Page 9 of A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2)

The first-interred, a bard at the court of Llyr’s earliest king.

Aneurin is known for his incomplete and fragmentary epic the Neiriad , tracking the king Neirin’s exploits and adventures, particularly his vanquishment of Argantian invaders.

His virtue is power, and when he rises from his slumber, he will rekindle the spirit of victory won in this ancient war.

—from the plaque beside the coffin of Aneurin the Bard, in the Sleeper Museum

The classroom was empty when Preston arrived, but Master Gosse had never been what one would call punctual .

Half the reason he’d taken on Preston as a teaching assistant in the first place was to compensate for his utter lack of organization and his penchant for tardiness.

So Preston was not alarmed by his adviser’s absence.

In the meantime, he busied himself by placing the papers and monographs on every desk, and occasionally peering out the frost-rimed window, hoping he would see Master Gosse approaching through the courtyard.

Luckily, there was a clock on the wall, which meant that he didn’t have to look down at his watch.

He was trying to convince himself that he had not seen what he saw.

His mind was still fuzzy and hallucinatory with sleep.

His eyes were still bleary. A dozen more explanations he conjured, yet he could not be moved to believe any of them.

And he knew that if he glanced at his watch again, the hands would still be stopped, and the face would be filled with water, and he would have to acknowledge—what? That he was going mad?

It had all started with the damned bells. He wished he had never heard them at all.

Since Master Gosse was still nowhere to be found, Preston picked up a piece of chalk and began writing the day’s assignment on the board.

The Early Writings of Aneurin the Bard: A Work in Translation by E.

A. Lawes. He opened the book and peeked at the first line, to refamiliarize himself with the text.

Lo! How we have heard the deeds and glory

Of Llyr’s last-and-greatest king;

How he broke the land through the sea

As quick as the spear shafts of his enemies;

How he kept at bay the water

Just as he repelled the savage pillagers

Who spoke the demon Ankou’s tongue.

Students began to filter in. Most smiled solicitously as they took their seats, but others regarded him with furrowed brows and narrowed eyes.

One particular student, a stocky boy with tightly gelled white-blond hair, gave him a very probing once-over.

His gaze caught on the dragon pin on Preston’s lapel, and the smile he gave was not groveling at all. It was smug.

“Are you our new professor?” one of the students asked. “Where’s Master Gosse?”

“You idiot,” another student whispered audibly. “He’s our age.”

“No,” Preston said. “I’m a teaching assistant. Master Gosse should be here at any moment.”

“He’s the legate,” said the platinum-haired student. His tone was indolent, and he leaned back in his chair, cracking his jaw with a yawn. “Didn’t you notice his little pin? We better keep on our best behavior, or he might report us to Dean Fogg for a caning.”

The other students snickered.

“And who are you?” Preston could not hide the irritation in his voice.

“Southey,” he replied. “Domenic Byron Southey the Second. And you’re Preston Héloury.”

At that moment, and with astonishing suddenness, all the snickering subsided. Twelve pairs of eyes trained on him, unblinking in their shock. Preston knew what had stunned them to silence: the sound of his Argantian name, rolling derisively from Southey’s lips.

The silence wore on, the air growing dense with it. Despite the cold outside, the room began to feel overly warm. Preston’s cheeks were hot.

“And you’re teaching us Aneurin?” came one student’s hesitant question, at last.

“I’m assisting Master Gosse in his teaching, yes,” Preston said, his jaw clenched.

Then came more silence. Southey reclined further, his expression resplendent.

Finally another student cleared his throat. “And you do speak Llyrian fluently—right?”

Preston lifted his gaze slowly, until he met the student’s eyes.

They were small and beady, and a washed-out shade of blue.

His nose was long but turned up at the tip, a trait Preston associated with Llyr’s nobility, and this impression was further enforced by the gold cuff links he wore, along with a silken pocket square.

Who wears cuff links to class? Preston thought peevishly. Only someone who was desperate to communicate his elite status. Who perhaps worried that his preeminence was being eroded by the influx of lower-class students, of women, of Argantians .

