Yet it was not panic, the same way it had been when she’d seen the Fairy King. This was the opposite, in fact—an eerie and unnatural calm.
All around her there was a stunning, seething silence. The floorboards had stopped their groaning, and Effy could no longer hear the distant sound of the ocean rolling against the rocks, slowly dragging Hiraeth down toward the sea.
Preston was only on the other side of the door, but Effy felt so terribly alone, the house spreading out on all sides like reaching vines.
And then she saw it: a white glimmer at the end of the hall, as if someone had left a window open and the curtain was blowing. But there was no window, no curtain. There was the ragged hem of a dress and a flash of long silver hair. She caught just the end of each, and the heel of a bare foot, pressing up from beneath the surface of her phantom skin like a fisherman’s tangled net and the fleshy sea-thing caught in it.
Effy’s pulse juddered in her throat. The air had turned sharp and fragile and cold, as cold as the heart of winter. This frigid terror caught her by surprise—it was not the fear she’d known all her life, the fear of the Fairy King and his reaching hand. That was a danger she recognized.
This was nothing she knew. It was a novel horror, one that she could only parse once the ghost had vanished. At least—it had to be a ghost. Effy even took one cautious step toward the end of the hall, where the figure had disappeared. The door to the bedchambers was shut, and she had not heard it open. Whatever it had been had passed right through the wood.
It was fleeing something. The thought occurred to Effy as she retreated again, heart pounding crookedly. Watching a dress disappear around the corner and—impossibly—through the shut door was like staring at a dead crow in your path. Everyone, even the most skeptical Northerners, knew it was a death omen.
You didn’t fear the bird itself. You feared whatever terrible, unknowable thing its death portended.
After Ianto’s car had sped away and Effy had picked herself up off the road, she had swallowed one of her pink pills. The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.
Yet still, she had seen the ghost. And the Fairy King had appeared to her in the daylight, as he never had before. In the dark corner of her bedroom, his clawed hand curling around her closet door—but Effy had always believed the sunlight made her safe from him. In Angharad, the Fairy King had come for her at night, when her father and brothers were sleeping too soundly to notice.
There was something wrong here, in Hiraeth, in perhaps all of the Bottom Hundred. Old magic and wicked—or worse, ambivalent—gods. The Fairy King had more power here. The unreal world was close to breaking its fetters.
And Effy had walked right into the center of it, into this sinking house at the edge of the world. Her cheeks and brow were soaked in a cold film of sweat. Whatever reassurances the doctor had given her, they did not matter now. His pills were not enough to stop the waves from crashing over her.
When Effy was able to move her numb legs again, she ran down the stairs and hurled herself out the door, into the blackness of the night, heart pounding like church bells. She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.
Nine
I can hear the mermaids singing
Beneath the rolling, wanton waves,
Their hair as lush as meadowsweet,
Their maidenheads as ripe for plunder
As the gold inside their sunken chests.
From “Great Captain and His Sea-Bride,” collected in The Poetical Works of Emrys Myrddin, 196–208 AD
Morning was the pale gray color of a trout’s belly, and the waves were lolling gently against the shoreline. Effy woke with a start slightly after dawn, the purple and green miasmas of her nightmares still swirling in the corners of her mind.
Her sleeping pills were meant to eliminate even her dreams, to plunge her into total, oblivious blackness, but they hadn’t worked last night, either. She’d spent hours in the throes of nightmares, tossing and turning so violently that the moss-colored duvet slipped off the bed and onto the floor.
She had dreamed of him, of course. The Fairy King and his bone crown. She could not remember a time when she had ever dreamed of anything else. Sometimes the nightmares were sliced through with images of Master Corbenic, but they flipped back and forth so rapidly that at some point, they appeared identical. It was all black hair and reaching hands and water rising to her throat.