Joy and sadness, too big for his body to contain.
He could feel the time-slipping sensation again. Down here, it was palpable, like water rushing over his thoughts. He had a thought that it was not just time that was slipping around him, but distance. It was possible this tunnel was folding back in on itself and taking him to an entirely different location along the ley line. He kept an eye on his cell phone battery as he walked; it drained quickly with the flashlight function on. Every time he glanced at the screen, the time had changed in some impossible way: sometimes moving forward twice as fast, sometimes jerking backward, sometimes sitting on the same minute for four hundred of Gansey’s steps. Sometimes the screen flickered and went out entirely, taking the flashlight with it, leaving him in a second of blackness, two seconds, four.
He wasn’t sure what he would do once he was left in darkness. He had already discovered on previous caving missions that it was very easy to fall into a hole, even with a flashlight. Even though the cave now appeared to be more hallway than cavern, there was no telling where it would end up.
He had nothing to trust but the ravens and the feeling of rightness. All of his footsteps had led him to this moment, surely.
He had to believe the light wouldn’t go out before he got there. This was the night, this was the hour; all of this time he was supposed to be alone for this.
So he walked and walked, as his battery flickered up and down. Mostly down.
When it was only a warning-red sliver, he hesitated. He could turn back now, and he might have light for a little bit. The rest of the walk would be in darkness, but at least he knew there had been no pitfalls in it during his trip down. Or he could keep going until the very last bit of light was gone, hoping to find something. Hoping he wouldn’t need it once he got to wherever he was going.
“Jesus,” Gansey breathed out loud. He was a book, and he was holding his final pages, and he wanted to get to the end to find out how it went, and he didn’t want it to be over.
He kept walking.
Sometime later, the light went out. His phone was dead. He was in utter blackness.
Now that he was standing still, he realized it was also chilly. A cool bit of water dripped on the crown of his head, and another slid down the collar of his shirt. He could feel the shoulders of Henry’s borrowed sweater getting wet. The darkness was like an actual thing, crowding him.
He could not decide what to do. Did he press forward in the dark, inch by inch? Now that he was in absolute blackness, he remembered well the sensation of the ground being robbed from him in the cave of the ravens. There was no safety rope to catch him here. No Adam to keep him from sliding in farther. No Ronan to tell the humming swarms to be ravens instead of wasps. No Blue to whisper to him until he was once again brave enough to rescue himself.
The darkness wasn’t just in the tunnel; it was inside him.
“Do you not want me to find you?” he whispered. “Are you here?”
The tunnel was silent except for the faint pat of water dropping from the ceiling to the stone floor.
Fear mounted in him. Fear, when it was Gansey, had a very specific form. And unlike the hole beneath Borden House, fear had power in a place like this.
He realized that the tunnel was no longer quiet. Instead, a sound had begun to form in the distance: an intensely familiar note.
Swarm.
This was not a single insect traveling down the hall. Not RoboBee. This was the oscillating wail of hundreds of bodies bouncing off the walls as they approached.
And even though it was dark in the tunnel, Gansey could feel the blackness that had bled out of that Cabeswater tree.
Gansey could see the entire story spread out in his head: how he had been saved from a death by stinging a little over seven years before, as Noah died. And now, as Noah’s spirit decayed, Gansey would die by stinging again. Perhaps there had never been a purpose to all this except to return to the status quo.
The hum came closer. Now the gaps in the buzzing were punctuated by nearly inaudible taps, insects ricocheting through the dark toward him.
He remembered what Henry had said when he put the bee in Gansey’s hand. He’d told him not to think of it as something that could kill him, but rather as something that might be beautiful.
He could do that. He thought he could do that.
Something beautiful, he told himself. Something noble.
The buzzing hummed-struck-hummed against the walls close to him. It was hideously loud.
They were here.
“Something that won’t hurt me,” he said out loud.
His vision went red and then black.
Red, then black.
Then just black.
“Leaves,” Ronan Lynch’s voice said, full of intention.
“Dust,” Adam Parrish said.
“Wind,” Blue Sargent said.
“Shit,” Henry Cheng added.
Light striped across Gansey and away, red and then black again. A flashlight.
In the first sweep of the light, Gansey thought the walls were trembling with hornets, but in the second, he saw that they were only leaves and dust and a breeze that sent them all scuttling down the tunnel. And in this new light, Gansey saw his friends shivering in the tunnel where the leaves had been.
“You dumb shit,” said Ronan. His shirt was very grubby, and the side of his face had dried blood on it, although it was impossible to tell if it was his own.
Gansey couldn’t immediately find his voice, and when he did, he said, “I thought you were staying behind.”
“Yeah, me too,” Henry said. “Then I thought, I can’t let Gansey Three wander around in the mysterious pit alone. We have such few old treasures left; it would be so careless to let them get destroyed. Plus, someone had to bring the rest of your court.”
“Why would you go alone?” Blue asked. She flung her arms around him, and he felt her trembling.
“I was trying to be heroic,” Gansey said, holding her tight. She was real. They were all real. They’d all come here for him, in the middle of the night. The completeness of his shock told him that no part of him had really thought they would do such a thing for him. “I didn’t want you guys to hurt anymore.”
