A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous. From Angharad by Emrys Myrddin, 191 AD

To the esteemed students of the Architectural College, The estate of Llyr’s national author EMRYS MYRDDIN is soliciting designs for a manor home outside the late author’s hometown of Saltney, Bay of Nine Bells. We ask that the proposed structure—HIRAETH MANOR—be large enough to house the surviving Myrddin family, as well as the extensive collection of books, manuscripts, and letters that Myrddin leaves behind. We ask that the designs reflect the character of Myrddin and the spirit of his enormous and influential body of work. We ask that the designs be mailed to the below address no later than midautumn. The winner will be contacted by the first day of winter.

If she had come to Caer-Isel with hope, or passion, or even just petty competitiveness, it had all eroded quickly. Time felt both compressed and infinite. It rolled over her, like she was a sunken statue on the seafloor, but it tossed and thrashed her, too, a limp body in the waves.

“You’re so pretty. You really are. You’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen. Do you know that?” If she said yes, I do, she was a conceited harpy. If she shook her head and rebuffed the compliment, she was falsely modest, playing coy. It was fae-like trickery. There was no answer that wouldn’t damn her.

She had no choice but to believe in the Sleeper magic, in Myrddin’s magic. It was the foundation her life was built upon. Though she had read Angharad for the first time at thirteen, she had been dreaming of the Fairy King long before that.

She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want.

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

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

What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned, What a selkie but an unwilling wife, What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both From the gentle tumult of dark waves? From “Elegy for a Siren,” collected in The Poetical Works of Emrys Myrddin, 196–208 AD

“There’s this project I’m doing,” she said. “For the estate of Emrys Myrddin. A bunch of architecture students sent in designs, and they picked mine.”

She was ten, and already she’d given up trying to explain that what she saw was real, even if no one believed her.

Few things could truly guard against the Fair Folk, but iron was one of them.

“No one owns the right to tell a story,” he said flatly. “Besides, I’m not pushing any particular agenda. I’m just here for the truth.”

She read the engraving aloud, her voice tipping up at the end to make it a question. “‘The only enemy is the sea’?”

“Everything ancient must decay,” he said, and it had the cadence of a song. “A wise man once said thus to me. But a sailor was I—and on my head no fleck of gray—so with all the boldness of my youth, I said: The only enemy is the sea.”

“I just meant . . . it must have been easier to believe that there was some magic at work—a childhood curse, the pernicious Fair Folk. Something other than ordinary human cruelty.”

I was a girl when he came for me, beautiful and treacherous, and I was a crown of pale gold in his black hair. I was a girl when he came for me, beautiful and treacherous, and I was a crown of pale gold in his black hair. I was a girl when he came for me, beautiful and treacherous, and I was a crown of pale gold in his black hair. She repeated the line over and over again in her mind, and then she spoke it out loud, into the black night and its uncanny silence. “I was a girl when he came for me, beautiful and treacherous, and I was a crown of pale gold in his black hair.” She was not afraid. She needed him to come. And then, behind the tree line, a flash of white. Wet black hair. Even a sliver of face, pale as moonlight.

“You’re no better than a sleazy tabloid journalist, looking for evidence my father was leading some lascivious double life. I don’t know where you got these, or where you managed to find his diary, but it ends here. This is my father’s house. This is my house. And you’ve come here to wreck it, to ruin it—”

“I knew what sort of girl you are. I’ve always known. A beautiful girl, but a weak one. One that no one would miss. Who would ask after you, if you vanished from your classes, from your dorm room? You were the perfect choice for this house. For me. A girl who could so easily slip away.”

Permanence was dangerous. It had always felt like a trap.

I come for the girls who are left out in the cold. They cannot belong anywhere else but with me.”