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It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous.
The solitude that had once comforted her had become an enormous empty space where so many bad things could happen.
She was tired of being afraid she might see Master Corbenic in the hall or the college lobby. She was tired of the memories that swam behind her eyelids at night, those little pieces: the enormous span of his fingers, knuckles whitening as his fist clenched and unclenched.
“How come all the spiders are men?” “Because then it feels more satisfying to squish them,”
There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.
Storytelling is an art deserving of greatest reverence,
The university’s bell tower wore its fog as if it were a widow’s mourning veil.
Why was it that an Argantian could study Llyrian literature, just because he was a man, but she couldn’t because she was a girl? Why didn’t it matter that she knew Myrddin’s books back to front, that she’d spent almost half her life sleeping with Angharad on her bedside table?
She wasn’t a Southerner, but she knew what it was like to drown.
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?
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?
A stained armchair peered out from behind one of the shelves like an old cat, ornery at being disturbed.
“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.”
She cut herself off. She meant to say that’s not the problem, but wasn’t it? At any point when she’d been in Master Corbenic’s office, she could have run. That’s what the boys in her college whispered: that she’d wanted it. After all, why else would she have stayed? Why had she never pushed him away? Why had she never said that simple word, no? Trying to articulate the inarticulable fear she’d felt as she sat in his green office chair would lead her down the same road it always had. It would end with her mother telling her there was no such thing as monsters.
you don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”
Effy was no great designer, but she was an excellent escape artist. She was always chipping away at the architecture of her life until there was a crack big enough to slip through. Whenever she was faced with danger, her mind manifested a secret doorway, a hole in the floorboards, somewhere she could hide or run to.
“It’s terrifying,” Effy confessed. “Most beautiful things are,” Ianto said.
the waves rose up and swallowed everything, houses and shops and women and children, the old and the young. The sea has no mercy.
Fear could make a believer of anybody.
Strangely, she found herself thinking of Master Corbenic. When he had first placed his hand over her knee, she had thought he was being warm, fatherly. She hadn’t known to be afraid. Even now, she didn’t know if she was allowed to be.
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.
Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world.
This isn’t about politics, not in the slightest. This is about scholarship.” “And you think scholarship is completely removed from politics?”
Scholarship should be the effort to seek out objective truth.” Effy made a scathing noise in the back of her throat. “I think you’re deluded in even believing there’s such a thing as objective truth.”
Master Corbenic, the other students—they couldn’t win if she quit their game and started playing another.
Effy knew what he meant: that truth and magic were two different things, irreconcilable. It was precisely what Effy had been told all her life—by the physicians who had treated her, by the mother who had despaired of her, by the schoolteachers and priests and professors who had never, ever believed her. Effy had put her faith in magic. Preston held nothing more sacred than truth. Theirs was not a natural alliance.
“I don’t see it as my duty to refute Llyrian clichés.”
That’s the legacy of imperialism—the North reaps while the South sows.”
“Some might call it celebrating; others would call it flouting a colonial legacy—oh,
Men liked to keep mad women locked up where everyone could comfortably forget they ever existed.
“Just be careful. Don’t—” Effy sighed. “I’ll be perfectly polite, if that’s what you mean.” “I meant the opposite, really.” Now Preston was flushed. “I would keep him at an arm’s length. Don’t be too . . . obliging.”
She was wearing stockings and a plaid skirt, with a white woolen sweater over it. It was the sort of outfit she’d worn during her first week at university. Before Master Corbenic. She regretted it now.
The tone of his voice pinned her there, like a needle through a butterfly wing. She was filled with a vague and ominous fear,
Some days I could not tell if the husband who came to me was the one who would kiss my eyes closed with infinite tenderness, or if he would press me down into our bed and not care that I whimpered. Those were the most difficult days. When I could not tell the kind version of him from the cruel. I wished he would be a serpent, a cloven-footed creature, a winged beast—anything but a man.
Old magic and wicked—or worse, ambivalent—gods.
She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.
But the girl wasn’t an adult, not really. She couldn’t be. She looked Effy’s age, and Effy certainly didn’t feel like an adult.
He couldn’t seem to get over the fact that Ianto had waved his rifle at them. But that was the least of Effy’s concerns. Ianto’s more overt antagonism didn’t bother her—a man with a gun was an enemy she could easily recognize and comprehend.
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.
“She’s a very private woman,” he said at last. “My father made her that way.”
“That isn’t right, Effy.” Preston’s voice was low but firm, and he met her gaze unrelentingly. “Mothers aren’t supposed to hate their children.”
“Like I said, I was a terrible child. Any mother would’ve been tempted to do the same.” “No,” Preston said. “They wouldn’t.”
“I know you well enough. You aren’t terrible. You’re nothing close. And even if you were a difficult child—whatever that means—there’s no justification for your mother wanting you dead. How did your mother expect you to live with that, Effy? To go on as normal knowing that she once tried to leave you out in the cold?”
Her mother had gotten her those pills for a reason, so Effy could live with it, so she could go on as normal knowing that she’d once been left for dead. Her mother had pulled Effy right from the Fairy King’s grasp, leaving just a finger behind. That was love, wasn’t it?
no one believed Angharad, either. And because no one believed her, the Fairy King was free to take her.”
she would always be just a scared little girl making up stories in her head. She would be infirm, unstable, untrustworthy, undeserving of the life she wanted. They put girls like her in attic rooms or sanatoriums, locked them up and threw away the keys.
As long as the Fairy King was real, he could be killed, just as Angharad had vanquished him. If he was not real, there would never be any escape from him.
She found it funny that he was so preoccupied with the technicalities. Effy’s mind always skipped over those details. She let those small things slough off her; the small things were never what ruined you. If she were kneeling and examining the shells on the beach, she wouldn’t see the titanic wave rising over her head.
She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.
