Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

glimmered in the afternoon sun. She wanted to be out there. She wanted to be gone, away from the towers and expectations that pressed down on her and made it hard to breathe.
    She turned and gave Iestyn a tight, teacher-to-pupil smile. “For a walk.”
    His brow furrowed. “I thought you were getting lunch.”
    She swallowed past her aching throat. “I’m not hungry.” That much, at least, was true.
    The boy’s gaze passed over her and lingered on Madadh, tongue lolling, at her side. “I will come with you.”
    “No,” she said sharply. Too sharply. A wildness reared inside her. She was desperate for escape from this place. From her pain. “I’ll be fine. I have Madadh with me.”
    Iestyn’s face hardened in a curiously adult expression. And then she remembered. He only looked like a teenager. “The dog did not protect you when Gau attacked.”
    No, she had protected herself.
    “I’ll be fine,” Lucy repeated. The Hunter family motto, used to guard secrets and deflect concern. She frowned, curiosity momentarily winning through her longing to be gone. “How much did you see, spying from the wall?”
    “Enough to know you should not be wandering outside the walls alone.”
    His concern was sincere and touching. “Conn said I was safe here.”
    “You could still get lost or turn an ankle. And then I’d be in trouble. I cannot let you go.”
    She raised her chin. “You can’t stop me.”
    Iestyn grinned at her, a boy’s grin, teasing, daring. “Will you put it to the test?”
    Um, no. For all his wiry build, he was as tall as she was and as leanly muscled as a high school runner.
    “How old are you?” she asked.
    Another grin. “I’ll tell if you let me come with you.”
    She blinked. Was he . . . Could he be trying to flirt with her? There was a complication none of them needed.
    But his friendly smile was balm to her bruised ego.
    “That’s okay. I’m not that interested,” she said and set off down the hill.
    Madadh ranged ahead, his long tail gently waving like the flag on the back of a bicycle. The wind plucked at Lucy’s hair and stirred the high weeds of the orchard. The heavy-sweet scent of apples carried on the breeze.
    Iestyn fell into step beside her. “I was twelve when the prince brought me to Sanctuary.”
    That caught her attention. “Conn brought you?”
    Iestyn nodded. “He paid my father in gold.”
    “How did your mother feel about that?”
    “I do not know. My mother is selkie.” He slid her a sideways glance. “Like yours.”
    “But . . . Didn’t you see her after you came here?”
    “No. She did not want me,” he explained simply. “I was conceived in human form, so all the time she carried me she could not go to sea. She gave me to my father as soon as a nurse could be found. I do not remember her, and I doubt that she remembers me.”
    Like Conn, Lucy thought with a pang at her heart. Poor boy. Poor lost boys. “It must have been hard for you to leave your dad.”
    Iestyn shrugged. “He was sorry to lose me just as I grew big enough to help around the farm. But my lord gave him enough gold to hire many men.”
    They waded through the orchard grass, threaded with wild strawberry vines and jeweled with tiny blue and white flowers. Fruit still clung to the low branches, dark as garnets, golden as moons, and under each Page 81
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    tree a ring of wind-falls lay like a necklace.
    “I mean, it must have been hard for you emotionally,” Lucy said.
    “I could not stay,” Iestyn said.
    “Why not?”
    “I was near my Change.” He raised his head to watch the hound, trotting out of the trees and up the slope on the opposite side. “The first time is hard, even when you are prepared. You must generate your own skin from the inside. It hurts. Like your guts being torn out.”
    “But you don’t have to Change,” Lucy said before she could stop herself.
    Her lungs squeezed in her chest. Her heart pounded. For a moment she was a fourteen-year-old runaway again in the seedy gas station outside Richmond, puking her guts into the dirty washroom toilet, dying on the cold tile floor.
    Iestyn turned and regarded her with narrowed golden eyes. “Of course you do. All selkies Change. We cannot help it. It is our nature.”
    Lucy forced herself to breathe. All selkies Change.
    She was not selkie.
    They hiked up the hill after Madadh, now scrambling through and over the rocks. The climb