A Study in Drowning(4)
And an Argantian. She couldn’t fathom how there even was one at the literature college, which was the university’s most prestigious, and especially one who was studying Myrddin. He was Llyr’s national author. The whole thing seemed like a terrible knife-twist of fate, a personal and spiteful slap in the face. The name in its precise writing hovered in the forefront of her mind: P. Héloury.
Why had she even thought this might work? Effy was no great architect; she was only six weeks into her first semester at the university and already in danger of failing two classes. Three, if she didn’t turn in those cross sections. Her mother would tell her not to waste her time. Just focus on your studies, she would say. Your friends. Don’t run yourself ragged chasing something beyond your reach. She wouldn’t mean it to be cruel.
Your studies, her mother’s imagined voice echoed, and Effy thought of Master Parri’s disdainful glare. He had held up her one cross section and shaken it at her until the page rippled, like she was an insect he was trying to swat.
Your friends. Effy looked down at the number on the back of her hand. The boy’s 0s and 8s were bulging and fat, as if he had been trying to cover as much of her skin as he could in the blue ink. All of a sudden, she felt very sick.
Someone shouldered roughly past her, and Effy realized she had been blocking the doorway to the library. Blinking, embarrassed, she hurried down the steps and crossed to the other side of the street, darting between two rumbling black cars. There was a small pier that overlooked Lake Bala. She leaned over the railing and rubbed at the third knuckle of her left hand like a worry stone. It ended there, abruptly, in a shiny mass of scar tissue. If the boy had noticed the absence of her ring finger, he hadn’t said anything about it.
Pedestrians brushed past her. Other students with leather satchels on their way to class, unlit cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. Tourists with their wide-lensed cameras moving in an awkward, halting mass toward the Sleeper Museum. Their odd accent drifted toward her. They had to be from the southernmost region of Llyr, the Bottom Hundred.
Beneath her the waves of Lake Bala lapped timidly at the stone pier. White foam frothed like spittle in a dog’s mouth. Effy sensed a dangerous frustration under the meekness of the tide, something fettered that wanted to be free. A storm could come on as quickly as an eyeblink. The rain would cause a sudden bloom of black umbrellas to rise up like mushrooms, and it would wash all the tourists out of the street.
Just faintly, through the ever-present rheum of fog, Effy could glimpse the other side of the lake, and the green land that lay there. Argant, Llyr’s belligerent northern neighbor. She used to think the problem was that Argantians and Llyrians were too intractably different, and that was why they couldn’t stop going to war and hating each other. Now, after living in the divided city for six weeks, she understood that it was the opposite problem. Argant was always claiming that Llyrian treasures and traditions were really their own. Llyr was forever accusing Argant of stealing their heroes and histories. The appointment of national authors, who would eventually become Sleepers, was a Llyrian effort to create something Argant couldn’t take.
It was an archaic tradition, but dutifully followed, even if most Northerners didn’t believe what Southern superstition said: that when Llyr’s tanks rolled across that green land, when their rifles peeked up from the trenches they had dug into Argantian soil, it was the magic of the Sleepers that protected them. That when Argantian guns jammed or an out-of-season fog crept across the battlefield, that was Sleeper magic, too.
For the past several years, the war had been at a standstill. Occasionally the sky rumbled with the sound of distant gunfire, but it could easily be mistaken for thunder. The inhabitants of Caer-Isel, Effy included, had learned to treat it like the white noise of traffic, vexing but unavoidable. With Myrddin’s consecration as a Sleeper, she hoped the odds might turn in Llyr’s favor.
She had no choice but to believe in the Sleeper magic, in Myrddin’s magic. It was the foundation her life was built upon. Though she had read Angharad for the first time at thirteen, she had been dreaming of the Fairy King long before that.
A spray of salt water kissed her cheeks. To hell with that literature student, that Argantian, P. Héloury. To hell with Parri and those terrible cross sections. She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want. She was tired of being afraid she might see Master Corbenic in the hall or the college lobby. She was tired of the memories that swam behind her eyelids at night, those little pieces: the enormous span of his fingers, knuckles whitening as his fist clenched and unclenched.
Effy stood up and retied her hair. Overhead the sky had turned the color of iron, clouds swollen with ominous fury. The tram clanged down the street, louder than the nearing thunder—real thunder this time, not gunfire. She buttoned her jacket and hurried toward her dorm as the rain started to fall.
She staggered into her dormitory damp-haired, water dripping off her lashes and pooling in her boots. Effy yanked them off and hurled them down the hallway, where they landed with two empty thuds. Of course today would end with her getting caught in one of Caer-Isel’s miserable autumn downpours, despite rushing to escape the rain.
Having exhausted a bit of her jilted fury, Effy hung up her jacket more calmly and squeezed out her hair.
The door to her roommate’s bedroom creaked hesitantly open. “Effy?”
“Sorry,” she said, a flush creeping up her neck. Her boots were still slumped at the end of the hallway. “I didn’t know you were home.”