Eleven

Eleven

Most scholars of Myrddin view him as somewhat in conversation with Blackmar, though the extent to which their works bear any genuine thematic or stylistic similarities is still debated. While Myrddin, in what few interviews he gave, was adamant that he did not seek to be known as a “Southern writer,” Blackmar, though a Northerner himself, was very much inspired by the aesthetic and folkloric traditions of the South. In this paper, I argue that Blackmar perceived the South as a fanciful realm of whimsy, trapped in a time long past, existing merely for Northern writers to project their fantasies upon. In that regard, I contend that Blackmar is indeed a Southern writer—but only in the South of his own imagining.

From The Question of the South: Colin Blackmar, Emrys Myrddin, and Northern Fascination by Dr. Rhys Brinley, 206 AD

When they met the next day, Preston did not bring up the Fairy King or changeling children. Effy was grateful to him. She did not want to try to justify herself, nor tell him that she’d spent the night in the cold darkness, waiting for the Fairy King to show himself. Preston had treated her kindly—more kindly than anyone else she’d told the truth to ever had—but still, he didn’t believe her. It stung, but the memory of him saying Isn’t that enough? thrummed in her mind, and there was a small reassurance in it. At least he had not called her mad.

Instead, there was just the matter of convincing Ianto to let them go see Blackmar. It would not be an easy task. Preston had become so jumpy around him (“He did wave a gun at us, Effy,” he’d said, in an oddly high-pitched tone, when she’d confronted him about it).

She did not relish the idea of beseeching Ianto to let her go away from the house. And Preston didn’t like any of her proposed lies.

“Ianto isn’t an idiot,” he said. “I don’t see how you can relate this to your project—and I don’t see how you could convince him that I would need to come along, too. Saints, it would be easier to just tell him we were sneaking off for some midnight tryst.”

Effy felt her face turn red. “I don’t think he would like that at all.”

Preston’s cheeks were pink, too. “Surely not. He was clear that he didn’t want to see us together again—but it would be a more convincing lie. I mean—well. He doesn’t care where I go. He’d be happier if I just left and never came back. He only cares about you.”

As much as she did not want to admit it, Effy knew it was true. But ever since the incident at the pub, Ianto had asked for nothing more than just a bit of perfunctory, chaste flirtation. She could do that.

“Then why don’t we tell him you’re bringing me somewhere?” she suggested. “Dropping me off in Laleston. Dropping me off in Laleston so I can, I don’t know, look at architectural textbooks. They have a library there. If everything goes to plan, maybe neither of us will ever come back. We can just take the diary with us.”

She spoke with more confidence than she felt. Though at least half the time, she wanted desperately to leave this sunken house and its disturbing secrets, she still felt a strange pull that urged her to stay. This was the realm of the Fairy King, after all. Perhaps this was where she belonged.

“I suppose that’s true,” Preston said. “You never signed anything binding you to him, did you? Money never changed hands?”

She found it funny that he was so preoccupied with the technicalities. Effy’s mind always skipped over those details. She let those small things slough off her; the small things were never what ruined you. If she were kneeling and examining the shells on the beach, she wouldn’t see the titanic wave rising over her head.

What sort of things would she wonder about, if she weren’t always waiting for the next wave to come? She didn’t let herself linger on it. She had to speak to Ianto.

Effy found him sitting on the edge of the cliffs, a casually dangerous pose, draped over the white rocks like a lizard in the midday sun. It wasn’t even particularly sunny that day, but even the weak, bleary light gave his hair an oily sheen. Wet. He always looked wet.

“Effy,” he said as she approached, “come sit.”

She went over to him but didn’t sit. A mile down the face of the cliffs, the sea sloshed like dishwater, lazy and gray. “I have something to ask you.”

“Anything,” Ianto said at once. “Really, Effy, please come closer.”

He was sitting so perilously close to the edge of the cliff, looking more like an outcropping of rock than a man. He had been born in the Bottom Hundred, in this very house. The danger of the sea was as familiar to him as breathing. Unexpectedly she felt a twinge of sympathy. He really did want to stay here, sinking foundation and all.

She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.

Effy stepped closer, an arm’s length from Ianto. His eyes were murky and colorless. Safe, for now.

“I have to go to the library in Laleston. They have some books I need—I’m sorry, I should have brought them with me from Caer-Isel, but I didn’t realize what an involved project this would be.”

“It’s a long trip, to Laleston. Are you sure you need to go?”

“Yes.” Her heart pattered; she was actually getting somewhere. “Quite sure. It’s the closest library for miles. I don’t want to have to take a train all the way back to Caer-Isel?.?.?.”

“Let me at least give you money for the train,” Ianto said. “It seems only fair, since you’re here at my behest.”

Effy drew a breath. “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. Preston has agreed to drive me.”

Immediately a shadow fell over Ianto’s face. In the silence, a seabird swooped and called, the noise echoing over the rolling sea. The wind picked up, carrying with it a faint sprinkling of salt water that dampened Effy’s face. Ianto’s colorless eyes shifted, a bit of the murk fading, and Effy’s muscles tensed.

