The Cruel Tide

He thought she was flirting. By sunrise, he was engaged to a queen.

Plot

A Cruel Bargain Story THECRUEL TIDE You were never meant to be the prince. “Walk me home?” 3 Routes  |  8 Endings26 Weeks  |  M17 Rating The treaty that ended a generations-long war demanded a son of the Queen of Dusk. Everyone thought she had only one. Your mother knew better. So she sent the son nobody knew existed. You. At the Samhain bonfire, a beautiful stranger asked you to walk her home. By sunrise you had crossed a border you never knew was there, entered a kingdom beneath the sea, and discovered that you were not a guest. You were the payment. Now you stand in Tidehollow, a selkie court that measures every word and remembers every insult. The queen you are promised to never wanted you. Half the nobility wants you gone. A general is waiting for your marriage to fail so he can start the war again. And somewhere beyond the waves, the mother who abandoned you is very interested in what happens next. The worst part? You are far more importantthan anyone has told you. Three Women. Three Courts. One Winter. The Long Game Queen Muireann Cold. Brilliant. Impossible to impress. She fought for peace and was rewarded with a husband chosen by somebody else. Every noble in her court is watching to see whether she regrets accepting you. Win her trust, and you may gain the most powerful ally in Tidehollow.Lose it, and you become the mistake everyone already believes you are. The Risk Lady Muirgheal Beautiful, ambitious, and dangerously entertained by you. She flirts without fear because she enjoys the chaos it causes. She also happens to be married to the man who wants the war back. Keeping her attention is easy.Surviving the consequences is harder. The Secret Queen Maeve The girl from home. Two years ago she vanished from Hollow Wick. Now she wears a crown of her own. She knows exactly what it means to be dragged into a fae court and remade into something else, because it happened to her first. A Court of Whispers Nobody needs a knife here. In Tidehollow, rumours are weapons. Every mistake becomes a story. Every story becomes reputation. Every reputation becomes power. The court is always watching. The question is whether they end the winter talking about your failure… or your rise. Your Choices Will Determine ▸  Whether Queen Muireann ever chooses you for herself ▸  Whether peace survives until spring ▸  Whether General Cathal gets his war ▸  Which secrets survive the winter ▸  What your fae heritage truly means ▸  Whether you become a husband, a kingmaker, a scandal… or a corpse Three women.One winter.A peace held together by your existence. You Arrived As A Payment What you becomeis up to you.

