Richard was ready. They would go for his arms, hoping to restrain him, so at the last minute he swerved, shoved the first aside, twisted to get out of the reach of the other. Threw his shoulder into a punch at the closest, rushed to tackle the second. They were strong, and fast, dodging and countering all his moves. He’d underestimated them.
But they’d underestimated him as well.
One stuck out his leg to trip Richard, a move he should have seen coming. He fell on the rocks and felt a cut open on his cheek, blood running. From the ground, he grabbed a loose stone, big enough to fit in his hand, with sharp edges. He saw his target’s eyes widen as Richard swung up. The guy ducked, which meant Richard caught his chin instead of the forehead he’d been aiming for. The spatter of blood was still satisfying, and the target had to pause a moment to clear his head. This guy’s partner was smart enough to stay out of range, so Richard threw the rock at him instead. He didn’t think he could lay the guy out, but it might buy him time.
He was reaching for another rock, his only available weapon, when the first guy grabbed his arm—his right arm; they’d paid attention to which arm was his strongest. Richard changed direction, tried to leverage himself free—didn’t work. The second guy grabbed his left arm and pulled the other direction. They stretched him out between them, forced him to his knees. He made a token struggle but he had nothing to fight against from this position. When he tried to swing a kick at one of the guy’s naked, unprotected genitals, the man swerved out of the way. Their muscles were taut, straining—at least they had to work to keep hold of him.
The third guy hadn’t joined in, not even when Richard did damage to his companions. He stood before them, leaning on his spear, regarding Richard with a clear sense of victory. He was the leader of the gang—and he had an agenda, a reason for all this. He was studying Richard. Sizing him up.
“Think he’ll do, then?” one of the henchmen said in the thickest brogue Richard had heard since arriving in Ireland. The man might have grown up not speaking English at all. “He can surely fight.” He sounded impressed, but the compliment only annoyed Richard. If they’d wanted a fight they could have asked for one.
The leader, Richard assumed—the one who’d kept his hands clean—said in an equally thick brogue, “What are you, then? Not so big as all that, not so tough. And I’d heard you were a big, bad man.” Richard grinned back in an attempt to piss the guy off but the man ignored him. “There’s some that think we can use you—a strong man with the sea in his veins, even if it’s just a little of it. A warrior with skills that none of us have, that might be useful in our battles. There’s some that think that blood calls to blood and if I called, you’d answer.”
Richard’s mind raced to keep up with the words and the tangle of meanings. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Show me your hand,” the leader said. Richard didn’t move, because he couldn’t.
Clamping his arm against his side to keep him still, the goon on the right forced Richard’s hand up, squeezing his palm to straighten and spread his fingers.
“Webbed,” the leader observed. “You know the stories?”
Richard struggled, mostly on principle, and the two guards gripped him even harder. His hands were growing numb. “Yeah.”
“Tell me the story.”
His mother met a handsome stranger under circumstances she never talked about. He’d always lived by the sea, and his mother would always look out at the waves as if she was searching for something. It was just the waves, he thought. How could anyone not look at the waves with a sense of longing? It was just the way things were.
“Tell me the story,” the naked man repeated, stepping forward and lifting his spear to threaten.
Richard was sure the guy wouldn’t actually hurt him. Pretty sure. “The story goes, the child of a selkie and a human will have webbed feet and hands.”
“You believe that? You think it’s real, those stories you’ve heard?” the man asked.
Just a mutation. Richard’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
The man smiled like he’d won something. “Well, then. Why are you here, selkie’s child?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said, suddenly tired. “I don’t even know.” He’d wanted to find something, but he hadn’t known that he’d been looking. He’d wanted an answer, an origin—but this wasn’t quite it.
“I think it’s fate.” The leader nodded, and his two guards let go. Richard’s arms dropped. He wiped blood from his cheek and stared up at this man with salt-crusted hair. “Do you know who you are, selkie’s child?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.” Richard chuckled, letting go of good judgment, of trying to make sense of this. He ought to be thinking of escape—he was sure he could swim to shore. But he couldn’t swim faster than seals or mermaids.
“You’re the son of the seal king. And so am I.”
The statement was no more outlandish than the fact of him sitting on these rocks, talking to these men in the first place, all of them slipped out of time and reality. He studied the man standing before him, trying to find any part of himself: eyes, nose, build, or manner. He couldn’t see it.
“How do you know?”
“The sea hears. The sea tells stories. You know it. You’ve listened.”
He’d been watching the sea the whole drive down the coast. He parked because it seemed like a good spot. He’d been looking for something, or following something. He’d been trying to drown.
He spread his hands, felt the membrane of the webbing stretch. A crowd of seals had gathered, staying a respectful distance off, but they watched, looking back and forth between them with an eerie awareness.
The man—who somehow seemed at home on the rocky outcrops, even as he seemed terribly out of place, bare-skinned and primal in a modern world—moved to a spot and reached into a hidden depression. With his free hand he drew out an object, a folded weight of something, thick and wide, almost too large for him to lift. He held it up like a prize. It was gray, sunlight reflected off a rubbery sheen.
Sealskin.
Richard almost reached out to touch it, but stopped himself. His hand was shaking again.
“My father—our father—sent me to find you,” the leader said. “I don’t like it at all—there should only be one Seal Prince. But I see why he did. I see the wisdom of it. We need warriors—”
“Why?” Richard said, laughing outright. “What kind of wars can you possibly have to fight, when all you have are spears and seaweed—”
The Seal Prince’s two guards tensed, and the damp seals around them grumbled and shifted.
The Prince merely smiled. “There are other tribes of our kind. They raid our fishing grounds and we raid theirs. We defend our territory. But you—you don’t understand what it is to have a home, do you, selkie’s child? Would you like to learn? I can give you this.” The sealskin was a limp, still version of the creatures gathered around him.
Richard had a flash of a vision, a lifetime encompassed in a beautiful moment, sunlight streaming through green-gray waters, nudged by a current as he dived along rocks, his body curving and twisting with the shape of the surf, clothed in the smoothness of the skin he’d been given, the second skin he’d longed for all his life without knowing—