“I don’t trust that Argantian boy,” Ianto said finally. “He’s been here for weeks now, and whenever I ask if he’s made any progress, all he does is stammer out some academic jargon no ordinary person could understand. And I don’t like the way he looks at you.”

Effy almost choked. “He doesn’t look at me any sort of way.”

“He does,” Ianto said. “Wherever you are in a room, he watches you. It’s like he’s waiting for you to trip so he can catch you. It’s unsettling.”

“It’s nothing like that,” she said, though she could feel her throat pulsing. “He’s an academic, like you said?.?.?. I don’t think he has those kinds of, um, preoccupations. He’s too focused on his work.”

But of course Ianto’s words made all manner of thoughts run through her mind, most of them inappropriate, many of them downright lascivious. Until now she had not wondered about Preston’s preoccupations, if he had ever done this or that, maybe he even had a girlfriend back in Caer-Isel. All of it was distressing and flustering to contemplate.

“Regardless.” Ianto held her gaze. “I can’t have you going away for too long. Wetherell is pestering me for a final blueprint so we can discuss finances.”

“It will only be two days,” Effy said, carefully.

And then she saw the strange thing happen again: the murkiness vanished from his eyes, like sunlight beaming through clouds, and then abruptly it returned again. It happened several times—cloudy and then clear, cloudy and then clear—each time as quick as a blink.

It made her stomach knot. “It’s just, you can’t do the whole drive there and back in one day—”

Suddenly, Ianto rose to his feet. Effy shrunk back.

“You know,” he said at last, “perhaps it will be good for you to have some time away. Being stuck up here in this house—it can be suffocating.”

He spoke as if the words had taken great effort. All these shifts in him, like the trembling and crumbling of the cliffside under her feet, made Ianto impossible to read. He could swing a gun at her one day and be perfectly friendly the next. He could seize her hand and grip it so hard that it hurt and the next day keep himself at a noticeable distance.

The wind beat Effy’s hair and the tails of her coat back and forth, snatching them up and then letting them loose again. She thought again of the ghost, of Ianto’s one-sided conversation. This house has a hold on me, Ianto had said out loud, to no one. Effy was no longer certain of anything when it came to Hiraeth or Emrys Myrddin—but she was quite sure of that.

And if she remained here, it would take hold of her, too.

Ianto watched from the driveway as they packed their things into the boot of Preston’s car. Wetherell stood beside him, looking as grave and disapproving as ever, his silver hair sparkling with the fine mist that had come over Hiraeth.

Preston was worried about the drive down the cliffs. Effy just wanted to leave as quickly as they could. Jagged tree branches snaked through the fog like witch’s fingers, grasping at the air.

“I can’t believe he agreed,” Preston murmured as he lifted her trunk. His shirt came up a little over his abdomen, exposing a narrow swath of fawn-colored skin. Effy watched, transfixed, until his shirt came down again.

“You keep underestimating my charms.”

“You’re right,” he said. “On the title page of our paper, I’ll be sure to credit you as Effy Sayre, enchantress.”

She tried to keep from laughing so Ianto wouldn’t see, but her skin prickled pleasantly.

Preston walked around the car and unlocked her door. When he reached the driver’s side, he pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. After a beat, he asked, “Do you want one?”

The same warm pleasure pooled in her belly. “Sure.”

Preston lit another and held it out to her. She took it, but she was no longer looking at Preston. Some force had pulled her gaze away from him, back to Ianto, standing in the gravel path, arms folded over his chest.

It was neither the cloudy-eyed, jovial Ianto nor the bright-eyed, dangerous Ianto. It took Effy a moment to decipher the look in his pale eyes as they skimmed from her to Preston and back again. But it was worse than she had ever imagined: worse than fury or loathing or wrath.

It was envy.

Even in winter, the Southern countryside was green: emerald-colored hills and patches of tilled farmland like plaited yellow hair. Coniferous trees stood in dense clusters along the hillsides in a darker green that gave a look of fullness to the landscape. There were streaks of purple thistle flowers and lichen-webbed rocks that jutted up from the grass. Some superstitious Southerners believed the hills were the heads and hips of slumbering giants.

Effy stared through the passenger window, everything crisp and sharp.

“It’s so beautiful,” she marveled, putting her fingers to the glass. “I’ve never been south of Laleston before.”

“Me either,” Preston said. “I’d never been south of Caer-Isel, actually, until I came to Hiraeth.”

In leaving Hiraeth behind, it felt as though they had walked out from under the sea. Everything that had been blurry beneath the film of water was now bright and clear. No more fog on the windows or dampness dripping from the walls. No more mirrors clouded over with condensation. The sky was a magnificently bright blue, clouds drifting pale and puffy across it. Black-faced sheep speckled the hillsides, looking like tiny clouds themselves, the land a green inverse of the sky.

This did not feel like the realm of the Fairy King. She could not imagine him lurking here among the verdant hills, the flower fields and goats.

She certainly could not imagine him sitting in Preston’s seat.

Preston had been driving for two hours now, up serpentine single-laned roads and down again, past villages that were no more than a clutch of thatched-roof houses, huddled together like bodies around a fire. They had only stopped once, for a farmer to cross his cows. Preston drove with consummate focus, his gaze rarely leaving the windshield, and only ever to look at her.