Opening scene

# THE CRUEL TIDE — CHAPTER ONE Samhain in Hollow Wick means the good bonfire down by the harbour wall, the one the council pretends is a fire-safety exemption and everyone else treats as the only night of the year worth turning up for. Bunting over the lane. A queue outside the pub four deep. Somebody's cousin doing a fiddle set nobody asked for and everybody stays for. You has worked this festival, drunk at this festival, and been eleven years old and terrified at this festival, back when the masks still meant something. Tonight he is mostly holding a paper cup of something mulled and letting the crowd move him around, which is the correct way to do Samhain when you have grown up here and have nothing left to prove about it. Which is roughly when somebody says, at his shoulder, "Is it always this loud?" She is not local. He would know. Hollow Wick is four hundred people and a car park, and he would absolutely know. Pale hair, nearly white, the sort people pay a great deal for and rarely get right. A long dark coat, too good for the weather and not warm enough for it. Grey-green eyes doing something with the firelight that he decides not to think about too hard. She is looking at the bonfire rather than at him, which somehow makes it worse. "Only the once a year," he says. "The rest of the time you could hear a door shut from the other end of the village." "That sounds better." "It's not, really. You just start hearing which door." She laughs — short, surprised, like she had not expected to — and turns to look at him properly for the first time, and You has the brief, uncomplicated thought that he is going to remember this evening regardless of how it goes. "You're visiting," he says. "I'm visiting from far away." She says it the way you say a thing that is completely true. "I came here to meet someone." "Did you find them?" "I found something." She tips her head very slightly. "That will do for tonight." --- They talk for an hour, and he cannot afterwards account for any of it. He tells her about the shop his father worked at and the boat he does not own and the winter he tried living in the city and came home after nine months. She asks the sort of questions that make a person interesting to themselves. She does not, he notices somewhere around the second cup, tell him very much at all — but she never dodges either. Every answer is a real answer. They are simply all the wrong size. Old Mairéad from the corner house goes past, and stops. Looks at the two of them a beat too long. "Going home the low road, are you," she says, to You, not to the woman. "Bit early yet, Mairéad." "Mm." She is still not looking at the stranger. "Not tonight it isn't." She moves on. His companion watches her go with an expression he cannot read at all. "What was that about?" "She thinks you should be careful," the woman says. "She's right. Most people here are, about tonight — they just don't say so where the tourists can hear." "You don't seem worried." "No," she agrees. "I don't." And then, without any particular weight on it, as though it were the obvious next thing and not the whole hinge of his life: "Walk me home?" He could say no. He wants to be clear with himself about that afterwards, and he is: there is no fog in his head, no lurch, no strange compulsion, nothing pulling at him but the entirely ordinary and very old human wish to keep talking to someone for one more hour than is sensible. "Yeah," You says. "All right." --- The lane out of the village he has walked ten thousand times. They pass the crossroads, where the fairy thorn stands in the middle of a perfectly good field that three generations of farmers have ploughed around rather than argue with. She does not look at it. He notices that she does not look at it. Past the turn for the rath, the hill fort nobody builds on, where the tour groups get their photograph and their shiver and their story. The bonfire noise falls off behind them much faster than it should. And then the road does something wrong. It is not dramatic. That is the part he keeps coming back to. It is simply that the wall on his left ought to end at the gate to the Corrigan place, and it does not end; it keeps going, and the field beyond it is the wrong shape, and when he looks back the lights of the village are at an angle they have no business being at. The air tastes of salt. Hollow Wick always tastes of salt, but not like this, not like standing in the mouth of a wave. And something in his chest turns over. Not fear — he knows fear, and this is on the wrong side of his ribs for it. Something further in, that has been asleep as long as he has been alive, moving for the first time. He puts it down to the cold, and the hour, and the woman beside him. You stops walking. He grew up here. He has sold the postcards. He knows exactly one thing about this situation and he knows it in his spine: *you do not follow a stranger off the road on Samhain night.* "You're very calm," she observes. "I'm really not." "No," she agrees. "But you stopped. That's more than most." --- The house, when they reach it, is a villa — white, low, expensive, the kind of place someone from Dublin buys and visits twice a year. The gate is open. There are lamps lit along the path, which strikes him as an odd thing to have done before going out. "This isn't yours," he says. "It was lent to me. By a cousin." She says *cousin* the way other people say a job title. "A private family visit. Nothing official." Inside is warm and very quiet and smells of woodsmoke and something underneath it he cannot place. She pours two glasses of something dark and does not drink hers. She sets it down, and she looks at him, and the whole shape of the evening changes without a single thing in the room moving. "You should sit down," she says. "I'd rather not, thanks." "No. You should." A pause. "Your mother was not from Hollow Wick." You does not sit down. "My mother," he says carefully, "left me on my father's doorstep and that's the entire story. Everyone in that village knows it. If this is—" "Your mother is one of the Good People." She says it plainly, without ceremony, the way you would state a fact about weather. "You are half of what she is. You have been your whole life, and nobody told you, and that was deliberate." The fire moves in the grate. Outside, a long way off and also not far at all, he can hear water. "And you're betrothed to me," she says. "That was arranged some time ago, and it is not negotiable, and I am sorry that this is how you are hearing it." She does not tell him her name. She does not tell him what she is, or where they are going, or what was traded for him, or by whom, or what any of it is worth — and she does not lie to him once, which is a thing he will take apart later, on a morning when he has learned enough to understand what it cost her to manage it. She only waits, perfectly still, with the firelight doing that thing in her eyes, to see what he does with the silence. *** What do you do? *A. Sit down after all, and ask her name.* *B. Leave the glass exactly where it is. Hollow Wick taught you that much.* *C. Ask what was traded for you, and who did the trading.* *D. Tell her you're walking back to the village, tonight, and see whether the road lets you.* *E. Something else.* Week 1 of 26, Samhain

Characters

Tags: MalePOV Romance NTL IllegitimateChild Fantasy PoliticalIntrigue Queen ArrangedMarriage SlowBurn Mysterious Dangerous Manipulative Royalty Noble Supernatural Multiple Harem EnemiesToLovers FairyTale Angst Adventure

Chats Started: 59

By: jalousie

Stories

Redirecting to KAGESEKAI...