A Study in Drowning

by Ava Reid

The mariner’s hubris isn’t necessarily in his belief that he won’t die, but his belief that the worst the sea can do is kill him.”

It was a beautiful house, but not a clever one. It was a house with no imagination.

Maybe the perfection of his furnishings was trying to compensate for something. A well-ordered house for a decaying mind.

Midnight was a fairy-tale thing.

Effy was remembering all the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bell struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.

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.

it was only Preston, his hair damp and mussed from the bath, wearing one of Blackmar’s dressing gowns. It was too short on him, and Effy felt, momentarily, very lascivious for taking notice of that at all. What young girl of this century was left feverish by the sight of a man’s calves? She was like one of those protagonists from a novel of manners, swooning over a glimpse of their betrothed’s bare ankle.

He looked absurd in his expensive suit. It was as if someone had put a tie and jacket on a rotting pumpkin.

When did Llyrians begin to see love as strictly dichotomic, rather than of a vast and multitudinous quality? Why was this dichotomy characterized by submission versus dominance? I put forth the argument that this doctrinal transformation is tied to the evolving role of women in Llyrian society, the fear of female advancement,

My sly and clever girl. My foolish and lovely girl. My beautiful and debauched girl. Call her by her name, Effy wanted to shout,

“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.”

She wasn’t afraid of dying, not really. It was the ultimate act of flight, an escape artist’s tour de force.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You weren’t there in that car with Ianto. When I jumped out I wasn’t doing it to be reckless—I was saving myself. What you think of as recklessness, I think of as survival.

That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.

“You’re not just one thing. Survival is something you do, not something you are.

Water finds its way through the smallest spaces and the narrowest cracks. Where the bone meets sinew, where the skin is split. It is treacherous and loving. You can die as easily of thirst as you can of drowning.

Why had the Fairy King chosen me? What had I done to deserve this? Those questions were powerful magic indeed, for they kept me trapped there, motionless, my husband slumbering beside me. Until I broke the spell my mind had cast, I could not ever be free.

“They’re cruel. They’ll be cruel to you, too.” “It doesn’t matter. I’m not afraid to care about you, Effy.”

at last Effy understood why the Southerners, in the very ancient days before the Drowning, believed that there were only two gods: the Sky and the Ocean. The land itself was just something caught and pressed between their warring furies.

At last Effy understood the magic of Hiraeth, its curse and its blessing. Hiraeth Manor, the grand thing that Ianto had wanted her to build, would always be an imagined future, a castle in the air. The magic was the impossibility of it. The unreal could never disappoint you, could never harm you, could never falter under your feet.

There are three men in this story, and none of them ever said they were sorry for anything. They never expressed as much as a twinge of guilt.”

“Can you really call something an affair if the man is nearly twice your age and you’re just, well . . .” “A girl?”

“I was eighteen,” said Angharad again. “That meant I was a woman, in some people’s eyes. Well—I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me. Everyone thought that I wanted it. I convinced myself that I wanted it,

It’s very hard to believe something when it feels like the whole world is trying to convince you otherwise.”

Her body remembered what it felt like to be afraid so well that it would take time, a long time, to teach it something new.

It is a romance—until it’s not.”

“I thought my own eyes were lying to me. How long had I been hearing that a woman’s mind couldn’t be trusted?

My father found one of Emrys’s letters to me. He was furious, of course. Not that he cared for my sake, but because it undercut his power. Like someone planting on your land without your permission, or putting up a fence around what used to be yours.”

But it’s so much to remember. The weight of a memory is one thing. You get very used to swimming with it dragging you down. Once it’s loosed, you hardly know what to do with your body. You don’t understand its lightness.”

“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.”

She would shout the truth to the world, even if it was only her voice, and even if it turned her throat raw. She could not bear to be silent any longer.

Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.

There was a small prickle of grief when she thought about it, how perhaps she and Preston would never quite see eye to eye. But he believed her fear, her grief, her desire. That had to be enough.

I didn’t know that I could fight back. I didn’t know how to do anything but wait to drown.” “Oh no, Effy. That’s not what I meant at all. You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.”

“You’ve always been such a stubborn lad.” Master Gosse looked amused. “I never thought you would try and extort the university, though. Good on you.”

Effy laughed again. “I thought you weren’t a romantic.” “I wasn’t,” Preston said, cheeks still pink. “Until you.”

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.

The truth was very costly at times. How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.

And to Zelda: I remember you. I believe you.