Adam said, “You dumb shit.”
They laughed restlessly, uneasily, because they needed to. Gansey pressed his cheek against the top of Blue’s head. “How did you find me?”
“Ronan nearly died making something to track you,” Adam said. He pointed, and Ronan opened his hand to show a firefly nestled in his palm. The moment his fingers stopped being a cage for it, it flew to Gansey and stuck upon his sweater.
Gansey plucked it carefully from the fabric and cradled it in his own hand. He glanced up at Ronan. He didn’t say I’m sorry, but he was, and Ronan knew. Instead, he said, “Now what?”
“Tell me to ask RoboBee to find your king,” Henry replied immediately.
But Gansey had only ever been in the business of ordering magic and never in the business of ordering people. It was not the Gansey way to command anyone to do anything. They asked, and hoped. Did unto others and silently hoped that they would do unto them.
They’d come here for him. They’d come here for him.
They’d come here for him.
“Please,” Gansey said. “Please help me.”
Henry tossed the bee into the air. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Gansey wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking when he finally found it.
In the end, this was how it looked: a raven-carved stone door and a dreamt bee crawling over the ivy. The tunnel behind them had led out of a house from Gansey’s unmagical youth, not a forest from Gansey’s extraordinary present. It was nothing as he had daydreamed it might look.
It felt exactly right.
He stood before the carving, feeling time slipping around him, him motionless in the rushing pool of it.
“Do you feel it?” he asked the others. Or is it only me?
Blue said, “Come closer with the flashlight.”
Henry had been hanging back, a newcomer to this search, waiting politely. Instead of crowding them, he handed her the flashlight. Blue held it close to the stone, illuminating the fine details. Unlike the previous tomb they’d found, which was carved with a likeness of a knight, this one was carved with ravens upon ravens. Ronan had kicked in the previous tomb they had discovered, but he touched this one carefully. Adam just looked at it in a distant way, his hands clasped together as if they were cold. Gansey reached for his phone to take the usual photo to document the search, remembered his phone was dead, and then wondered if there was any point to it if this was indeed Glendower’s tomb.
No. This moment was for him, not the general public.
He put his hand on the door, flat, fingers splayed, experimental. The easy rocking of it indicated that it would open easily.
“There’s no chance this guy is evil, is there?” Henry asked. “I’m really too young to die. Really, really too young.”
Gansey had been given enough time in seven years to contemplate every possible option for the king behind this door. He had read the accounts of Glendower’s life enough to know that Glendower could be either a hero or a villain depending on where you regarded him from. He had pulled Glendower’s daughter from her tomb and found that it had driven her mad. He had read legends that promised favors and legends that promised death. Some stories had Glendower alone; some stories had him surrounded by dozens of sleeping knights who woke with him.
Some stories — their story — had a demon in them.
“You can wait outside if you’re worried, Cheng,” Ronan said, but his bravado was thin as a spiderweb, and Henry brushed it away as easily as one.
Gansey said, “I can’t guarantee anything about what’s on the other side of this. We’re all in agreement that the favor is to kill the demon, right?”
They were.
Gansey pressed his hands to the death-cold stone. It shifted easily beneath the weight of him, some clever mechanism allowing the heavy stone to turn. Or perhaps no mechanism at all, Gansey thought. Perhaps some dreamstuff, some fanciful creation that didn’t have to follow the rules of physics.
The flashlight illuminated the interior of the tomb.
Gansey stepped inside.
The walls of Gwenllian’s tomb had been richly painted, birds upon birds chasing more birds, in reds and blues unfaded by light. Armor and swords hung on the walls, waiting for the sleeper to be woken. The coffin had been elevated and covered with an intricately carved lid featuring an effigy of Glendower. The entire tomb had been befitting royalty.
This tomb, on the other hand, was simply a room.
The ceiling was low and hewn into the rock: Gansey had to duck his head a little; Ronan had to duck his head a lot. The walls were bare rock. The flashlight beam found a broad, dark bowl sitting on the floor; there was a darker circle in the bottom of it. Gansey knew enough by now to recognize a scrying bowl. Blue swept the flashlight farther. A square slab sat in the middle of the room; a knight in armor lay on top of it, uncovered and unburied. There was a sword by his left hand, a cup by his right.
It was Glendower.
Gansey had seen this moment.
Time slid more generously around him. He could feel it eddying around his ankles, weighting his legs. There was no noise. There was nothing to make noise, except for the five watchful teens in the room.
He did not feel particularly real.
“Gansey,” whispered Adam. The room swallowed the sound.
Blue’s flashlight pointed past the armored figure to the floor beyond. It was a second body. They all exchanged a dark look before beginning to creep slowly toward it. Gansey was hyperaware of the dry scrape of his footsteps, and as one, they all paused and looked back at the tomb door. In a normal world, it would be a simple thing to talk themselves out of the fear of the door slamming shut. But they hadn’t lived in a normal world for a long time.
