All of Cabeswater was a dream, but the rose glen was a dream even within it.
“Maybe the girl will give Aurora company,” Gansey said, watching the last of his fish swim from the clearing.
“I don’t think you can just give someone a child and expect them to be thrilled,” Blue retorted. “She’s not a cat.”
Gansey opened his mouth, and Adam could see that a borderline offensive comment was queuing up. He caught Gansey’s eye. Gansey closed his mouth. The moment passed.
Gansey wasn’t entirely wrong, though. Aurora had been created to love, and love she did, in a fashion specific to the object of her affection. So she hugged her youngest son, Matthew, and she asked Gansey about famous people in history, and she brought Blue strange flowers she found during her walks, and she let Ronan show her what he had dreamt or made in the week before. With Adam, though, she would ask things like, “How do you know that you see the color yellow like I do?” And she would listen attentively as he reasoned it out. He would sometimes try to get her to reason it out herself, but she didn’t care so much for thinking, just hearing other people being happy to think.
So they already knew that she would love the Orphan Girl. Whether or not it was right to give Aurora someone else to love was another question entirely.
“Mom, are you here?” Ronan’s voice was different when he spoke to either his mother or Matthew. It was Ronan, unperformed.
No. Ronan, unprotected.
This tone reminded Adam of that unshielded smile from before. Don’t play, he told himself. This is not a game.
But it didn’t feel like a game, if he was being honest. Adrenaline whispered in his heart.
Aurora Lynch appeared.
She did not step out of the living area, nor from the path they had used. Instead, she emerged from the wall of roses cascading over the rock. It was impossible for a woman to step through rock and rose, but she did it anyway. Her golden hair hung in a sheet around her head, caught through with rosebuds and braided with pearls. For a brief moment, she was at once the roses and a woman, and then she was fully Aurora. Cabeswater behaved differently for Aurora Lynch than it did for the rest of them; they were human, after all, and she was a dream thing. They vacationed here. Aurora belonged.
“Ronan,” Aurora said, genuinely happy, as she was always genuinely happy. “Where’s my Matthew?”
“Lacrosse or some shit,” Ronan replied. “Something sweaty.”
“And how about Declan?” Aurora asked.
There was a pause, just a breath too long.
“Working,” Ronan lied.
Everyone in the rose glen looked at Ronan.
“Oh well. He’s always been so diligent,” Aurora said. She waved at Adam, Blue, and Gansey. Adam, Blue, and Gansey waved back. “Have you found that king yet, Gansey?”
“No,” replied Gansey.
“Oh well,” Aurora said again. She hugged Ronan’s neck, pressing her pale cheek to his pale cheek, as if he was holding an armful of groceries instead of a strange little girl. “What have you brought me this time?”
Ronan put the girl down without ceremony. She folded up against his legs, all sweater, and wailed in faintly accented English, “I want to go!”
“And I want to feel my right arm again,” Ronan snapped.
“Amabo te, Greywaren!” she said. Please, Greywaren.
“Oh, stand up.” He took her hand and she stood, rail-rod straight beside him, her brown dainty hooves splayed.
Aurora knelt so that she was on eye level with the Orphan Girl. “How beautiful you are!”
The girl didn’t look at Aurora. She didn’t move at all.
“Here’s a lovely flower the color of your eyes — would you like to hold it?” Aurora offered a rose in her palm. It was indeed the color of the girl’s eyes — a dull, stormy blue. Roses did not occur in that color, but they did now.
The girl did not so much as turn her head in the direction of the rose. Instead, her eyes were fixed upon some point just past Adam’s head, her expression blank or bored. Adam felt a prickle of recognition. There was no petulance or anger in the girl’s expression. She was not tantrumming.
Adam had been there, crouched beside the kitchen cabinets, looking at the light fixture across the room, his father spitting in his ear. He recognized this sort of fear when he saw it.
He could not quite bear to look at her.
As Adam gazed up at the autumn-thin branches instead, Ronan and his mother spoke in low voices. Unbelievably, Gansey’s phone buzzed; he pulled it out to look at it. Cabeswater pressed at Adam. Blue lined spent rose petals along her arm. The big trees outside the glen kept whispering to them in Latin.
“No, Mom,” Ronan said, impatient, this brand-new tone capturing the others’ attention. “This wasn’t like before. This was an accident.”
Aurora looked gently tolerant, which clearly infuriated her middle son.
“It was,” he insisted, even though she hadn’t said anything. “It was a nightmare, and something was different about it.”
Blue swiftly interjected, “Different how?”
“Something in this one was f— messed up. There was something black in the dream that felt weird.” Ronan scowled at the trees as if they might give him the words to explain it. He added finally, “Decayed.”
This word affected them all. Blue and Gansey looked at each other as if it continued a previous conversation. Adam recalled the troubled images Cabeswater had shown him when he first stepped into the forest. Aurora’s golden expression tarnished.
She said, “I think I’d better show you all something.”
Much to Gansey’s annoyance, he had phone reception.
Ordinarily, something about Cabeswater interfered with cell signal, but today his phone vibrated with incoming texts about black-tie Aglionby fund-raisers as he climbed up and then down a mountain.
