She read the engraving aloud, her voice tipping up at the end to make it a question. “‘The only enemy is the sea’？”
And then, to her complete surprise, it was Preston who spoke.
“Everything ancient must decay,” he said, and it had the cadence of a song. “A wise man once said thus to me. But a sailor was I—and on my head no fleck of gray—so with all the boldness of my youth, I said: The only enemy is the sea.”
Effy just stared at him while he recited the lines, his gaze steady behind his glasses, his tone hushed and reverent. She recognized the words now.
“‘The Mariner’s Demise,’” she said softly. “From Myrddin’s book of poems.”
“Yes,” he said, sounding taken aback. “I didn’t realize you knew it.”
“Literature students aren’t the only ones who can read,” she snapped, and then instantly regretted the razor edge to her voice. She’d shown her bitterness and envy too plainly. Perhaps Preston could already guess why she loathed him so much.
But all he said was, “Right.”
His voice was short, his gaze cold and aloof again. Effy shook her head, as if trying to dispel the hazy vestiges of a dream. She wanted to evict from her mind that one fragile moment she and Preston had shared.
Ianto cleared his throat. “My father was always his own greatest admirer,” he said. He waited for Effy to step aside and then shut the door, returning the key to his collar. “Let’s all go eat some breakfast. I won’t have you making a churlish host of me.”
But Effy excused herself, insisting that she needed air. It wasn’t a lie. She could scarcely breathe in that ruin of a house.
She clambered up the moss-laden steps and through the path onto the cliffside. This time she was careful not to stand too close to the edge. The crumbling white stone looked like the slabs of ice that floated down the river Naer in the winter: churning and fickle, nothing you could trust to hold beneath you. Effy squeezed her eyes shut against the biting wind.
Perhaps there had been no other applicants to the project at all. Perhaps she was the only student who had looked at the poster and seen a fantasy, while the others had seen the dreadful reality.
At last Effy understood: this was why Ianto had sought out a student. No seasoned architect would try to build a house on the edge of a sinking cliff, on a half-drowned foundation. Not even in reverence to Emrys Myrddin.
It’s beyond you, Master Corbenic had said, and he was right. He was like a splinter she couldn’t get out from under her nail. The memory of him stung at the oddest times, when she’d done as little as curl her fingers to reach for a coffee mug.
Far below, the waves gnawed at the cliffside. Effy could no longer see it as anything but consumption, dark water eating away at the pale stone. Her knees buckled beneath her and she sank hopelessly down onto the rippling grass.
The truth was, she had seen many fine and beautiful things underneath all the damp and rot, like chests of treasure waiting to be dredged up from a shipwreck. Plush carpets that must have cost a fortune, candelabras made of solid gold. But none of it could be salvaged from the rot and the rising sea.
It was the task of a fairy tale, the sort of hopeless, futile challenge the Fairy King himself might have set. In her mind, she saw that creature from the road. It turned toward her, opened its devouring mouth, and spoke: Sew me a shirt with no seam or needlework. Plant an acre of land with one ear of corn. Build a house on a sinking cliff and win your freedom.
She had never thought Myrddin would set a task so cruel. But she did not know this man, the one who had kept his own family trapped in a sinking, fetid house, the one who had let everything around him fall to ruin. The man she had spent her whole life idolizing had been strange and reclusive, but he had not been coldhearted. It all felt so terribly wrong. Like a dream she wanted desperately to wake up from.
It was Preston’s voice in her ear now, his hushed recitation. The only enemy is the sea.
Five
Myrddin’s reception is as curious as the man himself. Some critics accuse him of excessive romanticism （see Fox, Montresor, et al.）。 Yet Angharad is grudgingly accepted, even by his detractors, as a profound and surprising work. His admirers—and there are many, both critical and commercial—insist that the relatability of his work, the universalism, is intentional, reflecting a keen understanding of the human condition. In this manner, he is generally considered worthy of his status as national author.
From the foreword to The Collected Works of Emrys Myrddin, edited by Cedric Gosse, 212 AD