Page 25 of A Study in Drowning

“Have you heard the expression about the frog in hot water? If you raise the temperature slowly, he won’t notice a thing until he’s boiled alive. A soft-bellied Northerner might have seen the danger coming, but the Southerners practically had scales and fins themselves. The sea took and took and took, thousands of little deaths, and they endured it all because they knew nothing else. They didn’t think to fear the Drowning until the water was lapping at their door.

“The lucky ones, the wealthier ones, with their homes set back further from the shore, managed to flee. But the waves rose up and swallowed everything, houses and shops and women and children, the old and the young. The sea has no mercy. In this bay there were nine churches, and they were all swallowed up, too, no matter how hard their supplicants pleaded with Saint Marinell. They say that on certain days you can still hear the bells of those churches, ringing underwater.”

Effy turned toward the water and listened, but she didn’t hear any ringing.

“The Drowning was two hundred years ago,” she said. “Long before your father was born.” She hoped it didn’t sound disparaging.

“Of course,” Ianto said. “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.”

Effy remembered what Rhia had told her about the Southerners and their superstitions. About how they feared a second Drowning and thought the magic of the Sleepers would stop it. Watching the ocean barrage the cliffs, and hearing Ianto speak, Effy could understand why they thought such a thing. 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.

“That’s why my father built this house here,” Ianto went on. “He wanted my mother and me to learn how to fear the sea.”

“Your mother isn’t from the Bottom Hundred?” It wasn’t the point of what Ianto had said, but the small detail stood out to Effy, who hadn’t seen even a trace of the mysterious widow.

“No,” Ianto said shortly. “But Effy, I hope you understand that to tear down this house would be an act of sacrilege. It would dishonor my father’s memory. Perhaps I was unclear in my initial missive, and I apologize. This house cannot be leveled. I know that you have enormous respect and affection for my father and for the legacy of Emrys Myrddin, so I am confident you can rise to the challenge.”

Did he believe, too, that Myrddin’s consecration would stop another Drowning? That perhaps it would even reverse the damage that had already been done? Effy didn’t ask; she didn’t want to risk offending him. As she tried to decide how to reply, Ianto reached over and pulled the door shut. The wind’s howling grew muffled, and her hair lay flat again.

“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.

“Excellent,” Ianto said, smiling his one-dimpled smile. “I knew I was right to choose you.” He reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. Effy froze.

Ianto did not stop staring at her, as if he expected her to reply. But all Effy could feel was the clamminess of his touch, the enormous weight of his hand. It sent her stumbling backward in time, back to Master Corbenic’s office. Back to that green chair.

She couldn’t speak for how heavy it felt. She felt as if she’d turned into an old doll, buried under cobwebs and dust.

When the stretch of silence became too long and too awkward, Ianto let her go. The intensity of his gaze dimmed, as if he had sensed her sudden terror. He blinked, looking a bit dazed himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Excuse me for a moment. I need to run some numbers by Wetherell. He’s not going to be happy with me, I’m afraid. Please just wait here.”

Effy didn’t wait. Her head was throbbing and her stomach felt thick. Myrddin’s strange ruin of a house creaked and groaned around her. 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.

Effy wasn’t sure why she always pictured a woman when she thought of it. A woman with kelp-colored hair.

That was exactly the sort of barbarity the Northern conquerors claimed they were saving their Southern subjects from. Centuries later, it was the stuff of fairy tales and legends, all of it generally Llyrian, as if no conquest had ever occurred. As if whole villages had not been slaughtered in a quest to eradicate those unseemly traditions. As if stories were not spoils of war.

Effy walked slowly down the hall, one hand pressed flat against the wall for support. Her nausea did not abate as she paused outside one of the doors. It was the study on the other side, Preston’s room. Curiosity, or maybe something else, compelled her to reach out for the knob.

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.

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 held her breath and opened the door slowly. It creaked like the rest of the house, an awful squeal like a dying cat. She was expecting to see Preston sitting behind Myrddin’s desk, head bent over a book.