Effy flushed. “That doesn’t sound like something your grandmother would say.”
“You’re right. She would clap me on the back of the head for that one.”
“Tell me another,” said Effy.
Preston pursed his lips, eyes glazing over for a moment as he thought. At last, he said, “Ar gwir garantez zo un tan; ha ne c'hall ket beva? en e unan.”
“I like how that one sounds the best,” Effy said. “Tell me what it means.”
Behind his glasses, Preston’s eyes fixed on her. “‘Love is a fire that cannot burn alone.’”
Effy’s heartbeat skipped. “It sounded a lot longer in Argantian.”
“I’m paraphrasing.” His voice grew lower, sleepier. “I promise I’m not secretly swearing at you.”
“I didn’t think that.” Effy’s own eyelids were beginning to feel heavy. “That helped, though. Thank you.”
Preston didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes had slid shut. After a few moments, his breathing slowed, his chest rising and falling with the rhythm of sleep.
Very gently, so as not to disturb him, Effy reached over and took off his glasses. He didn’t shift at all.
A curiosity overcame her, and she slipped the glasses onto her own head for a moment. Effy had wondered, more than once, whether Preston really needed his glasses or if he just wore them to make himself look more serious and scholarly. But when she blinked and blinked behind the thick lenses, her vision blurring and head throbbing, she realized that he did need them after all, and quite badly.
Well. Angharad still eluded her, but that was one mystery solved.
She folded the glasses neatly and laid them on the bedside table. As she turned over, Effy saw one of the hag stones half sunk into the plush carpet. It must have fallen out of her pocket while she undressed. Effy fished it off the floor.
Preston still had not shifted. She turned back over, and held the hag stone up to her eye, holding her breath, pulse quickening.
But all she saw was Preston’s sleeping face: his long, thin nose, winged with the tiny indents his glasses had left, his freckles, the slight cleft of his chin. His skin looked soft; there was a small furrow in his brow as if, even in sleep, his mind was turning on so many things.
Effy lowered the hag stone. Her heart was still pounding, but for a very different reason. She rolled over and set the stone on the bedside table next to Preston’s glasses. Then she pulled the chain on the vaguely kitschy-looking lamp, settling them both into darkness.
Effy did manage to sleep, eventually. When she woke the next morning, Preston had already risen. He was sitting at the desk, Myrddin’s diary open in front of him.
Hearing her stir, he turned around. His normally untidy hair had achieved an unprecedented level of anarchy; the brown strands seemed to all be rebelling against one another, and against his scalp. He had his glasses back on.
The first thing she said as she sat up was, “It’s a good thing Blackmar didn’t peek in.”
Preston’s face reddened. “There was nothing untoward about it. But I can imagine how it might have looked.”
“No, you were very well-behaved.” Effy let the covers fall off her. One of the straps of her nightgown had slipped down her shoulder, and she noticed Preston intentionally averting his gaze as she righted it again. “Thank you.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for,” he said, still not quite meeting her eyes. “I slept well, actually.”
“And you kept your hands to yourself.” She couldn’t help but try to fluster him more, just because she liked the way he looked blushing.
In that room, just her and Preston, she almost forgot they were at Penrhos at all. They could have been anywhere, in this small, safe place just for them, everything quiet and gentle and slow. Even the light crawling in was tender and pale gold.
Reluctantly, Effy got out of bed, and Preston turned around again, facing the wall so that she could dress.
He had stayed dutifully on his side of the bed all night, knees curled to allow for the too-short length of the mattress, even his breathing soft and unobtrusive. He hadn’t touched her, but Saints, she wanted him to.
Twelve
What defines a romance? All scholars seem to converge on a single point: it is a story that must have a happy ending. And why is that? I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful worlds.