A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

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?

Rhia chewed her lip, then managed one of her incandescently bright smiles as the train sang like a teakettle behind them. “Be safe. Be smart. Be sweet.” “All three? That’s a lot to ask.” “I’ll settle for just two, then. Your pick,” Rhia said. She reached around Effy to embrace her, and for a moment, with her eyes shut and her face pressed into Rhia’s fluffy brown hair, Effy felt calmer than the windless sea. “That’s far more reasonable,” Effy mumbled. They broke apart as a mother trailing two ornery-looking children shouldered past them. “Thank you.” Rhia frowned. “What for?” Effy didn’t reply. She didn’t really know. She was just grateful not to be standing on the platform alone.

Be safe. Be smart. Be sweet.

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?

What’s the point in studying literature if you don’t want to tell stories? She wanted to ask him, but she was afraid that if she opened her mouth, she might actually cry.

Ianto led them down the hallway, naked glass bulbs flickering on the walls. The first door on the left was cracked open. “The library,” he said, turning to Effy. “I’m sure you’ll agree there’s the most work to be done in here.” Effy followed him into the room. A single greasy window poured light onto the overflowing bookshelves, the three-and-a-half-legged desk, the melted-down candles. A stained armchair peered out from behind one of the shelves like an old cat, ornery at being disturbed. The rotted wood floor creaked and moaned under their feet, heavy with so many stacks of books. They were overflowing the shelves and spilling onto the ground, spines ripped and pages torn out, sitting in puddles of their own bled ink. It was several moments before Effy was able to speak. The question that rose to her lips surprised her. “Was it like this all your life?” she managed. “Did your father keep it this way on purpose—” “Unfortunately,” Ianto said in a clipped tone. “My father was a genius in many respects, but it often meant he had little care for the mundane, unpleasant tasks of daily life.”

The truth was, she had seen many fine and beautiful things underneath all the damp and rot, like chests of treasure waiting to be dredged up from a shipwreck. Plush carpets that must have cost a fortune, candelabras made of solid gold. But none of it could be salvaged from the rot and the rising sea. It was the task of a fairy tale, the sort of hopeless, futile challenge the Fairy King himself might have set. In her mind, she saw that creature from the road. It turned toward her, opened its devouring mouth, and spoke: Sew me a shirt with no seam or needlework. Plant an acre of land with one ear of corn. Build a house on a sinking cliff and win your freedom. She had never thought Myrddin would set a task so cruel. But she did not know this man, the one who had kept his own family trapped in a sinking, fetid house, the one who had let everything around him fall to ruin. The man she had spent her whole life idolizing had been strange and reclusive, but he had not been coldhearted. It all felt so terribly wrong. Like a dream she wanted desperately to wake up from. It was Preston’s voice in her ear now, his hushed recitation. The only enemy is the sea.

“I know,” said Effy. “I’m sorry. I’m coming home now.” The words shocked her the second she uttered them. A moment ago, she’d been missing Caer-Isel, but she realized now that even if it was familiar, it wasn’t safe. A beat of silence. Her mother inhaled sharply. “Home? What about your studies?” “I don’t want to go back to Caer-Isel.” The knot of tears rose in her throat so suddenly, it was painful to speak. “Something happened, Mother, and I can’t—” She wanted to tell her mother about Master Corbenic, but any capacity for speech abandoned her. It still only came back to her in flashes; there was no narrative, no story with a beginning, middle, and end. There was only the haziness of dread, the dry-mouthed panic, the nightmares that sent her jolting awake at night. And she knew exactly how much sympathy her mother had for her nightmares. “Effy.” Her mother’s voice was so razor-edged, it made Effy’s stomach curdle. “I don’t want you to come home. You can’t. I have work and you’re an adult now. Whatever mess you’ve made, you need to sort it by yourself. Go back to school. Take your medication. Focus on your studies. Let me have my life. You are taking your pills, aren’t you?” Effy wished, in that moment, that her senses would dull again. She wanted to go to that deep-water place, where she could hear only the churning of the waves above her. But her mind wouldn’t carry her there. Instead she felt acutely the cold press of the telephone against her ear, and the tightening of ...

you don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”

“I don’t see any reason for studying literature unless you care about the stories you’re reading and writing.” “Well, I study theory, mostly. I’m not a writer.” That crushed her like something caught in the tight, relentless snarl of a riptide. How could he be satisfied only studying literature, never writing a word of his own? Never getting to put to paper the things he imagined? Meanwhile, the banal reality of her own life made her miserable: sketching plans for things she didn’t know how to build, drawing houses other people would call home. It was enough to make her want to cry, but she dug her fingernails into her palm to keep the tears from pricking her eyes.

