A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

“Everything ancient must decay,”

It was Preston’s voice in her ear now, his hushed recitation. The only enemy is the sea.

“Why are you so desperate to get to Saltney?” Her stomach knotted instantly. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was confess that she was planning to leave Hiraeth after only one day. Even in the face of such an impossible task, surrender was humiliating.

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.

“I don’t want you to come home. You can’t. I have work and you’re an adult now.

“Haven’t I done enough?”

She considered reminding her mother that her grandparents had done just as much, that they had paid for her schooling, taken her on trips, helped with her homework, tended to her while her mother nursed her gin headaches or stayed in bed for days under a gloom of exhaustion.

And Effy remembered the reverence in his tone when he’d recited those lines from “The Mariner’s Demise.” We all have our reasons for doing what we do.

Maybe she was just distracted by the way his lips rounded gently when he smoked them. Effy shook her head, trying to dispel the unwelcome thought.

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. Her gaze kept darting to his mouth, the way he held his cigarette delicately between his teeth while he drove.

Effy trailed off. A pall had come over Ianto’s face. His look of displeasure told her that their ideas were not, in fact, aligned. Had he not thought of an entirely new structure taking the place of the old?

But it can take a person up to ten minutes to drown. Ten minutes doesn’t seem like a very long time, but when you can’t breathe and your lungs are aching, it seems very long indeed.

“But the story of the Drowning lives in the minds of every child who is born in the Bottom Hundred. Our mothers whisper it to us in our cradles. Our fathers teach us to swim before we can walk. The first game we play with our friends is to see how long we can hold our breath underwater. It’s the fear we have to learn. The fear keeps the sea from taking us.”

Many years ago, before the first Drowning, the people of the Bottom Hundred had executed their criminals by tying them up on the beach at low tide. Then they all watched and waited as the waves came up. They brought picnic blankets and bread. They fed themselves as the sea fed the sinner, pouring water down her throat until she was pale and gorged.

Preston had said all he cared about was the truth. Who better, then, to tell her whether her fear was justified? She felt, somehow, that he could be trusted with this. All that time in the car and he had never touched her. In fact, he had moved about her, around her, in a very careful sort of way, as if she were something fragile he did not want to risk breaking.

Effy remembered how guarded he had been when Ianto showed her the study, how quickly he had put his notes away when she joined him in the booth yesterday. Now she knew why he’d been so careful to hide his work.

“‘Execution of the Author,’” she read aloud in a quavering voice. “‘An Inquiry into the Authorship of the Major Works of Emrys Myrddin.’ This is your thesis?”

Effy found she quite liked the idea of him begging her, and a little heat rose in her cheeks at the thought.

Fraud’ has certain connotations I’m not comfortable with. But no, I don’t think he’s the sole author of the majority of his works.”

Preston folded his arms across his chest. “No one else in the literature college can do that. Quote Angharad word for word at the drop of a hat. And that poem, ‘The Mariner’s Demise’? Myrddin isn’t known for his poetry, and that’s a very obscure one.”

But I’ll fight for you, Effy. I promise.”

“But I have faith in this project,” Preston went on. His voice was softer now. “I have faith in you—in both of us.” He stammered a little bit at the end, as if embarrassed by what he had said. Effy had never heard him trip over his words before, and for some reason it made her want to trust him more.

“Not just that. Ianto is shutting me out. He doesn’t trust me. But he trusts you.” She remembered the way Ianto had laid his hand on her shoulder. How heavy it had felt, how it had pushed her back down into that drowning place. Without thinking, she blurted out, “So what do you want me to do? Seduce him?” Preston’s face turned strikingly red. “No! Saints, no. What kind of person do you think I am?” Effy was flushing, too, unable to meet his gaze. Why had she said that? It was more proof that something was broken inside her brain, like a skewing of train tracks. She could never trust anyone’s intentions.

“Besides, it’s a fact that the South is economically deprived compared to the North, and that deprivation is felt most acutely in the Bottom Hundred. It’s also a fact that Llyrian political and cultural institutions are dominated by Northerners, and have been throughout history. That’s the legacy of imperialism—the North reaps while the South sows.”

She detected a note of fear in his voice. She had never heard him sound even remotely afraid before, and she decided not to press him on it. For now. Besides, something else had occurred to her.

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

“You’re a very pretty girl.”

