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Prologue
Cormac Illfinn sat on the edge of the war camp, his hands curled over his trident, his knuckles cracked and bloody. His temper was shorn close to the wick.
He looked out to the dark water, feeling the current change. Something was different, though he couldn’t pinpoint what or why.
King Irvine was dead, but Cruinn had not fallen.
It had taken a week for his men to get to the Whispering Pass and Tarsainn, but there was no triumph even though the Undine King had been turned to foam. No, there was unease and mutterings of dissent whenever Cormac swam away to relieve himself or to be alone with his thoughts. His men did not trust him. He wasn’t even sure he trusted himself.
No one knew if the war with Cruinn continued. Liam Cruinn had been a prisoner of Tarsainn and treated poorly, only to escape in the chaos. Maeve had not faired much better at the end of his trident.
Cormac, above all, had promised his Mer an end to the war. A new beginning.
And he’d gone and fecked it all up.
Cormac had never been a male with foresight. He knew that, and his mother, Lady Bloodtide, had repeatedly told him. Cormac liked immediate things with immediate payoff. He had been blind to the future in his anger, and now, he wasn’t certain if he had damned his people to more death and foam.
Maeve had all but confirmed that she had killed his mother. His closest advisor and only living relative.
His hate and need for revenge had driven him from the walls of Tarsainn and across the Twilight Lake. He thought he would feel whole once he heard Maeve confess her crimes, and he had a chance to put a blade through her spine and cut her as deeply as she had cut him.
But it felt so empty.
He hadn’t felt much of anything at all when he put his trident through the dark, pearl-speckled skin of her spine, not until she dissolved before his eyes.
What had it all been for? Cormac wondered.
For years, he had followed his mother’s guiding hand. He had taken the frosted sands at her behest, but it had never seemed good enough. His mother had only been happiest when Cormac was ruthless, perched on a mountain of bones. He had tried to do his best to avenge her, but he had bungled that up as well, just like he had bungled up his attempt to join Tarsainn and Cruinn together through marriage between him and Maeve.
Cormac rubbed his hand down his face, tired of it all.
He had watched his friends at Maeve’s side and wondered what it would have been like. To be hers. To be one of the males in that damned prophecy.
None of that mattered.
Because Maeve was dead.
Chapter One
We broke the surface before reaching the Skala Isles, as the craggy rocks shot out of the lake like fingers made of bark and bone, blocking the beach from view.
The single break between the isles was lined with rocks as sharp as shark’s teeth, suspected by will and magic. Shrouded in a thick fog, the rocks twisting and turning with each undulating wave. A chomping mouth, hungry and waiting for some unsuspecting fae to swim up and skewer themselves.
The selkies hadn’t always been so cautious, but my uncle had killed their trusting nature.
When the war under the waves began, the selkies hadn’t chosen a side. They remained neutral until my uncle stole fifteen skins from a group of younglings and forced the prepubescent fae to attack a group of merfolk—no doubt hoping that the selkies would blame the Mer for the deaths.
To hold a selkie’s skin was to control them, and it was known that selkies only ever gave their coats to their Shíorghrá if and when they found them.
To steal a selkie's coat was the worst violation.
From what I’d heard, even from frightened whispers back in the castle at Cruinn, my uncle had boasted about killing the younglings. Urging the selkies into the fray.
Shortly after the incident, a fog descended so thick that it choked the lake. The Skala Beach, a once beautiful cove with water as blue as polished lapis and mother-of-pearl sand, disappeared behind the fog, never seen by anyone but the selkies.
The Skala isles, once benign rocks that clung to the shore, broke away and grew in size until they formed a jagged wall—further protecting the selkies from the other creeds of the lake.
Even when I had sat on the High Throne and cast my consciousness across the water, I couldn’t see through the fog.
