Shakily, Blackmar rose to his feet. In the time it took him to stand, Effy watched a fly land on the taxidermy deer head and crawl into one of its nostrils. The deer was unperturbed. Dead, as it should be.
“I’m sorry,” Blackmar said plainly. “I’m an old man now, and early to bed. I’ll have the help show you to your rooms.”
Their trunks had already been placed in two adjacent bedrooms upstairs. Effy’s room had opaque black curtains and an enormous blue sea anemone sitting on the desk, frozen in timeless suspension. There was a full-length mirror but it had been flipped over to face the wall instead. For some reason Effy felt it would be a bad idea to turn it forward.
The bed was, strikingly, unmade: a morass of sea-green sheets and an incongruous purple duvet, the color of wine straight from the bottle. In opposition to the rest of Penrhos, there was nothing stodgy about this room; it had a bit of chaos to it.
If Effy had been allowed to decorate her own room as a child, it might have looked a bit like this. She sat on the edge of the bed, letting out a breath.
Preston leaned over the desk, arms crossed. “Blackmar did get cagey, didn’t he? The moment we brought up Angharad.”
“He did.” Effy chewed her lip. “There’s something there. I don’t know what it is. But we’ll have a chance to talk to Greenebough’s editor in chief tomorrow.”
Although everything they’d learned so far appeared to be pushing toward Preston’s theory of Blackmar as the true author, Effy just couldn’t force herself to accept it. It wasn’t just her allegiance to Myrddin, though she still felt it, that childlike admiration. There was something else. Secrets buried under years of dust. An emotion that was inarticulable.
“That still doesn’t give us much time,” Preston said. “If we don’t get back to Hiraeth tomorrow night, Ianto will be very suspicious.”
But it was not Ianto she was thinking about. It was the Fairy King, the creature with the slick black hair and the bone crown. Here at Penrhos she felt safe from him. Here that world of danger and magic felt properly chained and fettered.
“We’ll just have to get back then,” Effy said, voice shrinking. “I’m sorry I can’t help drive.”
“No, that’s all right. I don’t mind driving. We’ll get back to Hiraeth before midnight, I promise.”
Midnight was a fairy-tale thing. She didn’t know if Preston had been thinking about that when he promised it, but Effy was remembering all the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bell struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to put those thoughts out of her mind. “Tomorrow we’ll speak to Greenebough’s editor and get the answers we need.”
Preston nodded. “For now I suppose we’ll just . . . sleep on empty stomachs.”
Effy laughed softly. She found it odd, too, that Blackmar had offered them brandy with no food to accompany it, but who was she to question the man when he had been generous enough to entertain all their probing questions?
Up to a point, of course.
She reached for her purse and began to dig for her bottle of sleeping pills. She no longer minded if Preston saw them. He already knew she was a changeling child. He had learned her true name. He knew what she believed about the Fairy King.
But she searched and searched, and still her hand closed around nothing. Panic began to swell in her chest, her breaths growing rapid and short. And then, the flash of a memory: her bottle of pills on the bedside table in Hiraeth’s guesthouse, forgotten there in her haste to leave.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh no.”
“What is it?”
“It’s—” Her mouth was dry and it was hard to speak. She cleared her throat, vision blurring at the corners. “I forgot my sleeping pills. I don’t know how to sleep without them.”
Preston pushed off the desk and walked over to her. Still standing, he looked down at her with a furrowed brow. “What keeps you awake at night?”
It was not the question she’d expected him to ask. It rattled Effy from her panicked state, softening the sharp pulse of adrenaline. No one had ever asked her such a thing before, not since she was a child, babbling about the creature in the corner of her room.
It took her a few moments to find the words to reply.
“I get afraid,” she said at last. “Not of anything specific, really—it’s this bodily thing. Somatic thing. It’s hard to explain. My chest gets tight and my heart beats really fast. In the end I guess I’m scared that something bad will happen to me while I’m lying there. I’m scared that someone will hurt me.”