“Yes,” she said. “I am Angharad Myrddin, née Blackmar. My husband has been dead for six months. My son, I imagine, has died along with his father’s house. But in truth, like his father, he died months ago.”
The grief in her voice was hard to bear. Effy thought of what had become of the Fairy King, now just a heap of dust and ash. Ianto had perished along with him, like wine bled out of a smashed vessel, possessor and possessed both ruined by that one shard of mirror.
Inside Preston’s grasp, her numb fingers curled.
“I didn’t mean to,” Effy said despairingly. “I didn’t mean to kill him, too, I just . . . I didn’t know. Not until it was over. Well, I didn’t believe myself.”
To Preston it must have sounded like nonsense. But Effy knew that Angharad would understand. The older woman hugged her arms around her chest and replied, “There was nothing else to be done. As I said, my son has been dead for a long time. To become the Fairy King’s vessel is to lose yourself, little by little, like water wearing away stone. Ianto fought it as best he could.”
“I’m sorry,” Preston said, blinking. “Do you mean to say that the Fairy King is real?”
Angharad gave him a weary look. “Northerners never understand until they see something with their own eyes. I don’t blame you—I was a naive Northerner once, too, who thought that the stories were just stories and the Fairy King was nothing more than paper and ink and Southern superstition. Real magic is just cannier, better at disguising itself. The Fairy King is devious and secretive, but he is real. Was.”
To hear someone else say it out loud at last—Effy’s knees almost gave way under her.
“I’ve seen him my whole life,” she whispered. “Ever since I was a little girl. No one ever believed me.”
Angharad looked at her steadily. “No one believed me, either. Not about the Fairy King. Not about him using my husband and then my son as his vessels. And certainly not about the words I wrote. About my book.”
“We believe you,” Preston said. “We, ah, read your letters.”
“Which ones? I thought Greenebough had them all burned.”
“We found them under your bed,” said Effy. “We went to visit your father at Penrhos—it seemed like they’d just gotten left behind somehow, gathering dust . . .”
All of this, she only now realized, was very humiliating to recount. Her cheeks heated. Angharad’s wrinkled brow wrinkled further.
“Hm,” she said at last. “It sounds like you two are going to be a bit of a problem for Marlowe and my father.”
“Ianto tried to kill us for it,” Preston said. “Or it wasn’t him, I suppose, if—”
He trailed off again, appearing somewhat hopeless. Effy didn’t precisely blame him for being unable to take the revelation about the Fairy King in stride. Of all the skeptics she had ever met, he was the most skeptical by far.
“My son.” A look of devastation crossed Angharad’s face. “He has too much of his father in him. Had. The Fairy King can sense weakness and wanting in men. It’s like a wound, a gap that he can use to slip inside.”
Effy tried not to think of Ianto in his final moments, his mouth smearing against hers so hard her jaw still throbbed. There had been another Ianto, too, one she’d seen emerge in particular moments, like a seal briefly surfacing from the water. He’d been kind to her when they first met, hopeful about the house she would never build and the future he would never see.
The best parts of him were all too familiar to her. He, too, had liked to believe in impossible things. It was not his fault that the Fairy King had used him.
“I’m sorry,” Effy said, and it still felt like not nearly enough.
Angharad waved a hand, though her green eyes looked damp and overly bright. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose you have quite a lot of questions. Let’s sit.”
Angharad lit a fire with what little dry wood there was, and they all sat down on the floor in front of it. The blue death shade had receded from the tips of Effy’s fingers, leaving them tender and pink. She pressed close to Preston as the wind shook the walls, rain turning the window glass marbled and opaque.
“I was eighteen when I met Emrys Myrddin,” Angharad began. “I cannot say I had any idea back then that one day we would be wed, that we would have a son together, that all of this would come to pass. This.” She laughed hollowly. “My life. Back then Emrys was just a handsome stranger, an employee of my father, and all I knew was that when I asked questions, he answered them. I could not see the Fairy King behind his eyes.”
Preston leaned closer. “How old was Myrddin then?”
“Thirty-four.” Angharad looked into the fire. “When I was young, I believed I had invited all that came to pass. I believed that I wanted it.”
Effy’s stomach lurched. “The letters we saw . . . your father wasn’t happy that you and Myrddin, um . . .”
“Had an affair,” Angharad said, her voice clear. “That’s what we all called it then. An illicit thing, all parties equally to blame. Myrddin was unwed, but it was still terribly scandalous, to have relations with a young girl, your best friend’s daughter. That was another thing no one believed—that it had all begun so innocently. I was a young girl and my father had no time for me. I wanted him to look at some of my poems, but he waved me off. He said that girls’ minds were not fit for storytelling; we were too capricious and inconstant. Those were his words exactly—banal and redundant, if you ask me. That’s why the only enduring work of Colin Blackmar is a dull poem children read in primary school.”
It was such a shock to hear her deride her own father that Effy let out an inappropriate and too-loud laugh. “‘The Dreams of a Sleeping King’ really is terrible, isn’t it? Why did Greenebough Books pick it up?”
“Oh, I’m sure he saw a gap in the market for rote poetry that can teach nine-year-olds about metaphor and simile. The elder Marlowe was very shrewd. I’ve heard no similar praises sung of his son.”
“No, I expect not,” Preston said. “We met him, at one of your father’s parties. He was a lecherous sot.”
“Well, so was my father,” said Angharad, still staring into the flames. “He’s too old now, I think, to be much of a philanderer, and my mother is dead, so I suppose it’s not technically philandering, but he is vile. I’m sorry you had to meet him.”
She raised her head and looked directly at Effy when she said this, green eyes hard and bright. Effy felt herself caught in that gaze, like flotsam in a sea net. Angharad’s eyes were so clear, they were like twin mirrors—nothing like the murky green sea glass that the tide left strewn across the sand. Effy saw her own wavering, miniaturized reflection staring back from them. Her blond hair was a mess and her pale cheeks were splotchy with heat.
“He’s not yours to apologize for,” Effy said, tearing her gaze away from her own face. It had been so long, she realized, since she had seen it.
Angharad gave her a small smile. “Well. Regardless. There are three men in this story, and none of them ever said they were sorry for anything. They never expressed as much as a twinge of guilt.”
“Guilt,” Preston repeated. “Guilt over what?”
The fire crackled. Thunder rolled like waves against the shore. Angharad’s eyes held the firelight.
“Our affair began slowly,” she said. “At first it was nothing more than elbows brushing. The touch of a knee. Then a kiss, apologetic and rueful. Another kiss, penitent. Then another, heady and stolen and not regretted at all. Emrys feared my father’s wrath, but nothing more.”
Effy felt a phantom hand brush against her skull, raking its fingers through her hair. The whispers of her classmates hummed in the back of her mind, her surname scratched out on the college roster and replaced with whore. “Can you really call something an affair if the man is nearly twice your age and you’re just, well . . .”
“A girl?” Angharad arched her brow.