no man escapes his primal fault,
that silent seep of black decay.
decay is one thing, danger another, i said—laughingly.
but the wise man laughed right back at me, and said—
the sea is a thing no sword can slay.
from “the mariner’s demise” by emrys myrddin, 200 ad
the fairy king was gone, but the house was still sinking, and now there was no time. preston
could have drowned already. the mere thought of it threatened to destroy her, the notion of his
floating corpse—
but when effy flung open the door to the basement, she saw him there, his face pale in the
tepid light, his glasses flashing like two beacons.
she nearly collapsed in relief. he was drowned up to his shoulders, the walls still weeping, but
he was alive. effy stepped down into the black water and swam until she reached him. she threw
her arms around him, holding on to him like a buoy, as the water eddied around them, creeping
upward toward the open door.
“effy,” he gasped. “i thought you were—”
“i thought you were, too.” she touched every part of him that she could reach—his cheeks and
his long, narrow nose, his forehead and chin, the line of his jaw that she’d kissed last night, the
throat that pulsed beneath her hand. her head throbbed, but she paid it no mind. signs of life, she
thought. they could both still survive this.
eventually, her hands wandered down his arms until she reached the manacles holding him
fast to the wall. effy grasped the chains and pulled. preston pulled, too, desperately straining
forward against his bindings, until both were breathless. the stake had not budged an inch.
panic began to seep into her. “it won’t move.”
“i know.” preston’s voice trembled, his breath against her cheek. “i’ve been pulling this whole
time—i’m held fast. effy, you have to get out of here.”
she let out a low, shaky laugh, a sound that contained no humor at all. what else could she do
but laugh? it was absurd.
“don’t be stupid,” she said. “i’m not leaving you here. i’ll find something to break the chains
—”
she was interrupted by another terrible crashing noise—thunder, glass shattering, floorboards
cracking? effy couldn’t tell anymore. there was so much destruction around them that it had all
begun to sound the same. plaster and dirt rained from the ceiling. the water had risen to effy’s
chin.
“there isn’t any time,” preston said quietly. “you need to leave.”
“no.” effy locked her arms over his shoulders again, digging her fingernails in. “no.”
“if you don’t, we’re both going to die here, and what’s the use in that? you can still make it
down to saltney, take the car keys out of my pocket and—”
she hated him then, well and truly hated him, for trying to be so damned reasonable. the
fairy king was real, which meant they were far beyond the point of reason.
and besides—there was no reasoning with the sea.
“you’re not being fair,” effy choked out. “do you really think i can just walk up these stairs
and close the door behind me and leave? after everything . . .”
a sob drowned out the rest of her words. it had risen in her throat without her noticing, and
she wasn’t aware she was crying until she tasted a bitter tang in her mouth. tears, blood, seawater
—all of it tasted the same. salt and salt and salt. preston was now submerged to the chin.
“i wish we could have stayed there,” preston whispered into her hair. “forever—impossibly.
i’m sorry for saying all that inane nonsense about things only mattering because they don’t last.
that was hubris, i think. i don’t want to die here. i want—”
his voice broke, and effy was wrecked all over again. tears rolled down his cheeks, and effy
reached up and tried to brush them away, because how could he do it when his hands were tied?
she lifted his glasses and kissed his nose, then his mouth, tasting nothing but salt. preston choked
against her lips, a strangled sob wrenching itself from his chest. the water was past their chins
now, leaking into their mouths.
“i love you.” effy pressed her forehead against his.
“i love you,” preston said, voice wavering. “i’m so sorry it’s ruined us both.”
a part of her wanted to smile, wanted to laugh, even, but if she opened her mouth, the water
would pour in. she closed her eyes, then opened them again. preston stared back at her, gaze
unblinking behind his wet glasses. she wanted him to be the last thing she saw.
yet—familiar words rose up in her mind. if there’s one thing i know, it’s survival. she had
stared down the fairy king, vanquished him at last. she could not let it end like this. if that was all
she was—a survivor—she would be one until her very last breath.
effy reached down and began to yank furiously at preston’s chains again. she pulled so hard
she could feel her skin tearing, and preston strained, too, as the water rose to the bridge of his
nose. but still the stake held fast.
and then—impossibly—another pair of hands closed over hers.
