Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

surge of instinct, sharp as hunger, lurched in Lucy’s gut.
    No, no, no. Fear and memory smothered her lungs, tightened her throat. Force exploding through the cabin. Objects hurtling, clattering, crashing. Things shattering. Glass. Her mind.
    She drew a deep breath. Held it, until everything inside her was forced back into its proper place.

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    “Thanks, but I’m not . . . I can’t really do anything.”
    His eyes were kind and dark and fathomless as the sea. “Magic is not something we do, lass. It is what we are.”
    She swallowed. “I don’t know what I am.”
    “Perhaps it is time to find out.”
    Her panic resurged. Maybe her life B.C.—Before Conn—wasn’t all that great, but it was her life . Over the years, she’d whittled and shaped herself to fit her family’s expectations, to take her place in the close-knit island community. If she learned too much, if she changed too much, could she ever go home again? What if her family and neighbors couldn’t accept her? Would she be able to reinsert herself back into her old life, like a square peg forced into a round hole?
    Would she even want to?
    “I can’t do anything,” she said again. And then, more honestly, “I don’t want to do anything.”
    “You could watch,” Iestyn said.
    In the silence, the gurgle of the fountain seemed very loud. Outside the castle walls, a sea bird cried.
    Lucy’s heart hammered in her chest.
    Griff and the boys regarded her with varying degrees of interest and expectation.
    No pressure there, she thought.
    She didn’t owe them anything. She was here because Conn had kidnapped her. And however disappointed she had been not to see him this morning, whatever claims he made about her mother or their highly unlikely future children, she didn’t owe him anything either.
    His voice drummed in her ears. “ Your brother knew what he risked and what he rejected. You do not. ”
    Lucy frowned. Maybe she owed this to herself.
    If she had no magic, would they let her go?
    Her gaze met Griff’s. “Show me.”
    “Weather working is the simplest gift and the most common,” Griff lectured in his deep, easy voice. The boys sprawled on the bench and on the grass, clearly bored with a lesson they’d heard too many times before. Lucy perched on the wall bordering the fountain, out of reach of the water, her hands folded in her lap. “The first to come and often the easiest to master.”
    “Except for sex,” Roth said.
    Griff shot him a sharp look. “Which no woman will be learning from you, laddie. Seeing as you haven’t mastered the art yourself.”
    Iestyn grinned.
    The bigger boy flushed to the roots of his dark hair.
    “Water,” Griff continued, “is our element. So sensing water, feeling it, affecting it, is our power on the earth and over the earth and underground. There is the water you can see and touch—liquid water, rivers and rain and clouds. But it is the water you cannot see that creates the rain and clouds, that cools and warms the earth and sustains all life. This is the water you must know and control if you want to work the weather.”
    His explanation sounded oddly like a fifth grade science lesson on the water cycle, Lucy thought. No wonder the boys looked bored. She was having trouble concentrating herself. The day was so gray, and Griff’s voice droned on. “ Rising air . . . absorbing heat . . . energy . . . ”
    She shook her head. Not enough sleep.
    “Feel the pull from the earth,” Griff urged, quiet as a mourning dove murmuring from the trees on a long, slow, summer afternoon. “Feel the flow of rising water.”
    The sky brightened and darkened. A peculiar little wind swirled the waters of the fountain and disappeared. No one else spoke. Nothing happened.
    Lucy leaned her head against the stone and closed her eyes. Tired. She didn’t have to do anything. She didn’t want to do anything.
    “Follow the vapor, feel it cool,” said Griff.

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    She shivered, cold. Too cold. Too wet. Behind her closed eyelids, she pictured Maggie standing in the hall the morning after Caleb brought her home, the wind blowing through the front door and her arms outstretched to the rain. Remembered the tingle of electricity in the air and along her skin, the feeling of fullness in her chest, the heaviness in her head. She felt high, dizzy,