Wetherell finished with the lamp and handed her the box of matches. Effy took them wordlessly. “Well, I’ll send someone to fetch you in the morning.”
“How far is it to the house?”
“A ten-minute walk, give or take.”
“Depending on the roads?” Effy tried a fragile smile.
Wetherell looked back at her without humor. “Depending on a great many things.”
Then he was gone, and Effy was alone. She had expected to hear him stomping through the grass, but everything was unsettlingly silent. No crickets chirping, owls hooting, or predators shifting behind the tree line. Even the wind had gone quiet.
After growing up in Draefen, with the sounds of the city playing on a relentless loop, cars always honking and people always shouting, Effy found the silence intolerable. It was like two daggers driven into her ears. She drew in a deep breath and let it out again tremulously. She could not allow herself to cry. Today’s pill had already been swallowed.
Standing there in the cold, damp cottage, Effy considered her options. There were very few, and none of them good. She could try to stumble her way through the dark back to Saltney, but she would be at the mercy of the cliffs and the sea and whatever waited out there in the mist. She thought of the thing she’d seen dart across the road, and her stomach folded over on itself.
Even if she did make it down, there were no trains until morning. And then what? She would ride back to Caer-Isel, back to her decrepit dorm room, back to the spiders and soap scum, back to her terrible attempts at cross sections and boys who whispered about her in the halls. Back to Master Corbenic. Back to staring across the snowy courtyard at the literature college, full of envy and longing. She would call her mother to tell her the news, and her mother would sigh with relief and say, Thank you for being reasonable, Effy. You have enough problems to deal with as it is.
Just then, all of it seemed preferable to staying in Hiraeth. But she could do nothing about it until the sun rose.
She opened her trunk and changed into her nightgown, cringing at the feel of the icy stone floor against her bare feet. She opened up her other pill bottle and swallowed her sleeping pill without water, feeling too demoralized to even try the taps. She lit the candle on the bedside table, and extinguished the oil lamps.
Effy was about to crawl under the velvet duvet when a terrible fear plucked at her. She thought again of the creature in the road. It had not been a deer, but it had been nothing human, either; she knew that much. And it had not been imagined. She’d taken her pink pill. Wetherell had seen it, too. Even the doctor, with his medical tomes and his glass bottles, could not have explained it.
Anything could come bursting in, anything. Effy snatched up the candle and walked toward the door, her breath coming in short, cold spurts.
There was no lock, but the door was extraordinarily heavy and bolstered with metal. Iron. Effy ran her finger over the brace, and no rust flaked away under her touch. Everything else in the cottage was ancient, but the iron was new.
As Effy returned, haltingly, to the four-poster, a phrase floated up in her mind. I waited for the Fairy King in our marriage bed, but he didn’t know I was wearing a girdle of iron. Angharad’s words were so familiar, they were like the voice of an old friend. Few things could truly guard against the Fair Folk, but iron was one of them.
Effy knelt over her trunk and took out her copy of Angharad, flipping to the page where she’d underlined that passage in black pen. This was Myrddin protecting her, giving her a sign. Keeping her safe.
She tucked the book under the pillows and pulled the duvet up to her chin. The dark was heavy and still. It was utterly silent, save for the faint sound of water dripping. Wherever the water was, it sounded close.
She was sure she would never be able to fall asleep in this clammy, dense silence, but the sleeping pill did its work. Effy slipped quietly under, the memory of Angharad’s words something close to a lullaby.
Four
We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?
From A Meditation on Water and Femininity in the Works of Emrys Myrddin by Dr. Cedric Gosse, 211 AD
Effy woke the next morning to the sound of iron rasping against stone. The side of her face was wet and strands of damp hair stuck to her forehead. She wiped it dry with the edge of the green duvet. When she looked up, she saw a bit of the ceiling was soaked through—the sound she’d heard last night but couldn’t locate. The nasty, stale water must have been dripping on her for hours while she slept.