After several hours, Preston brought her back to his dorm room.
As soon as they arrived, he fell into bed without even taking his shoes off. Effy lay beside him, eyelids heavy. Moonlight was streaming through the window, as clear and bright as the beacon of a lighthouse.
Nighttime was still scary. Ordinarily it was when the Fairy King would appear as a vague, dark shape in the corner of her room, his pale hands reaching, his bone crown gleaming. If she did manage to sleep, Master Corbenic waited for her there: the glint of his gold watch and the enormity of his hands. And now her dreams were lurid with images of drowning houses, of the thrashing, uncaring sea.
And the Fairy King, always the Fairy King, in Ianto’s body or his own. She had defeated him in Hiraeth, but would he ever be gone for good? When she closed her eyes, she could still see him. His ghost lingered—or at least, the grief and fear did.
Preston shifted in his sleep, arms circling her waist. His heart thudded softly against her back, with a rhythm as constant as the tide. The walls here were strong. They would hold against anything. There was no need for iron, for rowan berries, for mountain ash.
The danger was real. Effy and Angharad had both proven that, with their wits and their mirrors. The danger lived with her; perhaps it had been born with her, if the rest of the stories about changeling children were to be believed. The danger was as ancient as the world. But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them.
Effy did not have her copy of Angharad under the pillow, but she thought of its last lines, which she knew by heart.
I know you think I am a little girl, and what could a little girl know about eternity? But I do know this: whether you survive the ocean or you don’t, whether you are lost or whether the waves deliver you back to the shore—every story is told in the language of water, in tongues of salt and foam. And the sea, the sea, it whispers the secret of how all things end.
At first the morning was a bit miserable, both of them groggy and Preston nursing a headache. The sun was too bright on their faces. Effy pulled a pillow over her head and groaned as Preston tried to urge her out of bed.
“Coffee,” he reminded her in a lofty, plying voice, and at last she threw off the covers, blond hair plastered to the side of her face.
Coffee was a necessity. They went to the Drowsy Poet and got paper cups, holding them in two hands as they walked down the street along Lake Bala, breath coming in white clouds. It was very cold that morning, but the sunlight was strong, and some of the ice on the lake had melted, veins of blue water showing between the cracks.
Effy tugged her gray coat around herself, the wind raking through her hair. She had forgotten her ribbon, or perhaps it had gotten lost somewhere over the course of the night. They paused at one of the lookouts, leaning over the railing to watch the sluggish tide moving ice along the surface of the lake.
Behind them, the white stone buildings of the university cast broad shadows, as huge as the Argantian mountains on the other side.
Looking at Preston’s homeland across the water made her think of something. “Have you told your mother everything?”
“I called her yesterday, before we went out. She was happy for me, of course, but I think secretly she was a bit glum. She was a fan of Myrddin, too. Even though she lives in Argant, she’s still Llyrian at heart.”
Right when they’d gotten back to Caer-Isel, Effy had gone to the Sleeper Museum. She told no one about it, not even Preston. She took one of the brochures and walked around the crypt, passing by the other Sleepers, wizened men whose alleged magic kept their bodies from decaying.
At last she had come to Myrddin’s glass coffin, and stared at his slumbering face.
It was the first time she had seen it. It was a long and slender face, rather unremarkable, marred by wrinkles and age spots. When their thesis went to print, Effy had wondered, would the magic vanish with it? Would the museum close off the exhibit in shame, would the curators meet in their smoke-filled rooms and decide, grimacing, to remove his body?
Even after everything, the thought had filled her with grief. The truth was very costly at times. How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.
But Effy had learned. Or at least, she was trying to. Better to pen a story of your own. Better to build your own house, with a foundation that was strong, with windows that let in plenty of light.
At least some people, she figured, would always be convinced that Emrys Myrddin had written Angharad. Effy had left the crypt behind, slipping out within a crowd of other visitors, and threw the brochure in a rubbish bin outside.