Effy shifted in her seat and squared her shoulders. “Do you need a break?”

“Can you drive?”

“No,” she said. “My mother never let me learn.”

There wasn’t much of a point to it, in Draefen, where trams and taxis could take you wherever you wanted to go, and the houses were pressed together like piano keys, so wherever you wanted to go was never very far, anyway.

She’d once asked for lessons, and her mother had let out an irritated breath. “I can barely trust you to remember to turn off the stove. Why would I want you behind the wheel of a car?”

“That’s all right,” Preston said. “I’m fine to keep driving for a while.”

Inevitably their conversation turned to Myrddin, Blackmar, and the diary. They had thumbed through the book to find all the references they could to Blackmar, and to Angharad.

Myrddin mentioned both quite often. Blackmar struggled with A. tonight, he wrote, the summer before the book’s publication.

“I think Blackmar wrote it,” Preston said at last, and then gave a huff, as though it had exhausted him to make such a bold assertion, with no hedging at all. “Myrddin talks about how Greenebough wanted to ‘reinvent’ him, to lean more heavily into the myth of the provincial genius. But Myrddin never mentions anything about penning Angharad himself. He only ever mentions it when he talks about Blackmar.”

“But it’s strange, isn’t it?” Effy had already turned over this possible conclusion in her mind, and something about it just didn’t feel right. She couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t just about Myrddin, not anymore. It was a bone-deep, blood-pulsing sense of wrongness that beat in her like a second heart. “The way they talk about her—about the book. They always call Angharad ‘she,’ or ‘her.’”

Preston shrugged. “Sailors also call their ships by women’s names. Myrddin’s father was a fisherman. I suspect it’s just a bit of cheekiness on Myrddin’s part.”

“Maybe.” It still felt wrong, in no way that Effy could articulate. “I’m thinking about ‘The Mariner’s Demise’ again. ‘But a sailor was I—and on my head no fleck of gray—’”

“‘So with all the boldness of my youth, I said: The only enemy is the sea,’” Preston finished. “It’s a memento mori. It’s about the hubris of young men.”

“The sea is what, then? Death?”

“Not death, exactly. But dying.”

She arched a brow. “What’s the difference?”

“Well, in that earlier line, right before what you started reciting—‘Everything ancient must decay.’ I think it’s about the sea taking and taking, eating away at you slowly, the way that water, say, rots the wood of your sailboat. The last thing the sea takes from you is your life. So. I think it’s about dying, slowly. The mariner’s hubris isn’t necessarily in his belief that he won’t die, but his belief that the worst the sea can do is kill him.”

Effy blinked. The road ahead bunched and then flattened, splitting the hills like a furrow carved through an ancient hand. “I like that,” she said after a moment.

“Do you?” Preston sounded surprised. Pleased. “I wrote a paper on it. I might incorporate it into my thesis—our thesis. Since you like it.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll happily put my name to that.”

The drive was very pleasant, the day green and blue and eventually, as evening came on, gold. After another hour they stopped at a small shop by the side of the road, and each got a sausage roll wrapped in waxed paper and coffee in a paper cup. Effy poured liberal amounts of cream into hers, and three sugar packets. Preston watched her with judgment over the rim of his own cup.

“What’s the point,” he began, as they climbed back into the car, “of drinking coffee if you’re going to dilute it to that degree?”

Effy took a long, savoring sip. “What’s the point of drinking coffee that doesn’t taste good?”

“Well, I would argue that black coffee does taste good.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that someone who drinks scotch straight would think that black coffee tastes good,” Effy said, making a face. “Or else you’re secretly a masochist.”

Preston turned the key in the ignition. “Masochism has nothing to do with it. You can learn to like anything if you drink it enough.”

The car rolled gently back onto the road. For a while they sipped their coffee and chewed their sausage rolls in silence. Effy’s mind was stuck on the memory of Preston swallowing that scotch without flinching. He didn’t strike her as the partying type, staying out until dawn at pubs or dance halls, stumbling back into his room and sleeping through morning classes. Those types of people milled around her at the university, but she’d never been one of them, never really known any of them—not even Rhia was so careless.

She looked at Preston, the golden light gathering on his profile, turning his brown eyes almost hazel. Every time he took a sip of coffee, Effy watched his throat bob as he swallowed, and let her gaze linger on the bit of moisture that clung to his lips.

She blurted out, suddenly, “Do you have a girlfriend? Back in Caer-Isel?”

Preston’s face turned red. He had been mid-sip of coffee, and at her question he coughed, struggling to swallow before replying. “What put that on your mind?”

“Nothing in particular,” Effy lied, because she certainly was not going to confess that she had been wondering about this since her conversation with Ianto—or admit how intently she’d been staring at him. “It’s just that we go to the same university, but we didn’t know each other there. I just wondered what sort of things you did?.?.?.”

She was flushing profusely, too, gaze trained firmly on the coffee cup cradled in her lap. She heard Preston draw a breath.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I mean, I don’t. Sometimes, you know, there are girls you meet, and—well. But it’s never more than a night, maybe coffee the next morning?.?.?. never mind. Sorry.”

