And then, all at once, they were standing on the edge of a cliff.
The wind was blowing hard enough to make her eyes sting, and Effy blinked furiously. The salt-streaked stone of the cliffside tumbled down to a rocky shoreline, where the waves rolled in over and over again, drenching the pebble beach. The sea stretched out to the line of the horizon, choppy and blue gray and dotted with caps of white foam. Seabirds swooped through the iron-colored sky, water glistening on their beaks.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. Preston just stared ahead, frowning.
She was going to make a snippy remark about how standoffish he was being. But then she heard a sound—a terrible sound, like the wrenching of a tree from its roots, loud and entirely too close.
Effy looked down in horror: the rock was crumbling under her.
“Watch out!” Preston’s hand closed around her arm. He pulled her to safety just as the outcropping where she’d been standing fell down into the sea.
The shattered rocks vanished beneath the water, each crash grim and final.
Effy stumbled back against Preston’s chest. Her head was jammed under his chin and she could feel the throb of his pulse, the heat of his body through his shirt.
They both jerked away from each other, but not before she managed to get a good glimpse of his notebook, near enough now to read the name embossed on its cover: P. Héloury.
“Don’t stand so close to the edge of the cliff,” he snapped, buttoning his jacket shut as if he wanted to forget that—Saints forbid—they had ever touched. “There’s a reason the naturalists are up in arms about a second Drowning.”
“It’s you,” Effy said.
His eyes narrowed. “What?”
She felt breathless. She had spent the last weeks conjuring a wicked version of P. Héloury in her mind, a perfect amalgam of everything she despised. A literature student. A shrewdly opportunistic Myrddin scholar.
An Argantian.
“You’re the one who took out my books,” she said at last, the only words she could summon as her blood pulsed with adrenaline. The memory of standing in front of the circulation desk, the boy’s number in bleeding ink on the back of her hand, filled her with a jilted anger anew. “On Myrddin. I went to the library and the librarian told me they had all been checked out.”
“Well, they’re not your books. That’s the entire premise of a library.”
Effy just stared at him. Her hands were shaking. She had practiced arguments in her mind against her imagined version of P. Héloury, but now that she was standing before him, all eloquent reasoning had abandoned her.
“What are you even doing here?” she bit out. “Pawing through a dead man’s things so you can steal what you need for some . . . for some scholarly article? I’m sure you can write a paragraph or two about the coffee rings on his desk.”
“Myrddin has been dead for six months now,” Preston said tonelessly. “His life story is more than fair game.”
The wind snatched at Effy’s hair in a fury, nearly yanking it free from its black ribbon. Preston folded his arms over his chest.
His impassive reply made her stomach roil. She searched the morass of thoughts in her mind, trying to find something she could use, an arrow that could pierce his stubborn facade. At last, an idea.
With a trembling voice, Effy said, “How did you even get here? Argantian students with temporary passports can’t leave Caer-Isel.”
Behind his glasses, Preston’s gaze was unflinching. She might as well have not spoken at all.
“My mother is Llyrian,” he said. “Regardless, I could have gotten a scholar’s visa. I’m here with permission from Dean Fogg. Collecting Myrddin’s letters and documents for the university archive.”
She hadn’t noticed his very faint accent before, but she heard it now: the little catch in his throat before the hard consonants, his barely aspirated h’s. Effy had never spent so long speaking to an Argantian before. For a moment, she was fixated on the particularly delicate way Preston rounded his lips when he said his long vowels, but then she blinked and all her anger returned.
“I don’t know why you care about Myrddin at all,” she said. Unexpectedly, her throat tightened, on the verge of tears. “He’s our national author. Not yours. Have you even read his books?”
“I’ve read them all.” Preston’s expression hardened. “He’s a perfectly valid subject of scholarly inquiry no matter the background of the scholar in question.