The result was, at least to her novice’s eyes, not half bad. She figured the plan would evolve over time—Ianto wanted a finalized design before she returned to Caer-Isel—but she could do it. She needed to do it.
Ianto led her into the foyer, which, despite the sun and cloudless sky, was still only half filled with gloomy gray light. The puddles on the floor were murky and salt-laced. Wetherell was standing by the entrance to the kitchen, looking stiff and dour and hard-edged. When she said good morning to him, he responded with only a nod.
Effy refused to let him temper her enthusiasm. “This is where I want to start, actually,” she said. “The foyer. It should be flooded with light on a sunny day.”
“That will be difficult,” Ianto said. “The front of the house faces west.”
“I know,” she replied, reaching into her purse for her sketchpad. “I want to flip the whole house around, if we can. The foyer and the kitchen facing east, overlooking the water.”
Ianto assumed a pensive look. “Then the entrance would have to be along the cliff.”
“I know it sounds impossible,” she acknowledged.
Wetherell spoke up. “What it sounds is expensive. Has Mr. Myrddin discussed the financial constraints of the project with you?”
“Not now,” Ianto said, waving a hand. “I want to hear the extent of Effy’s plans. If we need to make adjustments, we can do that later.”
For a moment Wetherell looked like he might protest, but his lips thinned and he sank back against the doorway.
“Well,” she began carefully, “I did think about that. Cost and feasibility. Following my design, it would be necessary to demolish most of the current structure and set the new house back several acres from the edge of the cliff. Given the unpredictability of the rock, the uneven topography . . .” Effy trailed off. A pall had come over Ianto’s face. His look of displeasure told her that their ideas were not, in fact, aligned. Had he not thought of an entirely new structure taking the place of the old?
Ianto’s expression, the darkening of his eyes, filled her with a vague but terrible dread. She shrank back.
But he only said, “Will you come upstairs with me, Effy? I’d like you to see something.”
Effy nodded numbly, immediately feeling foolish for being so afraid. It was the sort of thing her mother would have chastised her for—nothing happened, Effy. She’d been offered that puzzled scorn in lieu of comfort as a child when she’d run to her mother’s room after having a nightmare.
After having the same nightmare, over and over again, that same dark shape in the corner of her room. Eventually she had stopped coming to her mother’s door at all. Instead she read Angharad in the lamplight until her sleeping pills pulled her under.
Ianto led her upstairs, hand gliding over the rotted-wood banister. Effy followed, feeling a bit unsteady on her feet. As they passed the portrait of the Fairy King, she paused briefly and met his cold stare. She hadn’t meant to do it. It felt like a taunt, a reminder that this version of the Fairy King was trapped inside a gilded frame, inside an unreal world.
But the real Fairy King was not muzzled like the one in the painting. And she had seen that creature in the road.
Effy gripped the hag stone in her pocket as she and Ianto reached the upstairs landing. Water was dripping off the carvings of Saint Eupheme and Saint Marinell. Ianto was so tall that it dripped onto his shoulders and his black hair.
He didn’t seem to notice. Living in a place like this, Effy supposed, you might begin to not feel the cold or damp at all.
“This way,” Ianto said, directing her down the hall. The floor groaned emphatically beneath them. He stopped when they reached a small and unremarkable wooden door. “You left in such a hurry the other day, I didn’t get to show you this. Not that I blame you entirely, of course. This house is not for the faint of heart.”
The knob began to rattle and the doorframe began to shake, as if someone were pounding on the door from the other side. Effy tensed, heart pattering. She found herself thinking of Master Corbenic’s office and the green armchair, its loose threads like reaching vines.
Ianto threw the door open. Or rather, he turned the knob and the wind did the rest, nearly yanking the door right off its hinges with a vicious howl. Effy stumbled back instinctively, raising a hand to shield her eyes. It wasn’t until there was a lull in the wind’s wailing that she was able to peer through the open door.
There was a narrow balcony, only half its boards fully intact, eaten away so thoroughly by mold and damp that the floor resembled a checkerboard: stretches of black emptiness alternating with planks of sun-blanched wood. It creaked and moaned in the wind the way Effy imagined a ghost ship would, tattered sails swaying to a banshee’s song.