One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

What do you say to someone who’s dead? “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, the words sounding idiotic even as they left my lips.

“So am I,” she said, smiling very slightly. “Mistress Torquill approached me at the Farmer’s Market, of all mad places, and said she wished to speak with me—said she needed a Selkie’s perspective on some matter of great importance. I spoke with her because I thought she wished to make peace with Connor. I began to hope she might have found it in herself to come home to her husband, to begin to make amends.”

That was a more charitable view of Rayseline Torquill than I’d been able to maintain in a long time. I tried not to let that show on my face as I asked, “So you went with her?”

“Not right away, but I went to meet with her that night, yes,” said the night-haunt who’d once been Margie. Regret danced behind her eyes. “She asked me if I would be willing to meet with her near the docks behind the ballpark. I saw no harm in it. I went. And while she was standing in front of me, and us all alone, someone struck me from behind, and everything went black.”

I felt my brief sense of hope wither and die. There was no way Raysel was keeping the children at the docks. They’re big, but they have a high fae population, and the Lordens had been sending people out looking for the kids for days now. If the boys were alive and at the docks, they would have already been found.

“Is that where you died?” I asked.

The Margie haunt blinked, looking surprised. “No, it’s not. I woke again in a room with walls of stone and straw strewn on the floor. The air smelled of spices, like we were near some sort of a kitchen, or maybe a restaurant. I was bound, hand and foot.” Her expression darkened. “Mistress Torquill was there. She had an arrow in her hands. A black arrow, barely the length of a knitter’s needle.”

“Elf-shot,” I guessed aloud.

“Yes. She said she was going to make me sleep for a while—a long, long while—and that while I slept, my skin would be out, making mischief in the world. Then she stabbed the arrow into my shoulder, and everything went away again.” The night-haunt’s face crumpled like she was going to cry. “I don’t think she meant to kill me. She merely meant for me to be blamed for her crimes until the day I woke.”

Selkies without their skins are basically humans with a strange fondness for the beach. “You died when she took your skin,” I said.

Margie’s haunt nodded. “I did.”

“Did you see anything that might help me find the place where you were being held—anything at all? Did you hear something, smell something . . . ?”

“There were the spices . . . redwoods. I smelled redwood trees, and old earth, earth that had been let to decay without disturbance for a long, long time. The place I was in, it was underground, and it felt like a knowe, but not like a knowe.”

“Could you have been in a shallowing?” A proper knowe is built entirely in the Summerlands, where the laws of Faerie reign supreme. Sometimes, these days, that isn’t possible. There’s not enough land for that. So knowes get built in the shallow space between the worlds, dug out of ground that’s neither here nor there. They can scramble things, just because the words don’t exist to properly describe them.

The night-haunt looked thoughtful. “I rather think it could have been, yes.”

A shallowing in a place with redwood trees and old earth. There was one more thing: “Did you smell the sea?”

“No.”

That meant it was somewhere inland. Maybe Dean Lorden was still alive after all. “I will do my best to avenge you, Margie. I’m sorry you died.”