Ianto gave Effy coffee in a chipped mug. The back of his hand was covered in black hair, just like Master Corbenic’s.
Effy took one sip, but the coffee tasted as sour as the air. Preston held his own mug but didn’t drink from it. His hand kept fluttering back to his pocket, and Effy remembered how he had stuffed his cigarettes in there. His fingers were long, thin, nearly hairless. Feeling heat rise to her cheeks, she tore her gaze away.
“I really should get back to work,” he said, but Ianto was already ushering them into the dining room. There was a long table with a moth-eaten white cloth over it, the ends stained like the muddy hem of a dress.
An odd and very dusty chandelier dangled precariously from the ceiling. Effy had never seen anything quite like it before: shards of mirrored glass, carefully cut into narrow diamonds like icicles, light bouncing from one to the next in a rippling glimmer. It almost made it look like it was moving, even though the air in the room was oppressively still.
“That’s lovely,” Effy said, pointing up. “Where did you get it?”
“I think it was an acquisition of my mother’s. I don’t truly remember. I can’t say we’ve done a lot of dining in here recently,” said Ianto, and gave a short laugh that fell limply in the silence.
They passed through the rest of the rooms on the first floor: a pantry that even rats and roaches had abandoned, a living room that had certainly not seen very much living lately, and a bathroom that made even Ianto frown in tacit apology.
By that point, Effy’s stomach was churning so viciously, she thought she might retch.
Ianto took them up the stairs, pointing out each of the portraits on the way. None were of real people—the Myrddin family had no aristocratic pedigree and therefore no ancestral heirlooms. Emrys had been the son of a fisherman. No, these were paintings of characters and scenes from Myrddin’s books.
Effy saw Angharad in her marriage bed, pale hair strewn out among the pillows, iron girdle glinting at her waist. She saw the Fairy King, black hair streaming past his shoulders like a slick of fetid water, his colorless eyes seeming to follow her as she climbed. Effy paused mid-step, heart lurching. That hair, those eyes, the slender, jagged form like a gash in the fabric of the world—
“Mr. Myrddin—um, Ianto,” she said. “I saw something last night, in the dark—”
“What’s that, Effy?” Two steps ahead of her, Ianto’s voice sounded distant, disinterested. But Preston was looking at her with an inscrutable expression, as if waiting for her to keep speaking.
“Nothing,” she said after a moment. “Never mind.”
The entrance to the upstairs landing was a wooden archway decorated with carvings. Intricate vines and seashell outlines surrounded the solemn faces of two men.
“Saint Eupheme and Saint Marinell,” Preston said. Then he ducked his head, as if regretting that he had spoken at all.
Saint Eupheme was the patron of storytellers, and Saint Marinell the ruler of the sea and the patron of fathers. Ordinarily she might have been curious to see who Myrddin had chosen to bless his threshold. But now she only felt vaguely ill.
“I know you might think it blasphemous to have a portrait of the Fairy King beside the likeness of saints,” Ianto said, breaching the archway. “But my father was a Southerner through and through. He never left this estate, did you know that? After the publication of Angharad. He took no interviews, gave no speeches. They called him mad, his critics, but he didn’t care. He didn’t leave this house until the Sleeper Museum came to load his corpse into their car. And—well, I won’t bore you with the details. All I meant to say is that despite his thoroughly Southern upbringing, my father never sought to humanize or pardon the Fairy King in any way.”
Effy thought of Myrddin’s Fairy King: charming, cruel, and, in the end, pitiful in his corrosive desires. He had loved Angharad, and the thing he loved the most had killed him. She frowned. Surely there was nothing more human than that.
“I would suggest the opposite, actually.” Preston spoke up unexpectedly, his tone cool. “Stripped down to his essence, as he is in the end when Angharad shows him his own reflection in the mirror, the Fairy King represents the very epitome of humanity, in all its viciousness and vulgar fragility.”
That was how Angharad had finally slain him: by showing the Fairy King his own countenance in the mirror. There was a beat of silence. Ianto turned slowly toward Preston, pale eyes narrowing.
“Well,” he said in a low voice, “I suppose you are the expert among us. Preston Héloury, student of Cedric Gosse, the university’s preeminent Myrddin scholar. Or perhaps I should say Gosse’s errand boy—I presume he’s far too busy to pick through old letters in a house at the bottom of the world.”
Preston said nothing after that, but around the spine of his notebook, his knuckles turned white. Effy stood still for a moment in shock. He had been bold enough, articulate enough, to voice precisely what she had only thought quietly to herself. She had absolutely no interest in letting him know it, of course, but it seemed that on the topic of the Fairy King . . . she maybe almost agreed with him.
Effy pushed it out of her mind. She didn’t want to share any common ground with Preston, especially not when it came to Angharad.
Ianto led them down the hallway, naked glass bulbs flickering on the walls. The first door on the left was cracked open.
“The library,” he said, turning to Effy. “I’m sure you’ll agree there’s the most work to be done in here.”
Effy followed him into the room. A single greasy window poured light onto the overflowing bookshelves, the three-and-a-half-legged desk, the melted-down candles. A stained armchair peered out from behind one of the shelves like an old cat, ornery at being disturbed. The rotted wood floor creaked and moaned under their feet, heavy with so many stacks of books. They were overflowing the shelves and spilling onto the ground, spines ripped and pages torn out, sitting in puddles of their own bled ink.
It was several moments before Effy was able to speak. The question that rose to her lips surprised her. “Was it like this all your life?” she managed. “Did your father keep it this way on purpose—”
“Unfortunately,” Ianto said in a clipped tone. “My father was a genius in many respects, but it often meant he had little care for the mundane, unpleasant tasks of daily life.”
Should she have been taking notes? She felt woozy. Myrddin had been an odd man, a recluse, but there was no reason he had to live in such squalor. Effy could no longer see him as the enigmatic man in his author photo. She could only picture him now as a crab in its slippery tide pool, oblivious to being drenched over and over again by the water.
“Let’s keep going,” she said, hoping her voice did not betray how weary she felt. In her peripheral vision, she saw a little furrow appear between Preston’s brows.
The door to the next room was closed. Ianto pushed it open, and Preston immediately pressed forward, lodging himself in the threshold.
“This is the study,” he said. “I’ve been keeping my things in here.”
What could he possibly have to hide? Maybe he was examining Myrddin’s coffee rings after all. Maybe he had dug up Myrddin’s dentures. Another wave of nausea washed over her.
“I’d really like to see it,” Effy said. Sick as she felt, she didn’t want to miss an opportunity to goad him. And his caginess had made her curious.
Preston eyed her with immense disdain, lips going thin. But as it turned out, there was nothing incriminating or embarrassing in the study: there was a ripped chaise, a blanket tossed over its back, that he had clearly been sleeping on, and a desk scattered with papers. Cigarette butts lined the windowsill.