“I’m the college’s top-ranked literature student and I got a perfect score on my entrance exam,” Preston said. “Yes, I’m fluent in Llyrian. And I can read and write in Old Llyrian, too—which you might consider learning if you want to study Aneurin’s works in their original form.”

At that, the student drew in a sharp breath. Preston kept his gaze trained on him, unblinking, until the student averted his eyes, looking down at the floor instead.

Preston did not feel any amount of satisfaction at cowing him. Mostly, he felt nakedly vexed, and slightly humiliated.

“So they teach Llyrian in Argantian schools, then?” It was Southey now who spoke. “I suppose that’s wise, since their front line is crumbling like wet paper. The Times is saying that we may be only weeks away from a surrender.”

Preston stiffened. Heat laced through his veins. “Perhaps you ought to leave the speculation to war reporters and defense ministers. This is a classroom, not a political forum.”

He was thinking that he ought to be given a gold medal for restraint when Southey spoke again.

“I hardly said anything political,” he responded, in that same tone of idle contempt. “Only facts. And surely everyone here would agree that Argant ought to surrender—everyone who is loyal to Llyr and its cause, that is.”

Once more, silence fell over the room, as heavy as a velvet drape.

The other students all stared very pointedly at the floor.

Only Southey pridefully met Preston’s gaze, a smirk tugging at the corners of his lips.

Preston felt his hands start to shake so violently that he had to fold his arms across his chest to disguise their trembling.

And inside his sternum, his heart pounded with a dragging, almost painful ferocity.

The clock on the wall ticked past the hour, but Master Gosse never came.

When the bell gonged to announce the class period was over, Preston marched swiftly and immediately out of the room.

He had done his best to teach the class himself but had ended up doing little more than awkwardly stumbling through the material, all too keenly aware of Southey’s scornful, derisive gaze.

And all too aware of the fact that he was, in some tragic, perverse way, sharpening the weapons that would be used against him.

Aneurin’s work was a paean to Llyrian nationalism.

He was arming the students with its language.

Preston stomped through the corridor of the literature college, not caring who he shoved brusquely past, until he reached Master Gosse’s office. His whole body was racked with tremors of fury, and he didn’t bother knocking. He just pushed in the door.

Master Gosse’s office was in a state of disarray, even more so than usual.

The piles of books that usually stood precariously in every corner of the room had been knocked over, and every drawer of his desk was yanked open, the contents strewn about.

An ashtray had been tipped, and everywhere Preston walked, he tracked ash onto the carpet. The air stank of scotch.

A fuzzy feeling of bewilderment began to eat through his anger. His heart, which had been pounding erratically, now slowed to an eerie, trepidatious beat.

Preston picked his way through the office, shifting through some of the strewn papers, holding them up to the light and squinting to see if he could find any clues within them.

They were torn in places, underlined and highlighted haphazardly.

But there was no order to the markings that he could discern, no logic, no reason.

He let the pages flutter back to the ground.

Then he rose and walked over to the desk.

There were several books lying open upon it.

The first was Myrddin’s collection of poems, with a single line underlined: The seafloor is a tomb for dreams. The other was a copy of Angharad , again with one line underlined, rather forcefully, the pen tip pierced through the page.

I had not known that the seam of the world was not between the living and the dead, but rather between the real and the unknown.

There was a note, in Gosse’s handwriting, scrawled near-illegibly beside it. Touching the page, Preston could almost sense the heat of his adviser’s excitement; the paper seemed to singe his thumb.

The seam of the world is where the Sleepers dream. (!!!!!)

Preston felt the hair on his neck rise, his skin prickling with cold, as if a draft had blown into the room, even though all the windows were shut.

Gosse had made bold claims. And it was obvious where he would go to test their veracity.

Preston knelt down, to the bottom drawer of Gosse’s desk, and found that it, too, was wrenched open, the golden key discarded on the floor.

The photostated copy of Angharad’s diary was gone.

As always, the line for the Sleeper Museum wrapped around the block, despite the cold, and despite the slushy sprinkling of rain that had begun to fall just as Preston left the literature building.

Tourists jostled and rocked back on their heels with impatience.

Some opened their umbrellas, which caused a great swell of black in the crowd, like the bubbling of a cauldron’s draft.