“That’s a myth, a legend,” Preston said, voice edged with desperation. “It isn’t true; it isn’t real. But death is real, and we’re going to die if we stay.”
Ianto gave a low and bitter laugh. “All this time spent in the Bottom Hundred and you still don’t understand. What your scientists and academics call myths are as real as anything else. How else could a land and a people survive Drowning?”
Effy shut her eyes against the stinging wind. When she first came to Hiraeth, she had believed that, too. Believed in Angharad and rowan berries and mountain ash and girdles of iron. But stories were devious things, things with agendas. They could cheat and steal and lie to your face. They could crumble away under your feet.
“You are mad,” she said, opening her eyes to the barrel of the musket hovering ever closer.
“Call me mad if you like,” Ianto said, and as he stepped forward, the chains rattled, “but all I see before me are a drowning foundation and two fatherless children.”
The gun was jammed against her back before Effy had even made sense of his words. Preston was stammering out protests as Ianto herded them back out into the hallway, around the holes where the floorboards had at last given way, and down the stairs. Water was dripping down the ruined faces of Saint Eupheme and Saint Marinell, making it look as though they were weeping.
A torrent of water slid down the steps beside them, carrying the shattered painting of the Fairy King with it. The glass had cracked, but the painting was untarnished behind it, the features of his face still sharp and clear. It was as if the water couldn’t touch him at all.
Ianto stopped them in front of the door to the basement. He shook the end of the musket as if he were giving a reproachful wag of his finger. “I noticed that my key was missing, Euphemia,” he said. “You hardly needed to be so deceitful about it, you know. I would have given it up to you, for a price.”
His hand grasped at her face then, cupping her chin and turning it up toward him. His eyes were cloudless, crystal clear. He held her face so tightly that it hurt, and Effy gave a quiet whimper.
“Don’t touch her,” Preston snarled.
Ianto let go of her roughly, fingernail scraping down her cheek and drawing blood. “I’ve heard quite enough from you. Smug and smarmy since the first day I let you into my home. I think this will be a fitting way to go—just like your father. A death by water.”
“No!” Effy cried as Ianto swung the door open. Black water was pouring in from all the cracks in the wall, inching farther up the steps.
Without letting go of his musket, Ianto shifted the chains from his shoulder. Effy saw now that there was a stake tied to the end of them. He seized Preston by the arm, swinging him forward toward the dark water. Preston’s boots scrabbled against the slick stone, hands flying out to catch himself on the threshold, but Ianto grabbed the front of his shirt and held him so he didn’t fall.
Effy realized only then that he wasn’t going to hurl Preston down. Instead, he began wrapping the chains around Preston’s wrists.
“Stop!” Effy threw herself against Ianto’s back, but she was like a small wave lapping at solid stone. He shrugged her off with a mindless twitch.
Though Preston struggled against his bindings, Ianto’s grip was tight, and the musket was still aimed at his chest, barrel gleaming in the half-light.
Ianto jerked Preston by his chains down the steps, where he took the stake and drove it into the wall, then began hammering it into place with the blunt end of the musket. Time seemed to bend and slow around Effy, like river water around a rock, and there were no thoughts in her mind, nothing but the pure and brilliant surge of adrenaline in her veins.
She splashed down the stairs after them and took hold of Ianto’s wrist, making him fumble with the musket and stumble backward, nearly plunging into the dark water.
“You stupid girl,” Ianto growled as he righted himself. Water was pouring through the walls, between the cracks in the brickwork, like hundreds of weeping eyes. “You have no idea what you’re playing at.”
And then, with one huge, sweeping arm, he hurled her against the wall, so hard that her head hit the stone with a terrible crack. Effy felt the pain in her teeth and jaw, and then a hot, blooming agony seeped throughout her skull and down to her throat.
She managed to reach up with one numb hand and feel the back of her head. Her fingers came away smeared with blood.
Ianto was a large man, but not that large. Not large enough that two people couldn’t wrest the gun from his hands. The strength he had was impossible. Inhuman.
Preston was shouting, but she couldn’t hear him. She was deaf to everything but the roar of blood in her ears. Legs trembling beneath her, Effy slumped down onto the steps, submerging her lower body in the sleek, dark water.
“Please,” she heard Preston say, when her hearing briefly returned to her. “I’ll do anything—just let her live.” His voice was shaking, syllables dropped between his sobs.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Ianto said. “The foundation only needs one fatherless child. I have no intention of letting her die.”
Effy tried to pull herself back up, but the pain was obliterating. Her vision was starry and fading. She heard the sounds of the musket beating against the stake again, grim metallic clangs, and the brief rattle of chains.
And then everything but the water was silent.
He took Effy by the arm and dragged her up the steps, as if she were as light as a doll, some child’s plaything. The water sloshed around them, and upstairs the house was groaning and groaning.
Effy’s last glimpse of Preston was through half-shut eyes. She saw only the rusted chains around his wrists, binding him to the wall, and his gaze flashing fearfully behind his glasses.
She tried to cry out his name but couldn’t, and then Ianto slammed the door shut after them.
Ianto dragged her into the dining room. Effy’s vision returned in increments, enough to see that the doorway had half collapsed on their way through, splintered wood sticking out at strange angles like the branches of a stripped pine tree.
It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t just the blow to her head: the entire room was slanted, tipping down toward the sea. The dining table had slid against the far wall, the chairs crammed up alongside it, and against all odds the glass chandelier still swung perilously overhead, like the heavy pendulum of a grandfather clock.
She was propped up in one of the moldering chairs, gaze still fuzzy. Ianto moved with graceless determination around the room, hurling furniture, flinging open cabinet doors viciously. As if he were looking for something. The musket still gleamed at his side.
“Please,” Effy managed, around a mouthful of blood. “I’ll do whatever—whatever you want from me. Just don’t let him die, please don’t let him die . . .”
She couldn’t tell if Ianto heard her at all. He didn’t turn around again for several moments, and when he did, there was something clutched in his fist. A crumpled piece of paper and a pencil. He thrust them at her, and in her bewilderment, Effy took them.
“Here,” he snarled. “Finish the damn blueprints.”
Effy just stared at him, mouth hanging open. “This house is going to fall into the sea.”
Ianto laughed, and it was a terrible, rasping sound, like stone scraping against stone. “When the water fills your lover’s lungs, when he turns pale and swollen with it, when his body floats like the carcass of a dead fish—this house will stand. It must.”
Her heart was throbbing in her throat, hatred burning a hole in her belly. “Then why should I draw anything for you, if you’re just going to let him die? I won’t do it. I won’t.”
Fury rolled like dark clouds over Ianto’s face. He jammed the end of the musket under her chin. “I don’t want to have to kill you, Effy. You do know that, don’t you? I have always wanted to keep you here. Safe from the world.”