He was phenomenally red at this point, staring with stubborn attention at the road, though for a brief moment his eyes flickered to her, as if to gauge her reaction. Effy pressed her lips together, overcome by the inexplicable urge to smile.

She liked when she flustered him. It seemed to be happening more and more of late.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what you mean. What a charmer you are after all, Preston Héloury.”

He laughed, cheeks still flushed. “Not in the slightest.”

“I don’t know about that. I find you very charming, underneath all the smugness.”

“You think I’m smug?”

Effy had to laugh at that. “You aren’t exactly the most approachable person I’ve ever met. But I suppose that’s because you’re also the smartest, most eloquent person I’ve ever met.”

Preston just shook his head. He was silent for a moment, staring through the window as the scenery passed by slowly. At last, he said, “There’s a lot to compensate for, when you’re the only Argantian in Llyr’s most prestigious literary program.”

All at once Effy was suffused with sympathy—and with guilt. She remembered how she had berated him on the cliffside, and then again in the pub, pricking at him, questioning his loyalties. “I’m sorry if people have treated you cruelly. I’m sorry for the things I said, when we first met.”

“It’s really all right,” he said, turning to look at her. “It’s just whispers and looks in the hall, mostly. I’m sure you’ve gotten your fair share as the only woman in the architecture college.”

Effy tensed. She realized that, unintentionally, she’d created the perfect opportunity for him to ask about Master Corbenic. She still didn’t know if that particular piece of gossip had reached the literature college.

“It’s not so bad,” she said. A lie. “I knew what I was signing up for.”

Preston inhaled, and it seemed as though he wanted to say something more. In the end, though, he just snapped his mouth shut and turned back toward the road. They lapsed into a slightly uneasy silence as the green hills rolled past, looking as huge as waves at high tide.

Penrhos, Blackmar’s estate, was not technically in the Bottom Hundred. It was still south of Laleston, and the nearest landmark was a busy market town, Syfaddon, where the lamplight pooled on damp cobblestones and storefront awnings flapped in the wind like dresses hung on clotheslines.

Preston’s car inched through the crowded streets, jerking to a halt every few minutes so that a merchant could drag his cart across, or an errant child could escape her mother. The windows of the pubs and shops were bright with the glow of gas lamps.

“It’s not far from here,” Preston murmured. His knuckles were white around the steering wheel, brow furrowed with the immense concentration it required not to flatten an oblivious pedestrian. “Just up the road. Much less remote than Hiraeth.”

Effy watched a fishmonger adjust one of his carp, mouth open so she could see its tongue and teeth. His fish were aligned perfectly on their bed of ice, as neat as bodies in crematory drawers. “Is Blackmar from Syfaddon?”

“No, he’s from Draefen, actually. I think he’s descended from one of those post-Drowning industrialists. Oil or railroads or something like that. Enough money he never had to work a day in his life, which doesn’t make for a very interesting author profile.”

“At least, not as interesting as an upstart provincial genius,” Effy said, as Syfaddon’s market shrank in the rearview mirror. “So you think the publisher—Greenebough—arranged for Blackmar to write Angharad, but publish it under Myrddin’s name?”

“That’s my working theory, yes. Blackmar had the best education money could buy, naturally—he studied literature at the university in Caer-Isel. There’s even a scholarship named after him, or maybe his father?”

“But no one there is studying ‘The Dreams of a Sleeping King,’” she said. “It’s ironic, isn’t it—that his best-known work is commercial tripe, but Angharad is beloved. I mean, why would Blackmar agree to it? It’s not like Greenebough could have swayed him with money—you said he was rich enough already. And if he could write something like Angharad, why is his other work so?.?.?. so middling?”

Preston was quiet for a moment, considering. “You’re right,” he said. “There’s still plenty that doesn’t add up. But that’s why we’re here.”

With that, he turned onto a narrower road, more poorly paved, and lined closely with a fleet of enormous elms. The shadows between the trees looked dense and oily, like the dark itself was moving. It was evening now; the sun listing gently to the line of the horizon, the clouds a bruised violet. It was several more minutes down that dim, craggy road before the turrets of a house rose above the trees in the distance.

The black wrought-iron gates came into view, cutting the house behind them into slivers. House seemed insufficient, discourteous even—what stood before them was a mammoth construction of brickwork and groin vaults, marble columns and sash windows.

Effy hardly considered herself a real architect, but she could calculate the cost of each feature, each balcony and balustrade, and it amounted to a sum that made her dizzy.

Preston stopped the car in front of the gates and they looked at each other, the same unspoken question on their lips, before the gates began to slowly creak open.

He drove up the circular driveway, around an island of immaculately landscaped grass and a marble fountain in the shape of a maiden. Her arms were at her sides, hands turned out and fingers splayed, and water spurted from her open palms.

For a moment, Effy could swear she saw the woman’s face change, sightless eyes shifting under marble lashes, but when she blinked, the statue was still again. It had never been a woman, had never been alive at all.

She dug her fingernails into her palm, and for some reason, found it appropriate to whisper, “This can’t all be from writing, can it?”

