“Mm,” Ianto said vaguely. The end of his musket was a gaping hole, depthless black. Around him a puddle had formed on the wooden floor. “Perhaps you’ve done enough chatting for today, Ms. Sayre. Mr. Héloury. Effy, I’d like to see some new sketches by this afternoon.”
It was as if he had forgotten everything from yesterday: their time at the pub, her jumping out of the car. His eyes were turbid again, unreadable. Even if Effy had felt brave enough to try, she could not have divined anything from staring into them.
Without another word, Ianto turned and slammed the door shut behind him. All that remained was the puddle of water on the floor.
The whole incident was enough to convince Effy that Ianto was hiding something, even if he didn’t know about the diary. As she tried to work on her sketches downstairs at the dining room table, odd glass chandelier rippling overhead, she could not stop thinking about the photographs of the girl on the chaise. Each one was like a stake driven through her brain.
They were clearly old, though how old, Effy couldn’t say. She thought again of the line scrawled on the back of the last one: I will love you to ruination. The handwriting matched the handwriting in Myrddin’s diary.
And her mind turned even further on that line from Myrddin’s diary: a woman’s mind is too frivolous. Something was wrong with it, all of it—maybe not in the way Preston thought, but in a way that made her chest ache and her eyes burn. At this point, the best possible outcome was that the diary itself was a forgery. That Myrddin had never written those things about women. But that seemed highly unlikely, given the great pains someone—perhaps Myrddin himself—had gone to hide it.
That left her with two options: that Myrddin had believed all those things and still written Angharad （cognitive dissonance, like Preston had said）， or that he hadn’t written Angharad at all.
In that moment, Effy wasn’t sure which would be worse.
She worked half-heartedly on her sketches, fingers trembling around her pencil. It was a good thing she had plenty of practice fumbling her way through architecture assignments with little enthusiasm. But strangely, Ianto never came down to check on her, even as the thin gray light bleeding in through the windows grew dimmer, and finally vanished.
Effy peered through the smudged glass. It was almost totally dark out now, the sun making itself small against the horizon. She folded up her papers and got to her feet.
She meant to return to the guesthouse—really, she did—but somehow her legs were carrying her up the stairs, past the portrait of the Fairy King, who blessedly remained trapped in his frame, past the carvings of the saints, past the door to the study where Preston was certainly poring over the diary.
It had been about this time last night that she had seen the ghost. Dusk, when the war between the waning light and the hungering dark made everything look shuddery and unreal. Effy told herself she only meant to bring the sketches to Ianto, like he had asked. But as she crept toward the door leading to the private chambers, she found herself moving stealthily, trying not to make a sound.
There was the same oppressive stillness she’d felt when she and Preston had entered the chambers earlier. But she did not see the ghost: no flash of a white dress or a naked calf, no curtains twitching. Effy was about to turn back, disappointed, when she heard a voice.
“Had to get out—”
She froze, like a deer at the end of a hunter’s rifle. It was Ianto.
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said, and it was a low, moaning sound, as if he were in pain. “This house has a hold on me, you know that, you know about the mountain ash . . .”
He stopped speaking suddenly. Effy’s blood turned to ice.
And then he spoke again: “I had to bring her back. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Effy waited and waited, her whole body shaking, but Ianto said no more. When she had the strength to move, she lurched unsteadily down the stairs, fear thrumming in her like a second pulse. It was like Ianto had been talking to himself—or talking to something that couldn’t speak its reply.
Something like a ghost.
Ten
When the king was first interred,
He did not dream at all.
It was the abhorrent nothingness
That cast a dreadful pall.
That bleak and black oblivion
Was too much like death to bear.
And so the dreams came like a balm
For the half-dead king’s despair.
From “The Dreams of a Sleeping King” by Colin Blackmar, 193 AD
The next day, Preston was jumpier than usual, flinching at every unexpected sound. He couldn’t seem to get over the fact that Ianto had waved his rifle at them. But that was the least of Effy’s concerns. Ianto’s more overt antagonism didn’t bother her—a man with a gun was an enemy she could easily recognize and comprehend.