He didn’t even have the decency to look scandalized. He just backed up halfway out of the doorway, turning away from her with his hand still on the knob, and said, “Wetherell sent me to make sure you were up.”
Already Wetherell appeared to have very little confidence in her. Effy swallowed, still holding the duvet to her chin, squinting at the boy, who stared determinedly outside. He wore thin-framed round glasses, slightly misted by the dewy morning air.
“Well?” Effy demanded, scowling. “I’m not going to change with you in here.”
That, at last, appeared to offend him. His face turned pink, and without another word, he stepped outside and shut the door after him, more firmly than seemed necessary.
Still glowering, Effy got up and pawed through her trunk. Even her clothes felt somehow damp. She put on a pair of woolen trousers, a black turtleneck, and the thickest socks she owned. She tied her hair back with its ribbon. There was no mirror in the guesthouse, so she would have to hope her face wasn’t too puffy and her eyes weren’t too red. So far, she was zero for two on first impressions.
She shrugged on her coat and pushed through the door. The boy—university age, surely not much older than she—was leaning against the side of the cottage, a small leather-bound notebook in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He had a face that seemed both soft and angular at once, his glasses perched on a narrow, delicate nose.
If Effy had been in a more charitable mood, she would have called him handsome.
When he saw her, he put his cigarettes back into his pocket. He was still flushing a little bit, and resolutely made no eye contact. “Let’s go.”
Effy nodded, but his rudeness turned her stomach sour. The morning light, even through the trees, was bright enough to make her head throb behind her temples. Ungenerously, she shot back, “You aren’t even going to ask my name?”
“I know your name. You haven’t asked mine.”
He was wearing a blue coat, flapping open at the front, that seemed, to her, too thin for the weather, and a white button-down shirt under it. His boots showed some scuffing. All of it made Effy think he’d been at Hiraeth for some time now. But he was not a Southerner; she could tell. His complexion was not quite pale enough, and he picked his way through the forest with a hedging delicacy that bordered on distaste.
Effy relented, her curiosity getting the better of her. “What’s your name?”
“Preston,” he replied.
A stuffy, prim sort of name common in Northern Llyr. The name suited him. “Do you work for the Myrddin estate?”
“No,” he said, and did not elaborate further. He looked her up and down with a raised brow. “Aren’t you going to bring anything? I thought you were here to design a house.”
Effy froze. Without another word, she turned on her heel and hurried back into the cottage. She knelt beside the trunk and yanked out her sketchpad and the first pen she could find, then stomped out again. She no longer felt cold. Her cheeks were burning.
Preston had already continued down the path. She took three comically large steps to catch up with him, trying to account for the difference in the length of their legs. Though he had a slight, almost waifish frame, Preston had to be a head taller than her.
They went on in silence for a few moments, Effy’s eyes still adjusting to the light. In the morning, the forest was less terrifying but even stranger. Everything was too green: the moss growing over every stone and up the trunks of the trees and the long, soft grass under their feet. Overhead the leaves rustled with a sound like the nickering of horses, and the morning dew on the leaves turned crystalline in the sunlight. For some reason, the way the light trickled in reminded Effy of being in a chapel. Memories of dusty pews and prayer books made her nose itch.
The path curled upward, leading them over fallen branches and broken rocks. Effy’s legs were already aching when the trees began to thin. Preston ducked under a low-hanging branch, heavy with moss, and held it up so she could go through after him. The unexpected display of chivalry vexed her. Rather than saying thank you, she shot him a sulky glare.
And then, all at once, they were standing on the edge of a cliff.
The wind was blowing hard enough to make her eyes sting, and Effy blinked furiously. The salt-streaked stone of the cliffside tumbled down to a rocky shoreline, where the waves rolled in over and over again, drenching the pebble beach. The sea stretched out to the line of the horizon, choppy and blue gray and dotted with caps of white foam. Seabirds swooped through the iron-colored sky, water glistening on their beaks.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. Preston just stared ahead, frowning.
She was going to make a snippy remark about how standoffish he was being. But then she heard a sound—a terrible sound, like the wrenching of a tree from its roots, loud and entirely too close.
Effy looked down in horror: the rock was crumbling under her.
“Watch out!” Preston’s hand closed around her arm. He pulled her to safety just as the outcropping where she’d been standing fell down into the sea.
The shattered rocks vanished beneath the water, each crash grim and final.
Effy stumbled back against Preston’s chest. Her head was jammed under his chin and she could feel the throb of his pulse, the heat of his body through his shirt.
They both jerked away from each other, but not before she managed to get a good glimpse of his notebook, near enough now to read the name embossed on its cover: P. Héloury.
“Don’t stand so close to the edge of the cliff,” he snapped, buttoning his jacket shut as if he wanted to forget that—Saints forbid—they had ever touched. “There’s a reason the naturalists are up in arms about a second Drowning.”
“It’s you,” Effy said.
His eyes narrowed. “What?”
She felt breathless. She had spent the last weeks conjuring a wicked version of P. Héloury in her mind, a perfect amalgam of everything she despised. A literature student. A shrewdly opportunistic Myrddin scholar.
An Argantian.
“You’re the one who took out my books,” she said at last, the only words she could summon as her blood pulsed with adrenaline. The memory of standing in front of the circulation desk, the boy’s number in bleeding ink on the back of her hand, filled her with a jilted anger anew. “On Myrddin. I went to the library and the librarian told me they had all been checked out.”
“Well, they’re not your books. That’s the entire premise of a library.”
Effy just stared at him. Her hands were shaking. She had practiced arguments in her mind against her imagined version of P. Héloury, but now that she was standing before him, all eloquent reasoning had abandoned her.
“What are you even doing here?” she bit out. “Pawing through a dead man’s things so you can steal what you need for some . . . for some scholarly article? I’m sure you can write a paragraph or two about the coffee rings on his desk.”
“Myrddin has been dead for six months now,” Preston said tonelessly. “His life story is more than fair game.”
The wind snatched at Effy’s hair in a fury, nearly yanking it free from its black ribbon. Preston folded his arms over his chest.
His impassive reply made her stomach roil. She searched the morass of thoughts in her mind, trying to find something she could use, an arrow that could pierce his stubborn facade. At last, an idea.
With a trembling voice, Effy said, “How did you even get here? Argantian students with temporary passports can’t leave Caer-Isel.”
Behind his glasses, Preston’s gaze was unflinching. She might as well have not spoken at all.