i have to be dreaming, she thought. perhaps she was already dead. perhaps her escape had
been an illusion after all. perhaps ianto had killed her, or the fairy king had taken her; it didn’t
matter which. but she kept pulling, driven only by instinct now. preston strained. the phantom
hands pulled, too. at last, where two pairs of hands had not been enough, three sufficed, and she
felt something give, the stake shifting loose from the wall.
as soon as preston broke free, effy grasped him, still trailing his chains, and hauled them both
to the surface. when effy had blinked the film from her eyes, she saw someone floating in the
water beside them—a woman, white dress and white hair spreading out like a gauzy jellyfish
caught in the surf. her skin was pale and furrowed with age, but her hands, where they had
touched effy’s, were as soft as a girl’s.
effy choked out a laugh, as all three of them staggered up the steps. how absurd, to be rescued
by a ghost.
yet if the fairy king had been real, who was she to question it?
everything else felt very real, from preston’s arm draped over her to the cold, slick stone
against her palms and knees. lightning flashed, illuminating the face of the ghost, wrinkled in
some places but familiar, so familiar it was almost like looking into a gilt-edged mirror.
effy had seen that face trapped in photographs, attached to a nude torso. she had thought the
girl dead, erased from time, but now she stood right there before her.
as the whole house shook with the howling wind, effy was struck by a bolt of knowledge.
“it’s you,” she whispered. “angharad.”
the woman who was not a ghost led them swiftly through the foyer, deftly avoiding the holes in
the floor, as if she had done this a hundred times before. her feet were bare and effy wondered
how they didn’t bleed for all the splintered wood and shattered glass on the ground.
effy and preston limped after her, hand in hand. when they reached the threshold, it took all
three of them, sopping wet and breathing hard, to heave the door open.
the wind had its claws in them immediately. it wrenched effy’s black ribbon from her hair
and nearly swiped preston’s glasses from his face. it blew up angharad’s white robe, sheer with
dampness, until effy could see her bare ankles and knees, and the blue veins pressing up from
underneath her skin like striations in the cliffside. she stopped for a moment, even in the midst of
the deadly gusts, just to stare.
angharad’s hair shuddered around her face. aging, effy realized, was the opposite of alchemy.
what was now silver had once been gold.
“come on, then,” she urged them, in a fine and proper northern accent. “we need to get to
shelter.”
preston’s car was still in the driveway, but leaving hiraeth was a distant dream now. it would
be impossible to drive in this storm, impossible to see through the windshield. as they clambered
down the steps, effy saw the muscle in preston’s jaw clench and unclench. his hand in hers was
freezing.
“where are we supposed to go?” he asked, voice raised over the shrieking wind and the rain
that pelted them ceaselessly.
effy knew. “the guesthouse,” she said. “it will keep us.”
preston looked at her as if she were mad.
“the four walls will stand,” angharad said. “and we don’t have another choice.”
at the very least, preston could recognize the logic in that. his hand gripped hers more
fiercely.
there was no path now; it was all mud and sucking water. they skidded along the edge of the
cliff, limbs flailing, preston’s other arm flying out to catch them both against the trunk of a tree.
the mud had risen nearly to the cuffs of his trousers. overhead branches flew like clumsily loosed
arrows, aimless and deadly.
the hem of angharad’s gown was black. she said, “don’t stop walking.”
effy felt as if she’d been struck by a switch. “i won’t.”
they waded through the mud, through a wasteland of uprooted trees, their trunks split and
their roots splayed to the air like men struck down in the heat of battle. the guesthouse was in
sight now, its four stone walls seemingly unperturbed by the storm.
when at last they reached it, angharad threw her weight against the iron-girded door and
forced it open. effy and preston shuffled through, and preston shut the door behind them, muffling
the sound of the wind.
effy leaned against the desk, trying desperately to catch her breath. she could not feel her legs
under her. when she looked down at her hand, she saw that the tips of her fingers were blue and
trembling.
and yet she could not bring herself to care. she stared at the woman in the white dress as she
wrung out her hair. water dripped from her slim body and pooled decorously on the floor.
of all things to do, preston had begun pacing. he walked back and forth between the door and
the desk, stopping to look effy up and down, and on his second trip, when he noticed effy’s blue
fingers, he took both of her hands in one of his, raised them to his mouth, and blew on them.
