“‘Yours sincerely, Emrys Myrddin,’” she read aloud. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Pay attention to the surname,” Preston said. “He spells it Myrthin, with a th. That’s the Northern spelling.”
Effy took the paper from him and ran her finger over the signature. The ink was old and faded, smudged in places, but the th was clear.
She didn’t want to admit how much it baffled her, so she merely said, “It could have been a simple mistake.”
“Strange mistake, to misspell your own surname.”
“So what?” she challenged. “Being a poor speller hardly equates to illiteracy.”
“Regardless, I don’t think Myrddin wrote it at all. I think it’s a forgery.”
Effy gave a derisive laugh. “Now you’re sounding as nutty as those superstitious Southerners you have so much contempt for.”
“It’s not unprecedented.” Preston sounded almost petulant. “We’ve seen instances of literary forgery before. The trick of any good lie is just finding an audience who wants to believe it.”
Effy chewed her lip. “Then who is the audience for Myrddin’s supposed lie?”
“You said it yourself.” The corner of Preston’s mouth turned up into a thin half smile. “Superstitious Southerners who want to believe one of their own could transcend his common origins and write books that make even Northern girls swoon.”
“I’ve never swooned in my life,” she said crossly.
“Of course not,” Preston said, completely straight-faced again. “But there are other people who stand to profit from the lie. Myrddin’s publisher, for example—Greenebough makes a killing from royalties, even now. Half of Myrddin’s appeal was this compelling backstory: the impoverished provincial poet who turns out to be a genius. There’s a lot of money to be made off that myth.”
Preston had a way of speaking with such eloquence and certainty that for a moment Effy found herself half-convinced, and too intimidated to argue. When the fog lifted, she was angry with herself for being so easily swayed.
“You’re condescending,” she said. “Not all Southerners are backwards peasants, and not all Northerners are snobs. I bet you hate it when people paint Argantians in such broad strokes. You know, most Llyrians think Argantians are cold, leering little weasels who believe in nothing but mining rights and profit margins. I can’t say you’re doing much to dispel those beliefs.”
Even as she spoke, Effy regretted indulging the same old stereotypes. Mostly, she was frustrated with herself for failing to come up with a better argument against him.
“I don’t see it as my duty to refute Llyrian clichés.” Preston’s voice was cold now. “Besides, it’s a fact that the South is economically deprived compared to the North, and that deprivation is felt most acutely in the Bottom Hundred. It’s also a fact that Llyrian political and cultural institutions are dominated by Northerners, and have been throughout history. That’s the legacy of imperialism—the North reaps while the South sows.”
“I didn’t ask you to educate me about my own country,” Effy snapped. “Statistics don’t tell the whole story. Besides, Argantians did the same thing. Cut up your northern mountain villages into mining towns and coal tunnels, only you let your myths and magic fade into obscurity instead of celebrating them. At least Llyr doesn’t try to hide its past.”
Preston looked weary. “Some might call it celebrating; others would call it flouting a colonial legacy—oh, never mind. We can argue about this until the entire house falls into the sea. I’m not asking you to buy my narrative wholesale. But you did agree to help, so can you at least try not to fight me at every turn?”
Effy ground her teeth and looked down at the pile of letters on the desk. She had agreed, but she was finding it harder than she anticipated, what with Preston’s snooty attitude. She would try her best to bear it, for now. Once she had secured a place in the literature college, she could spend the rest of her university career trying to undo the damage she’d done to Myrddin’s legacy.
“All right,” she said at last, scowling. “But you have to promise to be fifteen percent less patronizing.”
Preston drew a breath. “Ten.”
“And you think I’m the stubborn one?”
“Fine,” he relented. “Fifteen, and you don’t swear at me again.”
“I only did that once.” She was still convinced he’d earned it. But he was right; there was no use arguing with every breath.
Yet it all tasted bitter to swallow. She had abandoned her principles to get what she wanted, to improve her standing at the university, to earn some academic honors. To escape the sneers in the hallway, the whispers, and that green chair. What did that make her? No better than Preston, in the end. At least he was committed to the vaguely noble principle of truth.
Mortified by this realization, Effy fell silent.
Preston folded his arms across his chest. “Anyway. Before I came here, Gosse and I compiled a list of vocabulary used across all of Myrddin’s work and cross-referenced that with his letters.”
Immediately forgetting her previous promise, Effy blurted out, “Saints, how bloody long did that take you?”
“It’s my thesis,” Preston said, but the tips of his ears turned pink. “It turns out there’s very little overlap between the vocabulary he uses in his letters and in his novels—specific phraseology that appears over and over again in his books but never occurs in his letters. If it didn’t all bear the name Emrys Myrddin, you would never imagine they were written by the same man. And then there’s the problem of Angharad.”
Effy was instantly defensive. “What’s the matter with Angharad?”
“It’s an odd book. Genre-wise, it’s hard to classify. Myrddin generally belongs to a school of writers credited with reviving the romantic epic.”
“Angharad is a romance,” she said, trying to keep her voice level. “A tragic one, but still a romance.”
Preston hesitated. Effy could almost see him turning over their agreement in his mind, calculating how to moderate his tone by around fifteen percent. “Romantic epics are typically written in the third person, and always narrated by men. Heroes and knights whose goals are to rescue damsels and slay monsters. But the Fairy King is both lover and monster, and Angharad is both heroine and damsel.”
“And of course you can’t simply credit that to Myrddin being a creative visionary,” Effy said, scowling.
“There are just too many inconsistencies,” Preston said, “too much that doesn’t sit quite right. And Ianto is so cagey about it. It only makes me more suspicious.”
Effy looked down at the scattered papers again. “Don’t tell me this is all you’ve managed to find out.”
“I said I needed your help,” he said, and he didn’t manage to not sound miserable about it. “Ianto is keeping me in the dark. Wetherell was the one who gave me these letters. He asked around for them from some of Myrddin’s correspondents, his publisher and friends. But there have to be more.”
“More letters?”
“Letters. Diary entries. Rough drafts of bad poems. Half-finished novels. Shopping lists, for Saints’ sakes. Something. It’s like the man has been erased from his own home.”
“He has been dead for six months,” Effy pointed out. She thought again of what Ianto had said: My father was always his own greatest admirer. She’d heard a hint of resentment there.
“Still,” Preston said, “I’m convinced Ianto is hiding something. This is an old, confusing house. There has to be—I don’t know, a secret room somewhere. An attic, a storage area. Something he’s not showing me. Ianto swears there’s not, but I don’t believe him.”
Effy thought of the door with the pulse of the tide behind it. “What about the basement?”
Preston turned pale. “I don’t see any use in asking about that,” he said quickly. “It’s flooded. And besides, Ianto guards that key with his life. I wouldn’t even bother.”