One Salt Sea

pants?”

“Among many other excellent questions,” said Dianda. She offered me her hand. “Come along. I’ll pull you.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. I couldn’t figure out how to take her hand without crushing the webbing between her fingers—or between my own—and so I grabbed her wrist, holding tight.

“Don’t hold your breath,” she advised, and pulled me under.

The strange lightness under the waves remained, making it almost easier to see below than it had been above. Dianda’s scales cast their own faint, luminous glow. Even if she hadn’t been pulling me, I wouldn’t have lost sight of her. Smiling encouragingly, she tugged me forward, away from the dock, into the open sea.

Splashes from behind us signaled the remaining Selkie archers entering the water. In a matter of seconds, the sea was alive with harbor seals, their silver-and-charcoal coats turning them into virtual ghosts. I couldn’t pick Connor out of the throng. I’ve seen him in seal form dozens, if not hundreds of times, but all the swimming Selkies looked alike to me. Anyway, I was preoccupied by the effort of keeping up with Dianda, something that got harder when I tried to think about what I was doing. It was like my body knew how to swim, but my brain complicated everything by insisting I was doing it wrong.

Thinking too much also had the unpleasant side effect of making me realize that I wasn’t actually breathing. Gills just aren’t the same. Finally, I stopped thinking and let myself go, trusting Dianda to get us where we were going. Things got better after that.

I’m no oceanographer, but I know enough to know that it’s supposed to get darker as you go deeper. That wasn’t happening here. Instead, we swam through a series of small temperature changes, wafting, diffuse things that would signify the transition between the mortal and fae worlds if they appeared in a land knowe. The fish swimming by got flashier, all bright colors and flamboyant patterns of the sort I usually only saw on the Discovery Channel. The Selkies wove a complicated pattern around us, acting as escort and guard. And in the middle of it all swam Dianda, cutting through the water with me firmly in tow.

Ahead of us, the Selkies began to vanish. Nothing was taking them, and they weren’t swimming away; they were swimming forward, and then they were gone, moving into some other sea. Dianda looked back, nodding her head toward the place where the Selkies disappeared. I nodded, bracing myself as much as I could while still swimming faster than a man could run. Dianda smiled and put on a burst of speed, towing me into a patch of water so cold it was like liquid ice. The world twisted—

—and we were through, entering an ocean full of moonlight. I thought it was easy to see in the mortal ocean. I was wrong. It was easy to see here, where the light clung to everything and the shadows were all but nonexistent. Even the saltwater tasted sweet, with no trace of pollution or modern industry. We were in the Summerlands sea.

An elegant stone palace decked in mother-of-pearl and patches of living kelp rose from the seafloor ahead of us, cradled in rings of multicolored coral. It had been constructed with no regard for gravity, resulting in dozens of tapering towers, high balconies that went nowhere, and wide windows instead of doors. Why bother building to constraints that don’t apply to you?

Dianda kept pulling me forward. I realized she was singing. It was a high, sweet sound, barely this side of whale song—and the sea answered her. Dozens of fae poured from the palace windows, swimming out to join our escort. They ranged from the expected Merrow and Sirens to stranger things, women with the lower bodies of octopi instead of the standard Merrow’s tail, men with slick, blue-black skin and the smooth fluidity of eels. Many of them belonged to fae races I had never seen before, Undersea denizens for whom the land held no attractions.

They surrounded us in a coruscating curtain of living bodies and brightly-colored scales. Most were wearing garments that were equally bright, like they were competing with the ocean around them. As if anything could have managed that. This sea was too wild and strange for anything to have ever truly competed with it.

All the sea fae were singing, their individual pitches and melodies joining with Dianda’s into a single sweet chorus that didn’t make a bit of sense. Words were impossible under the water—at least without magic—and it made sense that they would have found a way to fill that gap. I could even see a few of them signing to each other, waving their hands or tentacles in quick, fluid gestures that didn’t look a damn thing like American Sign Language. I hoped they all spoke English, and that we’d be in a place where talking was an option, or this visit was going to be like a pantomime in Hell.

The palace was just ahead of us. Dianda let go of my hand, gesturing for me to follow as she swam for the nearest window. Several members of our impromptu escort swam in ahead of her. The rest peeled off to the sides, leaving space for me to enter.

As if I could do anything else? After coming this far—out of my world, literally out of my element, and even out of my own natural form—following her through the window was no big deal. I twisted around to make sure I wouldn’t catch my flukes on the sill, and swam through. This was definitely turning out to be an interesting night.

Hell, maybe I’d get lucky, and someone in the Undersea would know what coffee was.

FIFTEEN

THE ROOM WE SWAM INTO made the grand ballroom at Shadowed Hills look tiny. The gleaming mother-of-pearl walls were mostly obscured by elaborate loops of coral shaped like an abstract jungle gym. I thought it was purely decorative until half the fae in our escort swam off and settled themselves among the nooks and handholds. Several of the octopus-merfolk actually suspended themselves from what should have been the ceiling, hanging there and watching us as we passed.

“Creepy,” I muttered—or would have, if I’d been above water. As it was, I just managed a few bubbles. I scowled, swimming after Dianda. She was moving more slowly now that we were out of open water. That was a good thing; I would never have been able to keep up with her otherwise.

The hall paid no attention to conventional geometry, twisting and looping like a piece of tangled string, until I could only tell up from down by the direction people’s hair floated. The ones that had hair, anyway. I’m used to fae with feathers or scales or even willow branches in place of hair. Kelp, coral, bristling sea urchin spines, and lionfish fins . . . those were new to me.

Dianda doubled back to grab my wrist before diving upward into a long passage. She gathered speed as she went. I did the same, or as close to the same as I could manage. This “swimming” thing was harder than it looked. At least it was keeping me from thinking too hard about the fact that I was underwater, and worse, actually breathing water, just like I did in the pond.

Even that brief acknowledgment of the fact that I was surrounded by water was enough to make me start panicking again. I surged forward, nearly smacking my tail against the walls, and actually pulled even with Dianda for a brief second. She nodded approvingly, jerked me closer, and sped up.

Her momentum carried us out of the tunnel into a shallow blue-watered pool that spread out around us like a basin. I gasped as we broke the surface, as much from reflex as from the actual need to feel air, real air, filling my lungs. Something tickled the sides of my neck; my gills, closing themselves now that they weren’t needed. Because that wasn’t creepy or anything.

My hair fell into my eyes as soon as my head was out of the water. I shoved it aside and took a good look at the room around us. It was built much more along the lines I’ve come to expect from buildings: walls that went straight up, rather than curving and twisting in odd angles, and ended at a flat ceiling. Everything looked like it had been carved from a single massive piece of pink coral, but aside from that, it was all normal. If it weren’t for the pink walls and the lack of windows, I could easily have believed that we had somehow managed to swim into a land knowe.

There was even furniture, clearly designed for use by human-shaped people. It looked like it had been scavenged from old sailing ships, creating a sort of “Jules Verne meets Martha Stewart” design aesthetic. Even the chandeliers appeared to have been fashioned from old ship’s wheels, with glowing anemone-things in place of candles.

Dianda paddled to the edge of the pool and pulled herself out of the water, twisting into a sitting position. All