One Salt Sea

  “We do, but they’re not quite as . . . standardized.” I smoothed my skirt with the heels of my hands. It was definitely a step up from my usual Old Navy couture. And I just had to go to the bottom of the sea to get it. “I think I’m ready to go back.”

  “Surely.” Helmi rotated her entire body, tentacles slapping the floor as she turned, and then made her way back to the door we’d entered through. She knocked three times before opening it, revealing a room that was absolutely not the one we’d been in before. For one thing, this one had walls—wooden ones, no less, making them seem strange and exotic after all the coral.

  Dianda and Patrick were standing near one wall, arguing quietly with Connor. All three looked up when Helmi and I approached. My bare feet were silent against the floor. Her tentacles weren’t. Connor’s eyes lit up when he saw me, and he took a half-step forward before he remembered that he was in the presence of his liege and stopped, standing at sudden attention.

  “You clean up well,” said Dianda, giving me a once-over.

  “Helmi was a great help.” Another careful two-step in the dance of avoided thanks, complete. “Your Graces, Connor, I wanted to verify something Helmi told me. Is that possible?”

  Dianda nodded. “Certainly. What did you want to know?”

  “Is it true that the wards on this place are set to admit Selkies with no verification of identity or allegiance?”

  “Yes.” Dianda frowned quizzically. “All the Undersea Duchies set their wards this way. Selkies act as messengers, and messengers are honor-bound to do no mischief in fiefdoms other than their own. Even in times of war, Selkies are safe guests.”

  “Right.” I turned to Connor. “Am I a Merrow?”

  “What? No!”

  “But if I asked the wards right now, would they say I was a Merrow?”

  “I . . .” He paused, looking confused.

  Patrick, on the other hand, looked horrified; Patrick, who was born in the land Courts, and knew how they operated. He’d been in the Undersea for a few hundred years, but there are some things you never forget.

  “Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying,” he said.

  “I can’t. Because I think someone used a stolen Selkie skin to get past your wards.” I met Dianda’s eyes. It was harder than I expected it to be. “I’m afraid your sons weren’t the first ones taken in this war.”

  SIXTEEN

  TO HER CREDIT, DIANDA didn���t flinch. Eyes narrowing, she asked, “Who could have done this?”

  “Moving past the part where I say ‘someone who was willing to steal your children to provoke a war,’ it would have to be someone who understood the way the Undersea operates. Someone who understood the way Selkies operate.” I let my eyes drift to Connor. He was staring at me, an expression of terrified understanding on his face. “Somebody who understood that a Selkie is the skin, and not the one who wears it.”

  “Oh, Oberon,” he whispered.

  Patrick frowned, following my gaze. “Connor?”

  “Well?” I asked.

  “It . . .” Connor took an unsteady breath. “She knows how the skins work. I told her. Showed her, even. I was trying to make her understand me a little better. I thought if we were going to be stuck with each other for a few hundred years, we should at least find a way to be friends.”

  “Showed who?” asked Patrick.

  Connor didn’t say anything. So I said it for him.

  “Rayseline Torquill,” I said. “His ex-wife.”

  “Connor, what have you done?” Dianda’s question was raw, aching, a mother yearning for impossible answers.

  “What you told me to do!” he said. I barely recognized the desperation in his voice. “I married her because you told me to. I tried! I tried to court her, to woo her, but she couldn’t be courted—she was too far gone, and I . . . I tried!”

  “It’s not his fault,” I said, bringing Patrick and Dianda’s eyes back to me. That wasn’t comfortable, but it was better than having them fixed on Connor. “She was more broken than anyone knew, even her parents. He couldn’t know what he was doing when he tried to make the marriage work. If you’re going to blame anyone, blame whoever broke her in the first place. And maybe it wasn’t Raysel. There are other options.”

  “Who?” asked Dianda.

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  Patrick broke the silence. Indicating the nearest door with a sweep of one hand, he said, “This is Dean’s room. Is there anything you’ll need?”

