“Yes,” Wetherell said. He dropped her trunk into the grass, which was so thick that it seemed to swallow the sound. “Just up this hill.”
The mist made it difficult to see more than a few steps ahead, but Effy felt the incline in the soles of her feet. She trudged after Wetherell, his flashlight parting the mist. After a few moments of walking in silence, following only the faint outline of Wetherell’s back, the fog thinned again. She could see that they were in a small, close circle of trees, the branches overhead knit together so thickly that no sky showed through.
A stout, clumsy shape emerged: a stone cottage with a thatched roof. It was so old that the earth had begun trying to reclaim it—grass was growing over the south-facing side, giving it the appearance of a large head with green hair, and vines were threaded through every crevice in the walls.
Wetherell stamped right up to the door and opened it with a blunt and businesslike shove. There was the rasp of metal against stone, like a knife being sharpened.
Effy couldn’t help the choked sound that came out of her. “This isn’t—this can’t be Hiraeth?”
Halfway through the door, Wetherell turned and gave her that now familiar pitying look. “No,” he said. “But the mistress has requested that you stay in the guest cottage. You can view the house tomorrow, when it’s light.”
The mistress. Myrddin’s obituary had mentioned that he was survived by a wife and a son, but neither had been named in the article. She only knew Ianto from his letter, which hadn’t spoken of his mother at all. Her skin prickling, Effy followed Wetherell inside.
He set down her trunk and began to fiddle with an oil lamp on the wall, which, after a moment, flared to life. Effy looked around. There was a small wooden desk in the corner, and a tub for washing, but the cottage was dominated by an enormous four-poster bed, which looked absurd against the crumbling, lichen-covered stone of the walls. It had a delicate, filmy canopy that reminded Effy of cobwebs. Its green velvet duvet was tucked under at least a dozen pillows, their gold tassels wilting like cut stalks of wheat.
Everything seemed worn out, somehow, weather-blanched and faded as an old photograph. It felt colder inside the cottage than out.
“No electricity,” Wetherell said frankly. He lit a second oil lamp, hanging over the door. “But the taps work, if you’re persevering.”
Effy looked at the two rusted taps above the tub and said nothing. She thought of her mother’s voice, crackling on the other end of the phone line. Bad decision after bad decision.
Wetherell finished with the lamp and handed her the box of matches. Effy took them wordlessly. “Well, I’ll send someone to fetch you in the morning.”
“How far is it to the house?”
“A ten-minute walk, give or take.”
“Depending on the roads?” Effy tried a fragile smile.
Wetherell looked back at her without humor. “Depending on a great many things.”
Then he was gone, and Effy was alone. She had expected to hear him stomping through the grass, but everything was unsettlingly silent. No crickets chirping, owls hooting, or predators shifting behind the tree line. Even the wind had gone quiet.
After growing up in Draefen, with the sounds of the city playing on a relentless loop, cars always honking and people always shouting, Effy found the silence intolerable. It was like two daggers driven into her ears. She drew in a deep breath and let it out again tremulously. She could not allow herself to cry. Today’s pill had already been swallowed.
Standing there in the cold, damp cottage, Effy considered her options. There were very few, and none of them good. She could try to stumble her way through the dark back to Saltney, but she would be at the mercy of the cliffs and the sea and whatever waited out there in the mist. She thought of the thing she’d seen dart across the road, and her stomach folded over on itself.
Even if she did make it down, there were no trains until morning. And then what? She would ride back to Caer-Isel, back to her decrepit dorm room, back to the spiders and soap scum, back to her terrible attempts at cross sections and boys who whispered about her in the halls. Back to Master Corbenic. Back to staring across the snowy courtyard at the literature college, full of envy and longing. She would call her mother to tell her the news, and her mother would sigh with relief and say, Thank you for being reasonable, Effy. You have enough problems to deal with as it is.
Just then, all of it seemed preferable to staying in Hiraeth. But she could do nothing about it until the sun rose.
She opened her trunk and changed into her nightgown, cringing at the feel of the icy stone floor against her bare feet. She opened up her other pill bottle and swallowed her sleeping pill without water, feeling too demoralized to even try the taps. She lit the candle on the bedside table, and extinguished the oil lamps.
Effy was about to crawl under the velvet duvet when a terrible fear plucked at her. She thought again of the creature in the road. It had not been a deer, but it had been nothing human, either; she knew that much. And it had not been imagined. She’d taken her pink pill. Wetherell had seen it, too. Even the doctor, with his medical tomes and his glass bottles, could not have explained it.
Anything could come bursting in, anything. Effy snatched up the candle and walked toward the door, her breath coming in short, cold spurts.
There was no lock, but the door was extraordinarily heavy and bolstered with metal. Iron. Effy ran her finger over the brace, and no rust flaked away under her touch. Everything else in the cottage was ancient, but the iron was new.
As Effy returned, haltingly, to the four-poster, a phrase floated up in her mind. I waited for the Fairy King in our marriage bed, but he didn’t know I was wearing a girdle of iron. Angharad’s words were so familiar, they were like the voice of an old friend. Few things could truly guard against the Fair Folk, but iron was one of them.
Effy knelt over her trunk and took out her copy of Angharad, flipping to the page where she’d underlined that passage in black pen. This was Myrddin protecting her, giving her a sign. Keeping her safe.
She tucked the book under the pillows and pulled the duvet up to her chin. The dark was heavy and still. It was utterly silent, save for the faint sound of water dripping. Wherever the water was, it sounded close.
She was sure she would never be able to fall asleep in this clammy, dense silence, but the sleeping pill did its work. Effy slipped quietly under, the memory of Angharad’s words something close to a lullaby.
Four
We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?
From A Meditation on Water and Femininity in the Works of Emrys Myrddin by Dr. Cedric Gosse, 211 AD
Effy woke the next morning to the sound of iron rasping against stone. The side of her face was wet and strands of damp hair stuck to her forehead. She wiped it dry with the edge of the green duvet. When she looked up, she saw a bit of the ceiling was soaked through—the sound she’d heard last night but couldn’t locate. The nasty, stale water must have been dripping on her for hours while she slept.
She was just sitting up in bed, gagging, when light cleaved through the open door. Her whole body tensed, half expecting to see wet black hair, a yellow curve of bone. But it was just a boy standing on the threshold, his dark brown hair wind tossed and untidy, though not remotely wet.
Decidedly not the Fairy King, but an intruder nonetheless.
“Hey!” She gasped, yanking the covers up to her throat. “What are you doing here?”