“i won’t let you lose another one,” he said.
there were quite a few more pressing injuries, including the torn skin around preston’s wrists
and the wound on effy’s head, but none of that seemed to matter in that moment. effy still felt
mostly numb.
“well,” effy said at last, a bit dizzily, “when things are meant to rot, they will.”
the strangeness of what she’d said made preston’s brow furrow, but angharad’s head shot up,
as if she’d been called by name.
this movement seemed to alert preston to her presence again, and he stopped blowing on
effy’s fingers long enough to say, “thank you. i—thank you.”
angharad nodded once, lips pressed thin.
“it really is you.” preston hesitated, lowering his hands, and effy’s, down from his mouth.
“the mistress of the house. myrddin’s . . .”
he trailed off, and for a moment everything was silent, even the sound of the wind beating
against wood and stone. it was as if the guesthouse, improbably, had been blanketed in a layer of
snow.
at last, angharad inclined her chin.
“yes,” she said. “i am angharad myrddin, née blackmar. my husband has been dead for six
months. my son, i imagine, has died along with his father’s house. but in truth, like his father, he
died months ago.”
the grief in her voice was hard to bear. effy thought of what had become of the fairy king,
now just a heap of dust and ash. ianto had perished along with him, like wine bled out of a
smashed vessel, possessor and possessed both ruined by that one shard of mirror.
inside preston’s grasp, her numb fingers curled.
“i didn’t mean to,” effy said despairingly. “i didn’t mean to kill him, too, i just . . . i didn’t
know. not until it was over. well, i didn’t believe myself.”
to preston it must have sounded like nonsense. but effy knew that angharad would
understand. the older woman hugged her arms around her chest and replied, “there was nothing
else to be done. as i said, my son has been dead for a long time. to become the fairy king’s
vessel is to lose yourself, little by little, like water wearing away stone. ianto fought it as best he
could.”
“i’m sorry,” preston said, blinking. “do you mean to say that the fairy king is real?”
angharad gave him a weary look. “northerners never understand until they see something
with their own eyes. i don’t blame you—i was a naive northerner once, too, who thought that the
stories were just stories and the fairy king was nothing more than paper and ink and southern
superstition. real magic is just cannier, better at disguising itself. the fairy king is devious and
secretive, but he is real. was.”
to hear someone else say it out loud at last—effy’s knees almost gave way under her.
“i’ve seen him my whole life,” she whispered. “ever since i was a little girl. no one ever
believed me.”
angharad looked at her steadily. “no one believed me, either. not about the fairy king. not
about him using my husband and then my son as his vessels. and certainly not about the words i
wrote. about my book.”
“we believe you,” preston said. “we, ah, read your letters.”
“which ones? i thought greenebough had them all burned.”
“we found them under your bed,” said effy. “we went to visit your father at penrhos—it
seemed like they’d just gotten left behind somehow, gathering dust . . .”
all of this, she only now realized, was very humiliating to recount. her cheeks heated.
angharad’s wrinkled brow wrinkled further.
“hm,” she said at last. “it sounds like you two are going to be a bit of a problem for marlowe
and my father.”
“ianto tried to kill us for it,” preston said. “or it wasn’t him, i suppose, if—”
he trailed off again, appearing somewhat hopeless. effy didn’t precisely blame him for being
unable to take the revelation about the fairy king in stride. of all the skeptics she had ever met, he
was the most skeptical by far.
“my son.” a look of devastation crossed angharad’s face. “he has too much of his father in
him. had. the fairy king can sense weakness and wanting in men. it’s like a wound, a gap that he
can use to slip inside.”
effy tried not to think of ianto in his final moments, his mouth smearing against hers so hard
her jaw still throbbed. there had been another ianto, too, one she’d seen emerge in particular
moments, like a seal briefly surfacing from the water. he’d been kind to her when they first met,
hopeful about the house she would never build and the future he would never see.
the best parts of him were all too familiar to her. he, too, had liked to believe in impossible
things. it was not his fault that the fairy king had used him.
“i’m sorry,” effy said, and it still felt like not nearly enough.
angharad waved a hand, though her green eyes looked damp and overly bright. “well,” she
said after a moment, “i suppose you have quite a lot of questions. let’s sit.”
angharad lit a fire with what little dry wood there was, and they all sat down on the floor in front
of it. the blue death shade had receded from the tips of effy’s fingers, leaving them tender and
pink. she pressed close to preston as the wind shook the walls, rain turning the window glass
marbled and opaque.
