Effy couldn’t resist rolling her eyes. “Is that really why you want my help?”
“Not just that. Ianto is shutting me out. He doesn’t trust me. But he trusts you.”
She remembered the way Ianto had laid his hand on her shoulder. How heavy it had felt, how it had pushed her back down into that drowning place. Without thinking, she blurted out, “So what do you want me to do? Seduce him?”
Preston’s face turned strikingly red. “No! Saints, no. What kind of person do you think I am?”
Effy was flushing, too, unable to meet his gaze. Why had she said that? It was more proof that something was broken inside her brain, like a skewing of train tracks. She could never trust anyone’s intentions.
“Do Argantians have a patron saint of truth?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” said Preston. “But I’ll swear by your Saint Una if it makes you happy.”
Somehow, Effy found herself nodding. Her right hand was still clutching Preston’s paper, so she stuck out her left hand, with its missing ring finger.
Preston took her hand and they shook. His palm was soft, his fingers long and thin. Effy usually didn’t like shaking hands with people. She always held on past the point of comfort because she never knew when it was time to let go.
“I swear by Saint Una I’ll help you,” she said. “And I won’t reveal you—us—to Ianto.”
“I swear by Saint Una I won’t betray you,” said Preston. “And I’ll fight for you. I promise your name will be there on the cover sheet, right next to mine.”
Effy held on to him, their fingers locked. She waited for him to twitch, to shake her loose, but he didn’t. The pad of his thumb was ink stained. She wondered if this was some sort of test, if he was trying to judge her mettle. Effy had never thought of herself as someone with much staying power.
Yet there was nothing challenging in his eyes, and Effy realized then that he was giving her the choice. It was a small thing, maybe not worth remarking upon at all. But very rarely did anyone allow Effy to choose.
Finally she let go. Preston’s hand dropped to his side at once, fingers flexing.
“We’ll start tomorrow,” he said stiffly. “Can I have my paper back?”
Mortified, Effy released the page and set it down on the desk. The ink had bled a little onto her palm. “You should have written that one in Argantian, too,” she said.
Preston gave her a thin-lipped look. “I know that now.”
Back in the guest cottage that night, Effy’s mind wouldn’t stop turning. Even after she had swallowed her sleeping pill, she lay awake staring at the damp and moldy ceiling, thinking of the bargain she had struck.
Perhaps in the morning she would realize it was a foolish thing to do. Perhaps she would regret not leaving on the next train.
Perhaps she would regret betraying Myrddin.
But for the moment, all she could feel was a stomach-churning adrenaline. She rubbed at the nub of her ring finger. It was as smooth as a hag stone.
Effy rolled over, hair streaming out over the green pillowcase, heartbeat still quick. When she closed her eyes, she could see Preston’s page of notes, blue ink against white. It was her name he’d scrawled aimlessly in the margins, repeating all the way down the page:
Effy
Effy
Effy
Effy
Effy.
Seven
Angharad is a difficult text to place. Certain passages read as lurid and vulgar, more befitting an erotic tale or a romance, while others have exquisitely rendered prose and great thematic depth. It is not uncommon to see housewives paging through their copies over a pile of laundry, or commuters hunched over their paperbacks on the tram. And yet it is just as common for Angharad to appear on the syllabi of the university’s most advanced literature courses. No other book in Llyrian history can boast such universal appeal.
From the introduction to Angharad: The Annotated Collector’s Edition, edited by Dr. Cedric Gosse, 210 AD
When Effy first came to Hiraeth, she would never have expected to find herself, at the bright hour of seven in the morning, poring over a dead man’s letters with Preston Héloury. Yet that was exactly where she found herself the next day.
“Well,” Preston said, “I suppose you’ll want to know where I’ve left off.”
She nodded.
“I suppose I’ll explain the basis for my theory, then. Myrddin’s family were refugees of the Drowning,” said Preston. “It would seem intuitive for his works to paint the natural world as inherently perilous, unstable, even malicious. Much of his poetry personalizes nature in that way—”