“Yes.” The word felt heavy in Effy’s mouth.
“I was eighteen,” said Angharad again. “That meant I was a woman, in some people’s eyes. Well—I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me. Everyone thought that I wanted it. I convinced myself that I wanted it, too. Emrys was always kind to me. At least, before the Fairy King took him over entirely. I suppose it was a bit of youthful rebellion on my part, too. I hated my father and wanted to spite him.”
At first Effy had imagined Master Corbenic’s hand, with all its rough black hair, palming her skull. Now, with a roil of nausea that made her want to retch, she imagined it was Myrddin’s hand instead, grasping the back of her head and holding it like a fish he expected to try to wriggle free.
“Emrys read my poetry,” Angharad went on, “and he told me what was good and what was rubbish. He encouraged me to write more; he said I had a talent. I wanted to be published, too.” She gave a dry, humorless laugh. “I suppose my dream did come true, in a way.”
Effy’s stomach knotted with grief. Preston said, gently, “The book—your book—it’s the most famous book in Llyrian history. Perhaps that’s cold comfort. I’m sorry.”
Angharad shook her head. “For a long time, I stopped even thinking of it as my book. It’s very hard to believe something when it feels like the whole world is trying to convince you otherwise.”
I know, Effy thought. And then, because she could, she said it out loud: “I know.”
“My father despaired of me,” Angharad said with a small smile. “My sisters all hated to read. They played harp and baked tarts and were eager to find husbands who worked at banks. I was the sort of girl who, in the old stories, caught the eye of the Fairy King.”
Effy drew a shaking breath as Angharad said this. Even though she had seen him crumble into dust, the fear of him had not yet faded. Her body remembered what it felt like to be afraid so well that it would take time, a long time, to teach it something new.
“Emrys was the one who told me that.” Angharad’s smile was almost sincere now. “Back then, I didn’t understand that it meant he would come for me. I was a Northern girl. The Fairy King was a legend—Southern superstition, as I said. But those words planted the seed.
“I went to the library in Laleston and read all the tomes I could find about the myth of the Fairy King. Yet I found that the stories were always about how to keep him at bay, how to hide from him: the horseshoe you could place over your door, or the necklace of rowan berries you could wear. They were about the girls he stole and how he killed them. I thought, what if there was a girl who invited the Fairy King to her door? Who did not weep when she was taken? Who fell in love with him?”
“So it was a romance,” Effy said. Preston gave her a dour look.
“At first,” Angharad replied. “You know, I never changed a word from the beginning of the book. I didn’t want there to be any signs. I wanted to preserve the way I felt when I wrote it, when I thought it was going to be a romance. I wanted the audience to be convinced that they were reading a romance as well.”
Effy opened her mouth to speak, but Preston was quicker. “So we were both right,” he said, “in a way. It is a romance—until it’s not.”
Angharad dipped her head. “The protagonist doesn’t know—and I didn’t know, then—what it would all become. I wrote the first part before I knew. Before that night I spent with Emrys in his apartment. That—”
It was the first time Angharad had stopped so abruptly in her telling, and the sudden silence felt as hard and rough as a rock dropping from some great height. It was a long and unbearable silence, during which Effy’s blood turned thick with despair.
The rain beat down on the roof. At last, Angharad opened her mouth again.
“I had a little hand mirror,” she said, voice low now. “After we made love for the first time, we lay in bed together, and Emrys nodded off to sleep. But I felt like there was a fire in my veins, a humming in my fingers and toes, and I couldn’t get myself to sleep. So I sat up and combed my hair in the mirror; what else was I going to do? I felt as bodiless as a ghost. I could not trust my own form any longer. I was there in bed beside him, and when the mirror caught Emrys’s sleeping form, I saw the Fairy King behind me instead.”
Effy’s breath caught. Even in the recounting, decades later, Angharad’s fear was so palpable and so familiar that her own stomach lurched with it. Preston’s grip on her hand grew tighter.
“I didn’t believe it, of course,” she said. “I thought my own eyes were lying to me. How long had I been hearing that a woman’s mind couldn’t be trusted? I dropped the mirror in shock and it shattered all over the floor. I remembered the books I’d read at the library—how if the Fairy King saw his own reflection, it would destroy him. But Emrys was sleeping, and only I had seen the truth.
“What I had seen occupied my whole being for weeks afterward. The rest of the book flowed out of me like no story or poem ever had. I finished it in no more than a fortnight. It was a book made of my own fears and hopes, about a girl who had seen terrible things but, in the end, defeated them.”
“How did Myrddin get his hands on it, then?” Preston asked. “And how did it all . . . become his?”
Angharad smiled ruefully. “I was so caught up in the world I had created inside my mind that I forgot the real one existed, for a while. I suppose that’s why I became careless enough to be caught. My father found one of Emrys’s letters to me. He was furious, of course. Not that he cared for my sake, but because it undercut his power. Like someone planting on your land without your permission, or putting up a fence around what used to be yours.”
The words made Effy’s blood roar in her ears, like water rushing down the cliffside. She wanted to clap her hands over them, to drown it out, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. All the hurt was what made it real. The hurt that transcended all the years stretched between them, tying together two different girls on two different shores, half a century apart.
“At the same time we were discovered, I was discovered. Emrys found the manuscript, newly completed, in the drawer of the desk I used when I visited him. I still don’t know if it was Emrys who read it or the Fairy King. Either way, he recognized that the book could bring him money, fame. Even eternity.”
“A place in the Sleeper Museum,” Effy said.
Angharad nodded. “The next thing I knew, I was dragged into my father’s sitting room, with my father and Emrys and Marlowe all gathered around me in their armchairs, looking solemn. Their brows wrinkled as they laid out the architecture of my future.”
Architecture. The word caught at Effy like a thorn. She and Angharad had been caught in the same trap, muzzled, made silent by the brick walls built around them. “And what did they say?”
“That I had been very bad, of course.” Angharad gave a thin smile. “Lying to my father, seducing his former employee and friend. What sort of licentious, depraved girl would do a thing like that? Certainly not one who could be trusted to live her own life. Certainly not one who could have believably authored a book like the one I had written.”
Effy heard Preston’s breathing quicken, but he didn’t say a word.
“So all was decided,” Angharad said, “by these three stern men in armchairs. Emrys could have me. Greenebough could have the manuscript. And Emrys could have the glory, but in exchange, my father would receive all the royalties. ‘Consider it a dowry,’ Marlowe said.”