Conn and Lucy sat in camp chairs overlooking the ocean, Madagh drowsing beside them.
Iestyn dropped to a crouch at their feet, scratching the hound’s graying muzzle. “Hey, boy. Remember me?”
The old dog rol ed to his back, wriggling like a pup, his thin tail whipping the pine needles.
Iestyn’s throat tightened. He scratched the hound’s wiry bel y. “I thought you would have replaced him by now,” he said to Conn.
The sea lord lived forever. His dogs did not. But there was always a dog, always a deerhound, always named
“Madagh”—hound—at the prince’s side.
Conn smiled his wintry smile. “This one has led something of a charmed life. As, apparently, have you.”
“Yeah.” Iestyn realized, to his horror, that his eyes were wet.
He focused hastily on the dog. “I guess I hoped . . . I thought Roth and Kera might have made it.”
“We don’t know that they did not,” Conn said. “I have never stopped searching.”
“I never stopped hoping.” Lucy reached out and squeezed Iestyn’s forearm. His right arm, the one she’d healed seven years and a lifetime ago, after he stood with her against the demons. “For seven years, I’ve asked myself if I could have made another choice that would have saved Sanctuary.
What happened to you was my fault.”
Silence descended on the hil above the sea.
F o r g o t t e n s e a 267
“You must not blame yourself,” Conn said. “I have never blamed you. It was my decision to send the younger ones away.”
Iestyn cleared his throat. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said to Lucy. He turned to the prince. “Or yours. It was our decision to turn back. My choice. My responsibility.”
What had Lara said?
“None of us figured the ship would go down. Nobody could have predicted I’d turn up now, after al this time.
Maybe it was an accident. Or luck.” He shrugged. “Or maybe it was something else.”
“Destiny,” Conn said.
He met the sea lord’s eyes. “Maybe.”
Lucy smiled. “And here you are, safe and back with us again.”
Back among his own kind, she meant.
Back where he belonged.
Iestyn smiled, but a vague dissatisfaction stil gnawed his gut.
“The question is, where wil you go now?” Conn said.
He had no idea. His lack of direction had never bothered him before.
But something was missing. Something was wrong.
Lucy tipped her head. “Won’t you come with us? To Sanctuary.”
Iestyn pictured the green hil s and round towers, the magic island set like a jewel between the swaying kelp forests and swirling sky. The work of rebuilding was done, Lucy had told him earlier. Everything was as it had been.
He could go home again. He waited for the rush of relief, the sense of homecoming.
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And was surprised to hear himself say, “No.”
“Ah,” Conn said.
The wind whispered from the sea, stirring Lucy’s hair.
“It’s the girl, isn’t it?” she said. “Lara.”
Iestyn ducked his head, feeling about fifteen again. Lucy had been his first love or at least his first serious crush. He suspected she knew it. He was sure Conn did. How could he tel them he was reconsidering his future based on his feelings for a girl he’d known less than a week?
“She saved my life,” he said.
“She also put you in danger,” Lucy said.
“Not deliberately.”
“We have never al ied with the children of air,” Morgan said.
The finfolk lord strol ed from the cover of trees like a shark emerging from the shadow of the rocks. His hair gleamed pale in the sunlight.
