“I’m sorry,” Preston repeated desperately. “You don’t have to say any more.”
“I don’t mind.” Effy was elsewhere now, floating. Her mind had opened its escape hatch and she was gone. “My mother had me, but a child was such an inconvenience to everyone. To her and my grandparents. I was a terrible child, too. I threw tantrums and broke things. Even as an infant I wouldn’t nurse. I screamed when anyone touched me.”
And then she stopped. The escape hatch snapped shut. She hit that wall, the boundary between the real and the unreal. In her mind there was an even divide, a before and an after. Once she had been an ordinary, if imprudent, little girl. And then, in the span of a moment, she became something else.
Or maybe she had always been wrong. A wicked fae creature from the unreal world, stranded unfairly in the real one.
“There’s a river that runs through Draefen,” Effy said after a moment. “That’s where my mother left me. I remember it was the middle of winter. All the trees were bare. I know she thought some sad and childless woman would come pick me up. She didn’t mean to expose me, to let me die—”
Preston’s expression was unreadable, but he had not taken his eyes off her face. She really should have taken the out he had tried to give her and stopped talking. Preston was the biggest skeptic she’d ever met. He didn’t believe in magic; he didn’t even believe in Myrddin. Why would he believe her, when no one else had?
But he had listened to her, when she had asked him about ghosts. He had not dismissed her, laughed at her, though clearly the discussion had made him uncomfortable. And then she thought of the way he had dropped to the floor in front of her and cleaned her skinned knees and hardly even questioned why she had thrown herself from Ianto’s car.
Effy opened her mouth again, and words poured out.
“No childless woman came for me,” she whispered. “But he did.”
Behind his glasses, Preston’s eyes narrowed. “Who did?”
“The Fairy King,” she said.
The old, barbaric custom was this: In the South, it was believed that some children were simply born wrong, or were poisoned by the fairies in their cradles. These changeling children were awful and cruel. They bit their mothers when they tried to nurse them. They were always given the names of saints, to try to drive the evil away. Effy always wondered whether her mother had picked her name, Euphemia, to be a blessing or a curse. The feminine variation of Eupheme, patron saint of storytellers. Most of the time it just felt like a cruel joke.
But if that did not work, it was the mother’s right to abandon her child: to leave them out for the fairies to take back.
Preston would probably say that was just the pretty truth the Southerners told themselves to sleep easily at night—that they weren’t leaving their children out to die, that a fairy would come to spirit them back to their true home, in the realm of fae. But Effy had seen him. Thirteen years later, and still the image was bright and clear in her mind. His beautiful face and his wet black hair. His hand, reaching out for hers.
Even thinking of it now, her chest tightened with panic. Before the true terror could take hold and plunge her under, Preston’s voice shattered the memory.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “The Fairy King is a story.”
She had heard it so many times that the words didn’t sting anymore. Ordinarily she would have stopped talking right then and there, apologized, told him she was only joking.
But the words kept pouring out.
“He was there with me,” Effy said. “He stepped right out of the river. He was still all glistening and wet. It was dark, but he stood in a puddle of moonlight. He told me he was going to take me, and he was terrifying, but when he held out his hand, I took it.”
That was the hardest part to speak aloud. The ugliest confession, the black rotted truth at the very core of her. She had reached back. Any ordinary child would have shrunk away in fear, would have wept, would have screamed. But Effy had not made a sound. She had been ready to let him take her.
“But my mother returned,” she said. Her voice was thick. “She snatched me up from the riverbank and pulled my hand right out of the Fairy King’s grasp. I saw the look of fury on his face before he vanished. He hates nothing more than to be refused. My mother held me, but where I had touched him, my finger was rotted away. He took it with him, and said he would be back for the rest.”
She held up her left hand, with its missing fourth digit. She didn’t add the last of what the Fairy King had said: That he had taken her ring finger so that no other man could put a wedding band on it. So that she would always belong to him.
“You said it was winter.” Preston’s voice was gentle. “Your finger could’ve fallen off from frostbite.”
That was what the doctor had said, of course. He had bandaged it and given her a brown syrupy medicine to stave off infection, just like, years later, he had given her the pink pills to stave off her visions.
It wasn’t until years later, when Effy first read Angharad, that she had learned what really kept the Fairy King at bay. Iron. Mountain ash. Rowan berries. She had broken off a bough of mountain ash in the park in Draefen and kept it under her pillow. She had stolen her grandfather’s iron candelabra and slept with it in her hand. She had even tried to eat rowan berries, but they tasted so bitter, she spit them out, gagging.
“I know you don’t believe me,” she said. “No one ever has.”
Preston was silent. She could almost see his mind working, the thoughts scrolling behind his eyes. At last, he said, “I suppose that’s why you’re such a big fan of Myrddin’s work.”
“I didn’t read Angharad until I was thirteen,” Effy said, cheeks growing hot. “If that’s what you mean. It wasn’t a child’s imagination—I didn’t have some image of the Fairy King in my mind.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I just meant . . . it must have been easier to believe that there was some magic at work—a childhood curse, the pernicious Fair Folk. Something other than ordinary human cruelty.”
He didn’t believe her. Maybe that was for the best. Her stomach was churning now. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“Effy,” Preston said softly. “I’m sorry. You didn’t have to tell me.”
“My mother did come back for me, in the end,” she said in a rush. “And she felt so enormously guilty for leaving me. She even gave me a good saint’s name. I feel sorry for the other changeling children, named after Belphoebe or Artegall.”
“That isn’t right, Effy.” Preston’s voice was low but firm, and he met her gaze unrelentingly. “Mothers aren’t supposed to hate their children.”
“What makes you think she hated me?” Now she did feel angry, not because he hadn’t believed her, but because he had no right to judge her mother—a woman he’d never even met. “Like I said, I was a terrible child. Any mother would’ve been tempted to do the same.”
“No,” Preston said. “They wouldn’t.”
“Why do you always have to be so certain you’re right?” Effy tried to imbue her words with venom, but she just sounded desperate, scrambling. “You don’t know my mother, and you hardly know me.”
“I know you well enough. You aren’t terrible. You’re nothing close. And even if you were a difficult child—whatever that means—there’s no justification for your mother wanting you dead. How did your mother expect you to live with that, Effy? To go on as normal knowing that she once tried to leave you out in the cold?”
She swallowed. Her ears were ringing; for a moment, she thought it was the bells from below the sea, the bells of those drowned churches. If she had had one of her pink pills with her, she would have taken it.