“i was eighteen when i met emrys myrddin,” angharad began. “i cannot say i had any idea
back then that one day we would be wed, that we would have a son together, that all of this would
come to pass. this.” she laughed hollowly. “my life. back then emrys was just a handsome
stranger, an employee of my father, and all i knew was that when i asked questions, he answered
them. i could not see the fairy king behind his eyes.”
preston leaned closer. “how old was myrddin then?”
“thirty-four.” angharad looked into the fire. “when i was young, i believed i had invited all
that came to pass. i believed that i wanted it.”
effy’s stomach lurched. “the letters we saw . . . your father wasn’t happy that you and
myrddin, um . . .”
“had an affair,” angharad said, her voice clear. “that’s what we all called it then. an illicit
thing, all parties equally to blame. myrddin was unwed, but it was still terribly scandalous, to have
relations with a young girl, your best friend’s daughter. that was another thing no one believed—
that it had all begun so innocently. i was a young girl and my father had no time for me. i wanted
him to look at some of my poems, but he waved me off. he said that girls’ minds were not fit for
storytelling; we were too capricious and inconstant. those were his words exactly—banal and
redundant, if you ask me. that’s why the only enduring work of colin blackmar is a dull poem
children read in primary school.”
it was such a shock to hear her deride her own father that effy let out an inappropriate and too-
loud laugh. “‘the dreams of a sleeping king’ really is terrible, isn’t it? why did greenebough
books pick it up?”
“oh, i’m sure he saw a gap in the market for rote poetry that can teach nine-year-olds about
metaphor and simile. the elder marlowe was very shrewd. i’ve heard no similar praises sung of
his son.”
“no, i expect not,” preston said. “we met him, at one of your father’s parties. he was a
lecherous sot.”
“well, so was my father,” said angharad, still staring into the flames. “he’s too old now, i
think, to be much of a philanderer, and my mother is dead, so i suppose it’s not technically
philandering, but he is vile. i’m sorry you had to meet him.”
she raised her head and looked directly at effy when she said this, green eyes hard and bright.
effy felt herself caught in that gaze, like flotsam in a sea net. angharad’s eyes were so clear, they
were like twin mirrors—nothing like the murky green sea glass that the tide left strewn across the
sand. effy saw her own wavering, miniaturized reflection staring back from them. her blond hair
was a mess and her pale cheeks were splotchy with heat.
“he’s not yours to apologize for,” effy said, tearing her gaze away from her own face. it had
been so long, she realized, since she had seen it.
angharad gave her a small smile. “well. regardless. there are three men in this story, and
none of them ever said they were sorry for anything. they never expressed as much as a twinge of
guilt.”
“guilt,” preston repeated. “guilt over what?”
the fire crackled. thunder rolled like waves against the shore. angharad’s eyes held the
firelight.
“our affair began slowly,” she said. “at first it was nothing more than elbows brushing. the
touch of a knee. then a kiss, apologetic and rueful. another kiss, penitent. then another, heady
and stolen and not regretted at all. emrys feared my father’s wrath, but nothing more.”
effy felt a phantom hand brush against her skull, raking its fingers through her hair. the
whispers of her classmates hummed in the back of her mind, her surname scratched out on the
college roster and replaced with whore. “can you really call something an affair if the man is
nearly twice your age and you’re just, well . . .”
“a girl?” angharad arched her brow.
“yes.” the word felt heavy in effy’s mouth.
“i was eighteen,” said angharad again. “that meant i was a woman, in some people’s eyes.
well—i was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use
me. everyone thought that i wanted it. i convinced myself that i wanted it, too. emrys was always
kind to me. at least, before the fairy king took him over entirely. i suppose it was a bit of
youthful rebellion on my part, too. i hated my father and wanted to spite him.”
at first effy had imagined master corbenic’s hand, with all its rough black hair, palming her
skull. now, with a roil of nausea that made her want to retch, she imagined it was myrddin’s hand
instead, grasping the back of her head and holding it like a fish he expected to try to wriggle free.
