Whatever Lucy lost, whatever she had given up, she could take comfort in this moment. She could cling to this hope. Different as they were, they were family. And maybe, one day, she could have more.
If they defeated Gau.
If they survived this.
If Conn could forgive her.
Dylan drove the truck under the black shelter of the trees. Yanked on the brake. The wind howled. White caps and skippers’ daughters ran in rows over the black water below. High tide, Lucy thought, her stomach clenching. That would worsen the effects of the surge.
Dylan cocked a brow at Lucy, letting the engine run. Steam curled off the hood into the night. “Cal said the epicenter was south of the Bay of Fundy. So the water will be coming from this direction. You want to try here?”
She consulted her bones, her heart, her gut. “Yes.”
Dylan cut the engine. They climbed from the truck. The snow had stopped, but an icy wind whipped tiny crystals into the air, swirling like a matador’s cape, silver on black.
Margred’s face appeared as pale and perfect as the snow. “Now what?”
Lucy took a deep breath and held out her hands. “Now we stop this.”
Conn stood on the castle wall in the path of the approaching flood, watching the wave roar out of the west, dark as an eclipse, loud as an attacking army, carrying destruction on its crest like foam. Spears of debris and pennants of spume flew before it.
His wardens stood with him, naked and unarmed, pelts at hand. Griff, sturdy as a tower, and Morgan, mysterious as the deeps, and Enya, blazing like the sea at sunset. Their faces were white with fear and stark with awe and alight with a terrible pride. For the sea was coming to the children of the sea, horrible and beautiful as death, and its voice was the voice of the deep.
And Conn knew that Gau had made a mistake.
For the sea was theirs.
They were united, for that one moment, in appreciation for the Creator’s awful power and the water that gave them being. Conn poured himself out along the channels Lucy had etched in his soul, drawing the wardens’ power to him, funneling their magic through him, until his gift thundered in him like the roaring of the surge and he held the flood poised on the cusp of Sanctuary.
He held it.
They held it.
Barely.
Conn trembled. He only needed one push, one soul, one gift more to tip the balance. To turn the tide.
He needed Lucy.
And at that moment, when the fate of Sanctuary hung sparkling like drops at the curl of a wave, he heard her voice, his heart’s own voice, calling out to him in his own words.
“Conn. Help me. I cannot do this without you.”
Conn staggered, and the wall of water slipped.
“Hold!” Morgan shouted, and the water halted, roaring like the waterfall at the edge of the ancients’ world.
Sweat broke out on Conn’s face.
Griff’s worried face swam before him. “Lord, what is it?”
Lucy. He saw her, blazing in his inner vision as she had blazed in the waters of the tide pool. She stood surrounded by snow and night, holding the hands of . . . Margred, Conn recognized. And Dylan. They balanced on a headland as he balanced on his tower, and above them threatened a flood.
They were holding the waters back.
She was holding the waters back.
Barely.
He felt the struggle Lucy exerted, heard the desperation in her voice. “We need you. I need you.”
His soul answered hers, spinning a golden thread of love and need, a wavering bridge across the sea.
He shook with effort and the enormity of his choice. He could not do both. He could not save both her and Sanctuary.
Either he drew on her power to hold the wave back here, or he sent his spirit self to help her turn the flood there.
Love or duty?
Life or Lucy?
The past or the future?
Her magic sprang from love, he remembered thinking. Could his do less?
He licked his lips, bitter with brine and defeat. “You must Change,” he ordered his wardens. “Save yourselves.”
“But my lord,” Griff objected.
“He goes to her,” Morgan snarled. “Fool!”
Enya’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“Change, damn you!” Conn cried before his heart was plucked from his chest.
For a moment, he hovered, his spirit winging like a bird above the tower. As he wheeled, he saw his body drop abandoned on the wall, and Morgan grab the chain about his neck.
And then his spirit was drawn away, sucked across the sea.
The wave reared taller than the towers and fell like a hammer on Caer Subai.
20
LUCY HELD TIGHT TO MARGRED’S AND DYLAN’S hands as if they were drowning.
Or she was.
The flood roared down on them like a train in a tunnel. The earth shook. The wind rushed in her ears.
She felt Dylan’s spirit draining and Margred’s spirit ebb, and the wall she had built to protect them, the dike to dam the demon flood, began to crumble and crack under the strain. Her knees trembled. Her soul cried out.
Never to return to Sanctuary.
Never to see Conn again.
“We need you. I need you.” An echo of his words.
I love you. A cry wrenched from her soul.
And as if her love were a bridge, a channel, he was suddenly there, with her, in her, his strength propping up her faltering strength, his power thundering through her veins.
She felt the demons’ surprise, heard their howls of pain and protest as she turned the ocean back on them, as the sea wall she had constructed burst to become one with this new surge of power, boulders tossed in the flood, missiles hurtled against an enemy.
Conn’s spirit flowed into her spirit. Her magic rose like the sea, shining, vengeful, smooth and towering as the wave.
“Gau!” she shouted. “I bury you!”
The wave crashed down, turning the flood back out to sea, where it was swallowed by the deeps.