“Then let’s go.” “What?” “I’ll drive you back to Hiraeth.” “I thought you were going to work here,” she said. “What about Ianto breathing down your neck?” “At the house it’s Ianto, here it will be you.” Preston caught the beginnings of an objection on her lips, and hurriedly went on: “It’s not your fault. You just won’t have anything to do in town except drink gin and stare at me while I work. I’m not happy to be the most interesting thing in Saltney, but regrettably I can assure you that that is the case.” “I don’t know about that.” Effy thought of the shepherd, the stones in her pocket. She decided not to mention any of that. Instead she said, “Not to wound your ego, but I saw some very interesting sheep dung on my way over here.” 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.

“I’m ready,” Effy said at last. “I want to do this.” She wanted so badly to do something valuable for once, to make something beautiful, something that was hers. She wanted this to be more than just an escape, wanted to be more than a scared little girl running away from imaginary monsters. She couldn’t write a thesis or a newspaper article or even a fairy tale of her own—the university had made damn sure she knew that. This was her only chance to make something that would last, so she would take it, no matter how insurmountable the task seemed. And when she went back to Caer-Isel, it would be to tell Master Corbenic and her schoolmates that they had been wrong about her. She would never go back whimpering and kneeling. She would never sit in that green chair again. She would have to put her faith in Myrddin once more. She would have to believe he would not set her an impossible challenge. She would have to trust, as she always had, the words written in Angharad, the happy ending it promised. So what about the million drowned men? So what about the rumors of another Drowning? Her only enemy was the sea.

She had always sat numbly inside the church confessional, trying to invent sins that seemed worth confessing but not so horrifying as to scandalize the priest. Now she had the unmistakable urge to confess. She wanted someone to know how Ianto had touched her—even if she was still trying to convince herself it had been nothing at all. A friendly gesture, a bracing pat on the shoulder. But didn’t all drownings begin with a harmless dribble of water? Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world. Looking at anything was like trying to glimpse a reflection in a broken mirror, all of it warped and shattered and strange. 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.

“You clearly want to be in the literature college, Effy. And you deserve to be.” Effy could only stare at him. She had to remember to breathe, to blink. “You can’t be serious. I have a good memory—” “It’s more than that,” he said. “What do you think the other literature students have that you don’t?” Now he had to be toying with her. Hot, indignant tears pricked at her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. “Just stop it,” she bit out. “You know the reason. You know women aren’t allowed in the literature college. You don’t need to play some cruel, silly game—” “It’s an absurd, outdated tradition,” Preston cut in sharply. Effy was surprised at his vehemence. He could have repeated the same platitudes that all the university professors did, about how women’s minds were too insipid, how they could only write frivolous, feminine things, nothing that would transcend time or place, nothing that would last. “I didn’t think you’d care so much about a rule that doesn’t affect you at all,” she said. “You should know by now that I’m not a fan of doing things just because that’s the way they’ve always been done.” Preston set his jaw. “Or preserving things just because they’ve always been preserved.”

“We should hurry,” Preston said. “I think Llyrian services only last an hour, but you would know better than me.” As they began walking toward the door, Effy said, “So my suspicions were correct—Argantians are heathens.” “Not all Argantians,” he said, nonplussed, almost cheerful. “Just me.” “I’m sure your Llyrian mother is very pleased with you.” “She does her best to make me feel guilty about it.” They started down the hall. “But she can’t really be that sanctimonious,” Effy said as they rounded the corner to the bedchamber, “or else she wouldn’t have married an Argantian.” “You’d be surprised how much cognitive dissonance people are capable of.” “Do you ever get weary of being so snootily unsentimental?” Preston huffed a laugh. “No, it comes very naturally to me.” “You know, you could have said that love transcends petty theological squabbles.” “Love conquers all?” Preston arched a brow. “I suppose I could say that, if I were a romantic.”

