Then her eye caught the patch on his jacket. It was the insignia of the literature college.
“Oh!” she said, abruptly and too loudly. “You study literature?”
“Yes.” The boy met her gaze. “I’m a first-year. Why?”
“I was just wondering . . .” She hesitated. She was sure the request would seem odd. But the morbid, bitter curiosity had pricked at her for so long. “Do you know any Argantian students in your college?”
He frowned. “I don’t think so. Well, maybe a couple, in their second or third years. But it’s not common. I’m sure you can imagine why. I mean, how many Argantians want to study Llyrian literature?”
Her question exactly. “So you don’t know any of them by name?”
“No. Sorry.”
Effy tried not to look visibly disappointed. She knew it was childish to make P. Héloury the avatar of all her bitterness. But it was just so wretchedly unfair. Argant had been Llyr’s enemy for centuries. Why was it that an Argantian could study Llyrian literature, just because he was a man, but she couldn’t because she was a girl? Why didn’t it matter that she knew Myrddin’s books back to front, that she’d spent almost half her life sleeping with Angharad on her bedside table? That once she’d tried to fashion a girdle of iron for herself and laid boughs of mountain ash at the threshold of her room?
“That’s all right,” she said, but the chagrin crept into her voice anyway. The boy was looking at her with bewilderment, so she felt the need to explain. “It’s just, I was trying to take out some books on Myrddin—”
“Oh,” he cut in. “You’re one of Myrddin’s devotees.”
His tone was disparaging. Effy’s face warmed. “I like his work. A lot of people do.”
“Lots of girls.” An expression she couldn’t quite read came over his face. He looked her up and down. “Listen, if you ever want to pick my brain about Myrddin, or anything else—”
Her stomach lurched. “Sorry,” she said. “I really have to go.”
The boy opened his mouth to reply, but Effy didn’t wait to hear it. She just dropped the atlas on the table and hurried out of the room, blood roaring in her ears. It was only once she’d made it down the elevator, out through the library’s double doors, and back into the biting cold that she felt she could breathe again. That same inner voice told her she was being childish, absurd. Just a few words, a narrow-eyed look, and she’d reacted as if someone had jabbed her with a knife.
Her vision was blurry for the entire trek back to her dorm. Rhia wasn’t home, and her own room was nearly empty, everything packed away in the trunk that she would take with her to Saltney. The only thing left out was her copy of Angharad, dog-eared at the page where the Fairy King bedded Angharad for the first time. Beside it, her glass bottle of sleeping pills.
She poured one out and swallowed it dry. If she didn’t, she knew she would dream about the Fairy King that night.
There remained one thing to do.
The door to her adviser’s office seemed wider and taller than the rest of the doors on the hall, like one of the ornamental letters on an old manuscript, embellished and baroque and huge compared to the small, ordinary text that followed.
Effy raised a hand and laid it flat on the wood. She had meant to knock, but somewhere along the way her body had given up her mind’s goal.
It didn’t matter. From the other side there was a shuffling sound, a muttered curse, and then the door swung open.
A blinking Master Corbenic stared down at her. “Effy.”
“Can I come in?”
He nodded once, stiffly, then stepped aside to let her through. His office was how she remembered it: so cluttered with books that there was only a narrow path from the door to the desk, dusty shutters pulled down so that only a knife of light squeezed through. Framed degrees lined the wall like taxidermy animal heads.
“Please,” he said, “sit down.”
Effy stood behind the green armchair instead. “I’m sorry I didn’t make an appointment. I’m just . . .” She trailed off, hating the smallness of her voice. Master Corbenic’s sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing the swathes of dark arm hair and the golden watch glinting within it.
“It’s not a problem,” he said, though his words had a chill to them that made Effy want to shrink down and vanish through that tiny gap in the shutters. “I figured you would come back sooner or later. I heard about your little project.”