Page 3 of A Theory of Dreaming
“One, two, four, one, three, two, three,” they recited.
Effy would not have been more baffled if they’d begun speaking Argantian. She looked down at the page, as if she might see the numbers there, but there were only the Lord of Landevale’s words (I found my deathless death in dreams).
Almost numb with shock, and with no small amount of encroaching panic, Effy peered over at the book of the student beside her. Above each word of the text, she saw that he had scratched a number, one to four, in pencil.Numbers, her old nemeses, which she thought she had left gleefully behind when she had quit the architecture program. Now they loomed back up again with malice.
Effy shrank down in her seat. The loud yet utterly unfeeling voices of the students seemed to press in on her and her alone, as if the very air knew she was an interloper. And then, slowly, they began to recede into the background, her ears filling instead with white noise, holding the sounds at a distance. Her body, insulating her mind from the fear and danger.
No, she reprimanded herself sharply. She could not afford to slip away. And anyway, where would she escape to? There was noother world beneath the real one, nothing else but bleak and black oblivion. The Fairy King was gone, and he had taken the dream world with him.
Effy dug her fingernails into the soft white flesh on the inside of her wrist. The pain, keen and sudden, returned her to herself. It restored her senses, depositing her back into the place that held no hatch in the floor and no crack in the wall.
Two
The storyteller is a liar, but the story he tells is true.
—from the diaries of Angharad Myrddin, 194 AD
“You didn’t tell me you spoke to the paper.”
Like vapor from a cauldron, a plume of smoke nearly engulfed Master Gosse’s head. He exhaled so forcibly on his cigarette that the smoke obscured most of his face, and then wafted malevolently toward Preston, who recoiled and stifled a cough.
“What was that, Héloury?” Gosse asked, voice muffled.
Feeling turned off from the whole enterprise, Preston stubbed out his own cigarette. “The front page of theLlyrian Times. They interviewed you for their piece on Myrddin.”
The smoke dissipated, and Gosse’s face was revealed behind it. His cheeks were taut and always pink, as though he had just come in from the cold. This impression was heightened by his tousled black hair, which looked perennially windblown, and his exuberantly curling mustache, which appeared never to be greased or combed. His eyes were blue, but they had a dim and murky quality that made them appear quite dark at times, like chips of smoked glass.
“Iwouldn’t say so,” Gosse replied at last. He took another long drag from his cigarette.
“Wouldn’t say what?”
“You called it a piece on Myrddin,” he said. “I think it was more so a piece on you.”
Preston stiffened in his seat. Leaning forward, he asked, “Did you know, then? That Dean Fogg was going to give the paper our names?”
Master Gosse tapped his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. He then smiled in an indulgent sort of way.
“Making the front page of theLlyrian Timesfor your scholarship is quite a feat,” he said. “How old are you, Héloury? Nineteen?”
“Twenty.” Preston forced his jaw to unclench. “And it was hardly an article about my scholarship.”
“Well, I hope you won’t forget your dear old adviser when you’re shaking hands with politicians and posing for magazine covers.” Gosse’s eyes gleamed. “Your compatriot has quite a face for photo spreads, don’t you think? It might warm the masses of Llyr to your cause.”
The very thought of appearing in a tabloid magazine was enough to make Preston feel vaguely nauseated. “Effy and I just want this matter to be handled with the decorum it deserves. This is about truth, objective truth, not gossip and celebrity—”
Gosse chortled. “You should have thought of that before you accused the most famous author in Llyrian history of fraud.” Preston opened his mouth to protest, but Gosse pressed on. “And yes, I know I put you up to it, but every scholar needs a bit of controversy in his career. It’s energizing, like an ice bath.”
“Thank you for the encouragement,” Preston said dully. “Is this why you wanted to see me?”
“No,” Gosse replied. Almost immediately, the glee and humor left his eyes. His face became a mask of solemnity, and his voice took on a grave tone. “Not at all.”
He rose from his seat behind the desk and strode over to the window. Winter rain was stippling the glass, turning it marbled and translucent. Preston hoped that Effy had made it to class before the storm began in earnest, and he hoped, too, that she would be careful when she returned to her dormitory. Slush limned the street corners and the pavement was icy and treacherous.
Thinking of her was always like this: a rush of fondness, and then a bolt of fear. Love poems never seemed to include this thread of terror. Was he uniquely ill-disposed to this sentiment, too uneasy, too anxious for the act of loving without reserve? Or was the object of his affection uniquely vulnerable?
As he had watched her walk away from him that morning, through the courtyard, vanishing into the sleet and the gray mist, Preston had been at war with himself. The urge to protect her fought brutally with the desire for her to be free. If he kept her contained because of his own fear, he would be no better than Ianto. No better than Myrddin.
Gosse stared out the window for a long time, though surely he could not see much except the gathering ice on the panes, or the faint yellow glow of the streetlamps, turned on prematurely to light a path through the fog and the sleet. It was an eerie silence, punctuated by the pattering of rain upon the glass and the serpentlikeexhalation of the radiator. Discomfort settled over Preston in a cloak of cold, and he reached over for another cigarette.