But even as her magic crested and crashed down, even as she clung to her family’s hands, she saw another wall, another wave, across the sea.
Like a bird high in the sky, she saw the castle wall on Sanctuary, topped with tiny figures, human and seal, and a wave rearing over them like the hammer of Hell.
She saw Conn, unconscious, helpless, lying on the wall; and she watched in horror as the hammer fell.
The next morning Lucy crept toward the stairs, aching and stiff in every muscle and sinew, sore and sick at heart. In the hallway outside her old room, she paused, caught by the sound of her father’s voice, reading aloud to the figure on the bed.
“ ‘Goodnight to the cow jumping over the moon ...’ ”
Lucy’s breath hitched.
Bart looked up and saw her. His spare, worn face flushed. “That new doctor told me it might help to read to her. He saw us—saw her—saw Cora at the community center last night.” He cleared his throat. “I’m calling her Cora. Too confusing to have two Lucys in the house.”
Tears sprang to Lucy’s eyes. She blinked, leaning against the door jamb. “That’s . . . great, Dad. Pretty name,” she offered, because what else was there to say?
“I found this with your teaching stuff.” Bart held up the orange-and-green-striped cover of Goodnight Moon. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” she said truthfully. “I don’t mind at all.”
Bart frowned at the figure lying on the bed, so still, so pale, her chest rising and falling softly with her breath. “She doesn’t look anything like you,” he said. “I don’t know why anybody . . . I don’t know why I thought she looked like you.”
Lucy’s laugh sounded more like a sob. Walking into the room, she bent and kissed the top of his head. “I don’t know either, Dad.”
Her father reached up and patted her hand awkwardly where it rested on his shoulder. “Caleb and the rest of them’s dow
nstairs,” he said. “You should go down. Get some breakfast.”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard. “I will.”
They were gathered in the living room: Caleb in his uniform, and Margred tired and beautiful, Regina with eight-year-old Nick on the couch, and Dylan with his back to the room, staring out the window at the snow.
Caleb and Regina were speaking in hushed voices, like schoolchildren in the library or visitors to a house where somebody has died.
Lucy’s heart squeezed with terrible grief. Somebody had died. Conn. She had not been able to feel him, touch him, sense his presence, since they had turned the flood the night before. The golden cord that stretched between them had snapped completely, leaving her cut off. Adrift.
“. . . dissipated in the Atlantic,” Caleb said. He looked up and saw her. His face sharpened with concern. “Lucy.”
Dylan turned.
Her gaze sought his, an impossible hope raging like a fire in her chest. “Any word?” she begged. “Anything.”
Dylan shook his head, his eyes black with regret. And she remembered that he, too, had loved Conn, had known the selkie prince since he was a sulky thirteen-year-old boy.
Regina nudged Nick, who jumped off the couch. “We don’t have school today,” he announced. “Because of the snow and, like, the evacuation and stuff. So Danny and me are going sledding.” He cocked his head. “Are you sick again?”
Lucy opened her mouth, but to her horror no words came out.
“She’s just tired,” Regina said, ruffling her son’s hair. “Come on. Let’s make Miss Lucy some tea.”
He trotted after her down the hall, and Lucy walked across the room and into her brother Dylan’s arms.
United in grief, they embraced for the first time. His body was hard and lean and spare, like their father’s.
“I’m sorry.” Dylan’s voice was hoarse.
She shook her head wordlessly. He patted her back awkwardly, briefly, before releasing her to follow his wife and son into the kitchen.
Lucy stood bereft in the middle of the living room. Margred watched her, her dark eyes deep and sympathetic.
“You did good,” Caleb said quietly.
“I feel so empty,” Lucy whispered.
He enveloped her in a hug. He smelled of uniform starch and spruce and snow. Caleb smells. World’s End smells.
“It always feels like that after a battle,” he said. “Even when you win.”
But they hadn’t won, she thought numbly, resting her head against his shoulder.
Her family was safe, for now. World’s End was safe. Gau was defeated, buried under sea and stone.
But Lucy had lost.
She’d lost Conn.
The week wore on, measured by the deepening ruts in the snow and the thickening ice layer around Lucy’s heart.
Island life resumed, marked by the rotating flyers in the window of Wiley’s Grocery and the changing daily specials at Antonia’s restaurant. Ferry and cable service were restored.
Lucy’s classroom filled with squirming bodies and the smell of wet coats and boots. Regina and Margred went shopping on the mainland for maternity clothes. Caleb rescued cars from ditches and checked on the elderly in the cold. Dylan walked the frozen beaches, casting for signs of Sanctuary.
Cora opened her eyes and smiled at their father.
Everything went back to normal.
Lucy’s life went back to normal.
A life without Conn in it.
She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. Her days were haunted by thoughts of Conn, her dreams by the falling towers of Caer Subai.
Grief, Regina told her, dropping by the house with a pot of Antonia’s minestrone.
Shock, Caleb said, when he came by after school.
Stress, Dylan concluded, his mouth compressed in sympathy.
Their well-meaning concern battered at the ice encasing her poor, bruised heart and scraped her nerves raw.
She fled to her garden for solitude and solace.
