“Please,” she said. Bile was rising in her throat. “Please stop.”
It was as if Ianto didn’t hear her, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “And you, Preston Héloury—well. I don’t know how you managed to seduce Effy into your little scheme, but now I know why you’re really here. You claimed you had nothing but respect for my father, for the legacy of Emrys Myrddin.” Ianto reached onto the table behind him, and Effy let out a small, strangled noise of terror, thinking he was reaching for his musket. But instead he picked up a scrap of paper. “‘Execution of the Author: An Inquiry into the Authorship of the Major Works of Emrys Myrddin.’ This is an assault on my father’s legacy.”
“It’s not like that,” Preston tried hoarsely. But Ianto only shook his head and held up his hand, rattling the chains again.
“I might have believed your wheedling lies, had I not found these.” With a flourish, he gathered up the photographs of the girl and then dropped them, letting them flutter to the ground. Effy saw a flash of the girl’s naked calf, her pale hair. “You’re no better than a sleazy tabloid journalist, looking for evidence my father was leading some lascivious double life. I don’t know where you got these, or where you managed to find his diary, but it ends here. This is my father’s house. This is my house. And you’ve come here to wreck it, to ruin it—”
His words were cut off by an enormous crash of thunder, so loud that Effy winced, and a fantastic bolt of lightning that cast the entire room in a clear white light.
The house groaned miserably around them, and from somewhere far below, there was a further crashing sound: more rocks crumbling into the sea.
“Ianto,” Effy said, once the thunder ceased and there was only the howling of the wind. She tried to make her voice low, pliant. What else was left but to try to reason with him? She had really thought the truth might save him, but perhaps it had not come soon enough. “Please—this house isn’t going to survive the storm. We all need to leave, now.”
“Shut up,” Ianto said savagely. His pale eyes were darting back and forth between them, manic and wild. “I called the university in Caer-Isel. It took a bit of convincing, but eventually the dean’s office pulled their files on both Preston Héloury and Effy—excuse me, Euphemia—Sayre.”
It was the first time she’d heard her full name, her true name, in Ianto’s mouth. There was another clap of thunder, and something large and black slammed against the window, hard enough to form an enormous fissure in the glass. A tree branch. Rainwater trickled in.
“It appears you were a bit of a problem for the architecture college, Euphemia,” Ianto went on. “Some funny business with your adviser—you start to think that’s why the university used to bar women from attending at all. They’re all temptresses or blushing maidens, unfit for higher thinking.”
Effy squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop it.”
“Perhaps I didn’t peg you right. Perhaps you’re Amoret, not Acrasia. Perhaps you lay there limp as your adviser had his way—”
It was Preston who shouted then, over the sound of the wind and the thunder. “Stop it! You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, you—”
“They pulled your file, too,” Ianto cut in. “Preston Héloury. What an odd, in-between name. Your mother is a blue-blooded Llyrian, but your father is some Argantian mountain peasant. Was. It took a while, searching through all those newspaper records in Argantian, but I found the obituary. So unpleasant. I can’t think of a much worse way to go, a mind decaying, bleeding water.”
Preston’s grip on her hand tightened. Behind his glasses, his gaze grew hard.
At last the window at Ianto’s back shattered entirely, letting in the rain and wind. The shards of glass were swept up and Effy’s hair blew around her face, tears stinging her eyes.
“Please,” she said. If the truth could not save Ianto, perhaps burying it would at least save her and Preston. “You can keep the diary, the photographs, everything. We’ll never write a single word about your father. Just please—we all have to go or we’ll die here.”
“Oh no,” Ianto said. “This isn’t a place for leaving. Things live and die here, but they don’t leave.”
Another deafening howl of wind, lightning crackling across the sky. “You’re mad,” Preston said.
And Ianto did look mad, in a way—his eyes glassy and overbright, his wet hair sticking to his scalp and shoulders, the enormous chain rattling with every movement. But in another way, Effy could tell that what he said made sense in his own mind. There was a logic to it—a sick logic, perhaps—that someone like Preston would never understand. That only people who believed in fairy tales and magic and ghosts could see.
People like her and Ianto.
Effy remembered a ghost story her grandfather had told her once, about a prisoner who had been forgotten about and left to starve in a dungeon cell. For all the rest of the lord’s life, he heard the rattling of chains at night, moving down the halls of his castle. With each passing night, the sound grew closer, until at last, one morning, the lord was found dead in his sheets, the bloody marks of strangulation around his throat like a garish ruby necklace.
If he stayed here, Ianto would become a ghost, too. Only there would be no house left to haunt.
She had to leave him here, in his madness, or she would be dragged down with him.
“Preston,” Effy said urgently. “Let’s go.”
Hands still joined, they took a cautious step backward. But before they could flee toward the door, quick as a flash Ianto had his musket in his hands, the black mouth of the barrel staring down at them. Effy’s throat went dry. She froze in place.
And then, most unexpectedly, Ianto asked, “Do you know the tale of Llyr’s very first king?”
Neither of them managed to speak, but that did not deter Ianto. He took another pace toward them, musket still aimed high. His chains shook like lots being cast.
“Llyr’s very first king was just a tribal chieftain who won all his wars,” he said. “He had the beards of all his enemies to prove it, and he wove them together into a great cloak of hair. He had tents and huts and even houses, but when his kingdom was at last united, he wanted to build a castle. He found the best builders among his new subjects, and they began to dig a foundation. But every night when they went to sleep, they would find that the foundation was flooded with water, even though they could not remember hearing any rain.
“The king, understandably, was bewildered and vexed. Angry. But his court wizard, a very old man who had seen many tribal chieftains live and die, told the king that the land was angry with him in return. All the trees he had cut down in his quest, all the grass he had burned—why should the land allow him to build anything, when he had treated it so cruelly? The court wizard told the king that if he wanted his castle to grow tall and strong, he would have to give something back to the land. A sacrifice.
“And so the king ordered his men to go find him a child, a fatherless child. He tied the orphan boy to a stake within the foundation of his castle, and then went to sleep. When he returned in the morning, he found that indeed the water had come, and the boy had drowned, but when his builders went to repair the foundation, the next night it stood strong and dry. The castle was thus built, and to this day no storm or conqueror has been able to tear it down.”
All through Ianto’s speech, the wind had not ceased its wailing, and rainwater pelted his back. From somewhere down below, Effy had begun to hear creaking, crashing sounds: floorboards crumbling inexorably against the cliffside and into the sea.