“That’s the family money, I’m guessing.”

It was so different from Hiraeth, and that, more than anything, was what shocked her. Why did Myrddin’s descendants live in such decaying squalor, all their once lovely things waterlogged and rotted and covered in a layer of sea salt and grime?

The bushes at Penrhos were groomed like equestrian steeds, no ragged leaves or split branches. Even without a family inheritance, the Myrddins must have had money—there was no good reason for Ianto and his mother to have been living like that unless they were doing it out of some misguided, superstitious deference to their dead husband and father.

Preston parked, and they got out. The air was cold enough that Effy’s breath floated out in front of her. She squinted in the evening light: there was a large stone staircase, and wooden double doors at the top of them.

In another moment, with a loud groan, the doors heaved open.

She couldn’t see Blackmar very well; she could only hear the clacking of his cane against the stone as he came down toward them. When he was close enough that Effy could pick out details, she saw the flash of his red velvet dressing gown, the sharp ebony of his cane, and, when he smiled at them, the gleam of a gold tooth in his mouth. His feet were ensconced in matching red velvet slippers.

His face was like a rusted mirror, stippled with a million cracks. He was the most ancient-looking person Effy had ever seen.

“Euphemia!” he said, with a rattling, excited gasp. “I’m so glad you took me up on my invitation.”

And then he seized her around the middle in a zealous but creaky embrace. Effy stiffened, unsure what to do, waiting for it to be over.

At last Blackmar let go, knifepoint eyes shining out of his shriveled-walnut face.

“Oh,” Effy said as he released her, feeling breathless. “Thank you very much for having us.”

“I’m always happy to entertain my admirers.” Blackmar smiled. From that close, Effy could see that nearly a third of his teeth were missing, and that they had all been replaced with gold imitations. “Is this your . . . compatriot?”

“Yes,” said Effy. “This is Preston Héloury.”

Blackmar’s wrinkled brow wrinkled even further. “Héloury,” he repeated slowly. In his posh Llyrian accent, he made the Argantian name sound almost like a curse. “That name is familiar—you’re a student at the literature college, aren’t you? You’ve written to me before.”

“I have.” Preston’s posture was stiff, arms folded over his chest. “I’m an admirer as well, just not as, ah, eloquent as Effy in expressing it. Euphemia.”

He had a bit of trouble with the first syllable; Effy could see the small furrow in his brow as he tried, with his subtle Argantian accent, to pronounce it.

Hearing her full name in Preston’s mouth for the first time made Effy feel strange. Not unpleasant, but distinctly odd, her skin prickling with unexpected heat. With the added effort that it took to articulate them, the vowels sounded softer somehow. Gentler.

“Well, Argantians are not known for their zeal or passion. Too cold up there in the mountains, I suppose.” Blackmar chuckled, very taken with his own joke. “Come in, both of you. I’ll get you some brandy.”

He had two black-clad domestic workers take their trunks from Preston’s car and carry them silently up the steps to the house.

Effy and Preston followed slowly. The low, flat clouds were hanging darkly around the turrets of Penrhos manor, almost enveloping them, like a pair of gloved hands. The domestics set down the trunks briefly to heave the doors open, and then they all stepped over the threshold.

Inside was as grand as Effy had expected: a double staircase of white marble that led up to the second-floor landing, plush velvet carpets that matched Blackmar’s slippers and dressing gown, damask wallpaper bulleted with gilt-framed paintings and portraits. A large tapestry rendered the Blackmar family tree, beginning with one Rolant Blackmar, who Effy assumed was that industrialist—oil or railroads.

Above it was an enormous taxidermy deer head, its black eyes gleaming emptily, staring at nothing.

“It’s beautiful,” Effy said, because she felt it was what she was expected to say, and because it saved Preston from having to lie again.

Penrhos was beautiful, in a particular way. It was perfectly ornate, the furniture and wallpaper and rugs impeccably matched, not a smear of dust or a cache of cobwebs in the corner. The portraits were all dour and unsmiling; the velvet curtains let in not a sliver of light. There were no audaciously kitschy lamps or brashly abstract paintings, no boldly ugly chandeliers that made you want to squint up at them, trying to gauge if they really were ugly or not.

It was a beautiful house, but not a clever one. It was a house with no imagination.

Effy found it almost impossible to believe that Angharad’s author could live here.

“Thank you, thank you,” Blackmar said, waving a hand. “But you haven’t even seen the best of it yet. Come into the study. I’m sure you’ll want to relax after your long drive.”

Effy did not feel that drinking with Blackmar would be relaxing at all, but she followed him into the study anyway, Preston just a pace behind her.

The study had the same cohesion: peacock-blue drapes and matching armchairs, which were lovely, but not exactly inspiring. Another taxidermy deer head was mounted over the doorway, and a grandfather clock ticked dully in the corner. It was around six fifteen.

The domestics had vanished; Blackmar poured the brandy himself, wizened hand trembling. He handed Effy and Preston each a cut-crystal glass.

Brandy was an odd choice. Effy had only ever seen her grandparents drink it, just one after-dinner swig of liquor served in a minuscule glass. It wasn’t rude, precisely, to serve brandy without offering a meal first, but it gave Effy the distinct sense that something was slightly off with Blackmar.

