“Do Argantians have a patron saint of truth?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” said Preston. “But I’ll swear by your Saint Una if it makes you happy.”
Somehow, Effy found herself nodding. Her right hand was still clutching Preston’s paper, so she stuck out her left hand, with its missing ring finger.
Preston took her hand and they shook. His palm was soft, his fingers long and thin. Effy usually didn’t like shaking hands with people. She always held on past the point of comfort because she never knew when it was time to let go.
“I swear by Saint Una I’ll help you,” she said. “And I won’t reveal you—us—to Ianto.”
“I swear by Saint Una I won’t betray you,” said Preston. “And I’ll fight for you. I promise your name will be there on the cover sheet, right next to mine.”
Effy held on to him, their fingers locked. She waited for him to twitch, to shake her loose, but he didn’t. The pad of his thumb was ink stained. She wondered if this was some sort of test, if he was trying to judge her mettle. Effy had never thought of herself as someone with much staying power.
Yet there was nothing challenging in his eyes, and Effy realized then that he was giving her the choice. It was a small thing, maybe not worth remarking upon at all. But very rarely did anyone allow Effy to choose.
Finally she let go. Preston’s hand dropped to his side at once, fingers flexing.
“We’ll start tomorrow,” he said stiffly. “Can I have my paper back?”
Mortified, Effy released the page and set it down on the desk. The ink had bled a little onto her palm. “You should have written that one in Argantian, too,” she said.
Preston gave her a thin-lipped look. “I know that now.”
Back in the guest cottage that night, Effy’s mind wouldn’t stop turning. Even after she had swallowed her sleeping pill, she lay awake staring at the damp and moldy ceiling, thinking of the bargain she had struck.
Perhaps in the morning she would realize it was a foolish thing to do. Perhaps she would regret not leaving on the next train.
Perhaps she would regret betraying Myrddin.
But for the moment, all she could feel was a stomach-churning adrenaline. She rubbed at the nub of her ring finger. It was as smooth as a hag stone.
Effy rolled over, hair streaming out over the green pillowcase, heartbeat still quick. When she closed her eyes, she could see Preston’s page of notes, blue ink against white. It was her name he’d scrawled aimlessly in the margins, repeating all the way down the page:
Effy
Effy
Effy
Effy
Effy.
Seven
Angharad is a difficult text to place. Certain passages read as lurid and vulgar, more befitting an erotic tale or a romance, while others have exquisitely rendered prose and great thematic depth. It is not uncommon to see housewives paging through their copies over a pile of laundry, or commuters hunched over their paperbacks on the tram. And yet it is just as common for Angharad to appear on the syllabi of the university’s most advanced literature courses. No other book in Llyrian history can boast such universal appeal.
From the introduction to Angharad: The Annotated Collector’s Edition, edited by Dr. Cedric Gosse, 210 AD
When Effy first came to Hiraeth, she would never have expected to find herself, at the bright hour of seven in the morning, poring over a dead man’s letters with Preston Héloury. Yet that was exactly where she found herself the next day.
“Well,” Preston said, “I suppose you’ll want to know where I’ve left off.”
She nodded.
“I suppose I’ll explain the basis for my theory, then. Myrddin’s family were refugees of the Drowning,” said Preston. “It would seem intuitive for his works to paint the natural world as inherently perilous, unstable, even malicious. Much of his poetry personalizes nature in that way—”
Effy cut him off. “‘The only enemy is the sea.’”
“Precisely. But Myrddin’s father was a fisherman, and his grandfather, too. Master Gosse was the first to bring up that apparent contradiction. Myrddin’s family depended on the sea for their livelihood, yet it’s only ever painted as a cruel and vicious force of evil in his work.”
“That’s not true,” said Effy. “In Angharad, the Fairy King takes her out to see the ocean, and she says it’s beautiful and free. ‘Lovely and dangerous and vast beyond mortal comprehension, the sea makes dreamers of us all.’”
Preston gave her an odd look. It was the first time she’d seen him look bemused, quizzical. “Finish the quote.”
“Hm.” Effy racked her brain to remember the passage. “‘I looked to the Fairy King behind me, and the ocean before, the two most beautiful things I had ever seen. They were both creatures of rage and salt and foam. Both could strip me to the bone. I wanted nothing more than to tempt their wrath, because if I were brave enough, I might earn their love instead.’”
“You really do know it cover to cover,” Preston said, and this time, Effy was certain—there was admiration in his voice. “But I don’t think that paints the sea in a very charitable way, either. The Fairy King is Angharad’s captor. Myrddin portrays the sea as a trickster god, luring Angharad with its beauty, but always with the potential to destroy her utterly.”
“He loved her,” Effy said. She was surprised at the vehemence of her tone. “The Fairy King. He loved Angharad more than anything. She was the one to betray him.”
She’d never had the chance to speak about Angharad like this, to defend her position, to present her own theories. There was something exhilarating about it, and Effy expected Preston to challenge her. Instead he stared at her for a long moment, lips pursed, and then said, “Let’s move on. The metaphoric resonance of one particular passage doesn’t matter right now.”
“Fine,” Effy said. But she felt let down.
“So anyway, Gosse published a paper discussing the irony of it, but he didn’t make any specific claims about Myrddin’s authorship. That was a few months ago, when Myrddin was freshly dead. Since then, scholars have really begun to dig into his background. Gosse wants first crack at it, but he didn’t want to spook Ianto by coming himself—the intimidating effect of being the preeminent Myrddin scholar and all that. So he sent me instead.” Preston frowned at this, as if expecting her to berate him again. “There’s no schoolhouse in Saltney, as you saw. Myrddin had some informal schooling from the nuns, but that stopped definitively at age twelve. His parents weren’t literate. We have several documents from the Myrddins—including the lease from their house—and they’re all signed with a mark.”
“Where is their house?” Effy asked. She thought of the shepherd retreating toward the green hills. “I didn’t see very many homes down there.”
“Oh, it’s gone now,” Preston said. “Several of the older homes in Saltney, the ones closer to the water, have already fallen into the sea. I almost don’t blame the locals for their superstitions about the second Drowning.”
She felt a thud of vague, confused grief. The house where Myrddin had grown up, where his mother had tucked him into bed at night, where his father had rested his scarred fisherman’s hands—swallowed up and eroded, lost to the ages. Effy had listened for the bells under the water that morning, but she hadn’t heard a sound.
Would she be responsible for further eroding Myrddin’s legacy? Her stomach twisted at the thought.
“That still doesn’t prove anything,” Effy said. “Look at all of Myrddin’s letters here. Clearly he could read and write.”
“But look at them,” Preston emphasized. He picked up the nearest one, its edges curled, paper turned yellow with time. “This is dated a year before the publication of Angharad. It’s addressed to his publisher, Greenebough Books. Look how he signs his name.”
Effy squinted at the page. Myrddin’s script was quite careless, difficult to comprehend.