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rheum
paramour,
I waited for the Fairy King in our marriage bed, but he didn’t know I was wearing a girdle of iron.
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.
“Hag stones,” the shepherd said. “The Fairy King has many clever disguises. Look through these and you’ll see him coming, in his true form.”
To religious Northerners, the fairies were demons, underworld beings, the sworn enemies of their Saints.
But to Southerners, fairies were a mere fact of life, like hurricanes or adders in your garden. You took precautions against them. You shut your windows and locked your doors. You didn’t go overturning any large rocks.
The Drowning was more than a climatological event.
it caused an upswing in Southern nationalism, a hardening of Llyr’s North-South divide.
You don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it,
“That’s one of the misconceptions many Northerners have about the Drowning. That it was one enormous storm, a single night of terror and then its aftermath.
As if whole villages had not been slaughtered in a quest to eradicate those unseemly traditions.
Ianto was taking his tea in the dining room, under that perilously dangling chandelier.
The Fairy King had never appeared to her in the daylight before.
There had been no mirrors in Ianto’s car.
drivel,”
That was one thing all the Sleepers had in common: they had to be from the South.
that a saint’s name was the mark of a changeling.
That he had taken her ring finger so that no other man could put a wedding band on it. So that she would always belong to him.
Wet. He always looked wet.
She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.
There was a full-length mirror but it had been flipped over to face the wall instead. For some reason Effy felt it would be a bad idea to turn it forward.
Love is a fire that cannot burn alone.’”
This house is nothing but an ugly, rotting testament to the late Myrddin’s cruelty, and the price Ianto is still paying for it.”
“This isn’t a place for leaving. Things live and die here, but they don’t leave.”
What your scientists and academics call myths are as real as anything else. How else could a land and a people survive Drowning?”
Ianto had perished along with him, like wine bled out of a smashed vessel, possessor and possessed both ruined by that one shard of mirror.
It’s very hard to believe something when it feels like the whole world is trying to convince you otherwise.”
licentious,
“The Fairy King was all of them,”
ebullient
The architecture of her new life was taking shape, and there were windows and doors.