Preston’s tone dripped with irony, and Effy rolled her eyes. “It must be immensely frustrating for you, to put up with all our Llyrian superstitions. Just because it’s an archaic belief doesn’t mean it’s not true.” “Argant has plenty of its own superstitions, let me assure you. But I think magic is just the truth that people believe. For most people, that truth is whatever helps them sleep at night, whatever makes their lives easier. It’s different from objective truth.” Effy laughed shortly. “No wonder you’re such a terrible liar.” It did charm her to know that despite all his monologuing about good lies requiring a willing audience, he still flushed and stammered over his falsehoods. “I don’t like lying.” Preston folded his arms over his chest. “I know it’s not realistic, but the world would be a better place if everyone just told the truth.” It was a strangely naive thing to say. Effy had never thought much about the lies she told—she didn’t feel good about them, but they didn’t rend her apart with guilt, either. Lying was a form of survival, a way out of whatever trap had been set. Some animals chewed off their own limbs to escape. Effy just tucked away truth after truth, until even she wasn’t sure if there was a real person left at all, under all those desperate, urgent lies. But it had been a long time since she’d even tried telling anyone the truth. She just assumed no one would believe her. Preston especially, with his pretentiousness and disdain for anything that ...

Magic.

“I will love you to ruination,” the Fairy King said, brushing a strand of golden hair from my cheek. “Yours or mine?” I asked. The Fairy King did not answer.

Maybe Preston was right about why people believed in magic. The truth was an ugly, dangerous thing.

Eleven

She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.

The drive was very pleasant, the day green and blue and eventually, as evening came on, gold. After another hour they stopped at a small shop by the side of the road, and each got a sausage roll wrapped in waxed paper and coffee in a paper cup. Effy poured liberal amounts of cream into hers, and three sugar packets. Preston watched her with judgment over the rim of his own cup. “What’s the point,” he began, as they climbed back into the car, “of drinking coffee if you’re going to dilute it to that degree?” Effy took a long, savoring sip. “What’s the point of drinking coffee that doesn’t taste good?” “Well, I would argue that black coffee does taste good.” “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that someone who drinks scotch straight would think that black coffee tastes good,” Effy said, making a face. “Or else you’re secretly a masochist.” Preston turned the key in the ignition. “Masochism has nothing to do with it. You can learn to like anything if you drink it enough.”

What defines a romance? All scholars seem to converge on a single point: it is a story that must have a happy ending. And why is that? I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful worlds.

“There’s no Fairy King at all,” she said. Speaking the words aloud terrified her. They felt like walls closing in, crumbling on top of her. “I thought Angharad was some ancient story made new, and Myrddin was some otherworldly genius, magic like the rest of the Sleepers. But he was just some lecherous old man, and Angharad was just some shrewd attempt by his publisher to make money. 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.” And what of all the times she had paged through Angharad, trying to discover its secrets, taking heart in the way Angharad’s life so clearly mirrored her own? What of all the nights she had slept with her iron, with her mountain ash, seeing the Fairy King through her slitted eyes? None of it was real. She was a mad girl, one whose mind could not be trusted, precisely the kind of girl her mother and the doctor and her professors and Master Corbenic had said she was. 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.

“Here,” he said. “Sorry I don’t have any tissues.” It was all so absurd. Effy blew her nose on a sleeve. “Why are you being so nice to me?” “Why wouldn’t I be?” She huffed a pitiful laugh. “Because I’ve been awful to you. Pestering you just to pester you, trying to get under your skin, being foolish—” “You don’t see yourself very clearly, Effy.” Preston shifted in his seat so that they were facing one another. “Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new. Everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, I don’t know, stubborn and ignorant. Moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. Tainted.”

