A Study in Drowning(80)

There was a low noise, a thrumming sound that seemed to come from the water itself, and Effy remembered, suddenly, all the fairy tales that warned children away from the edges of oceans and lakes. Kelpies, selkies, fairy women wrapped in seaweed who took you to the water and strangled you with their long hair. Arethusa, the consort of the Fairy King, who seduced men with her beauty and then drowned them while singing to cover up the sounds of their desperate, doomed thrashing.

A tense and terrible fear gripped her. She brushed her hand along the wood, quite sure now that it was a shelf. She was as much a fool as the mariner in Myrddin’s poem—if it really was Myrddin’s poem at all—who believed the only thing he had to fear was the might of the sea itself. There were a thousand dark creatures in it. There were a thousand ways to drown.

Effy had once read, in one of those ancient tomes on the sixth floor of the library, about a method of torture practiced in the south, in the pre-Drowning days. The victims were strapped down and forced to drink and drink and drink, until their stomachs burst, until their bodies gave out from the weight of it all. The water cure, it was called. For days after she could not stop imagining all those swollen bodies. Sometimes, she had read, the victim was forced to vomit up all the water and then drink it down again.

Effy’s lungs were starting to burn.

Her fingers found the edge of something, something with a handle she could grasp. She tried to pull but it was too heavy, and her chest felt close to bursting.

Yet somehow she knew that if she broke for the surface now, she would never have the courage to return. So she let her left hand leave the wall, and used both hands to grasp the heavy metal thing and pull.

She tried to swim for the surface, but the thing in her hands—feeling it now, she knew it was a box—weighed her down. Panic loosed itself from her chest. She felt the cold, and the fear, the awful fear that stilled her and pulled her down even farther. Her vision grew black at its edges.

Yet Preston had been wrong about her, in a way. Perhaps she realized it only now. Even though she was afraid of living, she didn’t want to die. Effy was no architect, and she might never be a storyteller, either, no heir to magic and myths and legends, but one thing she knew was survival.

Effy escaped the water and surfaced into a world of stubborn light.

Her eyes were still filmy with blackness, so she couldn’t see Preston. But she felt him as he grabbed her around the middle and hauled her up the stairs, both of them gasping and coughing, and Effy spitting the fetid water out of her mouth.

They lay there for a moment, Effy clutching the box to her chest and Preston clutching her. The water lapped tamely at their feet.

“I—I did it,” she stammered, voice hoarse. “I told you I could.”

“Effy,” Preston whispered, his breath warm against her ear. “Look.”

For a moment she wasn’t sure what he meant; her brain still felt waterlogged, churning like surf break. Her numb fingers curled and uncurled around the edges of the rusted metal box that now felt as if it was a part of her, a fifth limb.

A great daunting padlock jangled as she shifted. But printed at the top of the box, in steadfast black letters, was one word. A name.

Angharad.



The rain was falling in thick sheets as they stumbled down the path toward the guesthouse. Wetherell’s car was gone, frantic tire tracks gouged in the deep mud of the driveway. All around them, as the wind howled, there were the terrible twisting, wrenching sounds of branches being stripped from trees, of leaves being blown away in great swirling gusts.

Effy would have been afraid, but she was too busy concentrating on not freezing to death.

Layered under two coats—hers and Preston’s—she staggered through the mud, holding tight to Preston’s arm. In his other arm, he held the metal box.

Effy was trembling all over, her vision blurring in the half-light, the shadows oily and slick between the trees. For a moment she thought she saw him again, wet black hair flashing, bone crown shining, but when she blinked it was gone. She felt no fear. Whatever was inside the box was the truth, and it would vanquish the Fairy King for good. It would evict him from her mind. It would chain him in the world of myth and magic, where he belonged.

Her own hair was stuck to her forehead and cheeks, freezing there like seaweed in slushy water. Her numb legs trembled under her, and she was afraid that her knees might give out.

Somehow, without her speaking, Preston knew to hold on tighter. He hauled her up to the threshold of the guesthouse.

As he rammed open the stone-and-iron door, a deadly tangle of branches blew by them.

Preston shut the door, muffling the horrible sound of the wind. He took out his lighter and went around lighting the oil lamps and candles, while Effy stood there, clothes dripping onto the floor. Everything felt very heavy, dreamlike.

She looked at the box, which Preston had set down on top of the desk, reading that word, that name, over and over again. Angharad Angharad Angharad Angharad Angharad.

“I’m sorry,” Preston said, jolting her from her reverie. “There’s not much wood in the fireplace, and I don’t think I can get more, since it’s so wet outside . . .”

He trailed off, looking despairing. Effy just blinked at him and said tonelessly, “It’s all right.”

“You should, um, take off your clothes.”

That, at last, made Effy’s heartbeat quicken, cheeks flooding with heat. Preston flushed, too, and quickly added, “Not like that—I just mean, you’re soaking wet.”