Effy clapped a hand over her lips and swallowed it, dry-mouthed.
It took several minutes for the furious drag of her pulse to slow. She’d gone through bottle after bottle of these pills since she was ten years old. It was inside the doctor’s office that she’d first learned to call these moments of panic, these slippings, episodes.
The doctor had held the bottle of pink pills in one hand and wagged a finger at her with the other, as if he were admonishing her for something she hadn’t even done yet.
“You have to be careful with these,” he said. “Only take them when you really need them. When you start seeing things that aren’t real. Do you understand, missy?”
She was ten, and already she’d given up trying to explain that what she saw was real, even if no one believed her.
Effy had looked instead at the tuft of silver hair curling out of the doctor’s left ear. “I understand.”
“Good,” he said, and gave her a stiff, clinical pat on the head. Her mother had bundled the pills into her purse. They had left his office, walking into a damp spring morning, and under a flowering pear tree, her mother had stopped to blow her nose into a handkerchief. Allergies, she’d said. But her mother’s eyes had been rimmed with red and when they got home, she had shut herself in her room for hours. She didn’t want to have a crazy daughter any more than Effy wanted to be one.
Now her surroundings returned to her in pieces: the dark road, the puddle of lamplight, the houses with their shut windows and locked doors. Effy stepped out of the booth, dragging her trunk behind her, and inhaled the salt smell. The rush of waves bathing the rocky shoreline was loud again, oppressive.
She hadn’t been outside for more than a minute before a swath of light beamed down the gravel lane. As it grew closer, the single beam of light cleaved in two, and a black car crunched to a halt in front of her.
The driver’s-side window rolled down. “Effy Sayre?”
At once she was flooded with a staggering, breathless relief. “Yes?”
“I’m Thomas Wetherell, barrister for the Myrddin estate. I was instructed to pick you up at the station.”
“Yes,” she said again, the word pluming white in the cold air. “Yes. Thank you.”
Wetherell frowned at her. He had slicked-back gray hair and an extremely clean-shaven face. “Let me help you with your trunk.”
Once she was inside the car, Effy felt her body go stiff again, her short-lived relief curdling into fear. There were, suddenly, a hundred new worries in her mind. Mainly that she’d made an abysmal first impression.
In the bleary, rain-spattered window, Effy saw a muddled version of herself: nose pink, eyes puffy, cheeks still damp and shiny. She scrubbed at her face with the sleeve of her sweater but only succeeded in reddening her face further. The car clattered down the dark road, and a particularly nasty lurch sent her jolting forward, knees jamming up against the glove box.
Effy bit her lip on a curse. She didn’t want Wetherell to think her a squeamish city girl, even though that was exactly what she was.
“How far to Hiraeth?” Effy asked, as they passed Saltney’s handful of buildings. A pub, a small church, a fish-and-chip shop—in the Bottom Hundred, that was enough to constitute a town.
Wetherell frowned again. Effy had the sense that she would be seeing that frown quite a lot. “Half an hour, maybe more. Depends on the state of the road.”
Effy’s stomach churned. And then the car began to slant sharply upward.
Instinctively she grabbed the handle on the door. “Is that normal?”
“Yes,” Wetherell said, looking at her with sympathetic disdain, something almost approaching pity. “We’re going up the cliffs.”
It was only then that she realized Hiraeth Manor would not be in Saltney at all. Even that flyspeck of civilization was nothing she could count on. Effy’s heart sank further as the car jostled up the cliffside.
She was almost too afraid to look out the window. The moon seemed to keep pace with the car, painting the road and the moldering cliffs in a pallid light. They were white, ribboned with bands of erosion, grown over with moss and lichen and speckled with salt. They looked beautiful against the black enormity of the sea, its titanic waves striking the pale rock over and over again.
Effy was halfway to admiring them when the car jerked to a halt. In front of it, where the road curled up the cliffside, the road was suddenly awash with foam and dark water. She looked to Wetherell in horror, but he scarcely reacted at all. When the tide receded again, he drove on, tires sloshing through the newly wet dirt.