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H eart racing, Vahly followed Arc along the path Kyril made in the crowd with his shuffling wings and a quick snarl.

The ground sloped toward the coastline, darkening until it opened onto a view of the moonlit waves.

Arrosa stood over a shape at her feet, her trembling visible as Vahly rushed up beside her and Arc spun a light so they could see.

The body of a person curled around itself.

“Who is it?” Arrosa asked, her voice a hush to the murmuring crowd behind them.

Vahly knelt, and Arc lowered the sphere of flickering gold to show dark, wet hair partially covering a pale, bearded face, muscled legs beneath soaked trousers and powerfully built arms with—

“Fins. He has fins. It’s a sea kynd male,” Vahly said.

“What is he doing here?” Arrosa bent to shift the male’s hair from his face, wonder in her eyes.

Despite the mystery, Vahly’s heart lifted at the lack of fear she saw in her daughter’s expression.

Arc touched the male sea kynd’s chest. “He’s alive.”

Vahly exchanged a wide-eyed look with her daughter. “How?” they asked in unison.

Closing his eyes, Arc seemed to focus on healing.

The sea kynd gasped. Vahly stood, hand on her sword, while Arrosa touched the male’s arm as if in support.

The sea kynd’s eyes flew open, and he sat up quickly, pressing a hand against his gills.

His eyes rounded, then narrowed, and he tried to speak in the sea tongue, but ended up coughing and gasping.

“What’s happening to him?” Arrosa fisted her hand like she was trying to keep from touching his arm again in case it hurt him.

Arc frowned and cocked his head. “His chest is moving. He’s breathing like a land kynd. Ah, and I see his gills are gone. From this side at least,” he said, gesturing toward the uncovered side of the sea kynd’s neck.

The male began to shiver and grow even more pale.

“Let’s get him inside.” Vahly let go of her sword’s hilt and grabbed the sea kynd’s elbow. He was so weak he didn’t fight it. “If he can breathe, then maybe he’d do best to get out of this cold.”

Arc took the sea kynd’s other arm, and they hoisted him onto Kyril’s back.

“Mother!” Lyra’s young voice called out, her consonants not quite formed. “More! There’s more!”

Vahly turned to see a host of sea kynd crawling out of the ocean and up the sandy slope.

Arc raised a hand. “Help them into the great hall! Some strange magic is here, and we must do what we can to aid the kin of those who once helped us fight the old Sea Queen.”

Over one hundred sea kynd lay on straw pallets in Vahly and Arc’s great hall.

The fire in the hearth blazed high to warm their oddly shifting flesh.

Vahly watched the shimmering face of one sleeping sea kynd female.

The creature lay on her side, and Arc scribbled notes onto parchment as the female’s face faded in color, then suddenly grew slightly darker.

A peachy flush rose in the female’s exposed cheek.

“Fascinating.” Arc’s gaze snapped from the sea kynd back to his writings. “Vahly, I believe these sea kynd are morphing into something akin to elves or even humans. Look at her fins.”

The blue-green ridges of growth along the sides of the female’s arms had lessened in size. Vahly leaned close to look at the female’s hand. The webbing between her fingers remained, but the color had shifted from blue to match the new flesh covering most of her body.

Vahly straightened. The hall teemed with activity.

Ruda, who’d grown into her role as head of healing here at the new palace, flew from patient to patient, remaining in her human form to communicate as best she could with facial expressions and hand gestures.

The sea kynd who were conscious had been given fish stew that seemed to be palatable to them.

Ruda had seen to it that everyone had a blanket of the softest wool and a wooden mug of both seawater and freshwater since they had no idea what these changing sea folk needed.

The doors opened wide to show Kyril, Cygnus, and the twins carrying more buckets of water. Sand glittered on the backs of Cygnus’s hands and mud clung to Kyril’s paws as well as the twins’ boots.

Across from Vahly and Arc, Arrosa stood beside that same male sea kynd they’d first discovered. She was helping him sit up.

“Stew. Food.” She motioned to her mouth and stomach, then held out a wooden bowl that steamed. “Are you hungry?”

The male pushed the bowl away, his lips pulled into a grimace of pain. He kept repeating one word. Chaménos .

Vahly waved a hand in front of Arc’s face, the only way to break him from his intense focus during anything remotely scientific. “Any idea what chaménos means?”

Arc tapped his lower lip with his fist, his black eyebrows drawing together. “Lost, I think? Yes. Gone or lost.”

The male sea kynd’s ragged voice rose, and he repeated the word at Arrosa. Then he shouted a word Vahly did know.

Well. As in the well of magic where sea kynd refreshed their powers under the water.

Vahly hurried to the male. “The Blackwater well is gone? What do you mean? Did someone destroy it?”

The male shook his head, his eyes pinched like he might be trying to understand her.

“It disappeared into the sea floor,” a sharply accented female voice said from across the room.

The warning twinge of Vahly’s magic surged as she turned to see who had spoken.