Maybe the perfection of his furnishings was trying to compensate for something. A well-ordered house for a decaying mind.

“Cheers,” Blackmar said, settling himself into an armchair with great effort. “Here’s to a fruitful academic inquiry for you, and some good company for me.”

He chortled again at his own joke, and they clinked glasses. Preston swallowed his brandy without flinching; Effy puckered her lips and mimed taking a sip. She didn’t think Blackmar would notice. He sucked down half his glass in one gulp.

“Thank you,” Preston said, not at all convincingly. “And thank you again for your hospitality.”

Blackmar waved him off. “I’m an entertainer, you know. All great writers are. I entertain readers; I entertain guests. Once upon a time I entertained women, but those days are unfortunately behind me.”

Out of grim obligation, Effy laughed. Preston just stared uncomfortably down at his glass.

“Well, I’d love if you could entertain a few questions,” she said. “When did you first meet Emrys Myrddin?”

“Oh my. It was so long ago; I don’t think I could give you a year. It must have been in the late one-eighties. My father hired him, actually, as an archivist for some of our family records. He was my employee, you know.”

Effy glanced at Preston. That felt, somehow, significant. Preston’s eyes had taken on a gleam of interest as well—even Effy had to admit this fact bolstered his theory that Blackmar was the real author.

“So he lived in an apartment in Syfaddon, just like our other domestics, but during the day he was here at Penrhos, sorting files and doing other drearily menial things. But I’m a curious man, and I’ve always been interested in the lives of my domestics. Their backstories. So, with little better to do, I began spending time with Emrys in the record room. It turned out we got along like a house on fire.

“I could tell he was a Southerner, of course, from his name and accent, but he was different from the other Southern transplants that we hired. Sharper. More ambitious. I was working on a very early draft of ‘Dreams’ at that time, and Emrys showed great interest in my writing. He eventually told me that he was a writer, too, and we exchanged some of our works in progress.”

Effy’s heartbeat picked up as she leaned forward, but Preston spoke before she got the chance.

“Myrddin must have been working on The Youthful Knight then,” he said. “Was it bits of that you saw?”

Blackmar tilted his head contemplatively, eyes clouding. “I believe so. Saints, that was a long time ago. Another lifetime. Emrys was despairing—he thought no one would want to buy a book by a backwater peasant from the Bottom Hundred. But my family has connections with Greenebough Publishing, so I offered to make an introduction.”

Effy nodded slowly. That all lined up with what they’d read in the diary. “But The Youthful Knight didn’t do very well, did it? Myrddin wasn’t a household name until—”

“Yes.” Blackmar’s voice suddenly became curt. He set down his near empty glass on an austere side table. “That’s the part of the story everyone knows. Angharad made Myrddin famous.”

Blackmar had gotten cagey, and Effy could tell Preston sensed it, too. Preston set down his glass, and in a challenging sort of way, asked, “Was Myrddin still your employee then?”

“No, no,” Blackmar replied. “He’d made enough from royalties to rent an apartment in Syfaddon. And then he bought that dreadful house in the Bay of Nine Bells. I could never understand why he wanted to return to Saltney, of all places. But he said there was something about the bay that beckoned him. Like a lighthouse to a ship, calling him home.”

“There’s nothing quite like the place you were born,” Preston said. There was a solemn but inscrutable look on his face. “So did the two of you correspond while Myrddin was writing Angharad?”

“You know,” Blackmar said, his voice sharp, “my memory does not serve me as well as it once did. I think it would be better for you to speak to someone from Greenebough on these matters. As it happens, Greenebough’s editor in chief, Marlowe, will be coming tomorrow evening.”

Definitely cagey. But Effy was undeterred.

“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you so much for letting us spend the night. I’m sure we’ll be able to find everything we came for.”

Preston shot her a look, and she gave him a silent, almost imperceptible nod in return.

Shakily, Blackmar rose to his feet. In the time it took him to stand, Effy watched a fly land on the taxidermy deer head and crawl into one of its nostrils. The deer was unperturbed. Dead, as it should be.

“I’m sorry,” Blackmar said plainly. “I’m an old man now, and early to bed. I’ll have the help show you to your rooms.”

Their trunks had already been placed in two adjacent bedrooms upstairs. Effy’s room had opaque black curtains and an enormous blue sea anemone sitting on the desk, frozen in timeless suspension. There was a full-length mirror but it had been flipped over to face the wall instead. For some reason Effy felt it would be a bad idea to turn it forward.

The bed was, strikingly, unmade: a morass of sea-green sheets and an incongruous purple duvet, the color of wine straight from the bottle. In opposition to the rest of Penrhos, there was nothing stodgy about this room; it had a bit of chaos to it.

If Effy had been allowed to decorate her own room as a child, it might have looked a bit like this. She sat on the edge of the bed, letting out a breath.

Preston leaned over the desk, arms crossed. “Blackmar did get cagey, didn’t he? The moment we brought up Angharad.”

“He did.” Effy chewed her lip. “There’s something there. I don’t know what it is. But we’ll have a chance to talk to Greenebough’s editor in chief tomorrow.”

