A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“I refuse mirrors,” the Fairy King said. “I refuse them for you, and I refuse them for me. If you want to see what you are, look into the tide pools at dusk. Look into the sea.”

She had read them all so many times that the logic of his world was layered over hers, like glossy tracing paper on top of the original.

But Effy believed them. She believed them all: the rote academic accounts, the superstitious Southern folklore, the epic poetry that warned against the wiles of the Fairy King.

There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.

Storytelling is an art deserving of greatest reverence, and storytellers ought to be considered guardians of Llyrian cultural heritage.

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?

“No one owns the right to tell a story,”

What’s the point in studying literature if you don’t want to tell stories?

my father never sought to humanize or pardon the Fairy King in any way.” Effy thought of Myrddin’s Fairy King: charming, cruel, and, in the end, pitiful in his corrosive desires. He had loved Angharad, and the thing he loved the most had killed him. She frowned. Surely there was nothing more human than that.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Ianto said. Even in the wind, his hair still lay mostly flat. “It’s terrifying,” Effy confessed. “Most beautiful things are,”

Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world. Looking at anything was like trying to glimpse a reflection in a broken mirror, all of it warped and shattered and strange.

This isn’t about politics, not in the slightest. This is about scholarship.” “And you think scholarship is completely removed from politics?” To his credit, Preston seemed to genuinely consider this, fixing his gaze on some obscure point on the far wall for a moment. When he looked back at her, he said, “No. But ideally it would be. Scholarship should be the effort to seek out objective truth.”

I realized that without knowing it, the Fairy King had spoken truly: although the tide pools had not shown me my face, I had been revealed. I was a treacherous, wrathful, wanting thing, just like he was.

“You really care more about the truth than you do about being right?” “Of course I do.” There was not an ounce of hesitation in his voice.

He hadn’t spelled it out precisely, but Effy knew what he meant: that truth and magic were two different things, irreconcilable.

Effy had put her faith in magic. Preston held nothing more sacred than truth. Theirs was not a natural alliance.

‘Lovely and dangerous and vast beyond mortal comprehension, the sea makes dreamers of us all.’”

The trick of any good lie is just finding an audience who wants to believe it.”

Men liked to keep mad women locked up where everyone could comfortably forget they ever existed.

But I think magic is just the truth that people believe.

“I know it’s not realistic, but the world would be a better place if everyone just told the truth.”

“I will love you to ruination,” the Fairy King said, brushing a strand of golden hair from my cheek. “Yours or mine?” I asked. The Fairy King did not answer.

Maybe Preston was right about why people believed in magic. The truth was an ugly, dangerous thing.

She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.

Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.

Love is a fire that cannot burn alone.’”

I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful worlds.

There’s very little worse than when our heroes fail us, is there?”

“Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new. Everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, I don’t know, stubborn and ignorant. Moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. Tainted.”

Survival is something you do, not something you are. You’re brave and brilliant. You’re the most real, full person I’ve ever met.”

Even though she was afraid of living, she didn’t want to die. Effy was no architect, and she might never be a storyteller, either, no heir to magic and myths and legends, but one thing she knew was survival.

‘One must know before loving.’”

“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”

the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you.

I’m not afraid to care about you, Effy.”

“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.”

Real magic is just cannier, better at disguising itself. The Fairy King is devious and secretive, but he is real. Was.”

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.

The weight of a memory is one thing. You get very used to swimming with it dragging you down. Once it’s loosed, you hardly know what to do with your body. You don’t understand its lightness.”

“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.

Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.

You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.”

The danger lived with her; perhaps it had been born with her, if the rest of the stories about changeling children were to be believed. The danger was as ancient as the world. But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them.

I know you think I am a little girl, and what could a little girl know about eternity? But I do know this: whether you survive the ocean or you don’t, whether you are lost or whether the waves deliver you back to the shore—every story is told in the language of water, in tongues of salt and foam. And the sea, the sea, it whispers the secret of how all things end.

The truth was very costly at times. How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.

Better to build your own house, with a foundation that was strong, with windows that let in plenty of light.