Eight

Eight

The Fairy King had many forms, and some looked, on the surface, identical. Some days I could not tell if the husband who came to me was the one who would kiss my eyes closed with infinite tenderness, or if he would press me down into our bed and not care that I whimpered. Those were the most difficult days. When I could not tell the kind version of him from the cruel. I wished he would be a serpent, a cloven-footed creature, a winged beast—anything but a man.

From Angharad by Emrys Myrddin, 191 AD

It took Effy an hour to reach Hiraeth, her legs numb beneath her, vision blurring and then sharpening in dizzying turns. Her hair was damp and plastered to her face, her stockings ripped to ruins. Also, she was bleeding.

Preston was standing at the top of the stairs, and when he saw her, he lurched down, taking the steps two at a time.

“Effy,” he said, breathless, when he arrived. “Where did you go?”

“Where’s Ianto?”

“He came back half an hour ago, alone.” Preston gestured toward the black car in the driveway. “I tried to ask him where you were, but he just brushed past me and locked himself in his bedroom—what happened?”

Effy coughed, trying to find her voice. Her lip was split and felt puffy, painful.

“I got them,” she said at last. “The blueprints.”

Preston looked at her as if she’d grown scales and fins. “No, I mean what happened to you? You’re covered in blood and—well, dirt.”

“The road is dirty,” Effy said. She wasn’t quite lucid enough to feel embarrassed.

Preston led her up the stairs and into the house. Ianto was still nowhere to be seen—a small miracle—but Wetherell glowered at them from the threshold to the kitchen. He looked as dour as ever, skin washed gray in the watery light.

The stairs to the second floor were more difficult. Effy leaned heavily on the railing as Preston watched her with a tight mouth, shoulders tensed as if he expected her to topple over at any moment.

The portrait of the Fairy King looked fuzzy and kaleidoscopic, the paint colors swirling into an unreadable blur. His face was a pale smudge, featureless.

Maybe this was her punishment for betraying Myrddin, for planning to trample all over his legacy. She choked out something that was almost a sob, too low for Preston to hear.

The Fairy King had never appeared to her in the daylight before.

When they reached the study, it took all of Effy’s strength not to collapse. There was a bright, staccato beat of pain behind her temples. She looked around at all the papers scattered on the desk, the splayed-open books, and the battered chaise longue and felt, for some reason, a quiet thrum of relief.

“Effy,” Preston said again, his voice grave. “What did you do?”

“I jumped out of Ianto’s car,” she replied.

Hearing herself say it out loud made the fog dissipate. She was suddenly aware of how mad she sounded. How mad she had been. She raised a hand to her mouth and felt her swollen lip, wincing.

Preston looked despairing. “How did the blueprints factor into that? I didn’t think your mission would require such daring heroics.”

“There was nothing heroic about it,” Effy said. She was flushing profusely. “I wish there had been. Ianto had already given me the blueprints. I just—I couldn’t stand to be in the car with him any longer.”

That was all she could bear to tell him. What would Preston say if she confessed what she had seen—if she had really even seen it at all? It would be no different than it had ever been, with her mother and her grandparents, with the doctor, with the teachers and priests.

At best Preston would blink at her bemusedly, certain she was making some sort of joke. More likely he would scoff and secretly regret that he had tethered his academic future to some mad girl who needed pills to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

Surely there was no worse ally than Effy in a quest to uncover objective truth.

But all Preston did was shake his head. “And he just left you there? Looking like—like this?”

As Effy had watched Ianto’s taillights vanish in the distance, all she’d felt was relief. She’d been afraid he would pull over and drag her back inside. The vision of the Fairy King, his wet black hair and his horrible, reaching hand, was still playing on the inside of her eyelids.

“I don’t blame him,” she said, voice hollow. “It was a stupid thing to do.”

Preston let out a long breath. “I really didn’t think he’d try to take you out of the house. I’m sorry.”

“What are you apologizing for?”

He blinked, glasses slipping down his nose. “I’m not sure.”

If she’d been in a more coherent state of mind, hearing Preston admit to uncertainty would have pleased her. At last there was something, however trivial, that he didn’t know.

Effy finally had the courage to look down at herself. Her white sweater was damp and smeared with mud. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel her elbow throbbing under her sleeve, blood sticking to the woolen fibers. And though her skirt had emerged relatively unscathed, her hip ached.

Her stockings had suffered the worst: torn beyond repair, both of her knees scraped bloody and stinging enough to make her gasp. Flecks of dirt and tiny pebbles were caught in the mangle of her skin like flies trapped on flypaper. Her nose hurt and she was glad she couldn’t see her face.

There had been no mirrors in Ianto’s car. She was sure of that. In fact, ever since she had arrived in Hiraeth, she had not seen her own reflection once. She could not even see herself in the mirror of Ianto’s cloudy, roiling gaze.

