A sob drowned out the rest of her words. It had risen in her throat without her noticing, and she wasn’t aware she was crying until she tasted a bitter tang in her mouth. Tears, blood, seawater—all of it tasted the same. Salt and salt and salt. Preston was now submerged to the chin.
“I wish we could have stayed there,” Preston whispered into her hair. “Forever—impossibly. I’m sorry for saying all that inane nonsense about things only mattering because they don’t last. That was hubris, I think. I don’t want to die here. I want—”
His voice broke, and Effy was wrecked all over again. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and Effy reached up and tried to brush them away, because how could he do it when his hands were tied? She lifted his glasses and kissed his nose, then his mouth, tasting nothing but salt. Preston choked against her lips, a strangled sob wrenching itself from his chest. The water was past their chins now, leaking into their mouths.
“I love you.” Effy pressed her forehead against his.
“I love you,” Preston said, voice wavering. “I’m so sorry it’s ruined us both.”
A part of her wanted to smile, wanted to laugh, even, but if she opened her mouth, the water would pour in. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. Preston stared back at her, gaze unblinking behind his wet glasses. She wanted him to be the last thing she saw.
Yet—familiar words rose up in her mind. If there’s one thing I know, it’s survival. She had stared down the Fairy King, vanquished him at last. She could not let it end like this. If that was all she was—a survivor—she would be one until her very last breath.
Effy reached down and began to yank furiously at Preston’s chains again. She pulled so hard she could feel her skin tearing, and Preston strained, too, as the water rose to the bridge of his nose. But still the stake held fast.
And then—impossibly—another pair of hands closed over hers.
I have to be dreaming, she thought. Perhaps she was already dead. Perhaps her escape had been an illusion after all. Perhaps Ianto had killed her, or the Fairy King had taken her; it didn’t matter which. But she kept pulling, driven only by instinct now. Preston strained. The phantom hands pulled, too. At last, where two pairs of hands had not been enough, three sufficed, and she felt something give, the stake shifting loose from the wall.
As soon as Preston broke free, Effy grasped him, still trailing his chains, and hauled them both to the surface. When Effy had blinked the film from her eyes, she saw someone floating in the water beside them—a woman, white dress and white hair spreading out like a gauzy jellyfish caught in the surf. Her skin was pale and furrowed with age, but her hands, where they had touched Effy’s, were as soft as a girl’s.
Effy choked out a laugh, as all three of them staggered up the steps. How absurd, to be rescued by a ghost.
Yet if the Fairy King had been real, who was she to question it?
Everything else felt very real, from Preston’s arm draped over her to the cold, slick stone against her palms and knees. Lightning flashed, illuminating the face of the ghost, wrinkled in some places but familiar, so familiar it was almost like looking into a gilt-edged mirror.
Effy had seen that face trapped in photographs, attached to a nude torso. She had thought the girl dead, erased from time, but now she stood right there before her.
As the whole house shook with the howling wind, Effy was struck by a bolt of knowledge.
“It’s you,” she whispered. “Angharad.”
The woman who was not a ghost led them swiftly through the foyer, deftly avoiding the holes in the floor, as if she had done this a hundred times before. Her feet were bare and Effy wondered how they didn’t bleed for all the splintered wood and shattered glass on the ground.
Effy and Preston limped after her, hand in hand. When they reached the threshold, it took all three of them, sopping wet and breathing hard, to heave the door open.
The wind had its claws in them immediately. It wrenched Effy’s black ribbon from her hair and nearly swiped Preston’s glasses from his face. It blew up Angharad’s white robe, sheer with dampness, until Effy could see her bare ankles and knees, and the blue veins pressing up from underneath her skin like striations in the cliffside. She stopped for a moment, even in the midst of the deadly gusts, just to stare.
Angharad’s hair shuddered around her face. Aging, Effy realized, was the opposite of alchemy. What was now silver had once been gold.
“Come on, then,” she urged them, in a fine and proper Northern accent. “We need to get to shelter.”
Preston’s car was still in the driveway, but leaving Hiraeth was a distant dream now. It would be impossible to drive in this storm, impossible to see through the windshield. As they clambered down the steps, Effy saw the muscle in Preston’s jaw clench and unclench. His hand in hers was freezing.
“Where are we supposed to go?” he asked, voice raised over the shrieking wind and the rain that pelted them ceaselessly.
Effy knew. “The guesthouse,” she said. “It will keep us.”
Preston looked at her as if she were mad.
“The four walls will stand,” Angharad said. “And we don’t have another choice.”
At the very least, Preston could recognize the logic in that. His hand gripped hers more fiercely.
There was no path now; it was all mud and sucking water. They skidded along the edge of the cliff, limbs flailing, Preston’s other arm flying out to catch them both against the trunk of a tree. The mud had risen nearly to the cuffs of his trousers. Overhead branches flew like clumsily loosed arrows, aimless and deadly.
The hem of Angharad’s gown was black. She said, “Don’t stop walking.”
Effy felt as if she’d been struck by a switch. “I won’t.”
They waded through the mud, through a wasteland of uprooted trees, their trunks split and their roots splayed to the air like men struck down in the heat of battle. The guesthouse was in sight now, its four stone walls seemingly unperturbed by the storm.
When at last they reached it, Angharad threw her weight against the iron-girded door and forced it open. Effy and Preston shuffled through, and Preston shut the door behind them, muffling the sound of the wind.
Effy leaned against the desk, trying desperately to catch her breath. She could not feel her legs under her. When she looked down at her hand, she saw that the tips of her fingers were blue and trembling.
And yet she could not bring herself to care. She stared at the woman in the white dress as she wrung out her hair. Water dripped from her slim body and pooled decorously on the floor.
Of all things to do, Preston had begun pacing. He walked back and forth between the door and the desk, stopping to look Effy up and down, and on his second trip, when he noticed Effy’s blue fingers, he took both of her hands in one of his, raised them to his mouth, and blew on them.
“I won’t let you lose another one,” he said.
There were quite a few more pressing injuries, including the torn skin around Preston’s wrists and the wound on Effy’s head, but none of that seemed to matter in that moment. Effy still felt mostly numb.
“Well,” Effy said at last, a bit dizzily, “when things are meant to rot, they will.”
The strangeness of what she’d said made Preston’s brow furrow, but Angharad’s head shot up, as if she’d been called by name.
This movement seemed to alert Preston to her presence again, and he stopped blowing on Effy’s fingers long enough to say, “Thank you. I—thank you.”
Angharad nodded once, lips pressed thin.
“It really is you.” Preston hesitated, lowering his hands, and Effy’s, down from his mouth. “The mistress of the house. Myrddin’s . . .”
He trailed off, and for a moment everything was silent, even the sound of the wind beating against wood and stone. It was as if the guesthouse, improbably, had been blanketed in a layer of snow.
At last, Angharad inclined her chin.