A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

A story about a girl who’s kidnapped by the Fairy King, but defeats him through her courage and cleverness . . . if that’s not true, then everything I’ve always believed is a lie, too. You told me that the Fairy King never loved Angharad. That he was the villain of the book. I think you were right.”

There’s no magic in it at all. Or at least there isn’t anymore, because I’ve stopped believing in it. Now it’s just another lie.”

watching television,

Effy wondered what was leaking from upstairs, how the water had gotten in.

that was the problem with annihilating her imagination. Her mind could no longer conjure that escape hatch, that crack in the wall. There was nothing for her to slip through.

And then she had been thinking of her own theory,

Secret for plot

“Cruelty? What do you mean?” “This is no place to bring a wife, to raise a family, living always with the fear of destruction. Myrddin did it on purpose,

Damn welther you turned trator

Despite his odd, shifting moods, despite his occasional cruelty, Effy had finally realized they had more in common than she’d thought. “Are you sure you want to stay?”

Almost impossibly, a sliver of her reflection rippled up from that black mirror.

“Remember what we talked about,” he said.

As u know but at least he's anxious which cpuld make him double check

dappling the black surface with gold.

“We still need to get the letters and the photographs.”

Guys stop leaving those behind

The yielding was easy when the assault was so tender.

He loved nothing more than the truth, and she had loved nothing more than her imagined world. Somehow, in spite of that, they had found each other.

“Maybe the idea of constancy is what’s actually terrifying. Fear of the sea is fear of the eternal—because how can you win against something so enduring.

Effy woke in darkness, her heart clanging like a bell.

The bells finally bentrr the narrative

I shouldn’t have asked you to stay. We shouldn’t have slept—”

Ibmean yeah maybe pulled an all nighter

and we’re driving down to Saltney.

I guess there's another car

Something occurred to her then, with a terrible start. “The letters. The photographs and letters. They’re still up at the house.”

This was established last chapter

A last-minute thrill of fear compelled Effy to grab the rest of the hag stones off the desk and shove them into the pocket of her trousers.

Those had better pay off

the horrible professors and the horrible students . . . I never want you to have to weather it all alone again.” Effy’s throat tightened. “They’re cruel. They’ll be cruel to you,

Not all pf them not her friends

there were only two gods: the Sky and the Ocean. The land itself was just something caught and pressed between their warring furies.

The trees, the mountain ash—despite Ianto’s best efforts—were being torn from their roots.

Uh oh

Yet still the Fairy King did not appear.

Maybe he just becomes the dude she sleeeps with.

Execution of the Author: An Inquiry into the Authorship of the Major Works of Emrys Myrddin.’

Dude stop leaving those out on the desk its like ypu want everybody to read them

all I see before me are a drowning foundation and two fatherless children.”

I count three

I’ve spent twelve mortal years looking for you, and now, finally, you’ve come home.”

“Forever—impossibly. I’m sorry for saying all that inane nonsense about things only mattering because they don’t last. That was hubris, I think. I don’t want to die here.

How absurd, to be rescued by a ghost.

Oh yeah they never wonder if the widow is trapped there too

To become the Fairy King’s vessel is to lose yourself, little by little, like water wearing away stone. Ianto fought it as best he could.”

“No one believed me, either. Not about the Fairy King. Not about him using my husband and then my son as his vessels.

Wow sucks

Fairy King can sense weakness and wanting in men. It’s like a wound, a gap that he can use to slip inside.”

Oh no could have been preston too

He, too, had liked to believe in impossible things. It was not his fault that the Fairy King had used him.

I blike that there is some compassion

girls’ minds were not fit for storytelling; we were too capricious and inconstant.

thought, what if there was a girl who invited the Fairy King to her door? Who did not weep when she was taken? Who fell in love with him?”

I never changed a word from the beginning of the book.

Boo edit ypur work

wanted to preserve the way I felt when I wrote it, when I thought it was going to be a romance. I wanted the audience to be convinced that they were reading a romance as well.”

how if the Fairy King saw his own reflection, it would destroy him.

The rest of the book flowed out of me like no story or poem ever had. I finished it in no more than a fortnight.

And Emrys could have the glory, but in exchange, my father would receive all the royalties. ‘Consider it a dowry,’ Marlowe said.”

That is a bridee price not az dowry

“I never named the narrator, you know,” she said. “The book is in the first person,

Lol du maurier

“All of that wasn’t to keep the Fairy King away. It was to keep him trapped here.”

Effy felt another wave of sorrow. Ianto really had been fighting the Fairy King, as best he was able.

“There’s nothing to thank me for.” Angharad turned to Effy now, green gaze meeting green gaze. “I had decades to learn.”

“It’s not just that,” Effy said. “You have no idea—I’ve read your book a hundred times, maybe more. It was a friend when I didn’t have any. It was the only thing that said I was sane when the whole world was telling me I was mad. It saved me in more ways than I can count. Because I knew no matter how afraid I felt, I wasn’t truly alone.”

and had now been away from Caer-Isel more than a month.

Actually not much time

muttering about omniscient narration and melodrama. Effy understood all the theory only vaguely,

Adding this to the Effy is not a scholar list

She felt, as did Preston, that she understood Angharad on a level that was almost inarticulable:

Thats not a word lo

There was a small prickle of grief when she thought about it, how perhaps she and Preston would never quite see eye to eye.

And she’s more brilliant than any of my colleagues at the literature college,

Nah