  “Let’s find out.” I reached for the knob, pausing just before I grasped it. “Is there anything I need to know about the wards?”

  “There aren’t any.”

  I turned to blink at Dianda, surprised enough by her reply that I allowed my hand to complete its descent to the doorknob. Nothing shocked me. She was telling the truth; there were no wards on the private quarters. “What? Why not?”

  “We’re inside the knowe. Wards have never been needed here.”

  “Things are different on the land,” I said, and opened the door.

  Dean’s room was surprisingly normal, and could have passed for Quentin’s or Raj’s with a few alterations. A dark blue rug softened the polished wood floor, matching the curtains around the single window, which was shaped like—and possibly made from—a ship’s porthole. A tall wardrobe was shoved against one wall, and the bed was beneath the window. The rest of the available wall space was devoted to bookshelves, most of them groaning under the weight of the books stacked there.

  “Stay here,” I said, starting to step inside. Dianda’s eyes widened. I raised my hand to stop her protest. “Please. I know a lot of people have been through here, but I need to at least try.”

  “Let her, Di,” said Patrick, putting a hand on her arm.

  “All right.” She subsided, leaning against her husband. “Proceed.”

  I nodded before turning and walking slowly into the room. No blood had been shed here. That was a small problem—I work best when I work with blood—but not an insurmountable one.

  Most people assume an unfamiliar scene is harder to work than a familiar one, since you won’t be able to tell what’s out of place. Those people are both right and wrong. I couldn’t tell what was out of place, and I definitely couldn’t tell you if anything was missing, but at the same time, I didn’t have any preconceptions about what was supposed to be where. A familiar scene can become overwhelmingly strange when it’s disturbed in some way, while unfamiliar scenes are strange to begin with. More importantly, people fill in the blanks when they look at a familiar room, inserting objects where they think they belong. Their eyes can just skip over things. That’s dangerous—more dangerous than not knowing what it’s safe to disregard. Given a choice, I’ll take the unfamiliar every time.

  The covers on Dean’s bed were smooth. I indicated the bed, continuing to study the rest of the room. “Was Dean in the habit of making his bed that well?”

  “Helmi made it for him,” said Dianda. “It was unmade when he disappeared.”

  I bit back my usual lecture on preserving the scene of a crime. At least most land fae have heard of police detective shows, and sort of understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t even know if the Undersea knew what television was. “Was there anything strange about it?”

  “No.”

  “Right.” The books were shelved in alphabetical order, and even the ones that were wedged in tightly enough to dent their covers were where they belonged. Dean had a space problem, but not an organization problem. “Where do the books come from?”

  “Bookstores and Amazon,” replied Patrick. He smiled at my startled expression. “The land doesn’t have a monopoly on adopting mortal technology, you know. There’s something to be said for the anonymity of online shopping.”

  “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a mermaid.” I shook my head. “Did Helmi clean those up, too?”

  “Dean’s very careful with his library,” said Dianda. “He was a
sking . . . he’s been asking about a fosterage for a while now.” She glanced at Patrick, a tangled mixture of affection and regret in her expression. “He wants to know what life is like on the land.”

  “I can recommend some good fiefdoms when the time comes,” I said staunchly ignoring her slip into the past tense.

  “Let’s hope you get the chance,” said Patrick.

  There was nothing I could say to that. I gave the room one more long look before moving toward the bed. It was hard to resist the urge to muss the covers, just a little bit; just enough to make it look like a teenage boy still lived here. As it was, the mixture of tidiness and carefully shelved disorder made it all too easy to imagine this as Quentin’s room. I would have willingly started a war to get my squire back. I didn’t even want to think about what I’d do if Gilly’s life were the one on the line.

