“Not really,” he said. “Most of the time I don’t even notice. I wish I could see you more clearly right now. But even blurry you’re so beautiful.”
She felt her cheeks grow warm. There was no cold left in her now at all. “Please be gentle.”
“Oh. I will. I swear it.” He shifted, slowly parting her thighs.
There was a little bit of pain, but it was like a breath that was tightly held: it gave way to seemingly infinite pleasure upon release.
She whimpered quietly into his shoulder, a sound that was half surprise, half surrender. The yielding was easy when the assault was so tender. The land would never protest if the sea washed over it with what could not be called anything else but affection.
They matched each other inhale for inhale, Preston’s mouth close to her ear. When his breathing sped up, Effy could tell he was very close, but then he slowed again, strokes long and deliberate.
“Don’t,” she whispered petulantly against his throat. “Don’t stop.”
“I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “when this is over, I’ll take care of you, too. If you want me to.”
Effy closed her eyes, and even the blackness there behind them was bright with false stars. “I do.”
When it was over, Effy lay beside Preston, both of them concealed by the green covers. She lay on her belly, he on his back, but they faced each other with their cheeks pressed against the pillows.
The four walls around them seemed impenetrable. Effy scarcely heard the rain at all.
“I don’t want to go back out there,” she said, in a tiny muffled voice. “Not ever.”
He didn’t ask if she meant back into the storm, or the house, or the world entirely. “That seems, unfortunately, impossible.”
“Why should I believe that? You can’t even see two feet in front of you.”
Preston laughed. “I’ll put my glasses back on if that gives me more credibility.”
“No. I like knowing more than you for once.”
“You know plenty of things that I don’t.” He brushed back a damp strand of hair from her forehead. “There’s an Argantian saying about that, too, actually.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“Ret eo anavezout a-raok karout. ‘One must know before loving.’”
It was such a terribly Preston thing to say that Effy almost laughed herself. He loved nothing more than the truth, and she had loved nothing more than her imagined world. Somehow, in spite of that, they had found each other.
“You Argantians are a very poetic people after all,” she said. “As much as Llyrian propaganda would have us believe otherwise.”
“You told me I was smug.”
A smile tugged at her lips. “Well, some stereotypes have a bit of truth to them.”
Preston snorted. Effy shifted closer to him. She ran one gentle finger along the crook of his elbow, just to see how he tensed and shivered. A sign of life, like tiny green shoots that grew up stubbornly out of the hard winter earth.
In her peripheral vision, she could see the locked box.
“You’re right about one thing, though,” she said at last. “We will have to leave eventually.”
Preston must have heard the grief in her voice, the tremor of fear. He took her into his arms, her naked back against his naked chest, her head tucked neatly under his chin. His heartbeat sounded like the rhythm of a steady tide.
“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”
“That makes me want to cry.” She wished he hadn’t said it.
“I know. It’s not the most original argument, and I’m hardly the first scholar to make it—that the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you. But if any of that is evidence, I think it must be true.”
“Some things are constant,” Effy said. “They must be. I think that’s why so many poets write about the sea.”
“Maybe the idea of constancy is what’s actually terrifying. Fear of the sea is fear of the eternal—because how can you win against something so enduring. So vast and so deep. Hm. You could write a paper arguing that, at least in the context of Myrddin’s works. Well, it might have to be an entire thesis.”
“Oh, stop it. You’re being so relentlessly you.”
She felt his laugh against her back, making them both tremble. “Sorry. I’ll be quiet now. I’m so tired.”
“Me too.” Effy yawned. “But please go back to being you when I wake up. Don’t go anywhere.”
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
As inevitably as the sea rose up against the cliffs, sleep washed over them both.
Fifteen
I passed so many sleepless nights wondering how I could ever escape him. And yet I found the true fetters were ones of my own creation. Those nights I kept circling the same ancient questions: Why had the Fairy King chosen me? What had I done to deserve this? Those questions were powerful magic indeed, for they kept me trapped there, motionless, my husband slumbering beside me. Until I broke the spell my mind had cast, I could not ever be free.
From Angharad by Emrys Myrddin, 191 AD
Effy woke in darkness, her heart clanging like a bell. Thunder rolled against the stone walls of the guesthouse, and rainwater made the windows ripple. All the candles had burned down to puddles of wax. When she sat up and spoke, her breath clouded out in front of her face.
“Preston,” she said. “The storm—we have to go.”
He sat up with a start, as if he’d been prodded. She watched him blink into the filmy darkness, searching for his glasses on the bedside table, as lightning turned the windows a pure, stark white. He grasped them at last and put them on.
She could feel the pulse of fear that radiated from him, a skin-prickling heat.
They both dressed in silence. Nothing could be heard over the sounds of the wind and rain, but Effy was afraid to speak anyway, afraid to voice how dire everything felt. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, and when she had tied back her hair with shaking fingers, she said, “What if it’s too late? What if we can’t make it down?”
“We can,” Preston said, his voice fierce. “We are not getting trapped here.”
“I’m so stupid. I shouldn’t have asked you to stay. We shouldn’t have slept—”
“Effy, stop it.” He reached her, took her hand. “What’s done is done, and I don’t regret—I would never regret . . . it doesn’t matter. We’re taking this box and we’re driving down to Saltney. We’ll get some locksmith to break into it, and . . .”
He trailed off as another peal of thunder reverberated through the little house. Effy glanced over at the box, chin quivering. It looked so huge and heavy, and the padlock gleamed faintly under layers of algae and rust.
Something occurred to her then, with a terrible start. “The letters. The photographs and letters. They’re still up at the house.”
Preston’s face paled. His chest swelled and then deflated again as he drew one heavy, steeling breath. “Damn it. All right. That’s fine; I’ll go up and get them. You just wait in my car.”
“Now you’re being stupid.” Lightning flashed. “I’m coming with you.”
At least Preston had learned not to argue with her. They put on their coats and went to the door.
For some reason, Effy felt a pull of grief as she considered leaving the guesthouse behind. It had served her well, in her time at Hiraeth. The iron on the door had held; the four walls had not come down, even as the water trickled in. Whether he was real or not, it had kept the Fairy King at bay.
A last-minute thrill of fear compelled Effy to grab the rest of the hag stones off the desk and shove them into the pocket of her trousers.
Preston did not even appear to notice. His teeth were clenched, a muscle feathering in his jaw. When she joined him at the door again, he slid his hand into hers.
“I meant what I told you, before,” he said softly. “I want to take care of you. When we get back to Caer-Isel, the horrible professors and the horrible students . . . I never want you to have to weather it all alone again.”