“emrys read my poetry,” angharad went on, “and he told me what was good and what was
rubbish. he encouraged me to write more; he said i had a talent. i wanted to be published, too.”
she gave a dry, humorless laugh. “i suppose my dream did come true, in a way.”
effy’s stomach knotted with grief. preston said, gently, “the book—your book—it’s the most
famous book in llyrian history. perhaps that’s cold comfort. i’m sorry.”
angharad shook her head. “for a long time, i stopped even thinking of it as my book. it’s very
hard to believe something when it feels like the whole world is trying to convince you otherwise.”
i know, effy thought. and then, because she could, she said it out loud: “i know.”
“my father despaired of me,” angharad said with a small smile. “my sisters all hated to read.
they played harp and baked tarts and were eager to find husbands who worked at banks. i was the
sort of girl who, in the old stories, caught the eye of the fairy king.”
effy drew a shaking breath as angharad said this. even though she had seen him crumble into
dust, the fear of him had not yet faded. her body remembered what it felt like to be afraid so well
that it would take time, a long time, to teach it something new.
“emrys was the one who told me that.” angharad’s smile was almost sincere now. “back then,
i didn’t understand that it meant he would come for me. i was a northern girl. the fairy king was
a legend—southern superstition, as i said. but those words planted the seed.
“i went to the library in laleston and read all the tomes i could find about the myth of the
fairy king. yet i found that the stories were always about how to keep him at bay, how to hide
from him: the horseshoe you could place over your door, or the necklace of rowan berries you
could wear. they were about the girls he stole and how he killed them. i thought, what if there
was a girl who invited the fairy king to her door? who did not weep when she was taken? who
fell in love with him?”
“so it was a romance,” effy said. preston gave her a dour look.
“at first,” angharad replied. “you know, i never changed a word from the beginning of the
book. i didn’t want there to be any signs. i wanted to preserve the way i felt when i wrote it, when
i thought it was going to be a romance. i wanted the audience to be convinced that they were
reading a romance as well.”
effy opened her mouth to speak, but preston was quicker. “so we were both right,” he said, “in
a way. it is a romance—until it’s not.”
angharad dipped her head. “the protagonist doesn’t know—and i didn’t know, then—what it
would all become. i wrote the first part before i knew. before that night i spent with emrys in his
apartment. that—”
it was the first time angharad had stopped so abruptly in her telling, and the sudden silence
felt as hard and rough as a rock dropping from some great height. it was a long and unbearable
silence, during which effy’s blood turned thick with despair.
the rain beat down on the roof. at last, angharad opened her mouth again.
“i had a little hand mirror,” she said, voice low now. “after we made love for the first time, we
lay in bed together, and emrys nodded off to sleep. but i felt like there was a fire in my veins, a
humming in my fingers and toes, and i couldn’t get myself to sleep. so i sat up and combed my
hair in the mirror; what else was i going to do? i felt as bodiless as a ghost. i could not trust my
own form any longer. i was there in bed beside him, and when the mirror caught emrys’s sleeping
form, i saw the fairy king behind me instead.”
effy’s breath caught. even in the recounting, decades later, angharad’s fear was so palpable
and so familiar that her own stomach lurched with it. preston’s grip on her hand grew tighter.
“i didn’t believe it, of course,” she said. “i thought my own eyes were lying to me. how long
had i been hearing that a woman’s mind couldn’t be trusted? i dropped the mirror in shock and it
shattered all over the floor. i remembered the books i’d read at the library—how if the fairy king
saw his own reflection, it would destroy him. but emrys was sleeping, and only i had seen the
truth.
“what i had seen occupied my whole being for weeks afterward. the rest of the book flowed
out of me like no story or poem ever had. i finished it in no more than a fortnight. it was a book
made of my own fears and hopes, about a girl who had seen terrible things but, in the end,
defeated them.”
“how did myrddin get his hands on it, then?” preston asked. “and how did it all . . . become
his?”
angharad smiled ruefully. “i was so caught up in the world i had created inside my mind that i
forgot the real one existed, for a while. i suppose that’s why i became careless enough to be
caught. my father found one of emrys’s letters to me. he was furious, of course. not that he cared
for my sake, but because it undercut his power. like someone planting on your land without your
permission, or putting up a fence around what used to be yours.”
the words made effy’s blood roar in her ears, like water rushing down the cliffside. she
wanted to clap her hands over them, to drown it out, but she didn’t. she couldn’t. all the hurt was
what made it real. the hurt that transcended all the years stretched between them, tying together
two different girls on two different shores, half a century apart.
