Page 2 of A Theory of Dreaming
“Thank you,” she said. Then she tightened the black ribbon that she used to tie back her hair, took a breath to steel herself, and dashed across the courtyard through the sleety winter rain.
The main building of the literature college, being the most prestigious of the University of Llyr’s five colleges, was as sumptuous asthe palace of a king. Though Effy had left the architecture program behind without any wistfulness, she could still appreciate the building’s elaborate and opulent architectural features. The cornices were sculpted in great detail, with patterns of winding vines, flowers, and the faces of green men blossoming from beds of leaves. Some of the corbels had been eroded—understandable, as the college had stood against weather and war for over a hundred years—but they could still be mostly distinguished. Seven stone dragons, their long, scaly bodies curled in on themselves like mollusks, supported the lintel upon which the Sleepers’ names were etched.
Aneurin the Bard. Perceval ab-Owain. Tristram Marlais. Gelert Bedwyn-Lawes. Robin Crother. Laurence Ardor, Lord of Landevale. Emrys Myrddin.
At seeing that final name, Effy stopped cold upon the steps. A sense of wrongness pervaded her, something that seemed to twist and snarl her soul itself. The anger came first, and that was easy, a braid of heat climbing her spine. What came next, the grief, hollowed her. She felt scraped empty, a shell tossed again and again by the tide and worn to translucence.
She was, quite suddenly, very tired.
Effy shook her head. Droplets of water came loose from her damp blond hair. She could not think of Myrddin, not right now, not even as she entered the building upon which his name was carved. She could not allow herself to be distracted, to be cowed. This was her first day as a literature student, and she had decided(with a confidence and resolve she could not seem to summon up at the moment) to be brilliant.
Competentwas not enough. She had to beexceptional. She had to prove that she belonged, that she was not too flighty, too vacuous, too vain. For herself, for Angharad, and for all the women who the literature college would admit starting next year. Dean Fogg had promised.
Effy tried not to think of the fact that Dean Fogg had already broken one of his promises.The two students, Euphemia Sayre and Preston Héloury—
Doggedly, she shoved these thoughts from her mind. Then she pushed open the door and stepped foot, for the first time, into the literature college.
The warmth of the lobby was an instant and welcome relief, though Effy was surprised and somewhat horrified to find it empty. She glanced up at the clock. It was two fifteen, which meant that all the other literature students must already be in their seats. Her stomach flipped over on itself. She opened her satchel, checked the syllabus one more time, and then hurried down the corridor to her classroom, the first on the left.
LL101 Introduction to Literature: Theater 113
Effy wascertainthat she was late, that she would be humiliated on her very first day, but she should have given Preston more credit. Though the seats in the lecture hall were nearly full, there was no one at the lectern. She let out a low breath, relieved.
She made her way briskly up the aisle, chin held aloft, eyes scanning the room for an open seat. She had replayed this precise moment in her mind over and over again, imagining how she would walk in dignified silence, without flushing, without cringing. Even as dozens of heads rose and their leery, hostile gazes fixed on her, Effy had promised herself:do not shrink for them.
They would all know her, whether it was for thescandalwith Master Corbenic, or for Dean Fogg’s short and dispassionate missive about a new student—awoman—joining the literature college, or for the article on the front page of theLlyrian Times, now passing through the hands of hundreds of students. She had prepared for the whispers, for the hissed slurs.
Effy had slain monsters and survived drowning. She had beaten back the dark water, she had vanquished ancient evils, and she had wrested the truth free like drawing a sword from a forgotten stone. She could endure this, too.
Yet, as she paced the aisle, Effy noticed something peculiar: all of the students in the hall were dressed identically, in black blazers and black trousers over a white button-down. The jackets had piping of green and gold, with crossover neckties in those same colors, the silk turned glossy in the theater’s low lights, the buttons glittering like beetle shells.
It was not that she didn’t recognize them; she did. They were the uniforms of the University of Llyr, in the literature college’s colors. She had been given her own set upon entrance (in the black-and-red scheme of the architecture college, of course), and although the university handbook technically stipulated that the uniformswere to be worn to all classes, this was an archaic rule that was not enforced. In all her time at the university, Effy had never seen anyone wear their uniform. It seemed out of place, almost juvenile, like the scratchy wool sweaters she had been forced to wear in primary and secondary school, emblazoned with patriotic colors.
Perhaps it was only a custom in the literature college to wear their uniforms? Effy wondered. But surely Preston would have told her that. Bewildered, and feeling humiliation begin to creep like ice through her veins, Effy found the nearest seat and sank down into it. The boy beside her angled his body away, lip curling.
Do not shrink for them.Effy gripped the fabric of her skirt in increasingly damp fingers.
In these moments, moments when she felt herself begin to slip, Effy thought of Angharad. Trapped within the water-bloated walls of Hiraeth Manor, which swayed around her like a drunkard, the floor creaking ever more precariously under her feet, she had fought. She had performed no grand feats—no swords had been swung; no armor had been donned—yet she had borne on, meeting the Fairy King again and again in this quiet but ceaseless war.
What a small battle this was by compare. Effy lifted her head and willed her hands not to shake as she began to remove her books from her satchel.
At that moment, the door to the lecture hall began to creak unpersuasively. One of the students nearest to the entrance leaped up from his seat and flung it open with great urgency. He held the door ajar as, at last, Professor Tinmew began to inch through the threshold.
He was not nearly as old as Effy had imagined, and certainly not as old as his shuffling gait suggested. He was a tall and narrow man with spidery limbs and a wispy crop of gray-brown hair that seemed to cling rather diffidently to his skull. He wore square-rimmed glasses and, indeed, there was a pipe in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. Even from her seat in the third row, Effy could smell the wafting of tobacco smoke.
Professor Tinmew made his way in this unhurried manner to the lectern. As soon as he arrived there, another student leaped up and placed a mug of tea, still steaming, on the podium. Professor Tinmew lifted it, drank deeply, then set it back down. He dabbed at the corner of his rather wormy lips with a handkerchief, and then, finally, he spoke.
“Unseemly weather,” he remarked, “for the topic of our lecture. An unchanging garden, eternally in bloom.”
The students in the hall crowed with laughter—as if the comment had been some grand jest. Effy blinked, and then tried to force a smile onto her face.
“Right, then,” said Professor Tinmew. “We’ve left off on line four, stanza fifteen. Before we begin to address the meaning, let us recite the scansion.”
Scansion?Frantically, Effy flipped to the page she had marked last night, after skimming through the class syllabus. She was joining in the middle of the semester, and she had not yet had the time to give the text more than a cursory read.
The text was “The Garden in Stone,” a lengthy poem by Laurence Ardor, Lord of Landevale. Laurence Ardor was the sixthSleeper, so Effy had walked past his glass casket in the museum and regarded his gelid face. It hadn’t made a particularly strong impression on her. His lips were pulled back in an enigmatic sort of grimace, one that might have been either pained or contemptuous; Effy couldn’t be sure.
Before Effy even managed to find her place, the voices of the students rose up around her, in a resonant chorus.
