Mari Prothero grew up in a tiny fishing village on the west coast of
Wales where she lived alone with her father, Daffyd, a master fisherman.
Although the sea had never harmed her father, Mari still worried, for
her mother and older brother had been drowned by a rogue wave when she
was just an infant. Her father was all she had left, and Mari was not
blind to the possibility of losing him.
Mari and her father kept to themselves in their village. It would not be
wise to call attention to how much more prosperous the Protheros were
than any other fisherman's family; Daffyd was out in every storm,
pulling in fish where no other man could, and his fish were always the
fattest, the tastiest. But their unusual good fortune was not the only
reason for their reclusive behavior.
For as long as she could remember, Mari had seen things--things that
shouldn't, that couldn't be real: tiny manlike creatures that were
mischievous and wore only seaweed, and tiny beings that spoke to her
kindly but seemed to be made of water. When she was a child, she had
asked her father about these creatures, but Daffyd was so upset by these
conversations that Mari had given up trying to talk to him.
But on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, her father finally told
her the great secret of the Prothero Luck--and what they must do to keep
it. Her mother and brother were not truly dead, but neither were they
human. They were shape-shifters of the sea, the half-human, half-seal
people known as the Selch, and they had returned to their watery domain.
Since ancient times, the Prothero family had kept a covenant with these
magical creatures. In exchange for protection on the water, a member of
the Prothero family would take a Selch to marry, only to relinquish
their spouse and one of their children to the sea after a brief number
of years.
Now Mari's time had come, and her father told her that she must abide by
her family's ancient magical compact, or face dire consequences. But
Mari was not without protectors: for the tiny creatures she had seen her
whole life, which she now knew were real, counseled her to "bargain"
with her mother's people. While in faraway London, Lord Alderscroft, the
head of the Elemental Masters, was aware that a powerful but untrained
Water Master on the far coast of Wales was being threatened by some of
the Elemental Elder Spirits, and he had dispatched some very unique
champions to come to Mari's aid....