“Here,” Effy said weakly, thrusting her purse at Preston. “I have the blueprints.”

Preston took her purse and set it down on his desk. He didn’t open it or even peer inside. “Effy, why don’t you sit?”

“Why?” A bolt of panic shot up her spine. “I don’t want to.”

“Well,” Preston said, “that’s going to make this a lot more difficult.”

And then he knelt in front of her, and Effy was so shocked that she nearly did topple over. She had to put her hand on the desk to steady herself.

“What are you doing?” she choked out.

“If you don’t wipe away the dirt, your cuts will get infected. Infections can lead to blood poisoning, which, if it remains untreated, will eventually necessitate amputation. And in a way, it would be all my fault if you had to have your legs amputated at the knee, because I was the one who asked you to get the blueprints in the first place.”

He said all this with complete sincerity.

Effy took a breath—partly to steel herself, and partly so she wouldn’t laugh at him. True to his word, Preston began delicately picking the pebbles from her wounded knees. His touch was so gentle, she felt only the faintest nips of pain. His eyes were narrowed behind his glasses, as focused as he’d looked when poring over one of Myrddin’s books.

After a while he seemed satisfied that he had gotten out all the pebbles, and he reached up for the glass of water on his desk. Effy was still so baffled that she hardly reacted when he wet his shirtsleeve and began to dab at her gouged skin. That, finally, elicited a gasp from her.

“Ouch,” she whined. “That really stings.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Almost done.”

The pain was making her woozy again. Gingerly, she let her other hand rest on Preston’s shoulder for balance.

He paused in his ministrations, muscles tensing, and looked up at her. They locked eyes for several moments, but neither of them said a word. After another beat, Preston looked down again, returning to his work.

Effy curled her fingers into the fabric of his shirt. His skin, underneath, was warm, and she could feel his muscles flexing. “How many skinned knees have you treated in your career as an academic?”

“I have to say you’re my first.”

She laughed, almost in spite of herself. “You’re very strange, Preston Héloury.”

“You’re the one who jumped out of a moving car, Effy Sayre.”

“It’s only because I wasn’t wearing my seat belt,” she replied.

It was the second time she’d heard him laugh, and Effy remembered how much she liked the sound of it: low and breathy, his shoulder shaking just slightly under her grip.

In another moment, Preston got to his feet and said, “Let me see your hands.”

Effy held them out. Her palms were scratched but not badly. It looked like she’d tussled with a rosebush. With her fingers splayed like that, the absence of her ring finger seemed glaringly obvious.

She hoped Preston wouldn’t ask about it. That was another question she didn’t want to answer.

“They look all right,” Preston conceded. “I’m confident this will not be what does you in.”

He had a little smear of her blood on his cheek where he’d raised his red-stained hand to adjust his glasses. Effy decided not to tell him.

“That’s a relief,” she said. “I would hate for you to be responsible for my untimely demise.”

Preston laughed again. “I’d never overcome the guilt.”

Effy smiled, but she could not stop thinking of the look in Ianto’s eyes, the change in the tenor of his voice. Could she have imagined it all? Why had he hurried her out of the house, only to hurry her back again? He had driven so fast, with such determination, his words all snarled and low. Her brain had pulsed like a lighthouse beacon, every beat of her heart screaming, Danger. Danger. Danger.

She remembered how Ianto had told the story of the Drowning: how the inhabitants of the Bottom Hundred hadn’t realized they were going to die until they were neck-deep in the water. If she hadn’t flung herself out of the car, would she have drowned there?

Sometimes Effy had nightmares where she was sitting in Master Corbenic’s green office chair, her wrists strapped to the armrests, black, murky water rising around her. She couldn’t escape, and the water kept coming in—and worst of all, in those dreams, she didn’t even struggle. She just gulped down the water as if it were air.

“Do you think he’ll be angry at me?” Effy blurted out. “Ianto, I mean.”

The amusement in Preston’s eyes vanished. “Well?.?.?. it’s not the most tactful way to escape an awkward conversation, I’ll give him that. What did he say to you?”

She drew in a breath. Where would she even begin with explaining it all? She certainly could not tell him about the Fairy King. Preston had been clear enough on how he felt about Southern superstition. Confessing to any of it would reveal her as precisely the sort of unstable, untrustworthy girl Effy was so desperate not to be.

“It was just an awkward conversation, like you said,” she replied at last. “I overreacted.”

“I’m sure he’ll get over it,” Preston said. But his expression was uneasy.

Now that Preston was satisfied that Effy would not perish of her injuries, and now that Effy’s headache had begun to recede and her eyes had cleared, they unfurled the blueprints on the desk. By then it had grown dark, and only a pale trickle of starlight bled through the window. The moon was pearl white and not quite full, cobwebbed with lacy clouds.

