Page 30 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)

I do not recall wishing consciously for him to enter, only that when he did, I felt both enlivened and relieved.

He stood at the foot of my bed in his robe and slippers.

I sat up, my hair loose about my shoulders.

I wore the puff-sleeved, flowered nightgown of a little girl, and I recall feeling oddly embarrassed by that fact.

For several long moments, no words passed between us; no sound, even, save for the brief flitting of a moth against the windowpane, and no movement, save for the guttering of candles.

“Antonia,” Father said at last. Grief strangled his voice. “You look so much like your mother in this light.”

There was a soft pulsing in my chest. “Please,” I said, “will you stay?”

He set down his candle and came to my bedside. He laid his hand gently over mine, where it rested on the coverlet. And for the ensuing hours of the night I was not alone.

Until next time, Diary

—A.A.

The door to the small room swung abruptly open. Effy’s head snapped up. But it was only Rhia who stood in the threshold, a book tucked under her arm.

“Ready to go?” she asked.

Effy nodded and rose to her feet. A faint sensation of disgust prickled her, Antonia’s words running through her mind.

She glanced back down at the portrait on the front of the book, at the girl—the woman—who now was beginning to feel so real to her.

Whose grief and fear had reached forward through the centuries and touched her.

Outside, the snow began to skim like white-winged insects against the window glass.

Effy and Rhia returned to their dorm, Rhia to practice her piece, and Effy to sit soberly in her room.

She took Letters Preston almost jumped. It was Rhia, tuning her piano.

“Oh,” Preston said, once he recognized the sound. “This again...”

“She’s practicing for her showcase,” Effy reminded him, wincing in apology. “You don’t have to sleep over, if you don’t want.”

“No,” Preston said hurriedly. “It’s all right. I do.”

As Effy undressed and dressed again in her nightgown, her mind was not at all focused on what she was doing.

She was thinking about Antonia Ardor, fourteen, sleepless in her bed while her father paced the halls outside her room.

She was thinking about the pale, oval-faced girl in the portrait, neither old nor young, frozen in time, trapped in ink and paper.

And then, abruptly, she thought of Angharad .

I was a girl when he came for me, beautiful and treacherous, and I was a crown of pale gold in his black hair.

In the bathroom, Effy filled her glass with water, hands trembling faintly. The Fairy King was gone, but his words were with her still. Because they were written, they were eternal. As unchanging as a garden of stone.

More than one hundred years had passed, yet here was another sleepless girl, her mind a gyre of grief and confusion.

Only Effy had tools that Antonia Ardor had not—far better than peasant remedies.

She uncapped the bottle of sleeping pills and poured out three into her palm.

Up until recently, one had worked just fine, but over the past weeks, she needed more and more to quiet her thoughts. To smother her dreams.

Effy swallowed the pills and welcomed their oblivion.