But the ground was hard and barren, as frozen as her heart. Frost lay on the pumpkins and the broken stalks of corn.
She turned from the untidy rows, desolation blooming in her chest.
Someone was watching from the edge of the field. Her heart thumped. A man, taller than Dylan, broader than Caleb, watching her with an intensity that charged the air like a storm.
Something stirred in Lucy like the trickle of ice, like the melting of her heart. Her throat tightened. The blood drummed in her ears like the sea.
He strode across the field, his boots crunching the frozen furrows, a lean gray shadow trotting at his heels. Madadh.
Madadh and Conn.
The ice shattered, and Lucy burst into tears.
She stumbled forward, meeting him halfway. He caught her close, his breath warm, his arms strong. He was real and warm and solid and alive.
She clung to him, sobbing. “I thought you were dead.”
Conn kissed her hair, her cheek, her mouth. She tasted her tears on his lips like the salt of the sea. “Almost,” he said. “Morgan saved me. He dragged me out of the sea by the chain around my neck, and he and Griff kept watch over my body until I could return to it.”
“I love Griff,” she said in a choked voice.
“You love me,” Conn said, a hint of arrogance in his tone.
She didn’t mind. She loved his arrogance. He was the lord of the sea. The master of her heart.
She smiled. “Yes. Always.”
Emotion swirled in his gray eyes. “Do you forgive me?”
She blinked. “What for?”
“For not coming with you when you asked.”
“You came to me when it mattered the most.” A splinter of pain pierced her happiness, a tiny icicle of doubt. “Can you forgive me?”
He raised his dark eyebrows. “For what?”
It had to be said. Had to be faced. “I left you.”
“Yes.” A single word like a stone between them.
She swallowed hard. “I destroyed Sanctuary.”
“The demons destroyed Sanctuary.”
“But I could have stopped them.”
“You made the better choice. The only choice for either of us. Sanctuary is the past. You are my present and the future of our people.”
She wanted so desperately to believe him. “But the prophecy . . .”
“Is fulfilled.” His voice was strong with hope and purpose. “The balance of power is changed. The children of fire have suffered a defeat they cannot quickly forget or recover from. And my people, our people, have remembered the magic of the sea.”
“But the castle . . . everyone on Sanctuary . . .”
“Caer Subai can be rebuilt.”
She eyed him doubtfully. “Just like that.”
He looked down his long, elegant nose at her. “I did not say the effort would be easy. It will take cooperation. And time.”
She nodded. She could help with the rebuilding, she thought. She was the targair inghean. But under her resolve, worry stirred. “How much time?”
Conn raised his eyebrows. “You are impatient?”
“No. Yes. Conn . . .” Her gaze searched his face. “Where will you live? You cannot stay in human form forever. Without Sanctuary, you will age. You could die. All of the children of the sea will age and die.”
He shrugged. “Some may choose to live beneath the wave. Until Sanctuary is restored.”
“But—”
“Lucy. Each of us must use the gifts that we have, in the time that we have, in the place that we are. You taught me that. No more is required of us. And no less.”
She touched his face. “I don’t want to lose you.”
He turned his lips into her palm. “You told me you trusted me to come back to you. And so I have.”
Her heart swelled. “And the others?” she asked anxiously. “Griff? Iestyn?”
“Griff is well.” Conn slanted a look at her. “He sends his love.”
Conn still
had not said he loved her. But that small worry was swallowed by a bigger one.
“And Iestyn?” Lucy persisted.
Conn hesitated. “I sent them away,” he said, grief roughening his voice. “Iestyn, Roth, and Kera. I sent them on a boat with Madadh, before the wave struck. We found pieces of the craft drifting in the sea.”
Lucy’s heart contracted. She glanced down at the dog, its tongue lolling at their feet. “But Madadh survived.”
Conn’s mouth curved. “Yes.”
“So there’s a chance that Iestyn and the others survived, too.”
Conn met her eyes gravely. “That is,” he said, “my second greatest wish.”
Her gaze locked with his. Her breath caught in her chest.
“What . . .” Her mouth was dry. “What is your first wish?” she whispered.
Conn took her hands again, her cold, frozen hands, and folded them in his. He raised their clasped hands to his lips and kissed her fingers. “That you will come back with me to Sanctuary to rebuild,” he said. “To raise the castle and make the roses grow. To walk with me and rule with me. To bear our children. To be my love.”
He dropped on his knees in the snow. Her hands trembled in his. “I did not know I could love,” Conn said in his deep voice. He looked up, and his eyes were the color of the sea at dawn, reflecting her joy as the dancing waves reflect the sun. “But I love you. Be with me now and forever. Fill my life with magic and my heart with love.”
Lucy’s heart welled with emotion. Her eyes brimmed with happy tears. Tugging him to his feet, she threw herself into his arms. “Yes.”
“You will never leave me?”
“Never,” she promised.
“I love you.”
At last, they kissed, rediscovering each other with lips and hands and hearts, and for that moment the air around them was as warm as spring and the garden bloomed like summer.
Because love is the greatest magic of all.
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Kissing
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BY EMMA HOLLY
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Sea Lord Page 24