This did not feel like the realm of the Fairy King. She could not imagine him lurking here among the verdant hills, the flower fields and goats.
She certainly could not imagine him sitting in Preston’s seat.
Preston had been driving for two hours now, up serpentine single-laned roads and down again, past villages that were no more than a clutch of thatched-roof houses, huddled together like bodies around a fire. They had only stopped once, for a farmer to cross his cows. Preston drove with consummate focus, his gaze rarely leaving the windshield, and only ever to look at her.
Effy shifted in her seat and squared her shoulders. “Do you need a break?”
“Can you drive?”
“No,” she said. “My mother never let me learn.”
There wasn’t much of a point to it, in Draefen, where trams and taxis could take you wherever you wanted to go, and the houses were pressed together like piano keys, so wherever you wanted to go was never very far, anyway.
She’d once asked for lessons, and her mother had let out an irritated breath. “I can barely trust you to remember to turn off the stove. Why would I want you behind the wheel of a car?”
“That’s all right,” Preston said. “I’m fine to keep driving for a while.”
Inevitably their conversation turned to Myrddin, Blackmar, and the diary. They had thumbed through the book to find all the references they could to Blackmar, and to Angharad.
Myrddin mentioned both quite often. Blackmar struggled with A. tonight, he wrote, the summer before the book’s publication.
“I think Blackmar wrote it,” Preston said at last, and then gave a huff, as though it had exhausted him to make such a bold assertion, with no hedging at all. “Myrddin talks about how Greenebough wanted to ‘reinvent’ him, to lean more heavily into the myth of the provincial genius. But Myrddin never mentions anything about penning Angharad himself. He only ever mentions it when he talks about Blackmar.”
“But it’s strange, isn’t it?” Effy had already turned over this possible conclusion in her mind, and something about it just didn’t feel right. She couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t just about Myrddin, not anymore. It was a bone-deep, blood-pulsing sense of wrongness that beat in her like a second heart. “The way they talk about her—about the book. They always call Angharad ‘she,’ or ‘her.’”
Preston shrugged. “Sailors also call their ships by women’s names. Myrddin’s father was a fisherman. I suspect it’s just a bit of cheekiness on Myrddin’s part.”
“Maybe.” It still felt wrong, in no way that Effy could articulate. “I’m thinking about ‘The Mariner’s Demise’ again. ‘But a sailor was I—and on my head no fleck of gray—’”
“‘So with all the boldness of my youth, I said: The only enemy is the sea,’” Preston finished. “It’s a memento mori. It’s about the hubris of young men.”
“The sea is what, then? Death?”
“Not death, exactly. But dying.”
She arched a brow. “What’s the difference?”
“Well, in that earlier line, right before what you started reciting—‘Everything ancient must decay.’ I think it’s about the sea taking and taking, eating away at you slowly, the way that water, say, rots the wood of your sailboat. The last thing the sea takes from you is your life. So. I think it’s about dying, slowly. The mariner’s hubris isn’t necessarily in his belief that he won’t die, but his belief that the worst the sea can do is kill him.”
Effy blinked. The road ahead bunched and then flattened, splitting the hills like a furrow carved through an ancient hand. “I like that,” she said after a moment.
“Do you?” Preston sounded surprised. Pleased. “I wrote a paper on it. I might incorporate it into my thesis—our thesis. Since you like it.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll happily put my name to that.”
The drive was very pleasant, the day green and blue and eventually, as evening came on, gold. After another hour they stopped at a small shop by the side of the road, and each got a sausage roll wrapped in waxed paper and coffee in a paper cup. Effy poured liberal amounts of cream into hers, and three sugar packets. Preston watched her with judgment over the rim of his own cup.
“What’s the point,” he began, as they climbed back into the car, “of drinking coffee if you’re going to dilute it to that degree?”