  A nightstand sat just under the porthole window, holding the standard assortment of odds and ends: an oil lamp, a tattered Stephen King paperback with a bookmark about halfway through, and a ceramic dish filled with the sort of things that collect in an active teenager’s pockets. Small stones, salt-corroded coins, dice . . . and several slips of paper. Most looked like they’d been torn from court documents or larger pieces of parchment, which just made the scrap of blue-lined binder paper look all the more out of place.

  I crouched next to the nightstand, breathing deeply as I strained to find any trace of lingering magic to confirm my suspicions. The air smelled clean, with a strong undercurrent of saltwater and wood polish. I closed my eyes, forcing myself to focus. My own magic started to rise, the cut-grass-and-copper smell of it somehow forcing the other scents to separate, rather than obscuring them.

  And there, buried under the stronger, more recent scents, was the thing I’d been hoping and fearing I’d find: mustard flowers and hot wax. The signature of Raysel’s magic.

  I opened my eyes and reached for the scrap of binder paper. It was water-damaged, and most of the list of items had blurred beyond reading, but Raysel’s childish scrawl was still legible in a few spots. “ ‘Knock three times,’ ”I read aloud. “What does that mean?”

  “All servants are required to knock three times before entering,” said Dianda. She was frowning as I stood and turned to face her. “That gives the inhabitants time to prepare, so they won’t be surprised. A servant who didn’t knock might find themselves facing a rather unpleasant welcome.”

  “Unpleasant how?”

  Dianda’s frown became a thin smile, showing more teeth than I was strictly comfortable with. “Painfully so. Even in our quarters, we are never unarmed.”

  “Charming. Do the Selkies know about the knocking?”

  “Yes,” said Connor. “But . . . I never told Raysel that. There was no reason to.”

  There was no reason to tell her about the wards, either, but I decided to keep that to myself. “Someone did.” I held up the slip of paper. “Rayseline was here, and she had written instructions to help her get inside.” It was easy to picture Helmi finding the scrap of paper in the process of cleaning the room and simply putting it with the rest, not realizing it was from a different source.

  “Where is she now?” demanded Dianda. “Where are my sons?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.” I dropped the scrap of paper back into the dish, straightening.

  Dean’s room yielded nothing else of interest, although I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been happy to see me rooting through his underwear drawer. Eventually, even Dianda had to admit that we were done, and we moved across the hall to Peter’s room.

  If Dean was a budding scholar dreaming of the land, Peter was a normal twelve year old, and even Helmi’s valiant efforts to tame his room had failed. I knew as soon as I crossed the threshold that he was a collector of shells, a lover of strange stones, and an explorer of sunken ships—unless he’d managed to acquire his impressive assortment of coins, cannonballs, and other shipwreck souvenirs online, which I doubted. He didn’t have a bed; instead, a deep saltwater pool about the size of a hotel hot tub sat at the center of the room, with handgrips around the edges to make it easier to get in and out of.

  And none of that mattered, because the smell of blood punched me in the nose as soon as the door was opened. I grabbed the doorframe, half-staggering. Connor caught my shoulder, lending a bit of extra stability.

  “What is it?” Dianda demanded. “What’s wrong?”

  “Blood,” I said, trying to make my eyes focus. “Someone’s been using blood magic here.”

  “That’s impossible. If someone had, we’d know.”

  “Maybe not,” said Patrick. “Amandine could find a single drop of blood in a field of love-lies-bleeding. I saw her do it once, at a summer festival. It was a party trick for her.”

  “She was a pureblood. October is a changeling.”

  “Not where blood is concerned,” said Connor staunchly.

  I barely heard them. I was too busy trying to sort through the conflicting information I was receiving from the room, which smelled like blood that wasn’t blood, and magic that wasn’t magic. I shrugged off Connor’s hand and started forward, not allowing myself to look where I was going. The trail was too tenuous for me to get distracted by silly things like what was actually around me.

