“I never slept with him.” Her stomach lurched as if she might vomit. “I’ve never even—it’s not fair. Men just say whatever they want and everyone believes them.”
“It’s not fair.” Preston’s voice was low. “I know.”
“We did other things, but not that.” The tip of her nose grew warm, the way it always did when she was going to cry. She tried desperately not to cry now. “And everyone thinks I started it but I didn’t. I never got anything from him. That’s what all the boys at my college said. But he just touched me and I let him.”
“Effy,” Preston said. “I believe you.”
She blinked, half in bewilderment, half to keep the tears from falling. “Then why won’t you . . . ?”
Preston flushed lightly. “I didn’t mean it like that at all, that you were some fallen woman and I—never mind. But I won’t be another man who uses you. I don’t want you to think of me that way, just a shag on a chaise. I don’t want to be something else that keeps you from sleeping at night.”
Effy felt a sob rise in her throat. She pressed the heel of her hand to her eye. “I would never think of you like that. I thought you were . . . cold, frigid, like the stereotypes say. Really. I didn’t know you felt anything at all when you looked at me.”
“I did. I do.” Preston’s grip on her tightened, knuckles folding gently against the small of her back.
She remembered the way he had scrawled her name repeatedly in the margins of that paper: Effy Effy Effy Effy Effy. She wanted to hear him say her name like that, over and over and over again.
She was halfway to begging—fallen woman indeed. What sort of temptress was she if she couldn’t seduce the man she really wanted?
“I’m sorry,” she said miserably. “I’m so, so stupid.”
“Stop it. You’re not.” Preston swallowed, and Effy allowed herself, at last, to put one hand to his throat, feeling it bob under her palm. “I wanted you, too. For so long. It was terrible. Sometimes I could barely eat—sorry, I know that sounds like the strangest thing. But for days I didn’t feel hungry at all. I was . . . occupied. You took away all the other wanting from me.”
She held her hand there against his throat, and Preston held her that way in his lap, and outside, the sea roared against the rocks with a sound like nearing thunder. All the papers, Myrddin’s diary and letters, the photographs, spilled out on the floor, their edges lifted by an uncommon breeze. And still something slid between them, like water through a crack in the wall.
Fourteen
Water finds its way through the smallest spaces and the narrowest cracks. Where the bone meets sinew, where the skin is split. It is treacherous and loving. You can die as easily of thirst as you can of drowning.
From Angharad by Emrys Myrddin, 191 AD
The rain had already begun the next morning, just a light spray of it, enough to cloud the windows of the guesthouse with condensation. Outside, the green world had gotten greener: dripping with rainwater, the leaves and the grass turned jewel-toned and the moss on the trees and rocks looked richer. Well-fed. The wood had turned almost black, damp and breathing. The pieces of sky that showed through the tree canopy were densely gray.
Effy walked up the path toward the house, wind tossing her hair every which way, the sea churning and churning below. The rocks jutted through the slosh of foam like sharp teeth. She squinted and peered down the side of the cliff, but the seabirds had all gone, their nests and eyries abandoned.
Once Effy had read a book about the Drowning that said animals had sensed it coming. The penned sheep had bleated in desperation in the days before the storm, the yoked cattle straining and straining against their binds. In the end, they had all perished, too. Her skin chilled.
That was when she saw it, the flutter of something dark like a piece of fabric caught in the wind. But as her eyes adjusted to the muddled light and she blinked rainwater off her lashes, it took a more solid shape: damp black hair, scraggly as kelp, bone-white skin, and a jagged crown of antlers. Its face was blurred and featureless, as if it were a painting, not yet dry, that had been run over and ruined with rain.
It spoke to her, but it was a language not meant for human ears, something unfathomably ancient, or perhaps she simply could not make out the words over the thrashing rain and wind. It extended its hand, long fingers uncurling, claws at their tips. Effy stood there frozen in terror, water pouring off them both.
And then she ran. The path to the house had already turned mostly to mud, sucking at her boots, the air so fiercely cold she regretted her choice of a skirt and stockings instead of trousers. She ran until she was short of breath, and then she stopped, panting, and looked over her shoulder.