A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.

Why was it that an Argantian could study Llyrian literature, just because he was a man, but she couldn’t because she was a girl?

She could only picture him now as a crab in its slippery tide pool, oblivious to being drenched over and over again by the water.

The man she had spent her whole life idolizing had been strange and reclusive, but he had not been coldhearted. It all felt so terribly wrong. Like a dream she wanted desperately to wake up from.

And it would be worse to tell him the deeper, more painful truth: that seeing Hiraeth had ruined her childish fantasy, ruined the version of Myrddin she had constructed in her mind, one where he was benevolent and wise and had written a book meant to save girls like her.

No matter how much she disliked Preston, it wasn’t his fault for being born Argantian, any more than it was her fault for being born a woman.

thing. Fear could make a believer of anybody.

Centuries later, it was the stuff of fairy tales and legends, all of it generally Llyrian, as if no conquest had ever occurred. As if whole villages had not been slaughtered in a quest to eradicate those unseemly traditions. As if stories were not spoils of war.

That’s the legacy of imperialism—the North reaps while the South sows.”