Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

hand and touching it to his forehead. “ Targair inghean. ”
    “Don’t you start,” she begged him.
    “He does you honor,” Conn said behind her.
    She turned her head to look at him. “Why? What are they saying? What does it mean?”
    “You are the daughter of Atargatis.”
    “So?” she asked, bewildered. “We knew that.”

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    “The promised daughter,” Conn explained gravely. “The targair inghean . The one foretold by the prophecy who will alter the balance of power and save our people.”

15
    LUCY PULLED THE TURQUOISE ROBE TIGHT. SHE didn’t like the way Conn was looking at
    her—not as the woman he wanted to take to bed, but as if she were a puzzle he hadn’t quite figured out.
    He sprawled in the thronelike armchair on the other side of the bedroom hearth, watching her from beneath thick black lashes.
    Earlier, he had disappeared while the members of his household had bustled around her with hot water, towels, and tea. They addressed her as “lady” and “ targair inghean ,” but she did not know them. Kera appeared shaken, and Roth was subdued. None of her attendants comforted her as Conn might have done or teased her like Iestyn or answered her questions like Griff.
    She understood Conn’s need to closet himself with his wardens. Understood and resented it.
    Now that he was finally here, she felt like one more item on his To Do list.
    Outside the tower windows, the sky glowed pink and orange, bright as the beach roses back home.
    She had asked him for time.
    But there was no time. The past few days had slipped through her fingers like a rope of fat pearls, each one precious, perfect, glowing, whole. Now the string was cut, and she could only grab after what they had shared before it was lost.
    What they had shared . . .
    She was not his broodmare, whatever those wardens had said. She was . . . what? How did he see her now? What did he want from her?
    His hair was black and shiny from his bath. His face had fallen into its usual, inscrutable lines. Despite his stretched-out legs and half-closed eyes, she could feel tension emanating from him like the heat of the fire.
    “How old were you,” Conn asked quietly, “when you learned to fear the sea?”
    The dispassionate gentleness in his tone tore her apart. She hugged her elbows. “I don’t . . .”
    Remember. The lie died on her lips.
    Today she had faced down demons. Surely she could confront a few memories?
    She looked at Conn’s face, hard with kingship. She could at least try to be worthy of him and of her new title.
    “Eleven,” she said abruptly. “I was eleven.”
    “A difficult age.”
    She blinked, trying to picture the immortal lord of the sea as an eleven-year-old boy. “You remember?”
    A glint appeared in those silver eyes, so that for a moment he looked like her lover again. “We have—we had —children on Sanctuary,” he reminded her. “Many of them came to us then.”
    “So you know preteen girls.”
    He did not answer.
    “I took childhood development,” Lucy said. “I know adolescence sucks. But while everybody else was experimenting with nail polish and training bras and sneaking cigarettes in the woods, I was trying to cook dinner and make good grades so I could go to college like Caleb. And he was gone and my friends were changing and I hated it.”
    “You do not like change.”
    She twisted the sash of her robe. “Not really. I mean, as long as things stay the same, you know what to expect, right? You’re kind of in control. Even if you’re miserable.”
    “You did not want to Change.”
    “That’s what I just . . .” She dropped the ends of her sash, realization opening like a chasm in her chest.
    “Oh.”

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    Oh .
    “We bring our young to Sanctuary so they will have someone to guide them through the Change,” Conn said. His eyes were deep and dark. She wished he would take her in his arms again. But he sounded like a psychiatrist rather than her lover. “You had no one to prepare you. No one to guide you through your woman’s changes or your first Change as a selkie. You were afraid.”
    Anger, unacknowledged, unexpressed for years, burned in her chest. “That wasn’t my fault.”
    “Of course not.”
    His dismissal only fueled the fire raging at her heart. “It was her fault. My mother’s. She could have