“You,” she said, “are my least favorite. You remind me of both a man and a dog that I never liked.”
“Noted,” he replied. “Do we get a favor? For waking you?”
Of course, Blue thought stupidly. Of course we should have thought to ask that at once. It was all sleepers who supposedly granted a favor in the legends, not just Glendower. It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t have occurred to all of them, but everything that had seemed obvious in theory was muddy and loud and frightening in practice.
The woman shrieked like the crows overhead, and then she shrieked again, and then Blue realized it was laughter. “A favor! For waking me? Little mongrel, I never slept.”
Adam stared at her, raw, unmoving. He had let a single word — mongrel — slice down to his spine.
Gansey cut in, fearsomely polite. “We’ve been nothing but kind to you. His name is Adam Parrish, and that’s what you can call him.”
She bowed cartoonishly to Gansey, stumbling to a knee with her hands still tied.
“Forgive me,” she sneered, “my lord.”
He pursed his lips, dismissive of the gesture. “What do you mean that you didn’t sleep?”
“Go to sleep, my little daughter,” said the woman sweetly. “Dream of war. Only I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’ve always been a restless sleeper!” She cast a dramatic pose, legs spread to balance herself. A drop of blood had peppered her cheek like a tear. In a high-pitched voice, she called, “Help! Help! I’m not asleep! Come back! Come back!” Lower: “Did you hear something? Only the sound of my blood throbbing in my manhood! Let’s go!”
Ronan’s lip curled.
Blue was pretty sure she’d heard that sound in the halls of her high school. She asked, “Do you mean to say you’ve been awake for six hundred years?”
She chanted, “Give or take two hundred.”
“No wonder she’s mad as a cow’s tit,” Ronan said.
“Ronan,” Gansey started, but then he clearly couldn’t think of a good rebuke. “Let’s go.”
Inside the house, Jesse Dittley peered at the woman. She was nearly as tall as he was. “WHAT’S THIS?”
“Your curse,” Gansey replied.
Jesse looked dubious. He asked her, “NOW TELL ME THIS: DID YOU EVER MAKE MY WALLS WEEP?”
“Only three or five times,” she said. “Was it your father’s blood that choked me to silence?”
“DID YOU KILL MY WIFE’S CAT?”
“That,” she sang, “was an accident. Was it your grandfather’s blood before that?”
“TAKE HER OUT OF MY HOUSE,” Jesse said. “PLEASE.”
As the boys bundled the woman out the other side of the house, Malory and the Dog hurrying after, Blue stayed behind. She stood by Jesse as he drew aside a shabby curtain to watch the boys persuading the woman to get into the Suburban. Blue got a good glimpse of her biting the Dog.
She felt a little less afraid now that she was no longer standing right next to the woman, although she couldn’t stop seeing Chainsaw’s beak eerily parted in false song, or forget the jump of her heart when the body first moved within the coffin. This crooked enchantment felt nothing like Cabeswater’s organic magic.
“THAT ONE’S NOT ALL THERE.”
Blue said, “She’s been awake for hundreds of years. Somehow, when a Dittley died in the cave, it must’ve shut her up for a little bit. But we have her now. She was the curse. You don’t have to go into the cave and die now.”
Jesse let the curtain fall back into place. “DO YOU RECKON YOU CAN LOSE A CURSE AS EASY AS THAT?”
“Maybe. Probably! She’s been in there for a really long time,” Blue said. “As long as there have been Dittleys here. You heard her say she did those things.”
“BUT WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH HER?”
“I dunno. Something.” She patted his arm. “You should call your wife, or your dog.”
Jesse scratched his chest. “YOU REALLY ARE A VERY GOOD KIND OF ANT.”
They shook hands.
Blue saw him watching out the window as they left.
They took the woman to 300 Fox Way, of course, where they found an extremely unimpressed Calla and a rather alarmed-looking Jimi and a fascinated Orla. Persephone took one look at the woman, nodded firmly, and then disappeared upstairs. Malory drank footy tea in the reading room. Adam and Ronan lurked in the hall, eavesdropping, too cowardly to face Calla’s wrath.
And Calla was indeed in fine form. She barked, “Do you remember how I said that there were three sleepers, and Maura’s job was to not wake one of them, and your job was to wake one of the others? Remember how I didn’t say anything about the other one? I did not mean bring her to my kitchen.”
