Effy’s throat tightened. “They’re cruel. They’ll be cruel to you, too.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not afraid to care about you, Effy.”
If there had been more time, she would have folded into his arms and let him hold her there until the storm passed. Instead she only squeezed his hand. Together, they pushed open the door.
At first it seemed impossible to take a single step forward. The wind blew past them with such fury that Effy had to close her eyes and put up her hand in front of her face, and even then it felt so brutal and sharp that she thought it might chafe her skin. The rainwater drenched her an instant, soaking through her coat. Leaves and branches were flying through the air at dizzying speeds.
Preston put his hand up, too, and he had to yell to be heard over the wind. “We have to hurry! I won’t be able to drive down if it gets any worse.”
Effy wondered how he would be able to drive down now, but it seemed too defeatist a thought to be worth speaking aloud. Fingers still locked, they charged through the storm, up the path, which was now covered over with fallen trees and which had turned, mostly, to mud.
It was only Preston’s tight grip on her that kept Effy from falling down. When she had to stop because the mud was sucking desperately at her boots, he hauled her forward again and up the small incline.
But reaching the edge of the cliff was worse. From there Effy could see the sea, and the sky, almost indistinguishable in gray-white rage. Together they rose up, and then bore down on the rock, and at last Effy understood why the Southerners, in the very ancient days before the Drowning, believed that there were only two gods: the Sky and the Ocean. The land itself was just something caught and pressed between their warring furies.
She remembered, suddenly, what Rhia had told her: that the Southerners believed the Sleepers were the only thing stopping the second Drowning. That Myrddin’s consecration was keeping them safe. Had she and Preston done this, somehow? Had uncovering Myrddin’s lies whittled away at the magic of the Sleepers, just as Effy had initially feared it would?
Preston yanked her back as a bit of the cliff crumbled beneath her, swallowed up in an instant by the foaming mouth of the sea. Effy couldn’t help but stop and watching while something else—even if it was just nameless, weatherworn stone—was lost to the ages.
Yet in the midst of the chaos, no dark figure stood in the house’s shadow. Of all times, Effy thought it was now that he might come, with the seal between reality and something else broken.
As they stumbled up the path, Hiraeth appeared in the distance, a black bulwark against the gray sky. Maybe Ianto was right; maybe her task had not been insurmountable after all. Maybe there was some old, silent magic protecting it, something not even their discoveries could shatter.
The trees, the mountain ash—despite Ianto’s best efforts—were being torn from their roots. The rowan berries were stripped off their branches and smashed into pulp. All the wards obliterated. Yet still the Fairy King did not appear.
Effy was too bewildered to know whether she should feel relief. Shingles blew off the gabled roof like birds taking flight.
Just as they reached the steps, an enormous tree went flying past them, trailing its chains. Effy staggered back, gasping, and Preston stammered out a curse.
“Saints,” he said over the wind. “I’m starting to think the naturalists were right about the second Drowning.”
Effy didn’t mention the Southern superstitions, or the Sleepers. Her mouth had gone dry and her stomach was roiling with the same ferocity as the sea.
They clambered up the steps and through the door. Preston heaved it shut behind them, while Effy leaned back against the wall, trying to catch her breath.
“If this is a second Drowning,” she said, each syllable carefully and painfully rendered, “what are we meant to do?”
Preston wiped the rainwater from his glasses. “Get out of here as quickly as we can.”
There was nothing else to say. They charged upstairs as around them, the house groaned deafeningly, water bleeding through every crack in the walls and ceiling.
Some of the paintings along the stairwell had been shaken down; the glass holding the Fairy King had shattered, and he stared up at her with his colorless eyes from among the broken shards.
The frame no longer bound him. Effy felt a jolt of fear before Preston hurried her along again, beneath the archway carved with the faces of Saint Eupheme and Saint Marinell. The archway was crumbling, their wooden faces rotted. No saints to protect her now.
Your prayers are no use, the shepherd had said. They won’t protect you against him.
The second floor was worse. The walls were drenched with water, wallpaper peeling away in long tongues of faded green. All the naked glass bulbs had broken, and the floorboards creaked beneath them with every step.
Perilously, they made their way toward the study, while half the ground behind them fell away, ancient wood finally crumpling under the weight of so much water.
“It’s all right,” Preston was mumbling, more to himself, Effy thought, than to her. “It’s all right, it’s all right . . .” He flung open the door to the study.
Ianto stood in front of Myrddin’s desk. He had a length of chain thrown over his shoulder, and his musket was lying on the desk behind him. He was drenched, shirt sticking to his body, black hair dripping puddles onto the floor.
Effy froze, stomach lurching with dread.
Ianto said, very calmly, “Welcome back.”
“Wh—what are you doing here?” Preston stammered out.
“Well,” said Ianto slowly, “just last night, as I was about to crawl peaceably into bed, I got the most unexpected phone call from an old friend. Blackmar is ancient and half-demented, and at first I thought I was going to have to silently nod along to the ramblings of a toothless lunatic. But he actually began to tell me that recently he had hosted some unexpected guests, two students from the university in Caer-Isel. He said they told him that they had been working on a project centered around Emrys Myrddin, and had asked him quite a lot of suspicious questions. Specifically about the publication of Angharad.”
Effy’s legs began to go numb. Then her arms, then her whole body. She could scarcely feel Preston’s fingers gripping hers.
“How curious,” Ianto went on, putting one hand under his chin in an exaggerated gesture of perplexity. “Curious, curious, curious—that’s what I said to Blackmar, when I told him that I was also playing host to two students from the university in Caer-Isel, one of whom professed an interest in my father’s life and his works. I was utterly taken aback by Blackmar’s insistence that these wholesome students, whom I had graciously allowed into my home, could have any nefarious intentions. I don’t like to assume the worst of people, you know. But I also don’t like being taken for a fool. So I decided to come over to the study myself and ask—and oddly enough, I found it empty.”
His eyes. They were crisp and translucent, no more murk. They were sharp enough to cut and clear enough to see her reflection.
“I warned you away from him, Effy,” he said.
“Ianto . . . ,” she started, but her voice was trembling too much to go on. At its edges, her vision was rippling, fear thickening her belly.
He shifted, rattling the chains that he’d thrown over his shoulder. “Saint Acrasia is your patroness indeed. I see the mark of his mouth on your throat. Defiling yourself, and for an Argantian, of all people—I expected better from a good Northern girl like you.”
This was the Ianto from the pub, the one who had grasped her hand and held on to it until it hurt. If there was any trace of the genial, lighthearted, hopeful Ianto, she could find none of it in his gaze.