“Why?” she cried out, over the sound of the thrashing water below. It was the question that had plagued her more terribly than anything else. “Why me?”
The Fairy King laughed, a lovely and awful sound. “I am not as cruel a creature as all the stories say, Euphemia. I do not come for girls just because they are beautiful. You were a pretty young child, with your golden hair, but there are many pretty children, safe in their beds, who I cannot touch. I come for the girls who are left out in the cold. They cannot belong anywhere else but with me.”
Somehow, her missing finger began to throb, as if she had only just remembered that the loss of it was painful. A phantom pain, eerie and old, but a pain nonetheless. Effy gripped the hag stone, even though she knew it would not save her.
“The world has not been kind to you, Euphemia,” he went on, in his silk-sharp voice. “But I can be. If you obey, if you give yourself over to me entirely, I will be so kind, it will make you weep. When you were young, all I could take was your finger. Now I will have the rest.”
“No,” she said, even as her breath came in rough, panicked spurts. “No. I don’t want to go with you.”
The Fairy King cocked his head, and for a moment he looked quizzical. Almost human. “And why not? What is tying you to this insipid mortal world? Here you are just another beautiful girl who has been treated meanly. With me, you could be something so much greater. With me, you could be a queen.”
Part of her had waited her entire life to hear those words, fearing them and yearning for them in equal measure. Effy let out a tremulous breath, the phantom pain of her missing ring finger still throbbing.
The belief, the hope and the terror both, had kept her alive. At last Effy understood the magic of Hiraeth, its curse and its blessing. Hiraeth Manor, the grand thing that Ianto had wanted her to build, would always be an imagined future, a castle in the air. The magic was the impossibility of it. The unreal could never disappoint you, could never harm you, could never falter under your feet.
But now the real and the unreal had snarled together and it no longer mattered which was which. Effy was staring down the Fairy King in all his immense power, and she was just a girl clutching a hollow stone.
“I’ll do it if you save him,” she blurted out. “Save Preston, and I’ll go with you. I’ll do whatever you like.”
The Fairy King looked at her with a treacherous fondness. “I don’t make slanted deals with mortal girls. Mortal girls make their desperate bargains with me. You have walked into my world already, Euphemia. You took the bait and sauntered right into my trap. I will have you no matter what, my darling girl. You will not elude me again. But it would make me so much happier if you took my hand and came with a lovely smile on your face.”
It would have been painless. Effy knew that. If it was a kind of death, it would be much quicker than drowning, easier than falling into the sea along with this ruined house.
In some way, she had always yearned for this, to slip through the final crack in the world. But she had a rope to tether her now, and walls that stood, and a foundation that was strong.
A seed of something began to bloom in Effy’s mind.
“How would you have me?” she asked carefully, trying to make her voice sound low and sweet. “Would you have me on my knees?”
The idea seemed to surprise the Fairy King, if he were a creature capable of feeling such a thing. He smiled his beautiful smile.
“Yes,” he said. “It would make me very happy, to see you kneel.”
Very slowly, Effy lowered herself to the ground. The broken glass dug into her knees, but she swallowed the pain of it. As the Fairy King stalked toward her, she scrabbled through the wreckage until her hands closed on a long, broad shard of glass, about the size of a small dagger.
“Euphemia,” the Fairy King said, his voice a warning.
“Don’t,” she bit out. “Don’t speak my name.”
And then she held up the shard, the bit of mirrored glass that took in the Fairy King’s form and reflected it right back at him.
He stared at himself for a long moment, seeing, for the first time, his own lovely face, his black hair, his bone crown. The moment felt so heavy that Effy nearly let her arm drop from the weight of it.
Just as she was about to give up, there was a second shuddering metamorphosis: in the mirror, the Fairy King changed. His beautiful face turned waxy and sallow, cheeks hollowed like porcelain bowls. His hair grew silver and brittle and then fell out.
His skin sagged around his bones, creasing with wrinkles, and in the span of seconds he became a very, very, very old man, pitiful and mortal after all.