Wetherell spoke up. “What it sounds is expensive. Has Mr. Myrddin discussed the financial constraints of the project with you?”
“Not now,” Ianto said, waving a hand. “I want to hear the extent of Effy’s plans. If we need to make adjustments, we can do that later.”
For a moment Wetherell looked like he might protest, but his lips thinned and he sank back against the doorway.
“Well,” she began carefully, “I did think about that. Cost and feasibility. Following my design, it would be necessary to demolish most of the current structure and set the new house back several acres from the edge of the cliff. Given the unpredictability of the rock, the uneven topography . . .” Effy trailed off. A pall had come over Ianto’s face. His look of displeasure told her that their ideas were not, in fact, aligned. Had he not thought of an entirely new structure taking the place of the old?
Ianto’s expression, the darkening of his eyes, filled her with a vague but terrible dread. She shrank back.
But he only said, “Will you come upstairs with me, Effy? I’d like you to see something.”
Effy nodded numbly, immediately feeling foolish for being so afraid. It was the sort of thing her mother would have chastised her for—nothing happened, Effy. She’d been offered that puzzled scorn in lieu of comfort as a child when she’d run to her mother’s room after having a nightmare.
After having the same nightmare, over and over again, that same dark shape in the corner of her room. Eventually she had stopped coming to her mother’s door at all. Instead she read Angharad in the lamplight until her sleeping pills pulled her under.
Ianto led her upstairs, hand gliding over the rotted-wood banister. Effy followed, feeling a bit unsteady on her feet. As they passed the portrait of the Fairy King, she paused briefly and met his cold stare. She hadn’t meant to do it. It felt like a taunt, a reminder that this version of the Fairy King was trapped inside a gilded frame, inside an unreal world.
But the real Fairy King was not muzzled like the one in the painting. And she had seen that creature in the road.
Effy gripped the hag stone in her pocket as she and Ianto reached the upstairs landing. Water was dripping off the carvings of Saint Eupheme and Saint Marinell. Ianto was so tall that it dripped onto his shoulders and his black hair.
He didn’t seem to notice. Living in a place like this, Effy supposed, you might begin to not feel the cold or damp at all.
“This way,” Ianto said, directing her down the hall. The floor groaned emphatically beneath them. He stopped when they reached a small and unremarkable wooden door. “You left in such a hurry the other day, I didn’t get to show you this. Not that I blame you entirely, of course. This house is not for the faint of heart.”
The knob began to rattle and the doorframe began to shake, as if someone were pounding on the door from the other side. Effy tensed, heart pattering. She found herself thinking of Master Corbenic’s office and the green armchair, its loose threads like reaching vines.
Ianto threw the door open. Or rather, he turned the knob and the wind did the rest, nearly yanking the door right off its hinges with a vicious howl. Effy stumbled back instinctively, raising a hand to shield her eyes. It wasn’t until there was a lull in the wind’s wailing that she was able to peer through the open door.
There was a narrow balcony, only half its boards fully intact, eaten away so thoroughly by mold and damp that the floor resembled a checkerboard: stretches of black emptiness alternating with planks of sun-blanched wood. It creaked and moaned in the wind the way Effy imagined a ghost ship would, tattered sails swaying to a banshee’s song.
She looked up at Ianto in horror. She hoped he didn’t expect her to actually set foot on the ruined platform.
As if able to read her thoughts, he thrust out his arm to hold her back. It was a large arm, black-haired, the skin under it as pale as the ancient stone.
“Don’t go any further,” Ianto said. “And ignore yet another testament to my father’s negligence. I want you to look at the view.”
Feeling safer behind Ianto’s arm, Effy peered forward. Over the rotted wood was the cliff face, green and white and gray, dotted with eyries and smaller gull nests, feathers catching in the wind. Below it, the sea looked sleek and deadly, waves gnashing their teeth against the rock.
Effy felt the height in the soles of her feet and her palms turned slick. Before, when the cliff had broken apart beneath her, it had been so unexpected, she hadn’t even had the chance to be afraid. Now she understood the danger of the rocks, the ocean’s foaming wrath.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Ianto said. Even in the wind, his hair still lay mostly flat.
“It’s terrifying,” Effy confessed.
“Most beautiful things are,” Ianto said. “Do you know why it’s called the Bay of Nine Bells?”
Effy shook her head.
“Before the Drowning, the land stretched out further into the sea. There were dozens of small towns there on the old land—fishing villages, mostly. What have you been taught about what happened to them?”
“Well, there was a storm,” Effy started, but she could tell it was one of those false questions that was like a hole in the floor. If you took the bait, you would fall right into it.
Ianto smiled at her thinly. “That’s one of the misconceptions many Northerners have about the Drowning. That it was one enormous storm, a single night of terror and then its aftermath. But it can take a person up to ten minutes to drown. Ten minutes doesn’t seem like a very long time, but when you can’t breathe and your lungs are aching, it seems very long indeed. You can even die after you’ve been pulled from the drink, dry on land, water having rotted your lungs beyond repair. The Drowning of the Bottom Hundred took years, my dear. It started with the wet season lasting longer than it should and the dry season being less dry than it ought. A few cliffs crumbling, a marsh or two swelling past its margins—at first it was scarcely remarked upon, and certainly not taken as a warning.
“Have you heard the expression about the frog in hot water? If you raise the temperature slowly, he won’t notice a thing until he’s boiled alive. A soft-bellied Northerner might have seen the danger coming, but the Southerners practically had scales and fins themselves. The sea took and took and took, thousands of little deaths, and they endured it all because they knew nothing else. They didn’t think to fear the Drowning until the water was lapping at their door.
“The lucky ones, the wealthier ones, with their homes set back further from the shore, managed to flee. But the waves rose up and swallowed everything, houses and shops and women and children, the old and the young. The sea has no mercy. In this bay there were nine churches, and they were all swallowed up, too, no matter how hard their supplicants pleaded with Saint Marinell. They say that on certain days you can still hear the bells of those churches, ringing underwater.”
Effy turned toward the water and listened, but she didn’t hear any ringing.
“The Drowning was two hundred years ago,” she said. “Long before your father was born.” She hoped it didn’t sound disparaging.
“Of course,” Ianto said. “But the story of the Drowning lives in the minds of every child who is born in the Bottom Hundred. Our mothers whisper it to us in our cradles. Our fathers teach us to swim before we can walk. The first game we play with our friends is to see how long we can hold our breath underwater. It’s the fear we have to learn. The fear keeps the sea from taking us.”