Page 47 of A Study in Drowning

“Had to get out—”

She froze, like a deer at the end of a hunter’s rifle. It was Ianto.

“I didn’t have a choice,” he said, and it was a low, moaning sound, as if he were in pain. “This house has a hold on me, you know that, you know about the mountain ash . . .”

He stopped speaking suddenly. Effy’s blood turned to ice.

And then he spoke again: “I had to bring her back. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Effy waited and waited, her whole body shaking, but Ianto said no more. When she had the strength to move, she lurched unsteadily down the stairs, fear thrumming in her like a second pulse. It was like Ianto had been talking to himself—or talking to something that couldn’t speak its reply.

Something like a ghost.

Ten

When the king was first interred,

He did not dream at all.

It was the abhorrent nothingness

That cast a dreadful pall.

That bleak and black oblivion

Was too much like death to bear.

And so the dreams came like a balm

For the half-dead king’s despair.

From “The Dreams of a Sleeping King” by Colin Blackmar, 193 AD

The next day, Preston was jumpier than usual, flinching at every unexpected sound. 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.

No, she was far more concerned about the things she could only see out of the corner of her eye, the voices she heard when no one else was listening.

Ianto’s threats had been vague, but she knew he didn’t want to see her and Preston together again. So they began working only under the cover of night.

It would have taken days, if not weeks, to read through the whole diary with the careful attention it required. But the entries they had read pointed over and over again to Colin Blackmar. If Preston was to be believed, they didn’t have much time to solve the mystery before the rest of the literature college came pounding at the door—or before Ianto banished him from the house.

“We could only have days,” Preston said. “We have to focus on Blackmar now.”

Effy knew nothing about Blackmar other than her memories of that one terrible poem, which she had a clear vision of reciting while wearing an itchy school sweater.

“He’s about as patriotic a writer as you can imagine,” Preston said. “Openly nationalist. There’s a reason every Llyrian child has to learn ‘The Dreams of a Sleeping King.’ And the king is venerated because he slaughtered hundreds of Argantians.”

Preston’s voice tipped up at the end; he always sounded uncharacteristically nervous when he spoke of Argant, and his normally subtle accent became more pronounced.

“I bet the Llyrian government wishes they could put him in the Sleeper Museum too,” Effy said. That was one thing all the Sleepers had in common: they had to be from the South.

“Oh, Blackmar is probably pitying himself that he had the misfortune to have been born north of Laleston. I suppose he could make up some story about how he was an orphan child, taken in by nobility, but with Southern blood running true in his veins. There you go—Sleeper Museum, eternal veneration, magic.”

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.”