“So it was a romance,” Effy said. Preston gave her a dour look.
“At first,” Angharad replied. “You know, I never changed a word from the beginning of the book. I didn’t want there to be any signs. I wanted to preserve the way I felt when I wrote it, when I thought it was going to be a romance. I wanted the audience to be convinced that they were reading a romance as well.”
Effy opened her mouth to speak, but Preston was quicker. “So we were both right,” he said, “in a way. It is a romance—until it’s not.”
Angharad dipped her head. “The protagonist doesn’t know—and I didn’t know, then—what it would all become. I wrote the first part before I knew. Before that night I spent with Emrys in his apartment. That—”
It was the first time Angharad had stopped so abruptly in her telling, and the sudden silence felt as hard and rough as a rock dropping from some great height. It was a long and unbearable silence, during which Effy’s blood turned thick with despair.
The rain beat down on the roof. At last, Angharad opened her mouth again.
“I had a little hand mirror,” she said, voice low now. “After we made love for the first time, we lay in bed together, and Emrys nodded off to sleep. But I felt like there was a fire in my veins, a humming in my fingers and toes, and I couldn’t get myself to sleep. So I sat up and combed my hair in the mirror; what else was I going to do? I felt as bodiless as a ghost. I could not trust my own form any longer. I was there in bed beside him, and when the mirror caught Emrys’s sleeping form, I saw the Fairy King behind me instead.”
Effy’s breath caught. Even in the recounting, decades later, Angharad’s fear was so palpable and so familiar that her own stomach lurched with it. Preston’s grip on her hand grew tighter.
“I didn’t believe it, of course,” she said. “I thought my own eyes were lying to me. How long had I been hearing that a woman’s mind couldn’t be trusted? I dropped the mirror in shock and it shattered all over the floor. I remembered the books I’d read at the library—how if the Fairy King saw his own reflection, it would destroy him. But Emrys was sleeping, and only I had seen the truth.
“What I had seen occupied my whole being for weeks afterward. The rest of the book flowed out of me like no story or poem ever had. I finished it in no more than a fortnight. It was a book made of my own fears and hopes, about a girl who had seen terrible things but, in the end, defeated them.”
“How did Myrddin get his hands on it, then?” Preston asked. “And how did it all . . . become his?”
Angharad smiled ruefully. “I was so caught up in the world I had created inside my mind that I forgot the real one existed, for a while. I suppose that’s why I became careless enough to be caught. My father found one of Emrys’s letters to me. He was furious, of course. Not that he cared for my sake, but because it undercut his power. Like someone planting on your land without your permission, or putting up a fence around what used to be yours.”
The words made Effy’s blood roar in her ears, like water rushing down the cliffside. She wanted to clap her hands over them, to drown it out, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. All the hurt was what made it real. The hurt that transcended all the years stretched between them, tying together two different girls on two different shores, half a century apart.
“At the same time we were discovered, I was discovered. Emrys found the manuscript, newly completed, in the drawer of the desk I used when I visited him. I still don’t know if it was Emrys who read it or the Fairy King. Either way, he recognized that the book could bring him money, fame. Even eternity.”
“A place in the Sleeper Museum,” Effy said.
Angharad nodded. “The next thing I knew, I was dragged into my father’s sitting room, with my father and Emrys and Marlowe all gathered around me in their armchairs, looking solemn. Their brows wrinkled as they laid out the architecture of my future.”
Architecture. The word caught at Effy like a thorn. She and Angharad had been caught in the same trap, muzzled, made silent by the brick walls built around them. “And what did they say?”
“That I had been very bad, of course.” Angharad gave a thin smile. “Lying to my father, seducing his former employee and friend. What sort of licentious, depraved girl would do a thing like that? Certainly not one who could be trusted to live her own life. Certainly not one who could have believably authored a book like the one I had written.”