Although everything they’d learned so far appeared to be pushing toward Preston’s theory of Blackmar as the true author, Effy just couldn’t force herself to accept it. It wasn’t just her allegiance to Myrddin, though she still felt it, that childlike admiration. There was something else. Secrets buried under years of dust. An emotion that was inarticulable.

“That still doesn’t give us much time,” Preston said. “If we don’t get back to Hiraeth tomorrow night, Ianto will be very suspicious.”

But it was not Ianto she was thinking about. It was the Fairy King, the creature with the slick black hair and the bone crown. Here at Penrhos she felt safe from him. Here that world of danger and magic felt properly chained and fettered.

“We’ll just have to get back then,” Effy said, voice shrinking. “I’m sorry I can’t help drive.”

“No, that’s all right. I don’t mind driving. We’ll get back to Hiraeth before midnight, I promise.”

Midnight was a fairy-tale thing. She didn’t know if Preston had been thinking about that when he promised it, but Effy was remembering all the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bell struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.

“Thank you,” she said, trying to put those thoughts out of her mind. “Tomorrow we’ll speak to Greenebough’s editor and get the answers we need.”

Preston nodded. “For now I suppose we’ll just?.?.?. sleep on empty stomachs.”

Effy laughed softly. She found it odd, too, that Blackmar had offered them brandy with no food to accompany it, but who was she to question the man when he had been generous enough to entertain all their probing questions?

Up to a point, of course.

She reached for her purse and began to dig for her bottle of sleeping pills. She no longer minded if Preston saw them. He already knew she was a changeling child. He had learned her true name. He knew what she believed about the Fairy King.

But she searched and searched, and still her hand closed around nothing. Panic began to swell in her chest, her breaths growing rapid and short. And then, the flash of a memory: her bottle of pills on the bedside table in Hiraeth’s guesthouse, forgotten there in her haste to leave.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh no.”

“What is it?”

“It’s—” Her mouth was dry and it was hard to speak. She cleared her throat, vision blurring at the corners. “I forgot my sleeping pills. I don’t know how to sleep without them.”

Preston pushed off the desk and walked over to her. Still standing, he looked down at her with a furrowed brow. “What keeps you awake at night?”

It was not the question she’d expected him to ask. It rattled Effy from her panicked state, softening the sharp pulse of adrenaline. No one had ever asked her such a thing before, not since she was a child, babbling about the creature in the corner of her room.

It took her a few moments to find the words to reply.

“I get afraid,” she said at last. “Not of anything specific, really—it’s this bodily thing. Somatic thing. It’s hard to explain. My chest gets tight and my heart beats really fast. In the end I guess I’m scared that something bad will happen to me while I’m lying there. I’m scared that someone will hurt me.”

The words came out all at once—breathless, stammering. She hadn’t mentioned the Fairy King by name, but the rest was true enough.

She tried to gauge Preston’s reception. He was only looking at her with the same furrowed brow, the same concern.

“Is there anything that helps? I mean, aside from the sleeping pills.”

No one had ever asked her that, either, not since the doctor had thrust the pills into her hands. Effy looked at him, feeling very small, but not necessarily in a meek, prey-animal sort of way. She said, “I suppose it helps not to be alone.”

Silence fell softly over the strange room. Preston drew in a breath. And then he said, very carefully, “I could stay.”

Effy blinked at him in surprise, her cheeks instantly growing hot. Preston flushed too, as if only just realizing his words had a certain implication.

“Not like that,” he assured her, running a nervous hand through his hair. “I’ll even sleep on the floor.”

In spite of herself, Effy laughed. “You don’t have to sleep on the floor.”

The bed was easily big enough for two, even if they were not touching. The next few moments unfolded in silence as well: Preston turned around, face to the wall, so that Effy could strip out of her sweater and trousers and into her nightgown, and slip under the wine-colored duvet.

Preston turned around again and sat hesitantly on the edge of the bed. Effy gave him an encouraging look, though her cheeks were still splotchy with heat, and he shifted to lie down beside her. Her beneath the covers, him atop them. Facing each other. Not touching.

She had never been so close to him before. His eyes were fascinating from this vantage point, light brown ringed with green, gold daubs around the irises. His freckles were pale, winter-faded. She suspected they would become more prominent when summer returned. His lips were stained just a little bit from the brandy.

While Effy looked at Preston, he looked at her. She wondered what he saw. Master Corbenic had seen green eyes and golden hair, something soft and white and pliable.

Sometimes she wanted to tell someone everything that had happened, and see what they had to say about it. She had already heard the version of the story in which she was a tramp, a slut, a whore. She had heard it so many times, it was like a water stain on velvet; it would never quite come out. She wondered if there was another version of the story. She didn’t even know her own.

Surely Preston couldn’t guess at all the things running through her mind. Unlike Effy, he looked very tired. Behind his glasses, his eyelids had begun to droop. That was something funny: his left eyelid seemed to droop slightly more than his right. From far away, she never would have noticed.

“Sleepy yet?” he asked, his words somewhat slurred.

“Not really,” she confessed.

“What else can I do?”

