A Study in Drowning(57)

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.’”