Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

as if she floated miles above the earth.
    Currents flowed, droplets flashing like a shoal of silver fish. She opened her mouth to breathe. Pressure there . A push.
    A pop .
    A warm shaft of sunlight fell on her face.
    “Well done,” Griff said softly.
    Lucy opened her eyes. Blinked.
    The waters of the fountain sparkled. They all looked at her: Griff with an arrested expression, Roth wide-eyed, Iestyn with open admiration.
    She shivered. Not with cold this time.
    “What?” Her voice was shrill. “I didn’t do anything.”
    “Well, it was not me,” Iestyn said. “I was trying to make rain.”
    “I wanted sun,” Roth offered.
    Griff’s eyes narrowed. “Did you, now.” Not-quite-a-question.
    Her heart thudded. It wasn’t me, it couldn’t be.
    Could it?
    The possibility gnawed at her insides. She felt like that Spartan boy who stole a fox and hid it under his tunic. Either she exposed herself or she let herself be torn apart. Neither seemed like a very good option.
    “Nothing happened,” she said. “Not really.”
    Griff’s forehead creased. “Likely not. This being your first time and all.”
    She sat very still, barely breathing, trying hard not to remember Margred in her wet blue dress, standing in the blowing rain.
    Griff sighed. “I must go.”
    He paused, as if he was waiting for her to say something.
    Lucy bent her head, studying her clasped hands in her lap as if she’d never seen them before. As if they belonged to somebody else.
    Maybe they did. She bit her lip.
    Roth stood.
    “Stay,” Griff said. “I do not want to see any of you anywhere near the hall while the delegation is here.”
    The delegation.
    A chill silence settled over the small courtyard, unrelieved by the singing, sparkling fountain. Lucy’s peace fled. She had forgotten the demons were coming.
    Maybe she wanted to forget. Not that anyone had asked her to face demons.
    Thank God.
    Roth apparently did not share this perfectly healthy attitude. “I can handle myself.”
    “You cannot handle Gau,” Griff said. “The demons are coming here as a show of strength. We do not respond by exposing our youngest and weakest.”
    “But we are at peace,” Iestyn said.
    “For now,” the warden responded grimly. “That did not stop them from murdering our Gwyneth.”
    Lucy sucked in her breath. Conn had said the selkie could be killed, but . . .
    “ Murdered? ” Her voice rose. She bit her lip again, from embarrassment and because she really didn’t want to know.
    Griff gave her another long, assessing look. “This summer. On your island, on World’s End. I thought your brother must have told you, seeing as he was so involved.”
    “No.” She felt numb, absorbing this fresh shock. She knew the case, of course. It had been all over the news, all over the island. An unidentified tourist from Away had been tortured, killed, and dumped on the beach.
    Not a tourist, she realized now, sickly.

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    A selkie.
    And her brother knew.
    “Dylan and I never even spoke before Caleb’s wedding,” she said.
    Griff nodded. “Caleb, he’s the one. He and Margred bound the killer.”
    “Caleb?” Dismay was turning her into a parrot.
    “Aye. It was well done, too, for all your brother’s human and Margred’s lost her pelt.”
    Her mind struggled to come to grips with the fact that this summer, while she was writing lesson plans and waiting tables and working in her garden, her family had apparently been acting out episodes from Buffy .
    She wanted to go home. She wondered now if the home she missed, the family she thought she knew, even existed outside her imagination. “What do you mean, lost?”
    Griff shrugged. “Gone. Destroyed. The demon that killed Gwyneth burned Margred’s sealskin.”
    Lucy tried to reconcile his words with the fur at the foot of the bed, with her memories of her sister-in-law. She summoned an image of Maggie, bloodied and dazed on the night Caleb brought her home. But overlying that was the picture of Maggie smiling up at Caleb on their wedding day. What was real? Which was true?
    “And what happens . . .” Her throat closed. Conn’s harsh face haunted her. His fierce accusation echoed in her memory. “ I am more your prisoner than you are mine. ” She wet her lips. “What does it mean?
    When a selkie loses its sealskin?”
    “They cannot Change,” Iestyn said promptly.
    Lucy blinked. “That’s