His mother’s texts looked like state documents.
Headmaster Child agrees that the timing will be tight but luckily my team has enough practice by now to bring it together quickly. It will be so wonderful to do this with you and the school.
His father’s texts were jovial, man-to-man.
The money’s not the point, it’s just going to be a “do.” Don’t call it a fund-raiser, it’s just a swingin’ good time
His sister Helen’s cut through to the important details.
Just tell me how much public debauchery the press is going to have on your classbros so I can start spinning the situation now.
Gansey kept thinking the signal would cut out, but it stayed strong and true. It meant that he was simultaneously getting a text about the Henrietta hotel situation for out-of-town guests while also observing a magical tree seeping some kind of black, toxic-looking liquid.
Greywaren, whispered a voice from distant branches. Greywaren.
The liquid beaded from the bark like sweat, collecting into a slow and viscous cascade. They all regarded it, except for the strange girl, who pressed her face into Ronan’s side. Gansey did not blame her. The tree was a little … difficult to look at straight on. He had not considered how few things in nature were purely black until he saw the tarry sap. The absolute darkness bubbling on the trunk looked poisonous, or artificial.
Gansey’s phone buzzed again.
“Gansey, man, is this diseased tree cutting into your digital time?” Ronan asked.
The fact was the digital time was cutting into his diseased tree time. Cabeswater was a haven for him. The presence of the texts here felt as out of place as the darkness oozing from the tree. He switched his phone off and asked, “Is this the only one like this?”
“That I’ve found in my walks,” Aurora replied. Her expression was untroubled, but she kept running a hand over the length of her hair.
“It’s hurting the tree,” Blue said, craning her head back to look at the wilting canopy.
The dark tree was the opposite of Cabeswater. The longer Gansey spent in Cabeswater, the more awed
he was by it. The longer he spent looking at the black sap, the more distressed he was by it. He asked, “Does it do anything?”
Aurora tilted her head. “What do you mean? Other than what it’s doing?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I meant. Is it just an ugly disease, or is it something magical?”
Aurora shrugged. Her problem solving only went as far as finding someone else to solve the problem. As Gansey circled the tree, trying to look useful if nothing else, he saw Adam crouch in front of the hooved orphan girl. She continued staring past him as he unbuckled his cheap watch. He tapped the top of her hand, lightly, just so that she marked that he was offering the watch to her. Gansey expected her to ignore him or to reject the gift like she had Aurora’s rose, but the girl accepted it without hesitation. She began to wind it with intense concentration as Adam remained crouched before her for a moment longer, eyebrows knitted.
Gansey joined Ronan directly by the tree. This close, the darkness hummed with an absence of sound. Ronan said something in Latin to the tree. There was no audible response.
“It doesn’t seem to have a voice,” Aurora said. “It just feels very odd. I keep finding myself returning to it, even if I don’t mean to.”
“It reminds me of Noah,” Blue said. “Decaying.”
Her voice was so melancholy that Gansey was struck all at once by what he and Blue really lost by keeping their relationship a secret. Blue radiated psychic energy for others, but touch was where she gained hers back. She was always hugging her mother or holding Noah’s hand or linking her elbow in Adam’s or resting her boots on Ronan’s legs as they sat on the sofa. Touching Gansey’s neck just between his hair and his collar. This worry in her tone demanded fingers braided together, arms on shoulders, cheeks rested against chests.
But because Gansey was too cowardly to tell Adam about falling in love with her, she had to stand there with her sadness by herself.
Aurora took Blue’s hand.
Shame diffused through him, black as the tree sap.
Is this really how you want to spend the rest of your time?
A sudden movement between the trees caught Gansey’s attention.
“Oh,” Blue said.
Three figures. Familiar, impossible.
It was three women wearing Blue’s face — sort of. It was not so much Blue’s face as the way one might remember Blue’s face. Perhaps the difference between those two things might not have been as obvious if Blue herself had not been there with them. She was the reality; they were the dream.
They approached in the way of things in a dream, too. Were they walking? Gansey couldn’t remember, even though he was watching it happen. They were getting closer. That was all he knew. Their hands were up by either side of their faces; their palms were red.
“Make way,” they said together.
Ronan’s eyes darted to Gansey.
“Make way for the Raven King,” they said together.
The Orphan Girl began to cry.
Gansey asked in a low voice, “Is Cabeswater trying to tell us something?”
They were closer. Their shadows were black and the ferns beneath them were dying.
“It’s a nightmare,” Adam said. His right hand held the wrist of his left, thumb pressed into his pulse point. “Mine. I didn’t mean to think of them. Cabeswater, take them away.”
The shadows stretched to the black on the tree, a black-sap pedigree proving their lineage. The black bubbled out of the tree a little faster; a branch above them groaned.
“Make way,” they said.
“Take them away,” the Orphan Girl wailed.
“Cabeswater, dissolvere,” Ronan said. Aurora had stepped in front of him as if she meant to protect her son. There was nothing vague about her now.
The three women came closer. Again, Gansey missed how they accomplished it. They were far, they were close. Now he smelled rot. Not the too-sweet decay of plants or food, but the musky horror of flesh.