Blue continued to illuminate the body with the flashlight. It was boots and bones and some sort of disintegrating garment of indeterminate color. It was sprawled partially against the wall, skull propped up as if gazing at its own feet.
What am I doing? Gansey thought.
“Did they die trying to do what we’re doing?” Adam asked.
“Only if waking kings was a historical pastime,” Henry replied, “because this guy was packing some medieval heat.”
Gansey and Ronan knelt beside the bones. The body was wearing a sword. Well, wearing was a poor verb. The rib cage was wearing the sword, which had been stabbed through it, the tip of it jammed evocatively into a shoulder blade.
“Correct to Glendower’s period,” Gansey said, mostly to make himself feel more himself.
There was a heavy silence. Everyone was regarding Gansey. He felt as if he were about to give a speech to a crowd.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m doing it.”
“Do it fast,” Blue suggested. “I’m incredibly creeped out.”
This was the moment, then. Gansey drew close to Glendower’s body in its suit of armor.
His hands hovered just over the helmet. His heart was racing so hard that he couldn’t catch a breath.
Gansey closed his eyes.
I am ready.
He gently freed the leather chin strap from the cool metal, and then he carefully pulled the helmet free.
Adam inhaled.
Gansey didn’t. He didn’t breathe at all. He just stood, frozen, his hands gripped around his king’s helmet. He told himself to breathe in, and he did. He told himself to breathe out, and he did. He didn’t move, though, and he didn’t speak.
Glendower was dead.
Bones.
Dust.
“Is that — is that what he’s supposed to look like?” Henry asked.
Gansey did not reply.
It was not what Glendower was supposed to look like, and yet it did not feel untrue. Everything that day had felt lived before, dreamt, redone. How many times had Gansey feared that he would find Glendower, only to discover him dead? The only thing was that Gansey had always feared that he would find Glendower just a little too late. Minutes, days, months after death. But this man had been dead for centuries. The helmet and skull were only metal and bone. The gambeson beneath the plate mail was threads and dust.
“Are we …” Adam started and then stopped, uncertain. He put his hand on the wall of the tomb.
Gansey covered his mouth with his hand; he felt his breath would blast the remainder of Glendower away. The others still stood in shocked assembly. None of them had words. It had been longer for him, but they had been just as hopeful.
“Are we supposed to wake his bones?” Blue asked. “Like the skeletons in the cave of bones?”
Adam said, “That’s what I was going to say, but …”
He trailed off again, and Gansey knew why. The cave of bones had been filled with skeletons, but it had still felt inherently vital. Magic and possibility had crackled in the air. The idea of waking those bones had felt incredible, but not impossible.
“I don’t have my dream amplifier,” Ronan said.
“Wake. His. Bones,” echoed Henry. “I really don’t mean to sound like the naysayer here, as you are all clearly experts at this, but.”
But.
Ronan said, “Then let’s do it. Let’s do it fast. I hate this place. It feels like it’s eating my life.”
This vehemence served to focus Gansey’s clouded thoughts.
“Yes,” he said, although he didn’t feel remotely certain. “Let’s do it. Perhaps the cave of bones was a practice run for this and that’s why Cabeswater led us there.” The bones hadn’t stayed alive long in that cave, but it didn’t matter, he supposed. They only needed Glendower to be awake long enough to grant a favor.
Gansey’s heart stumbled inside him at the idea of trying to extract both a favor and a purpose for his existence before Glendower turned to dust.
Better than nothing.
So the teens attempted to assemble as they had in the cave of bones, with Henry standing back, curious or wary. Adam splayed his fingers on the tomb walls, feeling for some semblance of energy to project. He moved around and around the tomb, clearly unhappy with what he was finding. Eventually, he stopped where he had begun and put his hand on the wall.
“Here is as good as any place,” he said, but he didn’t sound hopeful. Blue took his hand. Ronan crossed his arms. Gansey carefully put his hand on Glendower’s chest.
It felt pretend. Ridiculous. Gansey tried to summon up intention, but he felt empty. His knees were knocking, not out of fear or anger, but some more vast emotion that he refused to acknowledge as grief.
Grief meant he’d already given up.
“Wake up,” he said. Then, again, trying a little harder, “Wake up.”
But they were just words.
“Wake,” Gansey said again. “Up.”
A voice and nothing more. Vox et praeterea nihil.
The first moment of realization was giving way to a second, and third, and each new minute revealed some facet that Gansey had not yet let himself consider. There would be no waking of Glendower, so there was no favor. Noah’s life would not be begged for, the demon would not be bargained away. There may have never been magic involved with Glendower; his corpse may have been brought to the New World only to be buried out of reach of the English; it was possible that Gansey needed to notify the historian community of this find, if it was even findable by normal means. If Glendower had always been dead, it could not have been him who spared Gansey.
If Glendower had not saved Gansey’s life, he did not know who to thank, or who to be, or how to live.
No one said anything.
Gansey touched the skull, the raised cheekbone, the face of his promised and ruined king. Everything was dry and gray.
It was over.
This man was not going to ever be anything to Gansey.
“Gansey?” Blue asked.
Every minute was giving way to another and then another, and slowly it sank into his heart, all the way to the center: