Page 2 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)
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 uniforms were 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 sixth Sleeper, 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.
“ 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 no other 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.