One Salt Sea

“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