“I’ve seen him my whole life,” she whispered. “Ever since I was a little girl. No one ever believed me.”
Angharad looked at her steadily. “No one believed me, either. Not about the Fairy King. Not about him using my husband and then my son as his vessels. And certainly not about the words I wrote. About my book.”
“We believe you,” Preston said. “We, ah, read your letters.”
“Which ones? I thought Greenebough had them all burned.”
“We found them under your bed,” said Effy. “We went to visit your father at Penrhos—it seemed like they’d just gotten left behind somehow, gathering dust . . .”
All of this, she only now realized, was very humiliating to recount. Her cheeks heated. Angharad’s wrinkled brow wrinkled further.
“Hm,” she said at last. “It sounds like you two are going to be a bit of a problem for Marlowe and my father.”
“Ianto tried to kill us for it,” Preston said. “Or it wasn’t him, I suppose, if—”
He trailed off again, appearing somewhat hopeless. Effy didn’t precisely blame him for being unable to take the revelation about the Fairy King in stride. Of all the skeptics she had ever met, he was the most skeptical by far.
“My son.” A look of devastation crossed Angharad’s face. “He has too much of his father in him. Had. The Fairy King can sense weakness and wanting in men. It’s like a wound, a gap that he can use to slip inside.”
Effy tried not to think of Ianto in his final moments, his mouth smearing against hers so hard her jaw still throbbed. There had been another Ianto, too, one she’d seen emerge in particular moments, like a seal briefly surfacing from the water. He’d been kind to her when they first met, hopeful about the house she would never build and the future he would never see.
The best parts of him were all too familiar to her. He, too, had liked to believe in impossible things. It was not his fault that the Fairy King had used him.
“I’m sorry,” Effy said, and it still felt like not nearly enough.
Angharad waved a hand, though her green eyes looked damp and overly bright. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose you have quite a lot of questions. Let’s sit.”
Angharad lit a fire with what little dry wood there was, and they all sat down on the floor in front of it. The blue death shade had receded from the tips of Effy’s fingers, leaving them tender and pink. She pressed close to Preston as the wind shook the walls, rain turning the window glass marbled and opaque.
“I was eighteen when I met Emrys Myrddin,” Angharad began. “I cannot say I had any idea back then that one day we would be wed, that we would have a son together, that all of this would come to pass. This.” She laughed hollowly. “My life. Back then Emrys was just a handsome stranger, an employee of my father, and all I knew was that when I asked questions, he answered them. I could not see the Fairy King behind his eyes.”
Preston leaned closer. “How old was Myrddin then?”
“Thirty-four.” Angharad looked into the fire. “When I was young, I believed I had invited all that came to pass. I believed that I wanted it.”
Effy’s stomach lurched. “The letters we saw . . . your father wasn’t happy that you and Myrddin, um . . .”
“Had an affair,” Angharad said, her voice clear. “That’s what we all called it then. An illicit thing, all parties equally to blame. Myrddin was unwed, but it was still terribly scandalous, to have relations with a young girl, your best friend’s daughter. That was another thing no one believed—that it had all begun so innocently. I was a young girl and my father had no time for me. I wanted him to look at some of my poems, but he waved me off. He said that girls’ minds were not fit for storytelling; we were too capricious and inconstant. Those were his words exactly—banal and redundant, if you ask me. That’s why the only enduring work of Colin Blackmar is a dull poem children read in primary school.”
It was such a shock to hear her deride her own father that Effy let out an inappropriate and too-loud laugh. “‘The Dreams of a Sleeping King’ really is terrible, isn’t it? Why did Greenebough Books pick it up?”
“Oh, I’m sure he saw a gap in the market for rote poetry that can teach nine-year-olds about metaphor and simile. The elder Marlowe was very shrewd. I’ve heard no similar praises sung of his son.”
“No, I expect not,” Preston said. “We met him, at one of your father’s parties. He was a lecherous sot.”