“at the same time we were discovered, i was discovered. emrys found the manuscript, newly
completed, in the drawer of the desk i used when i visited him. i still don’t know if it was emrys
who read it or the fairy king. either way, he recognized that the book could bring him money,
fame. even eternity.”
“a place in the sleeper museum,” effy said.
angharad nodded. “the next thing i knew, i was dragged into my father’s sitting room, with
my father and emrys and marlowe all gathered around me in their armchairs, looking solemn.
their brows wrinkled as they laid out the architecture of my future.”
architecture. the word caught at effy like a thorn. she and angharad had been caught in the
same trap, muzzled, made silent by the brick walls built around them. “and what did they say?”
“that i had been very bad, of course.” angharad gave a thin smile. “lying to my father,
seducing his former employee and friend. what sort of licentious, depraved girl would do a thing
like that? certainly not one who could be trusted to live her own life. certainly not one who could
have believably authored a book like the one i had written.”
effy heard preston’s breathing quicken, but he didn’t say a word.
“so all was decided,” angharad said, “by these three stern men in armchairs. emrys could
have me. greenebough could have the manuscript. and emrys could have the glory, but in
exchange, my father would receive all the royalties. ‘consider it a dowry,’ marlowe said.”
now effy understood the opulence of penrhos, the obvious discomfort blackmar had
displayed when they had questioned him about angharad. “so emrys never earned anything from
the book at all?”
“not a penny. he, my father, and marlowe had all done their leering calculations and figured
out the worth of my book and the worth of my life. and what did i get in return? i was not turned
out of my father’s house, disinherited for being a loose woman. a disgrace to the blackmar
name.”
“that’s unbelievable.” preston huffed and shook his head. and then, realizing his error,
hurriedly added, “i don’t mean to say i don’t believe you. just that it’s so egregiously unfair.”
angharad arched a brow and turned further toward the fire. the firelight pooled in all the
crevices of her face, her crow’s-feet and smile lines, the marks of passing time. her hair, dry now,
feathered lightly over her shoulders. pure silver, save for a few enduring strands of gold.
“i never named the narrator, you know,” she said. “the book is in the first person, as of course
you’re aware, and she’s never referred to by name. the fairy king only calls her—”
“‘my darling girl,’” effy quoted. the same thing myrddin had called angharad in his letters.
the words felt terribly heavy.
“so the omission of the main character’s name was intentional?” preston shifted forward
eagerly. “i always thought it was meant to reflect the universality of angharad’s experience, how
her story reflected the stories of thousands of other girls and—sorry. i don’t mean to be rude. i just
have so many questions.”
“i know.” angharad drew her knees to her chest, and she did look almost like a girl then, very
small in her white dress. “i’ll answer them. eventually. but it’s so much to remember. the weight
of a memory is one thing. you get very used to swimming with it dragging you down. once it’s
loosed, you hardly know what to do with your body. you don’t understand its lightness.”
a memory sparked in effy’s mind. “in myrddin’s letters,” she said, “he mentions that
blackmar was bringing angharad to his house. we thought he was talking about the manuscript.
but really he must have meant you.”
angharad nodded. “my father delivered me to emrys like a horse that had been bought and
sold. we were married in a matter of weeks. the book came out not long after that. marlowe
decided the title.”
“i thought it was just cheekiness on myrddin’s part, calling the book she and her.” preston
flushed. “and i thought, initially, that blackmar wrote it. i thought that was the conspiracy we
were trying to uncover.”
“the letters.” effy blinked, as if newly prodded from slumber. “preston, remember? there
were some strange letters, allegedly from myrddin, only his name was spelled wrong. it’s what
made you think at first that they might be forgeries.”
“oh,” angharad said. “about a decade after the book was published, some intrepid reporters
began sniffing around. in a fit of paranoia, emrys burned all of his letters and ripped pages from
his diary. marlowe was even more paranoid, so he drafted some letters that would be proof of
emrys’s authorship, if it ever came to that. it never did, of course. no one cared to look further.
until . . .”
“until me.” preston swallowed, a muscle feathering in his jaw. “and it still took far too long.
i’m sorry. now it feels obvious, like i should have known.”
