Page 88 of A Study in Drowning

Of all things to do, Preston had begun pacing. He walked back and forth between the door and the desk, stopping to look Effy up and down, and on his second trip, when he noticed Effy’s blue fingers, he took both of her hands in one of his, raised them to his mouth, and blew on them.

“I won’t let you lose another one,” he said.

There were quite a few more pressing injuries, including the torn skin around Preston’s wrists and the wound on Effy’s head, but none of that seemed to matter in that moment. Effy still felt mostly numb.

“Well,” Effy said at last, a bit dizzily, “when things are meant to rot, they will.”

The strangeness of what she’d said made Preston’s brow furrow, but Angharad’s head shot up, as if she’d been called by name.

This movement seemed to alert Preston to her presence again, and he stopped blowing on Effy’s fingers long enough to say, “Thank you. I—thank you.”

Angharad nodded once, lips pressed thin.

“It really is you.” Preston hesitated, lowering his hands, and Effy’s, down from his mouth. “The mistress of the house. Myrddin’s . . .”

He trailed off, and for a moment everything was silent, even the sound of the wind beating against wood and stone. It was as if the guesthouse, improbably, had been blanketed in a layer of snow.

At last, Angharad inclined her chin.

“Yes,” she said. “I am Angharad Myrddin, née Blackmar. My husband has been dead for six months. My son, I imagine, has died along with his father’s house. But in truth, like his father, he died months ago.”

The grief in her voice was hard to bear. Effy thought of what had become of the Fairy King, now just a heap of dust and ash. Ianto had perished along with him, like wine bled out of a smashed vessel, possessor and possessed both ruined by that one shard of mirror.

Inside Preston’s grasp, her numb fingers curled.

“I didn’t mean to,” Effy said despairingly. “I didn’t mean to kill him, too, I just . . . I didn’t know. Not until it was over. Well, I didn’t believe myself.”

To Preston it must have sounded like nonsense. But Effy knew that Angharad would understand. The older woman hugged her arms around her chest and replied, “There was nothing else to be done. As I said, my son has been dead for a long time. To become the Fairy King’s vessel is to lose yourself, little by little, like water wearing away stone. Ianto fought it as best he could.”

“I’m sorry,” Preston said, blinking. “Do you mean to say that the Fairy King is real?”

Angharad gave him a weary look. “Northerners never understand until they see something with their own eyes. I don’t blame you—I was a naive Northerner once, too, who thought that the stories were just stories and the Fairy King was nothing more than paper and ink and Southern superstition. Real magic is just cannier, better at disguising itself. The Fairy King is devious and secretive, but he is real. Was.”

To hear someone else say it out loud at last—Effy’s knees almost gave way under her.

“I’ve seen him my whole life,” she whispered. “Ever since I was a little girl. No one ever believed me.”

Angharad looked at her steadily. “No one believed me, either. Not about the Fairy King. Not about him using my husband and then my son as his vessels. And certainly not about the words I wrote. About my book.”

“We believe you,” Preston said. “We, ah, read your letters.”

“Which ones? I thought Greenebough had them all burned.”

“We found them under your bed,” said Effy. “We went to visit your father at Penrhos—it seemed like they’d just gotten left behind somehow, gathering dust . . .”

All of this, she only now realized, was very humiliating to recount. Her cheeks heated. Angharad’s wrinkled brow wrinkled further.

“Hm,” she said at last. “It sounds like you two are going to be a bit of a problem for Marlowe and my father.”

“Ianto tried to kill us for it,” Preston said. “Or it wasn’t him, I suppose, if—”

He trailed off again, appearing somewhat hopeless. Effy didn’t precisely blame him for being unable to take the revelation about the Fairy King in stride. Of all the skeptics she had ever met, he was the most skeptical by far.

“My son.” A look of devastation crossed Angharad’s face. “He has too much of his father in him. Had. The Fairy King can sense weakness and wanting in men. It’s like a wound, a gap that he can use to slip inside.”

Effy tried not to think of Ianto in his final moments, his mouth smearing against hers so hard her jaw still throbbed. There had been another Ianto, too, one she’d seen emerge in particular moments, like a seal briefly surfacing from the water. He’d been kind to her when they first met, hopeful about the house she would never build and the future he would never see.

The best parts of him were all too familiar to her. He, too, had liked to believe in impossible things. It was not his fault that the Fairy King had used him.