“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—
But it would be a borrowed skin, an act of charity. He wasn’t born to the water, not like these men were. He was born at the edges, in the surf, half of him in each world. He could swim like a fish and hold his breath for ten minutes. He could fight and kill—and was that all they needed him for? What then, when the war was over?
“He left us. My mother and I—he left us. Why should I think that he, that any of you, care about me now?”
“He’s been listening for you all this time, hasn’t he? We know about the boy you shot, the hostages you didn’t save. The feeling of fear and of failure, and how you haven’t had a good day since.”
He didn’t need to be told. Being told made him angry, and it put him back there. That chaotic moment when your thinking brain didn’t know what the hell was going on but your training knew exactly what to do, and you already had the target in your sights. Enemy shots fired, and when your captain yelled, “Take it, take it!” you were already breathing out and squeezing the trigger. The Somali boy’s head whipped back. A crack shot on rough seas and a rush of triumph. This was the kind of shot they gave medals for. He didn’t really see the kid when he shot him. He saw the gun, he saw the enemy, he’d felt very rational about the whole thing. When it was all over, the water he’d swum in looked just like this. When they arrived at the skiff and examined the aftermath, the rush died. The pirates were dead. So were the three hostages. The pirates had been trapped so they lashed out, taken a stand the only way they could, and if Richard had made the shot two seconds earlier, the aid workers he’d been trying to save would have survived. Nobody’s fault, no reprimands needed. Just the bad odds of a bad situation. Two sides with guns face off, people get
killed. But he should have taken that shot two seconds earlier. And this shouldn’t be a world where fifteen-year-old kids carried AK-47s and killed hostages for a living. That moment your training takes over becomes the moment you play in your memory over and over again, wondering what happened and if you could have done it differently.
“The sea is in our blood, and our blood is your blood. We felt the shock, even so far away,” the Seal Prince said. “We felt you return home, felt you swimming straight out from shore as far as you could, thinking you’d swim so far out you couldn’t get back and so not have to make a decision to keep going at all. You thought maybe one of the white sharks would take you, but they know better than to hunt the son of the Seal King. And now here you are ’cause you’ve nowhere left to go.