“I wish I remembered,” he said very quietly, “the last time he pointed out a rabbit on the lawn. When I found him that day in the bedroom, all I could think of were the rabbits. That gentle, brilliant person he’d been—that person was dead long before he was. Sometimes I feel guilty even doing what I do, studying the things I study . . . because my father never had the chance. And he won’t even get to see me graduate, or read any of my papers, or . . .” He trailed off, and Effy squeezed his hand. The wind rattled the car windows, and it was like they were awash in a churning river, clinging to each other so that the water wouldn’t drag them down. Preston lifted his gaze, eyes meeting hers. “Thank you,” he said. “For what?” “I don’t know. For listening, I suppose.” “You don’t have to thank me for that.” Preston was silent. After a beat, he said, “And, well, I suppose that’s partly why I don’t have much faith in the notion of permanence. Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.” “I understand,” Effy said softly. “I understand what you mean.”

She remembered the way he had scrawled her name repeatedly in the margins of that paper: Effy Effy Effy Effy Effy. She wanted to hear him say her name like that, over and over and over again.

“You’re right about one thing, though,” she said at last. “We will have to leave eventually.” Preston must have heard the grief in her voice, the tremor of fear. He took her into his arms, her naked back against his naked chest, her head tucked neatly under his chin. His heartbeat sounded like the rhythm of a steady tide. “The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.” “That makes me want to cry.” She wished he hadn’t said it. “I know. It’s not the most original argument, and I’m hardly the first scholar to make it—that the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you. But if any of that is evidence, I think it must be true.” “Some things are constant,” Effy said. “They must be. I think that’s why so many poets write about the sea.” “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. So vast and so deep. Hm. You could write a paper arguing that, at least in the context of Myrddin’s works. Well, it might have to be an entire thesis.”

It had not been Myrddin protecting her as Effy had initially thought; he had not put the iron on the door. It had been Angharad this whole time—everything had been Angharad. Effy felt tears prick at her eyes. Just as Angharad had said, she felt like some enormous weight had been lifted, and the lightness of her limbs was unfamiliar. Like the buoyancy of water. “Thank you.” “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.” Angharad’s eyes were shining now, too. “That’s all I wanted, you know,” she said. “When I was young—when I was your age. I wanted just one girl, only one, to read my book and feel that she was understood, and I would be understood in return. Writing that book was like shining a beacon from a lighthouse, I suppose. Are there any ships on the horizon? Will they signal back to me? I never got the chance to know. My husband’s name was all over it, and his was the only ship I could see.” “I saw it,” Effy whispered. “I see it. And it saved me.” “Well,” Angharad said, “you saved me, too. The Fairy King is gone. No matter what happens now, I’m free.”

What wisdom do you want from a death-marked girl? I can say only this: In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.

All around her Effy could feel walls coming up, rising out of the earth like a tree from its roots. But they didn’t feel stifling. The architecture of her new life was taking shape, and there were windows and doors. She did not need to slip through cracks in order to escape. If she wanted to leave, she could. If she wanted to stay, there were repairs that could be made. The foundation would be strong. Effy was sure of that.

Preston shifted in his sleep, arms circling her waist. His heart thudded softly against her back, with a rhythm as constant as the tide. The walls here were strong. They would hold against anything. There was no need for iron, for rowan berries, for mountain ash. The danger was real. Effy and Angharad had both proven that, with their wits and their mirrors. The danger lived with her; perhaps it had been born with her, if the rest of the stories about changeling children were to be believed. The danger was as ancient as the world. But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them. Effy did not have her copy of Angharad under the pillow, but she thought of its last lines, which she knew by heart. I know you think I am a little girl, and what could a little girl know about eternity? But I do know this: whether you survive the ocean or you don’t, whether you are lost or whether the waves deliver you back to the shore—every story is told in the language of water, in tongues of salt and foam. And the sea, the sea, it whispers the secret of how all things end.

Even after everything, the thought had filled her with grief. The truth was very costly at times. How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you. But Effy had learned. Or at least, she was trying to. Better to pen a story of your own. Better to build your own house, with a foundation that was strong, with windows that let in plenty of light.

“I can’t decide if I want that.” Effy chewed her lip. “I don’t know if I want him to be forgotten in obscure shame, or for his works to still be appreciated for what they were. The real ones, that is. A part of me still loves him, I think. The idea of him.” Preston gave her a small smile. “That’s all right,” he said. “You don’t have to know. For what it’s worth, I’ve stopped believing in objective truth.” Effy laughed softly. “So all this has left its mark on you, too.” “Of course it has. You have.” The wind tousled his already tousled hair, and as he pushed