Effy opened her mouth again, and words poured out.
“No childless woman came for me,” she whispered. “But he did.”
Behind his glasses, Preston’s eyes narrowed. “Who did?”
“The Fairy King,” she said.
The old, barbaric custom was this: In the South, it was believed that some children were simply born wrong, or were poisoned by the fairies in their cradles. These changeling children were awful and cruel. They bit their mothers when they tried to nurse them. They were always given the names of saints, to try to drive the evil away. Effy always wondered whether her mother had picked her name, Euphemia, to be a blessing or a curse. The feminine variation of Eupheme, patron saint of storytellers. Most of the time it just felt like a cruel joke.
But if that did not work, it was the mother’s right to abandon her child: to leave them out for the fairies to take back.
Preston would probably say that was just the pretty truth the Southerners told themselves to sleep easily at night—that they weren’t leaving their children out to die, that a fairy would come to spirit them back to their true home, in the realm of fae. But Effy had seen him. Thirteen years later, and still the image was bright and clear in her mind. His beautiful face and his wet black hair. His hand, reaching out for hers.
Even thinking of it now, her chest tightened with panic. Before the true terror could take hold and plunge her under, Preston’s voice shattered the memory.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “The Fairy King is a story.”
She had heard it so many times that the words didn’t sting anymore. Ordinarily she would have stopped talking right then and there, apologized, told him she was only joking.
But the words kept pouring out.
“He was there with me,” Effy said. “He stepped right out of the river. He was still all glistening and wet. It was dark, but he stood in a puddle of moonlight. He told me he was going to take me, and he was terrifying, but when he held out his hand, I took it.”
That was the hardest part to speak aloud. The ugliest confession, the black rotted truth at the very core of her. She had reached back. Any ordinary child would have shrunk away in fear, would have wept, would have screamed. But Effy had not made a sound. She had been ready to let him take her.
“But my mother returned,” she said. Her voice was thick. “She snatched me up from the riverbank and pulled my hand right out of the Fairy King’s grasp. I saw the look of fury on his face before he vanished. He hates nothing more than to be refused. My mother held me, but where I had touched him, my finger was rotted away. He took it with him, and said he would be back for the rest.”
She held up her left hand, with its missing fourth digit. She didn’t add the last of what the Fairy King had said: That he had taken her ring finger so that no other man could put a wedding band on it. So that she would always belong to him.
“You said it was winter.” Preston’s voice was gentle. “Your finger could’ve fallen off from frostbite.”
That was what the doctor had said, of course. He had bandaged it and given her a brown syrupy medicine to stave off infection, just like, years later, he had given her the pink pills to stave off her visions.
It wasn’t until years later, when Effy first read Angharad, that she had learned what really kept the Fairy King at bay. Iron. Mountain ash. Rowan berries. She had broken off a bough of mountain ash in the park in Draefen and kept it under her pillow. She had stolen her grandfather’s iron candelabra and slept with it in her hand. She had even tried to eat rowan berries, but they tasted so bitter, she spit them out, gagging.
“I know you don’t believe me,” she said. “No one ever has.”
Preston was silent. She could almost see his mind working, the thoughts scrolling behind his eyes. At last, he said, “I suppose that’s why you’re such a big fan of Myrddin’s work.”
“I didn’t read Angharad until I was thirteen,” Effy said, cheeks growing hot. “If that’s what you mean. It wasn’t a child’s imagination—I didn’t have some image of the Fairy King in my mind.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I just meant . . . it must have been easier to believe that there was some magic at work—a childhood curse, the pernicious Fair Folk. Something other than ordinary human cruelty.”
He didn’t believe her. Maybe that was for the best. Her stomach was churning now. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”