“I hope he hasn’t locked it.”
There was something wrong with this section of the house. It seemed to exist in another world, cold and silent and strange, like a shipwreck on the ocean floor. The rest of Hiraeth creaked and groaned and swayed, protesting its slow destruction. The air here was stiff and heavy, and Effy moved through it almost in slow motion, as if she were wearing sopping wet clothes. In truth, it was as though this wing of the house had already been drowned.
Ianto’s door opened without so much as a shudder.
Effy didn’t know what she had expected to see on the other side. A beached mermaid on the bed, a heap of selkie skins? The ghost herself? The bedroom was disappointingly ordinary, at least as far as Hiraeth was concerned. There was an enormous canopy bed, not unlike the one Effy slept in herself, with moth-eaten gossamer curtains and dark blue satin sheets that made the mattress appear waterlogged. As far as she could tell, there was no mirror.
There was a wardrobe, its doors firmly shut, between which the sleeve of a black sweater was caught like a badger in a trap. A badger, Effy thought suddenly. Perhaps that had been the animal in the road.
There were piles of yellowed newspapers, but none of them pertained to Emrys Myrddin. The headlines were very arbitrary: An article about an art installation in Laleston. One about a series of burglaries in Corth, a town not far east of Saltney. Another was about a pony that had become a hero for bravely facing down a mountain cat; in the end, the pony had succumbed to its injuries and died.
Effy let the newspaper drift back down to the floor. “Nothing.”
“I’m not quite ready to surrender yet,” said Preston. “Where was that white space in the blueprints?”
“Along the western wall.” Effy pointed.
The western wall was just one huge bookshelf, only about half full. Silently Effy and Preston went about examining the spines, but they found no works of Emrys Myrddin there. Ianto’s reading taste appeared to be more lurid. Mostly mysteries and romances, the sorts of books she knew Preston would call pedestrian.
One erotic title stuck out to her: Dominating the Damsel. Effy slid it back into place with a shudder.
“I don’t understand,” Preston said, letting out a heated breath. “There can’t just be nothing. What sort of man scrubs a house so thoroughly of his dead father’s memory?”
It was the second time Preston had brought that up, and she wondered why the fact seemed to bother him so much. “I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone has their own way of grieving. You can’t know what you’d do until it happens to you.”
“As it happens,” Preston replied, “my father is dead.”
He said it so casually, so conversationally, that it took Effy a while to react. She looked at him, half turned toward her, the meager light clinging to his profile. His eyes, which were a pale brown, seemed intense but steady, like he was staring at something he had been watching for a long time already.
“Look at us,” she said finally. “Two fatherless children marooned in a sinking house. We ought to be careful that Ianto doesn’t decide to slit our throats over the new foundation.”
She’d meant to lighten the moment, but Preston’s mouth went thin. “If there’s anyone who would still believe in an old custom like that, it’s Ianto. Did you see the horseshoe over the door?”
“No,” she admitted. “But that’s an old folk tradition, to keep the fairies out of your house.”
Preston nodded. “And all the trees planted around the property are mountain ash. For someone who doesn’t keep any of his father’s books around, he certainly seems to have studied their edicts closely.”
Mountain ash, iron. Effy had even noticed a crush of red berries outside the cottage. Rowan berries were meant to guard against the Fair Folk, too.
Ianto had his father’s commissioned portraits of the Fairy King and Angharad hanging right above the stairs. Maybe that was another aegis. If he could keep the Fairy King trapped inside a frame, inside one of Myrddin’s stories, it would stop him from slipping through the front door.
Effy wondered if perhaps that was what Ianto truly wanted from her: a house that could protect him from the Fairy King. What if he, too, had seen the creature in the road, with its bone crown and wet black hair?
But what would the Fairy King want with Ianto? He came for young girls with pale hair to gild his crown. Men slept soundly in their beds while their wives and daughters were spirited away. That was what the stories said.
And the shepherd had told her as much when he gave her the hag stones. A pretty young girl alone on the cliffs up there . . .
She shook her head to dispel the thoughts. Preston, who had been gripping the edge of the bookcase with both hands, stepped back, sighing.
The bookcase wobbled, not inconsiderably—enough to reveal a knife-slit of space between the shelf and the wall. Effy and Preston looked at each other.
Without needing to speak, they both went to the far end of the bookcase and pulled. It made a heaving sound that Effy was sure would disturb the mistress—if she was indeed in the next room—but her pulse was racing and her mind didn’t linger on the possibility that they might be caught.
When they had gotten the bookcase far enough away, Effy could see that there was no wall behind it at all. Just an empty black space that became, as she stepped into it, a small room gouged into the side of the house.
“Be careful,” Preston said. “Effy, wait. I’ll get a candle.”
She didn’t want to wait. Her heart was pounding, but it was so dark that she didn’t really have a choice. She stood there in the cold room, seeing nothing on all sides, and oddly she was not afraid. It was so silent, the air so still. Effy could only imagine that whatever was in the room with her, if it had ever been alive at all, was already dead.
Preston came back with a candle and slid into the room beside her. It was a tight fit, and their shoulders were pressed together. She could feel his arm rise with his breathing, just a little hitched, just a little quick.
He shined the candle around, revealing dust-coated walls and cobwebbed corners, peeling plaster and gray spots of mold. Where the paint had been stripped away, a patch of brickwork was exposed, and the mortar was dyed black, as if with ink.
There was nothing in the room save for a single dented tin box. It was in the exact center of the floor, placed there with purpose.
Effy went to kneel beside it, but Preston thrust out his arm, pinning her back.
“What?” she demanded. “What is it?”
“Your knees,” he said, lowering the candle to point at them. “I’m sure they’re still raw and—” He looked flustered, one hand brushing through his untidy hair, and it took another moment for him to finally say, “Just let me.”
“Oh.” Effy watched as Preston knelt down on the floor. “I thought you were going to tell me the box was haunted.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she heard Preston’s now familiar huff of laughter. “It does look a bit haunted, doesn’t it?”
“I’m glad you don’t entirely lack imagination.”
Preston gave the box a gentle shake. “It’s locked.”
“No,” Effy said, her voice edging on petulant. “Let me see.”
Preston stood up, brushing off his trousers, and handed her the box. Like the rest of the room, it was covered in dust. Effy had to blow on the front to read the words stamped on it: PROPERTY OF E. MYRDDIN.