“I warned you away from him, Effy,” he said.
“Ianto . . . ,” she started, but her voice was trembling too much to go on. At its edges, her vision was rippling, fear thickening her belly.
He shifted, rattling the chains that he’d thrown over his shoulder. “Saint Acrasia is your patroness indeed. I see the mark of his mouth on your throat. Defiling yourself, and for an Argantian, of all people—I expected better from a good Northern girl like you.”
This was the Ianto from the pub, the one who had grasped her hand and held on to it until it hurt. If there was any trace of the genial, lighthearted, hopeful Ianto, she could find none of it in his gaze.
“Please,” she said. Bile was rising in her throat. “Please stop.”
It was as if Ianto didn’t hear her, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “And you, Preston Héloury—well. I don’t know how you managed to seduce Effy into your little scheme, but now I know why you’re really here. You claimed you had nothing but respect for my father, for the legacy of Emrys Myrddin.” Ianto reached onto the table behind him, and Effy let out a small, strangled noise of terror, thinking he was reaching for his musket. But instead he picked up a scrap of paper. “‘Execution of the Author: An Inquiry into the Authorship of the Major Works of Emrys Myrddin.’ This is an assault on my father’s legacy.”
“It’s not like that,” Preston tried hoarsely. But Ianto only shook his head and held up his hand, rattling the chains again.
“I might have believed your wheedling lies, had I not found these.” With a flourish, he gathered up the photographs of the girl and then dropped them, letting them flutter to the ground. Effy saw a flash of the girl’s naked calf, her pale hair. “You’re no better than a sleazy tabloid journalist, looking for evidence my father was leading some lascivious double life. I don’t know where you got these, or where you managed to find his diary, but it ends here. This is my father’s house. This is my house. And you’ve come here to wreck it, to ruin it—”
His words were cut off by an enormous crash of thunder, so loud that Effy winced, and a fantastic bolt of lightning that cast the entire room in a clear white light.
The house groaned miserably around them, and from somewhere far below, there was a further crashing sound: more rocks crumbling into the sea.
“Ianto,” Effy said, once the thunder ceased and there was only the howling of the wind. She tried to make her voice low, pliant. What else was left but to try to reason with him? She had really thought the truth might save him, but perhaps it had not come soon enough. “Please—this house isn’t going to survive the storm. We all need to leave, now.”
“Shut up,” Ianto said savagely. His pale eyes were darting back and forth between them, manic and wild. “I called the university in Caer-Isel. It took a bit of convincing, but eventually the dean’s office pulled their files on both Preston Héloury and Effy—excuse me, Euphemia—Sayre.”
It was the first time she’d heard her full name, her true name, in Ianto’s mouth. There was another clap of thunder, and something large and black slammed against the window, hard enough to form an enormous fissure in the glass. A tree branch. Rainwater trickled in.
“It appears you were a bit of a problem for the architecture college, Euphemia,” Ianto went on. “Some funny business with your adviser—you start to think that’s why the university used to bar women from attending at all. They’re all temptresses or blushing maidens, unfit for higher thinking.”
Effy squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop it.”
“Perhaps I didn’t peg you right. Perhaps you’re Amoret, not Acrasia. Perhaps you lay there limp as your adviser had his way—”
It was Preston who shouted then, over the sound of the wind and the thunder. “Stop it! You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, you—”
“They pulled your file, too,” Ianto cut in. “Preston Héloury. What an odd, in-between name. Your mother is a blue-blooded Llyrian, but your father is some Argantian mountain peasant. Was. It took a while, searching through all those newspaper records in Argantian, but I found the obituary. So unpleasant. I can’t think of a much worse way to go, a mind decaying, bleeding water.”
Preston’s grip on her hand tightened. Behind his glasses, his gaze grew hard.
At last the window at Ianto’s back shattered entirely, letting in the rain and wind. The shards of glass were swept up and Effy’s hair blew around her face, tears stinging her eyes.