Preston lit two kerosene lamps and brought them over so they could read by their orange glow.

The blueprints were very old. Effy could tell because they were actually blue. A decade or so ago, traditional blueprints had become obsolete, replaced by less expensive printing methods that rendered blue ink on a white background. The blueprints for Hiraeth Manor were the bright sapphire color of her mother’s favorite brand of gin. The edges were ragged and much of the ink was smudged and faded.

The first page showed a cross section of the house—far, far better than anything Effy could have dreamed of drawing—and the second showed a floor plan.

Preston squinted. “I can’t make sense of any of this.”

“I can.” Effy was pleased that for once she knew something he didn’t.

She drew her thumb down the page, tracing the outline of the first floor. There was the dining room, the kitchen, the foyer, and the horrifying bathroom she had not even been permitted to lay eyes on. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But when she looked for the door to the basement, she found nothing.

“Interesting,” she murmured.

“What?”

“It doesn’t look like the basement is in the blueprints at all,” she said. “But, well, a basement isn’t exactly something you can tack on at the last minute. It has to be part of the architectural plans from the very start. The only thing I can think is maybe this house was built on a previously existing foundation, one that already had a basement.”

Preston’s jaw twitched. “You mean there used to be another structure here, before Hiraeth? It’s hard to imagine how that’s possible. Even this house seems to defy the laws of nature.”

“It wouldn’t be so strange. The Bay of Nine Bells was ravaged by the Drowning, but that doesn’t mean nothing survived.” Effy looked down at the blueprints again, feeling certain of her theory. “It’s easier to repair an existing foundation than to build something entirely new.”

“You’re the expert, I suppose,” Preston said, though he sounded unconvinced.

It was curious, but it didn’t solve any of their problems, since Preston had point-blank refused to go anywhere near the basement, and his face had turned pale at even the mention of it. Effy scanned the drawing of the second floor. There was the study, and the door out to the crumbling balcony, and then the series of rooms Ianto had forbidden her from seeing: his and his mother’s bedchambers. The larger one had to be the master, and then on the left, Ianto’s.

As was always the case when she came up, Myrddin’s widow caught in Effy’s mind like the prick of a needle.

“You’ve never met the mistress of the house, right?” she asked.

“No,” Preston said. “I’ve never even spoken to her on the phone. She’s old, and I imagine she values her privacy.”

But a chill prickled the back of her neck. “If she values her privacy so much, she wouldn’t have invited the university to poke around here.”

He folded his arms across his chest and replied defensively, “I’m only looking through her husband’s things, not hers. Whoever Mrs. Myrddin is, she’s not relevant to my scholarly inquiries.”

“But haven’t you wondered—outside of your scholarly inquiries—why she’s so reclusive?” All of it felt wrong, had felt wrong ever since she came to Hiraeth, and certainly ever since she saw the Fairy King. “When I’ve asked Ianto about her, he hasn’t said much.”

“We’re not writing a thesis on Myrddin’s widow, Effy. We should just be relieved she’s staying out of our way.”

Effy could think of at least five rebuttals, but in the end she just pressed her lips shut.

She looked back down at the blueprints. The private chambers, which Ianto had barred them from, consisted of two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Perfectly typical. All of it was perfectly typical.

Slightly demoralized but unwilling to admit defeat, she flipped over to the cross sections again.

There was the gabled roof with a very slight pitch, not large enough for an attic, or even a crawl space, as Preston had previously suggested. But along the eastern-facing wall of the house, just near Ianto’s bedroom, there was a narrow strip of white space, something the architect had forgotten to fill in.

Only no architect worth their salt forgot to finish their cross sections (just Effy, and that was mostly apathy, not incompetence), so she leaned over the desk and squinted, trying to measure the size of the empty space against her thumb.

“What is it?” Preston urged. “Do you see something?”

“Yes.” Effy pointed. “It’s not in the floor plan, which is odd, but if you look closely at the cross section, you can see this little bit of white space. Judging by the relative scale of the drawing, it’s just the size of a narrow closet and it’s off Ianto’s bedroom. I’d say it was a mistake on the architect’s part, but I already know you don’t believe in coincidences.”

Though Preston looked affronted, he didn’t argue. “Well, I can believe Ianto is hiding something of his father’s in there. He’s certainly cagey enough.”

“But we can’t go there now.” It was already late; Ianto had retreated to his chambers, and the thought of confronting him again made Effy feel queasy. Whenever her mind was not otherwise occupied, it was immediately filled with the image of the Fairy King, one hand on the steering wheel and the other reaching toward her. She shook her head, trying to dispel the memory.

“No, of course not,” said Preston. “But tomorrow morning Ianto will go out—he always goes down to church on Sundays; it takes about an hour. We can seize the opportunity while he’s gone.”

