortable with what you had the potential to become. I really did.”
“I know,” I said. “You can’t lie.”
“I can’t,” she agreed. “But three years ago I told Liz the Selkies had a year, and I’m pushing the limits of that statement. You’re ready. You’re strong enough. I need to act, or I’m going to make a liar of myself. The consequences of that would be . . . bad.”
“How bad?” asked Quentin.
“Bad enough,” said the Luidaeg, eyes still on me. “You know what happens now.”
I sighed deeply. “Yeah. I do.”
The Luidaeg lifted an eyebrow. “You’re not going to argue? Try to run? Any of that bullshit?”
“No. Even if I thought I could get away with it—and I know enough to know that I can’t—I wouldn’t do that to you.” I looked at her as levelly as I could. “This is your family. You deserve to stop mourning for them. Go ahead and say it.”
“Very well, then.” The Luidaeg took a deep breath. The air around us slowed until it became perfectly still, like the air right before some terrible storm rolls in. It grew colder and full of static at the same time, crackling around us, heavy with the memory of lightning. The Luidaeg never took her eyes off me.