And she knew exactly how much sympathy her mother had for her nightmares.
“Effy.” Her mother’s voice was so razor-edged, it made Effy’s stomach curdle. “I don’t want you to come home. You can’t. I have work and you’re an adult now. Whatever mess you’ve made, you need to sort it by yourself. Go back to school. Take your medication. Focus on your studies. Let me have my life. You are taking your pills, aren’t you?”
Effy wished, in that moment, that her senses would dull again. She wanted to go to that deep-water place, where she could hear only the churning of the waves above her.
But her mind wouldn’t carry her there. Instead she felt acutely the cold press of the telephone against her ear, and the tightening of her throat, and the panicked, off-kilter beat of her heart. She lifted her hand to rub at the knob of scar tissue where her ring finger should be.
“I’m taking them,” Effy said. “But that’s not—”
She cut herself off. She meant to say that’s not the problem, but wasn’t it? At any point when she’d been in Master Corbenic’s office, she could have run. That’s what the boys in her college whispered: that she’d wanted it. After all, why else would she have stayed? Why had she never pushed him away? Why had she never said that simple word, no?
Trying to articulate the inarticulable fear she’d felt as she sat in his green office chair would lead her down the same road it always had. It would end with her mother telling her there was no such thing as monsters. That there was nothing watching her from the corner of her room, no matter how many nights Effy could not sleep under its cold, unblinking gaze.
“Haven’t I done enough?” Her mother’s voice was trembling faintly, like a needle against a scratched record. “For eighteen years it was just you and me, and by the Saints, you didn’t make it easy . . .”
She considered reminding her mother that her grandparents had done just as much, that they had paid for her schooling, taken her on trips, helped with her homework, tended to her while her mother nursed her gin headaches or stayed in bed for days under a gloom of exhaustion. But Effy had listened to this record turn a thousand times. There was no use saying any of that, no use saying anything at all.
“I know,” was all she managed, in the end. “I’m sorry. I’ll go back to school now. Goodbye, Mother.”
She hung up before her mother could answer.
Effy stepped out of the phone booth, her boots crunching the wet gravel. She had expected to feel a tight cord of panic lace up her spine, but instead she felt oddly serene. It was the removal of choice that calmed her. There were only two roads ahead of her now, one of them well-trod and dark, the other half lit and waiting.
She had thought she could go down that dark road, but the more she thought of the whispers in the hall and Master Corbenic, the more she realized she could not bear it. That made her next decision easy. She knelt to roll up her wet pant leg and then stood and marched down the empty street, the train station blurring in her peripheral vision.
Effy hadn’t gone more than a dozen paces when she saw someone coming down the road toward her. He was an older man with a weather-beaten face and a shepherd’s crook, and there were a number of bleating sheep at his back. She couldn’t count how many until he grew closer.
It was city-bred instinct that had Effy clutching her purse against her body, but the man paused more than an arm’s length away from her, wizened fingers curled around the crook. His eyes were the color of sea glass, a matte and cloudy green.
“I know you aren’t from here,” he said, in a garbled Southern accent that Effy struggled to understand. “A pretty young girl alone on the cliffs up there—you haven’t been reading your fairy tales.”
Effy felt deeply offended. “I’ve read plenty of fairy tales.”
“Haven’t been reading them right, then. Are you a religious girl? Do you pray to your Saints at night?”
“Sometimes.” Truthfully, she hadn’t been to church in years. Her mother had only brought her out of vague obligation, citing her grandmother’s faith and devotion to Saint Caelia, patron of maternity. The nearest chapel in Draefen was dedicated to Saint Duessa, the patron of blessed liars. Effy had sat there in a starched white dress, swinging her legs beneath the pews and counting the number of red bits in the stained glass windows. Once or twice she had caught her mother nodding off.
“Well, your prayers are no use,” the old shepherd said. “They won’t protect you against him.”
The wind picked up then, brittle and cold. It blew the grass on the hilltops flat and carried the salt spray of the sea from the shoreline. One of the black-faced sheep bleated at her anxiously. There were seven of them, horns curled against their flat heads like mollusks.
Electricity sparked along Effy’s skin. She lowered her voice and leaned closer to the shepherd. “Do you mean the Fairy King?”
The man did not immediately reply, but his eyes shifted left and then right, toward the hills and then toward the sea, as if he expected something to come rising or lumbering out of either one.
Effy thought of the creature in the road, its wet black hair and bone crown. She had seen it. Wetherell had seen it. Perhaps the shepherd had seen it, too. Her whole body felt like a live wire, blood running with adrenaline.
“Guard yourself against him,” the shepherd said. “Metal on your windows and doors.”
“Iron. I know.”
The old man reached into his left pocket and dug around for several moments. Then he held out his hand. Cupped in his palm were a bevy of stones, white and gray and rust-colored, like the pebbles on the beach. Each one had a small hollow in its center, through which Effy could see the man’s wrinkled, ancient skin.
“Hag stones,” the shepherd said. “The Fairy King has many clever disguises. Look through these and you’ll see him coming, in his true form.”
He grasped Effy’s wrist and pried her fingers open, then deposited the stones in her palm before she could protest. They were heavier than they had looked when the old man held them. She put the stones in the pocket of her trousers.
When she looked up again, the shepherd had turned around and was walking down the road, away from her, up toward the green hills. His sheep bobbed after him like buoys on the water. One paused in the road and looked back at her.
Her skin was still electric. Effy reached into her pocket and lifted one of the stones to her eye, peering through the hollow in the middle. But she only saw the sheep staring back at her, unblinking and frozen.
She lowered the stone again, feeling foolish. Fairy tales or not, back in Caer-Isel, she never would have stopped to listen to the ramblings of some strange old man in the street. She put the stones back in her pocket and wiped the sea spray off her cheeks. It occurred to her that she’d just been the exact opposite of pickpocketed.
The pub had a name, but the sign was so damp and wood-rotted that Effy couldn’t make it out. She pushed through the door with more confidence than she felt. The hairs on her neck were stiff and risen from listening to the shepherd’s words.
At once she was bathed in the pub’s warm, golden light. There was a stone fireplace in the corner that crackled with a sound like twigs snapping under the tread of a boot. Above it, the mantel bore old sepia-toned photographs. The room was crammed with a number of circular tables and two booths in the far back corner. The wood on the booths was shinier, newer, clearly an effort at modernizing.