An hour. That was roughly as long as they had spent in the pub, and Ianto had been in such a vicious hurry to get back. Effy considered bringing it up, but what did it suggest, really? Nothing useful. Just her brain trying to make meaning out of the baseless terror that haunted her like a ghost.

Instead she said, “What about the irrelevant Mrs. Myrddin? You said she never leaves her chamber. She’ll be there, even if Ianto won’t.”

Preston glanced askance at the door, as though he expected someone to come bursting through. “We’ll just have to be quiet so that we don’t disturb her.”

“But what if we do disturb her?” Effy ventured.

“Then I suppose we’ll have to lie,” said Preston. He shifted a little as he said it, shoulders rising. “Just tell her Ianto sent us.”

“That’s not a very good lie.”

“Well, you come up with something, then.” He was very faintly flushed. “We’ll meet back here tomorrow morning. Ianto will be gone by sunrise.”

It still seemed like an extraordinarily bad idea. But Effy couldn’t think of any alternatives. “All right,” she agreed. “Meet here at dawn.”

Preston nodded. As Effy turned toward the door—slowly, so as not to aggravate her gouged knees any further—she felt his gaze on her still. She looked back over her shoulder and saw Preston look down hurriedly, shuffling through some papers on the desk, embarrassed to have been caught watching her.

His flush had deepened. Effy found herself thinking about how lightly he had touched her, and how the pads of his fingers were still stained with her blood.

“Preston?” she said. Her voice sounded strange: small, wondering. Almost hopeful.

He glanced up. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For caring whether or not I die of sepsis,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, you can never be too cautious. People have died in much more banal ways.”

“Thank you for giving me the chance to die of something interesting, then.”

“As long as you don’t throw yourself out of any more moving cars.” There was a slight quiver on the left side of his mouth, as if he were trying not to smile. Behind his glasses, his eyes were solemn. “There are far more interesting deaths out there.”

Effy stepped out of the study and stood in the flickering glow of the naked bulbs that lined the hallway. The moment the door shut behind her, she felt suddenly cold and rooted to the ground, as if something invisible were holding her there. Her breath misted out from her mouth in pale wisps.

Yet it was not panic, the same way it had been when she’d seen the Fairy King. This was the opposite, in fact—an eerie and unnatural calm.

All around her there was a stunning, seething silence. The floorboards had stopped their groaning, and Effy could no longer hear the distant sound of the ocean rolling against the rocks, slowly dragging Hiraeth down toward the sea.

Preston was only on the other side of the door, but Effy felt so terribly alone, the house spreading out on all sides like reaching vines.

And then she saw it: a white glimmer at the end of the hall, as if someone had left a window open and the curtain was blowing. But there was no window, no curtain. There was the ragged hem of a dress and a flash of long silver hair. She caught just the end of each, and the heel of a bare foot, pressing up from beneath the surface of her phantom skin like a fisherman’s tangled net and the fleshy sea-thing caught in it.

Effy’s pulse juddered in her throat. The air had turned sharp and fragile and cold, as cold as the heart of winter. This frigid terror caught her by surprise—it was not the fear she’d known all her life, the fear of the Fairy King and his reaching hand. That was a danger she recognized.

This was nothing she knew. It was a novel horror, one that she could only parse once the ghost had vanished. At least—it had to be a ghost. Effy even took one cautious step toward the end of the hall, where the figure had disappeared. The door to the bedchambers was shut, and she had not heard it open. Whatever it had been had passed right through the wood.

It was fleeing something. The thought occurred to Effy as she retreated again, heart pounding crookedly. Watching a dress disappear around the corner and—impossibly—through the shut door was like staring at a dead crow in your path. Everyone, even the most skeptical Northerners, knew it was a death omen.

You didn’t fear the bird itself. You feared whatever terrible, unknowable thing its death portended.

After Ianto’s car had sped away and Effy had picked herself up off the road, she had swallowed one of her pink pills. The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.

Yet still, she had seen the ghost. And the Fairy King had appeared to her in the daylight, as he never had before. In the dark corner of her bedroom, his clawed hand curling around her closet door—but Effy had always believed the sunlight made her safe from him. In Angharad, the Fairy King had come for her at night, when her father and brothers were sleeping too soundly to notice.

There was something wrong here, in Hiraeth, in perhaps all of the Bottom Hundred. Old magic and wicked—or worse, ambivalent—gods. The Fairy King had more power here. The unreal world was close to breaking its fetters.

And Effy had walked right into the center of it, into this sinking house at the edge of the world. Her cheeks and brow were soaked in a cold film of sweat. Whatever reassurances the doctor had given her, they did not matter now. His pills were not enough to stop the waves from crashing over her.

When Effy was able to move her numb legs again, she ran down the stairs and hurled herself out the door, into the blackness of the night, heart pounding like church bells. She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.