“It’s not just that,” Effy said. “You have no idea—I’ve read your book a hundred times, maybe more. It was a friend when I didn’t have any. It was the only thing that said I was sane when the whole world was telling me I was mad. It saved me in more ways than I can count. Because I knew no matter how afraid I felt, I wasn’t truly alone.”
Angharad’s eyes were shining now, too. “That’s all I wanted, you know,” she said. “When I was young—when I was your age. I wanted just one girl, only one, to read my book and feel that she was understood, and I would be understood in return. Writing that book was like shining a beacon from a lighthouse, I suppose. Are there any ships on the horizon? Will they signal back to me? I never got the chance to know. My husband’s name was all over it, and his was the only ship I could see.”
“I saw it,” Effy whispered. “I see it. And it saved me.”
“Well,” Angharad said, “you saved me, too. The Fairy King is gone. No matter what happens now, I’m free.”
Tears were falling down Effy’s cheeks, and even though she tried, she couldn’t stanch them. The warmth in her chest spread through her blood, all the way to her fingers and toes. Her missing ring finger didn’t ache anymore. That phantom, too, had been banished.
“I’m so sorry,” Preston said quietly, “but we couldn’t get it in time—Myrddin’s diary, the letters. The, uh, photographs.” His cheeks reddened. “The two of us know the truth, but the rest of it has been lost with the house.”
“You found Emrys’s diary?” Angharad’s voice tipped up in disbelief. “My son didn’t know that secret room was there. The Fairy King might have, but I put iron on the back of the wardrobe, so he couldn’t get at it even if he wanted to. How did you find it?”
Preston glanced over at Effy, with a look of great admiration and affection. “She’s very clever, this one. Effy.”
“Effy,” Angharad repeated. It was the first time she had spoken Effy’s name. “I cannot begin to explain how grateful I am for all that you’ve done for me. Both of you. It’s enough, I think, to be free from this house. And to have even two people who know the truth.”
But Effy just wiped her eyes, feeling wretched. Feeling angry. It was an uncommon feeling, unexpected. Her weightless limbs suddenly strengthened, as if filled with purpose.
It was not enough. Not enough to justify a life spent in obscurity and repression, a girl and then a woman and then a ghost, alone in that ruined house, tormented endlessly by the Fairy King. It wasn’t fair, and Effy could not bear it. She would shout the truth to the world, even if it was only her voice, and even if it turned her throat raw. She could not bear to be silent any longer.
And she would not return to Caer-Isel only to lower her gaze to the ground every time a classmate snickered at her, every time she saw Master Corbenic in the hall.
She would not go back to that green chair.
As Effy’s gaze traveled across the room, it landed on something she had forgotten about until now.
She lurched to her feet, so abruptly that Preston looked frightened and startled, and Angharad blinked in bewilderment. Heart beating fast, Effy grabbed the heavy box from the desk and brought it over to them, its enormous padlock thumping.
“We have this,” she said, a little breathless from the effort. “We couldn’t open it, of course, but . . .”
Angharad looked up at her, eyes wide and disbelieving. “How?” she managed. “I thought it had been lost, drowned . . . that silly line. Emrys did write that one, sort of. He wrote all his poetry, more or less, at least when he was himself. It was after an argument we had, when my husband was still my husband some of the time. I wanted us to move, before the Fairy King took his body back, but Emrys was as deluded as his possessor, driven mad by those cycles of possession. He said there was something important about living in Hiraeth, no matter how close it was to ruin. I snapped at him, ‘Well, everything that’s ancient must decay.’ ‘You can’t fight time,’ I must have said. And Emrys snapped back, ‘It’s not time I’m worried about, darling girl. The only enemy is the sea.’ How did you manage to recover it?”
Effy and Preston looked at each other. At last Preston said, “Brave, too. Brave and clever, Effy Sayre.”
“I can see that,” said Angharad. Very slowly, she drew her hands up to her throat. She pushed her hair back over her shoulder and dipped her fingers below the collar of her gown. After a few moments, she produced a thin chain and, at the end of it, a key.
The key slipped into the lock like a sword at last returning to its sheath. Effy saw a little leather-bound book tucked inside, and yellowed letters wrapped in twine. She saw Angharad’s decorous script, her name and Myrddin’s bracketing every page. His at the top (dear), hers at the bottom (yours); him beginning, her ending.
But Effy also saw that the top of the box had been fitted with a mirror, and in that mirror she watched her own lips parting, her lashes fluttering, her golden hair curling in the firelight. She saw her face there beside Angharad’s, and right above the old letters, past and present and future all coiled into one moment that felt as tight and tense as a held breath.
Effy reached up and felt her own face, watching her movements in the mirror. She traced the bridge of her nose, trailed gently along the planes of her cheeks and the line of her jaw. The numbness had receded, and warmth radiated from her skin.
Signs of life, as her muscles twitched and jumped at the featherlight touch. Signs of life, everywhere.
Seventeen
What wisdom do you want from a death-marked girl? I can say only this: In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.
From Angharad by Angharad Myrddin (née Blackmar), 191 AD
It took some time, of course, for Effy and Preston to compile and index the letters, to copy the pages of Angharad’s diary using the wheezing mimeograph in Laleston, and for Preston to write it all up on the old typewriter that Laleston’s chief librarian grudgingly permitted them to use. They had spent two weeks in Laleston, and had now been away from Caer-Isel more than a month.
Preston had a cigarette in his mouth while he worked, smoke curling out the window of their hotel room. Sometimes he got up to pace, mussing his already mussed hair, muttering about omniscient narration and melodrama. Effy understood all the theory only vaguely, but she offered insight where she could.
She felt, as did Preston, that she understood Angharad on a level that was almost inarticulable: it was as primal and unconscious as her lungs pumping and her heart beating.
“Why don’t you take a break?” Effy offered as she perched on the edge of the hotel bed, mug of coffee in hand. “I can write for a while.”
“You don’t have to.” He had told her, at the beginning, that he thought it might be difficult for her. To read all the words, to write in such a stilted, formal manner about a life that so neatly mirrored her own.
“I want to,” Effy said. She handed him her coffee. “I want it to be finished. I want it all to be done.”
What she meant was that she wanted it all tied up neatly. No more questions, no more doubting. No more scolding about how what she knew and what she believed weren’t real.
Preston frowned. “I don’t think scholarship is ever really done,” he said. “If anything, this is only the beginning. Academics and tabloid journalists alike are going to be hounding us, hounding her. There are going to be a hundred papers, even books, arguing against our thesis. Not to mention the Sleeper Museum . . . are you ready for all that?”
It didn’t make her happy. But Effy knew he was right.