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She wasn’t going to sleep.
She did anyway.
Griffith watched the woman’s blue eyes slide closed, aware of a faint, unfamiliar regret. The command to sleep was such a little magic, a minor imposition of his will compared to what he had already done. What he was prepared to do.
The future of his people was at stake, he told himself. The fate of one mortal woman hardly weighed in the balance.
He did what was necessary. Whatever his prince commanded.
And yet…
Her face was smooth and freckled as an egg, her lips closed and composed. He wondered at the discipline she imposed on that soft mouth, even in sleep. Her red gold hair spread wantonly, luxuriously across the bed. All that brightness tangled with the sleek dark fur of her covers, the contrast of colors, the mingling of textures, tugged at his senses. His body tightened in unwelcome arousal.
He had not brought her here for this.
But the image of her body, soft and white and pink as he undressed her, burned in the back of his brain. Her scent—potent, hot, female—curled around him, heady and unmistakable. Every male within miles of Sanctuary would be drawn to her like sharks to the promise of fresh blood.
Griff’s lips drew back from his teeth. Despite the fear in her eyes—perhaps because of it—he would protect her. As long as she slept covered by his pelt, she was safe.
But she could not sleep forever. The sooner he turned her over to the prince, the better.
He left her and descended the steps to the great hall.
Children and dogs drowsed together in a pile before the fire-place, where a sullen blaze produced more smoke than heat. Most of the child
ren were very close to Change, ten or twelve years old in appearance. Born of human mothers, fostered in human households, they were only brought to the selkie island of Sanctuary as they neared puberty and could take their seal form, their proper form, in the sea.
Unfortunately, the magic of the island that kept their elders from aging prevented the young selkies from reaching maturity for a very long time.
And so they grew as lean and wild as the dogs, and fought as viciously for whatever scraps the adults threw their way.
A shaggy-haired boy raised his head at Griff’s approach, his eyes the same calm gold as the prince’s hound’s. “Did you bring her?”
Griff nodded.
“To read to us?”
“Aye.”
“I would rather she fed us,” the boy said and laid his head back down.
Griff sympathized. He remembered. But the prince had instructed him to fetch a teacher, not a cook.
He padded up the circular stair of the prince’s tower, his bare feet silent on stone.
Selkies shed their sealskins to walk on land, to play at politics or sex, and—rarely and reluctantly—to give birth. The water was their life and their home. Who would trade the bliss and oblivion of the ocean for the dreary duty of raising whelps on land? The sea king himself, old Llyr, had abandoned his human form and all responsibility to dwell in the land beneath the waves.
So it was the king’s son, Conn, who ruled from this isolated tower, insulated by thick stone walls and a hundred-foot drop from the siren call of the sea below.
The prince’s study was lined with books and piled with scrolls. Windows pierced the round room, north and south, east and west. The last red glare of the sun spilled from the sky, reddening the prince’s strong, pale face like a fever.
The prince himself sat at a desk of carved walnut and iron plucked from a Spanish wreck off the coast of Cornwall. The entire castle was furnished with the salvage of centuries.
As if, Griff thought, gold and wood and crumbling pulp could compensate the selkie ruler for the time he must spend on land.
Griff entered the room silently, a big man on bare, webbed feet.
Conn looked up from the book on his desk, his eyes as clear and cool as rain. “The woman?”
