“You always have the choice.”
She attempted a smile. “Not if you’re holding my hair.”
He twined it around his fist. “Maybe I’m afraid you’l run away.”
Was he kidding? She’d just dismissed her last, best chance to go home. Every mile, every decision, separated her more irrevocably from everything and everyone she knew at Rockhaven.
“I’m not the one who’s leaving,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
But of course she didn’t. “You’re the one on your way to World’s End.”
“That was your idea.”
“Because you need to find your people.”
“I’m not like you. I don’t need others of my kind to survive.”
“It’s more than a matter of survival.” She struggled to explain the precepts she had lived with for the past thirteen years. The nephilim spent their entire earthly existence aspiring to the perfection that had been theirs before the 2
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V i r g i n i a K a n t r a
Fal . “Only your own kind can see you as you real y are.
Without their vision, how can you become your best self?
The self the Creator intends you to be.”
His golden eyes were unreadable. “And you think your masters at Rockhaven see you as your best self.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it again. “At least they know me there.”
“Wel , they don’t know me on World’s End.”
She realized with a shock of sympathy that she wasn’t the only one venturing into the unknown on this journey. She had admired Iestyn’s confidence, envied his ability to go with the flow. But real y, he was as cut-off, as alone in this, as she. More so, because of the seven years he had lived without sight or memory of his own kind.
“Someone there wil know you,” she reassured him. “This Lucy Hunter. You must have friends who survived. Family.”
“I have no family.”
She knew nothing of the merfolk’s social structure. But he was an elemental, one of the First Creation. “You were born on the foam?” she asked.
“No, I am blood born. My mother is—was—selkie.”
Her heart squeezed. “Did she . . . die in the attack?”
Iestyn shrugged. “I do not know.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I should have said, I do not know her. She did not want me.
I was conceived in human form, so al 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.”
Lara bristled on his behalf. How could a mother not love her child?
But of course it happened. She herself had Fal en trying to save one of those unloved, unwanted children.
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“At least you knew your father wanted you,” she said.
“My mother paid him to take me. And Prince Conn paid him to give me up. Most children of the sea are fostered in human households until they near the age of Change,” he explained. “My father was sorry to lose me just as I grew big enough to help around the farm, but the prince gave him enough gold to hire many men.”
As he spoke of his childhood, his speech thickened and slowed. He had a faint burr. Scottish? Welsh?
“Your father was human,” Lara said slowly, testing the idea.
Iestyn nodded. “Prince Conn told me my father had finfolk blood, but that could have been because of my eyes.
The color,” he explained. “I have finfolk eyes.”
“You have beautiful eyes,” she said.
He smiled faintly. “Fish eyes.”
“Who told you that?”
He shrugged.
She frowned. “Is that why your mother didn’t want you?
Because your father wasn’t selkie?”