Blue jerked away from them. Gansey thought it was fear, but she was only running to get to him. She seized his hand.
“Yes,” Adam said, understanding what she was doing before Gansey did. “Gansey, say it.”
Say it. They wanted him to tell the women to leave. Really tell them. In the cave of bones, Gansey had ordered the bones to wake, and the bones had woken. He had used Blue’s energy and his own intention to speak a command that had to be heard. But Gansey didn’t understand why it worked, and he didn’t understand why it was him, and he didn’t know how Adam or Ronan or Blue ever came to grips with their magical capabilities, because he certainly couldn’t.
“Make way for the Raven King,” the women said again. And then they were in front of Gansey. Three false Blues facing Blue and Gansey.
To Gansey’s astonishment, Blue flicked out a switchblade in her free hand. He had no doubt that she would use it: She’d stabbed Adam with it once, after all. He had a lot of doubt, though, that it would be effective against these three nightmares before him.
Gansey looked into their black eyes. He pressed certainty into his voice and said, “Cabeswater, make it safe.”
The three women rained away.
They splattered on Blue’s clothing and on his shoulders, and then the water dissolved into the ground. Blue let out a little sigh that had a tone to it, her shoulders slumping.
Gansey’s words had worked once again, and he was none the wiser about why or how he was meant to use this ability. Glendower had controlled the weather with his words and spoken to birds; Gansey clung to the possibility that his king, when found and woken, would explain the intricacies of Gansey to Gansey.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said. “Stupid of me. I wasn’t being careful. And this tree is — I think it amplified it.”
“I might be amplifying it, too,” Blue said. She was staring at Gansey’s rain-spattered shoulders; her expression was so stricken that he glanced at his sweater to be certain that the splash had not eaten holes in the material. “Can we … can we get away from it now?”
“I think that’s wise,” Aurora advised. She did not seem particularly concerned, merely pragmatic, and it occurred to Gansey that to a dream, perhaps a nightmare was simply an unpleasant acquaintance rather than anything uncanny.
“You should stay away from it,” Ronan told his mother.
“It finds me,” she said.
“Operae pretium est,” Orphan Girl said.
“Don’t be a weirdo,” Ronan told her. “We’re not in a dream anymore. English.”
She didn’t translate, though, and Aurora reached out to pat her skullcap-covered head. “She’ll be my little helper. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”
Back at the forest’s edge, Aurora walked with them to the SUV. It was outside the boundaries of the forest, but she never fell asleep straightaway. Unlike Kavinsky’s dreamt creatures, who fell asleep instantly after his death, Niall Lynch’s wife always managed to persist for a bit of time on her own. She’d stayed awake for three days after his death. She had once stayed awake for an hour outside Cabeswater. But in the end, the dream needed the dreamer.
So now Aurora walked them out to the SUV, looking even more like a dream when removed from Cabeswater, a vision wandered into waking life, clothed in flowers and light.
“Give Matthew my love,” Aurora said, and hugged Ronan. “It was so nice to see all of you again.”
“Stay with her,” Ronan ordered Orphan Girl, who swore at him. “Watch your mouth around my mother.”
The girl said something else, rapid and lovely, and he snapped, “I can’t understand that when I’m awake. You have to use English or Latin. You wanted out; you’re out now. Things are different.”
His tone drew the keen attention of both Aurora and Adam.
Aurora said, “Don’t be sad, Ronan,” which made him look away from all of them, the set of his shoulders unmoving and furious.
She spun in a circle, hands outstretched. “It’s going to rain,”
she said, and then she fell gently to her knees.
Ronan, still and dark and very much real, closed his eyes.
Gansey said, “I’ll help you carry her.”
The moment Blue got back from Cabeswater, she promptly got herself into yet more trouble.
After the boys had dropped her off, Blue stormed into 300 Fox Way’s kitchen and began a one-sided interrogation of Artemus, who was still hidden behind the closed storage closet door. When he failed to reply to her reasonably asked questions about murder-handed women with Blue’s face and about the possible whereabouts of Glendower, she got progressively louder and added door pounding. Her heart was full of the memory of the spattered shoulders of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater — precisely what his spirit had been wearing on the church watch — and her head was full of frustration that Artemus knew more about all of this than he was saying.
Gwenllian delightedly watched the proceedings from a perch on the counter.
“Blue!” Her mother’s voice broke in from somewhere else in the house. “Blooooooooo. Why don’t you come chat with us for a moment?”
The gooeyness of her tone was how Blue knew she was in trouble. She lowered her fist from the kitchen closet door and started up the stairs. Her mother’s voice was coming from the house’s single shared bathroom, and when Blue got there, she found her mother, Calla, and Orla all sitting in a full bathtub, all fully clothed and all equally soaking. Jimi was sitting on the closed toilet lid with a burning candle in her hands. They had all been crying but none of them were crying now.
“What?” Blue demanded. Her throat was a little sore, which meant that she’d possibly been shouting even louder than she’d intended.
Her mother peered up at her with more authority than one would think a woman could in her position. “Do you think you would like it if someone pounded on your bedroom door and ordered you to come out?”