Creepy

“Your eyes. Your hair,” he said. “Beautiful.” Effy dug her fingernails into her palm. She regretted coming here at all. But she didn’t want to fail at her task. As much as it shocked her to realize it, she didn’t want to fail Preston. So she met Ianto’s gaze and gathered up as much of a response to the insipid flattery as she could muster.

Again creepy

In the cities up North, I’ve heard that women are starting to have very uncharitable views about men and marriage.” Effy swallowed hard. It was true that there were more women at the university than ever, and many of them left without wedding rings. Ten years ago, the only reason a girl went to college was to find a husband. Her grandmother still inquired about this every time she wrote, asking if Effy had met any nice young men.

The tone of his voice pinned her there, like a needle through a butterfly wing. She was filled with a vague and ominous fear, fingers curled around the handle of her purse, blood racing and heart pounding. A bodily, animal instinct was telling her: Something terrible is about to happen.

“A beautiful girl like you doesn’t need this project to pad her résumé. Any hot-blooded professor would give you highest marks in a heartbeat.” Her panic crested like a white-capped wave, and then Effy saw him. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, where Ianto had only just been. His black hair was as slick as water. His skin was moonlight pale, and his eyes burned holes right through her, down to her blood, down to her bone. His fingers uncurled from the steering wheel and reached for her, nails long and dark and sharp as claws. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt, so when she flung the door open, it was easy enough to hurl herself out of the car.

“It doesn’t look like the basement is in the blueprints at all,” she said. “But, well, a basement isn’t exactly something you can tack on at the last minute. It has to be part of the architectural plans from the very start. The only thing I can think is maybe this house was built on a previously existing foundation, one that already had a basement.” Preston’s jaw twitched. “You mean there used to be another structure here, before Hiraeth? It’s hard to imagine how that’s possible. Even this house seems to defy the laws of nature.”

She’s old, and I imagine she values her privacy.” But a chill prickled the back of her neck. “If she values her privacy so much, she wouldn’t have invited the university to poke around here.”

“But haven’t you wondered—outside of your scholarly inquiries—why she’s so reclusive?” All of it felt wrong, had felt wrong ever since she came to Hiraeth, and certainly ever since she saw the Fairy King. “When I’ve asked Ianto about her, he hasn’t said much.”

After Ianto’s car had sped away and Effy had picked herself up off the road, she had swallowed one of her pink pills. The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.

Did she jump out of the car so he wouldn't know she takes a pill?

She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.

Is the widow even still alive?

She drew a breath and resisted rolling her eyes, but the utter predictability of his reaction was oddly comforting. After all the strangeness, her nightmares, Ianto’s violently shifting moods, Preston’s reliable fussiness was almost like a balm.

Effy snorted, but for some reason her heart thumped unevenly. She told herself it was nervousness about their assuredly ill-fated plan, and—as Preston reached for the door—the memory of the ghost surged forward in her mind. Her white hair lashing like a cut sail, her skin so pale it was almost translucent.

she might not exist at all.

Effy wondered if perhaps that was what Ianto truly wanted from her: a house that could protect him from the Fairy King.

What if he, too, had seen the creature in the road, with its bone crown and wet black hair?

But what would the Fairy King want with Ianto? He came for young girls with pale hair to gild his crown. Men slept soundly in their beds while their wives and daughters were...

Effy could only imagine that whatever was in the room with her, if it had ever been alive at all, was already dead.

I will love you to ruination.’” It was what the Fairy King had said to Angharad, the first night they had lain together in their marriage bed. His long black hair had spilled out over the pillow, tangling with her pale gold.

They left the photographs inside the box. Effy never wanted to see them again. She had no way of knowing, but she felt very certain that the girl in the pictures was dead.

I don’t see how you could write a book like Angharad if you really believed women were empty-headed and frivolous.”

“Cognitive dissonance,” Preston said. When Effy glowered at him, he quickly added, “But you’re right. Angharad isn’t something your common misogynist would write.”

Meeting his stare, she realized what she felt was closer to affection. Even—maybe—passion. And Effy couldn’t help but wonder if he felt the same.

It was as if he had forgotten everything from yesterday: their time at the pub, her jumping out of the car. His eyes were turbid again, unreadable. Even if Effy had felt brave enough to try, she could not have divined anything from staring into them.

That left her with two options: that Myrddin had believed all those things and still written Angharad (cognitive dissonance, like Preston had said), or that he hadn’t written Angharad at all.