“Just?.?.?. talk,” she said. She had to lower her gaze, embarrassed. “About anything, really.”

“I’ll try to think of the dullest topics I know.”

She smiled, biting her lip. “They don’t have to be dull. You could—you could tell me something new. Something you’ve never told me before.”

Preston fell silent, contemplating. “Well,” he said after a moment, “if you want to know why I remember ‘The Mariner’s Demise’ so well, it’s because there’s an old Argantian saying that’s eerily similar.”

“Oh?” Effy perked. “What is it?”

“I’ll tell you if you promise you won’t flinch at the sound of our heathen tongue.” The corner of his mouth twitched upward.

Effy just laughed softly. “I promise.”

“Ar mor a lavar d’ar martolod: poagn ganin, me az pevo; diwall razon, me az peuzo.”

“Is that really Argantian?”

“Yes. Well, it’s the Northern tongue. It’s what grandmothers speak to their eye-rolling grandchildren.” Preston smiled faintly.

“What does it mean?”

“‘Says the sea to the sailor: strive with me and live; neglect me and drown.’”

“That does sound a lot like something Myrddin would write,” Effy said. It was the first time, she realized, that she’d heard Argantian spoken by a native. It was beautiful—or maybe just Preston’s voice was. “Say something else.”

“Hm.” Preston frowned, considering. Then he said, “Evit ar mor beza? treitour, treitouroc’h ar merc’hed.”

“What’s that?”

Amusement crinkled his eyes. “‘The sea is treacherous, but women are even more treacherous.’”

Effy flushed. “That doesn’t sound like something your grandmother would say.”

“You’re right. She would clap me on the back of the head for that one.”

“Tell me another,” said Effy.

Preston pursed his lips, eyes glazing over for a moment as he thought. At last, he said, “Ar gwir garantez zo un tan; ha ne c’hall ket beva? en e unan.”

“I like how that one sounds the best,” Effy said. “Tell me what it means.”

Behind his glasses, Preston’s eyes fixed on her. “‘Love is a fire that cannot burn alone.’”

Effy’s heartbeat skipped. “It sounded a lot longer in Argantian.”

“I’m paraphrasing.” His voice grew lower, sleepier. “I promise I’m not secretly swearing at you.”

“I didn’t think that.” Effy’s own eyelids were beginning to feel heavy. “That helped, though. Thank you.”

Preston didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes had slid shut. After a few moments, his breathing slowed, his chest rising and falling with the rhythm of sleep.

Very gently, so as not to disturb him, Effy reached over and took off his glasses. He didn’t shift at all.

A curiosity overcame her, and she slipped the glasses onto her own head for a moment. Effy had wondered, more than once, whether Preston really needed his glasses or if he just wore them to make himself look more serious and scholarly. But when she blinked and blinked behind the thick lenses, her vision blurring and head throbbing, she realized that he did need them after all, and quite badly.

Well. Angharad still eluded her, but that was one mystery solved.

She folded the glasses neatly and laid them on the bedside table. As she turned over, Effy saw one of the hag stones half sunk into the plush carpet. It must have fallen out of her pocket while she undressed. Effy fished it off the floor.

Preston still had not shifted. She turned back over, and held the hag stone up to her eye, holding her breath, pulse quickening.

But all she saw was Preston’s sleeping face: his long, thin nose, winged with the tiny indents his glasses had left, his freckles, the slight cleft of his chin. His skin looked soft; there was a small furrow in his brow as if, even in sleep, his mind was turning on so many things.

Effy lowered the hag stone. Her heart was still pounding, but for a very different reason. She rolled over and set the stone on the bedside table next to Preston’s glasses. Then she pulled the chain on the vaguely kitschy-looking lamp, settling them both into darkness.

Effy did manage to sleep, eventually. When she woke the next morning, Preston had already risen. He was sitting at the desk, Myrddin’s diary open in front of him.

Hearing her stir, he turned around. His normally untidy hair had achieved an unprecedented level of anarchy; the brown strands seemed to all be rebelling against one another, and against his scalp. He had his glasses back on.

The first thing she said as she sat up was, “It’s a good thing Blackmar didn’t peek in.”

Preston’s face reddened. “There was nothing untoward about it. But I can imagine how it might have looked.”

“No, you were very well-behaved.” Effy let the covers fall off her. One of the straps of her nightgown had slipped down her shoulder, and she noticed Preston intentionally averting his gaze as she righted it again. “Thank you.”

“There’s nothing to thank me for,” he said, still not quite meeting her eyes. “I slept well, actually.”

“And you kept your hands to yourself.” She couldn’t help but try to fluster him more, just because she liked the way he looked blushing.

In that room, just her and Preston, she almost forgot they were at Penrhos at all. They could have been anywhere, in this small, safe place just for them, everything quiet and gentle and slow. Even the light crawling in was tender and pale gold.

Reluctantly, Effy got out of bed, and Preston turned around again, facing the wall so that she could dress.

He had stayed dutifully on his side of the bed all night, knees curled to allow for the too-short length of the mattress, even his breathing soft and unobtrusive. He hadn’t touched her, but Saints, she wanted him to.