Definitely cagey. But Effy was undeterred.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Thank you so much for letting us spend the night. I’m sure we’ll be able to find everything we came for.”
Preston shot her a look, and she gave him a silent, almost imperceptible nod in return.
Shakily, Blackmar rose to his feet. In the time it took him to stand, Effy watched a fly land on the taxidermy deer head and crawl into one of its nostrils. The deer was unperturbed. Dead, as it should be.
“I’m sorry,” Blackmar said plainly. “I’m an old man now, and early to bed. I’ll have the help show you to your rooms.”
Their trunks had already been placed in two adjacent bedrooms upstairs. Effy’s room had opaque black curtains and an enormous blue sea anemone sitting on the desk, frozen in timeless suspension. There was a full-length mirror but it had been flipped over to face the wall instead. For some reason Effy felt it would be a bad idea to turn it forward.
The bed was, strikingly, unmade: a morass of sea-green sheets and an incongruous purple duvet, the color of wine straight from the bottle. In opposition to the rest of Penrhos, there was nothing stodgy about this room; it had a bit of chaos to it.
If Effy had been allowed to decorate her own room as a child, it might have looked a bit like this. She sat on the edge of the bed, letting out a breath.
Preston leaned over the desk, arms crossed. “Blackmar did get cagey, didn’t he? The moment we brought up Angharad.”
“He did.” Effy chewed her lip. “There’s something there. I don’t know what it is. But we’ll have a chance to talk to Greenebough’s editor in chief tomorrow.”
Although everything they’d learned so far appeared to be pushing toward Preston’s theory of Blackmar as the true author, Effy just couldn’t force herself to accept it. It wasn’t just her allegiance to Myrddin, though she still felt it, that childlike admiration. There was something else. Secrets buried under years of dust. An emotion that was inarticulable.
“That still doesn’t give us much time,” Preston said. “If we don’t get back to Hiraeth tomorrow night, Ianto will be very suspicious.”
But it was not Ianto she was thinking about. It was the Fairy King, the creature with the slick black hair and the bone crown. Here at Penrhos she felt safe from him. Here that world of danger and magic felt properly chained and fettered.
“We’ll just have to get back then,” Effy said, voice shrinking. “I’m sorry I can’t help drive.”
“No, that’s all right. I don’t mind driving. We’ll get back to Hiraeth before midnight, I promise.”
Midnight was a fairy-tale thing. She didn’t know if Preston had been thinking about that when he promised it, but Effy was remembering all the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bell struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to put those thoughts out of her mind. “Tomorrow we’ll speak to Greenebough’s editor and get the answers we need.”
Preston nodded. “For now I suppose we’ll just . . . sleep on empty stomachs.”
Effy laughed softly. She found it odd, too, that Blackmar had offered them brandy with no food to accompany it, but who was she to question the man when he had been generous enough to entertain all their probing questions?
Up to a point, of course.
She reached for her purse and began to dig for her bottle of sleeping pills. She no longer minded if Preston saw them. He already knew she was a changeling child. He had learned her true name. He knew what she believed about the Fairy King.
But she searched and searched, and still her hand closed around nothing. Panic began to swell in her chest, her breaths growing rapid and short. And then, the flash of a memory: her bottle of pills on the bedside table in Hiraeth’s guesthouse, forgotten there in her haste to leave.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh no.”
“What is it?”
“It’s—” Her mouth was dry and it was hard to speak. She cleared her throat, vision blurring at the corners. “I forgot my sleeping pills. I don’t know how to sleep without them.”
Preston pushed off the desk and walked over to her. Still standing, he looked down at her with a furrowed brow. “What keeps you awake at night?”
It was not the question she’d expected him to ask. It rattled Effy from her panicked state, softening the sharp pulse of adrenaline. No one had ever asked her such a thing before, not since she was a child, babbling about the creature in the corner of her room.
It took her a few moments to find the words to reply.
“I get afraid,” she said at last. “Not of anything specific, really—it’s this bodily thing. Somatic thing. It’s hard to explain. My chest gets tight and my heart beats really fast. In the end I guess I’m scared that something bad will happen to me while I’m lying there. I’m scared that someone will hurt me.”
The words came out all at once—breathless, stammering. She hadn’t mentioned the Fairy King by name, but the rest was true enough.
She tried to gauge Preston’s reception. He was only looking at her with the same furrowed brow, the same concern.
“Is there anything that helps? I mean, aside from the sleeping pills.”
No one had ever asked her that, either, not since the doctor had thrust the pills into her hands. Effy looked at him, feeling very small, but not necessarily in a meek, prey-animal sort of way. She said, “I suppose it helps not to be alone.”
Silence fell softly over the strange room. Preston drew in a breath. And then he said, very carefully, “I could stay.”
Effy blinked at him in surprise, her cheeks instantly growing hot. Preston flushed too, as if only just realizing his words had a certain implication.
“Not like that,” he assured her, running a nervous hand through his hair. “I’ll even sleep on the floor.”
In spite of herself, Effy laughed. “You don’t have to sleep on the floor.”
The bed was easily big enough for two, even if they were not touching. The next few moments unfolded in silence as well: Preston turned around, face to the wall, so that Effy could strip out of her sweater and trousers and into her nightgown, and slip under the wine-colored duvet.
Preston turned around again and sat hesitantly on the edge of the bed. Effy gave him an encouraging look, though her cheeks were still splotchy with heat, and he shifted to lie down beside her. Her beneath the covers, him atop them. Facing each other. Not touching.
She had never been so close to him before. His eyes were fascinating from this vantage point, light brown ringed with green, gold daubs around the irises. His freckles were pale, winter-faded. She suspected they would become more prominent when summer returned. His lips were stained just a little bit from the brandy.
While Effy looked at Preston, he looked at her. She wondered what he saw. Master Corbenic had seen green eyes and golden hair, something soft and white and pliable.
Sometimes she wanted to tell someone everything that had happened, and see what they had to say about it. She had already heard the version of the story in which she was a tramp, a slut, a whore. She had heard it so many times, it was like a water stain on velvet; it would never quite come out. She wondered if there was another version of the story. She didn’t even know her own.
Surely Preston couldn’t guess at all the things running through her mind. Unlike Effy, he looked very tired. Behind his glasses, his eyelids had begun to droop. That was something funny: his left eyelid seemed to droop slightly more than his right. From far away, she never would have noticed.
“Sleepy yet?” he asked, his words somewhat slurred.
“Not really,” she confessed.
“What else can I do?”
“Just . . . talk,” she said. She had to lower her gaze, embarrassed. “About anything, really.”