“well, you came to the answer in the end,” angharad said. “even with the world against you
—marlowe and my father and my son, who was far too much like his father. i must sound as
innocent as a child now. but for all my life, those three were my whole world.”
effy’s voice wavered when she asked, “what about the fairy king?”
“the fairy king was all of them,” said angharad. “every wanting man has that same wound
he can use to slip in. it wasn’t until we were back in the bottom hundred, in hiraeth, that the
fairy king’s hold over emrys became unshakable. his power was at its peak here. still, there
were years of wondering—would the man entering the threshold be my husband, imperfect as he
was, or would he be the fairy king, cruel down to his marrow? it was almost easier when the
fairy king took him over entirely. then i knew to expect his viciousness, and i had my little
mortal tricks.”
“the mountain ash, the rowan berries, the horseshoe over the door,” effy recounted,
realization dawning on her. “all of that wasn’t to keep the fairy king away. it was to keep him
trapped here.”
that was why ianto had so hurriedly rushed her back to hiraeth the day they visited the pub,
back to the fetters that angharad had placed on the house, before the fairy king could take him
over entirely. effy felt another wave of sorrow. ianto really had been fighting the fairy king, as
best he was able.
i had to bring her back, she remembered ianto saying. isn’t that what you wanted?
he hadn’t been talking to a ghost at all. he’d been talking to the fairy king, to the voice inside
his own head, invisible and inaudible to anyone else. and he’d been talking about effy: the fairy
king could not allow ianto to let her slip from his grasp.
“emrys—or the fairy king—smashed all the mirrors,” angharad said. “and of course forbade
me from buying new ones. his power was enough to keep me here, and my mortal trickery was
enough to keep him here. when my husband died, i thought i might at last be free of him. but the
fairy king found a new vessel. my son.”
grief entered angharad’s voice again, like the sea flooding a tide pool.
“i’m so sorry,” preston said again. “for that . . . and for everything you’ve endured.”
angharad’s smile was sad and gentle. “i’m sorry, too. for what my son did, for what the fairy
king did, for what i couldn’t stop them from doing. he did fight, you know—ianto. he could
loosen the fairy king’s bonds sometimes, long enough to leave the house, but eventually, always,
the fairy king would begin to take over again and ianto would have to hurry back. to trap him
here again, in my little web, in my orchard of mountain ash.”
ianto had driven up the cliffs in such a vicious hurry, even as he had been losing the battle. she
had seen the fairy king in the car beside her. it had not been her imagination, a hallucination. the
pink pills could not have stopped him—and neither, in the end, could ianto.
“i could tell he was fighting it,” effy said. “he wasn’t entirely a monster.”
angharad lowered her gaze. “there were times, i confess, that i could have gotten my hands
on a mirror. yet i knew i could not bring myself to use it against my own son, even as i saw the
fairy king’s hold on him grow more complete with every passing day. i invited you here, preston,
in hopes that you might uncover the truth. but you . . .” she turned toward effy, eyes dim. “the
fairy king wanted a bride, and i didn’t know how to keep you safe from him.”
“the guesthouse,” effy realized, and it seemed almost a silly thing now, with the storm
battering the walls and the embers burning with their waning light. “you did protect me. you
ordered ianto to have me stay here.”
angharad appeared almost bashful. “i thought you might take it as an offense. i wasn’t sure it
would be enough to keep you safe—but still, it was something.”
it had not been myrddin protecting her as effy had initially thought; he had not put the iron on
the door. it had been angharad this whole time—everything had been angharad.
effy felt tears prick at her eyes. just as angharad had said, she felt like some enormous weight
had been lifted, and the lightness of her limbs was unfamiliar. like the buoyancy of water. “thank
you.”
“there’s nothing to thank me for.” angharad turned to effy now, green gaze meeting green
gaze. “i had decades to learn.”
“it’s not just that,” effy said. “you have no idea—i’ve read your book a hundred times, maybe
more. it was a friend when i didn’t have any. it was the only thing that said i was sane when the
whole world was telling me i was mad. it saved me in more ways than i can count. because i
knew no matter how afraid i felt, i wasn’t truly alone.”
angharad’s eyes were shining now, too. “that’s all i wanted, you know,” she said. “when i
was young—when i was your age. i wanted just one girl, only one, to read my book and feel that
she was understood, and i would be understood in return. writing that book was like shining a
beacon from a lighthouse, i suppose. are there any ships on the horizon? will they signal back to
me? i never got the chance to know. my husband’s name was all over it, and his was the only ship
i could see.”
