A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

The tender belly of his cruelty made her heart flutter. There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.

The moon seemed to keep pace with the car, painting the road and the moldering cliffs in a pallid light. They were white, ribboned with bands of erosion, grown over with moss and lichen and speckled with salt. They looked beautiful against the black enormity of the sea, its titanic waves striking the pale rock over and over again.

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.

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?

The white tiles were laced so thoroughly with filthy grout that they looked like crooked teeth in an old man’s mouth.

Effy thought of the creature in the road, its wet black hair and bone crown.

His sheep bobbed after him like buoys on the water. One paused in the road and looked back at her. Her skin was still electric. Effy reached into her pocket and lifted one of the stones to her eye, peering through the hollow in the middle. But she only saw the sheep staring back at her, unblinking and frozen.

Effy almost raised the hag stone to her eye again, but she would have felt stupid, here in open sight of the bartender and these men. Besides, the Fairy King was vain until his very last breath. He would choose a more dignified disguise.

“And anyway, you don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”

Preston actually laughed. It was a short, surprised little huff of air, but there was no malice in it, only genuine amusement. And Effy found—regrettably—that she liked the sound of it.

They got into the car. Effy put the cigarette to her lips and inhaled, trying not to cough. She’d never smoked before, but she didn’t want Preston to know that. She also didn’t want Preston to know that she was thinking intently about how the same cigarette had touched his lips mere moments ago.

As if stories were not spoils of war.

“Not exactly,” said Preston. “But I’ll swear by your Saint Una if it makes you happy.”

It’s like he’s waiting for you to trip so he can catch you.

She looked at Preston, the golden light gathering on his profile, turning his brown eyes almost hazel. Every time he took a sip of coffee, Effy watched his throat bob as he swallowed, and let her gaze linger on the bit of moisture that clung to his lips.

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

His eyes were fascinating from this vantage point, light brown ringed with green, gold daubs around the irises. His freckles were pale, winter-faded. She suspected they would become more prominent when summer returned. His lips were stained just a little bit from the brandy.

Very gently, so as not to disturb him, Effy reached over and took off his glasses. He didn’t shift at all.

“That line.” Her eyes were hot with unshed tears. “‘I will love you to ruination.’ That’s one of Angharad’s most famous lines, and Myrddin didn’t even come up with it.”

She had not seen him since she’d left Hiraeth, and last night, sleeping beside Preston, she had not even dreamed of him. She had woken up feeling refreshed and safe, for the first time that she could remember. She hadn’t needed the sleeping pills at all.

That was the truth at the very center of everything, the truth she had tried her whole life to evade: there were no fairies, no magic, and the world was just ordinary and cruel.

“I wanted you, too. For so long. It was terrible. Sometimes I could barely eat—sorry, I know that sounds like the strangest thing. But for days I didn’t feel hungry at all. I was . . . occupied. You took away all the other wanting from me.”

You can die as easily of thirst as you can of drowning.

It was nothing like swimming at the natatorium, where the water was clear and chemically blue. This was a dense and exquisite darkness. Her body, too, was heavier now. She no longer had the lightness of a child, all spindly limbs and easy faith. Her arms and legs felt so burdensome now.

Effy had once read, in one of those ancient tomes on the sixth floor of the library, about a method of torture practiced in the south, in the pre-Drowning days. The victims were strapped down and forced to drink and drink and drink, until their stomachs burst, until their bodies gave out from the weight of it all. The water cure, it was called. For days after she could not stop imagining all those swollen bodies. Sometimes, she had read, the victim was forced to vomit up all the water and then drink it down again.

Yet Preston had been wrong about her, in a way. Perhaps she realized it only now. 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.

Preston just ducked his head, as if he wanted to scold her but couldn’t. Preston, who had delicately picked all the rocks from her wounded knees and washed away the blood, back when they both still barely trusted each other. A surge of sudden, desperate affection swelled in her chest.

She rested her chin on his shoulder very carefully, as if she were setting a glass down on a table and didn’t want it to make a discordant sound.

it mattered only as much as it mattered whether the house was sinking or the sea was rising. Once their lips touched, Effy could think of nothing else.

The yielding was easy when the assault was so tender.

argument, and I’m hardly the first scholar to make it—that the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning.

That old fear sensation was starting in the tips of her fingers and toes, the somatic terror that gripped her at night, that had hunted her like a dog all her life. It was the fear that her body felt before her mind could comprehend it.

You were offered to me on the riverbank, and then withdrawn. I don’t like to be forsaken. I have spent twelve years chasing you, but you hid yourself from me with your banal mortal tricks. No more. I come to claim what is mine by right. Once offered, a sacrifice cannot be revoked.”

They cannot belong anywhere else but with me.”

“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.

How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.