  One step. Two. On the third step, I stumbled, nearly tripping over the edge of the pool, and had to dare a glance down in order to recover my balance. I almost lost the trail after that, and had to stop again, closing my eyes and breathing as deeply as I could. The smell of blood had been impossible to miss when we opened the door because it had been trapped. Now, with the air circulating in from the hall, it was getting fainter. I needed to keep moving, or I was never going to find it at all.

  Three more steps carried me to the wall. It was covered by a complex tapestry of interwoven fishnets, ropes, and sea-stained lengths of fabric, all studded with shells and interesting pieces of driftwood. There was blood trapped in the fiber, places where the weaver’s fingers had bled in the process of tying knots or securing shells; the image of a dark-haired Merrow boy formed behind my eyes, and was just as quickly filed away. I’d know Peter if I saw him now, but that wasn’t the blood I’d followed into the room.

  Shutting out the traces of blood in the tapestry only took a few seconds. My own magic was rising around me again. I borrowed strength from its familiarity, letting it wash away everything but the blood before I knelt and pulled the base of the tapestry away from the wall.

  A silver needle glittered among the bottom loops of fishnet, obviously snagged there by mistake. It was practically invisible among all the things woven into the netting. If there hadn’t been time for a full search of the room, Rayseline wouldn’t even have realized that it was missing.

  “Here,” I said. The bottom inch of the needle was darker than the rest. I didn’t need magic to tell me it was covered with dried blood. Gingerly, I grasped the opposite end and began working it free of the tapestry. “I found something.”

  “What is it?” This time, no amount of restraining was going to keep Dianda out of the room. She strode toward me, practically vibrating with the need to know what I’d found. “How did my people miss it?”

  “They didn’t smell the blood.” I held up the needle. “I wouldn’t touch this if I were you. This is a blood magic charm.”

  “Intended to do what?”

  “I’m not sure.” I brought the needle to my nose, sniffing cautiously. “It smells a little bit like elf-shot, but it’s not quite elf-shot. I’m going to need to take this to an alchemist friend of mine; he’ll be able to tell us more.”

  Dianda’s expression darkened. “If you think I’m going to let you swim out of here with that—”

  “I’m exactly right,” I finished. “Dianda, I’m trying to save your sons. We know Rayseline was involved, and we know this is blood magic. There’s no way she brewed this on her own. That means we need to find out who did brew it, and the best way to do that is t
o learn exactly what it is. Walther will be able to do that. You’ve trusted me this far. Is there anything to gain in taking that trust away from me now?”

  Dianda’s eyes flicked from my face to the needle and back. Finally, she said, “Helmi will fetch you a water-tight bottle to transport it back to the surface. You have until the morning tide rolls in twice to tell me who took my children. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted more than that—I wanted her to promise we wouldn’t be going to war—but I knew better than to demand. Her children were missing. I was lucky she was still being as reasonable as she was.

  “Good.” Dianda’s shoulders drooped. “I . . . is there anything else we can show you? Anything at all?”

  I took a deep breath. “Honestly, I don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with the way your knowes are constructed. How about you take me on a tour of the boys’ favorite spots, and we’ll see if anything else jumps out at me?” I glanced at the needle. “After Helmi brings the bottle, that is. I’ve already jabbed one dubiously enchanted pin into my leg tonight, and since that ended with me growing fins, I’d rather not do it again.”

  “All right,” said Dianda. She rubbed her face with one hand, looking overwhelmingly tired. “A tour it is.”

  “And an escort to the surface afterward, if you don’t mind. I don’t think I can find the way back on my own, and this,” I waved a still-webbed hand, indicating my body, “isn’t going to last forever. I won’t be very much use to you if I drown when the Luidaeg’s spell wears off.”

  “You’ll be escorted,” said Patrick.

  Silence fell. I looked around, wishing I had better news for them—wishing I had some idea of where Raysel might have taken the missing boys. I didn’t have either of those things.

  Having nothing useful to contribute has never been enough to keep my mouth shut. “So,” I asked, “anybody know how to get saltwater out of leather?”