“i saw it,” effy whispered. “i see it. and it saved me.”
“well,” angharad said, “you saved me, too. the fairy king is gone. no matter what happens
now, i’m free.”
tears were falling down effy’s cheeks, and even though she tried, she couldn’t stanch them.
the warmth in her chest spread through her blood, all the way to her fingers and toes. her missing
ring finger didn’t ache anymore. that phantom, too, had been banished.
“i’m so sorry,” preston said quietly, “but we couldn’t get it in time—myrddin’s diary, the
letters. the, uh, photographs.” his cheeks reddened. “the two of us know the truth, but the rest of
it has been lost with the house.”
“you found emrys’s diary?” angharad’s voice tipped up in disbelief. “my son didn’t know
that secret room was there. the fairy king might have, but i put iron on the back of the wardrobe,
so he couldn’t get at it even if he wanted to. how did you find it?”
preston glanced over at effy, with a look of great admiration and affection. “she’s very clever,
this one. effy.”
“effy,” angharad repeated. it was the first time she had spoken effy’s name. “i cannot begin to
explain how grateful i am for all that you’ve done for me. both of you. it’s enough, i think, to be
free from this house. and to have even two people who know the truth.”
but effy just wiped her eyes, feeling wretched. feeling angry. it was an uncommon feeling,
unexpected. her weightless limbs suddenly strengthened, as if filled with purpose.
it was not enough. not enough to justify a life spent in obscurity and repression, a girl and
then a woman and then a ghost, alone in that ruined house, tormented endlessly by the fairy king.
it wasn’t fair, and effy could not bear it. she would shout the truth to the world, even if it was only
her voice, and even if it turned her throat raw. she could not bear to be silent any longer.
and she would not return to caer-isel only to lower her gaze to the ground every time a
classmate snickered at her, every time she saw master corbenic in the hall.
she would not go back to that green chair.
as effy’s gaze traveled across the room, it landed on something she had forgotten about until
now.
she lurched to her feet, so abruptly that preston looked frightened and startled, and angharad
blinked in bewilderment. heart beating fast, effy grabbed the heavy box from the desk and
brought it over to them, its enormous padlock thumping.
“we have this,” she said, a little breathless from the effort. “we couldn’t open it, of course,
but . . .”
angharad looked up at her, eyes wide and disbelieving. “how?” she managed. “i thought it
had been lost, drowned . . . that silly line. emrys did write that one, sort of. he wrote all his
poetry, more or less, at least when he was himself. it was after an argument we had, when my
husband was still my husband some of the time. i wanted us to move, before the fairy king took
his body back, but emrys was as deluded as his possessor, driven mad by those cycles of
possession. he said there was something important about living in hiraeth, no matter how close it
was to ruin. i snapped at him, ‘well, everything that’s ancient must decay.’ ‘you can’t fight time,’
i must have said. and emrys snapped back, ‘it’s not time i’m worried about, darling girl. the only
enemy is the sea.’ how did you manage to recover it?”
effy and preston looked at each other. at last preston said, “brave, too. brave and clever, effy
sayre.”
“i can see that,” said angharad. very slowly, she drew her hands up to her throat. she pushed
her hair back over her shoulder and dipped her fingers below the collar of her gown. after a few
moments, she produced a thin chain and, at the end of it, a key.
the key slipped into the lock like a sword at last returning to its sheath. effy saw a little
leather-bound book tucked inside, and yellowed letters wrapped in twine. she saw angharad’s
decorous script, her name and myrddin’s bracketing every page. his at the top (dear), hers at the
bottom (yours); him beginning, her ending.
but effy also saw that the top of the box had been fitted with a mirror, and in that mirror she
watched her own lips parting, her lashes fluttering, her golden hair curling in the firelight. she saw
her face there beside angharad’s, and right above the old letters, past and present and future all
coiled into one moment that felt as tight and tense as a held breath.
effy reached up and felt her own face, watching her movements in the mirror. she traced the
bridge of her nose, trailed gently along the planes of her cheeks and the line of her jaw. the
numbness had receded, and warmth radiated from her skin.
signs of life, as her muscles twitched and jumped at the featherlight touch. signs of life,
everywhere.