Blue felt equal parts relief and annoyance. The former because she had been worried that the woman might have been the sleeper that was not to be woken. The latter because they were in trouble.
She demanded, “Where else are we supposed to take her? Mom would’ve said to bring her here.”
“Your mother has no common sense! We’re not a halfway home.” Calla walked right up to the woman, who gazed around the kitchen with something between bewilderment and regal insanity. “What’s your name?”
“My name is that of all women,” the woman replied. “Sorrow.”
One of Calla’s eyebrows momentarily considered punching the woman. She said, “Why didn’t you just leave her?”
From the hall, Ronan shot a superior look at Gansey.
“Look, I understand she can’t stay here,” Gansey said. “But she’s clearly more like you than like …”
Calla’s expression turned volcanic. “Like what, sir? Like you, Richard Gansey? Is that what you were going to say? You think she’s going to get her crazy on you but we’re immune? Well, you’ve got another think coming, mister.”
Gansey blinked rapidly.
A slow smile spread over the woman’s face. “He’s not wrong, witch.”
Lava spilled over Calla’s eyelids. “What did you just call me?”
The woman laughed and sang, “Blue lily, lily blue, you and I.”
Both Blue and Calla scowled at the eerily familiar words. This woman must have been the one who had possessed Noah, just as she had possessed Chainsaw. Blue hoped this skill didn’t extend beyond dream birds and dead boys.
“It’s not too late to put her back,” Ronan said.
“YOU TWO,” roared Calla. Both Adam and Ronan winced. “Go to the store and get some supplies for her.”
Adam and Ronan exchanged a wide-eyed look. Adam’s look said, What does that mean? and Ronan’s said, I don’t care; let’s get out of here before she changes her mind. Gansey frowned after them as they scrambled to the front door.
Persephone reappeared then, holding the sweater with mismatched arms. She peered at the woman in an appraising sort of way; it would have seemed rude if it hadn’t been Persephone. The woman appraised her back, with a lot more of the whites of her eyes showing.
Finally, Persephone seemed satisfied. She offered up the sweater. “I made you this. Try it — oh! Why haven’t they untied you yet?”
“We thought she might be … dangerous?” Gansey answered lamely.
Persephone cocked her head at him. “And you thought tying her hands would change that?”
“I …” He turned to Blue for help.
“She’s an uncooperative witness,” Blue provided.
“This isn’t how we treat guests,” Persephone said, faintly chastising.
Calla retorted, “I was unaware she was a guest.”
“Well, I was expecting her,” Persephone said. She paused. “I think. We’ll see if the sweater fits.”
Gansey cut his eyes over to Blue; she shook her head.
“You should untie me, little lily,” the woman said to Blue. “With your little lily knife. It would be very fitting and circular.”
“Why would it be fitting and circular?” Blue asked warily.
“Because your father is the one who tied me in th
e first place. Oh, men.”
Blue was abruptly awake. She had been awake before, but she was now so much more than she had been the second before, that she felt as if she had been sleeping.
Her father.
The woman was suddenly in her face, hands still tied behind her back.
“Oh, yes. Suitable punishment, he said. Artemusssssssss.” She laughed at the shocked faces in the room. “Oh, the things I know! Behold the way in which it glows, within a ring of water, within a moat, upon a lake, all in a ring of water!”
Earlier that year, when Blue had first met the boys, there had been a moment when she had been suddenly struck by how she was being drawn into their tangled lives. Now she realized that she had never been drawn in. She had been there all along, together with this woman, and all the other women at Fox Way, and maybe even Malory and his Dog. They were not creating a mess. They were just slowly illuminating the shape of it.
With a frown, Blue took out the switchblade. Taking care not to cut herself or the woman’s pale white skin, she sliced the worn bonds at her wrists. “Okay, talk.”
The woman stretched her arms up and out, her face rapturous. She spun and spun, knocking glasses off the table and smashing her hands into the complicated light fixture hanging over the kitchen table. She tripped over shoes and kept going, laughing and laughing, ever more hysterical.
When she stopped, her eyes were electric and unhinged.
“My name,” she said, “is Gwenllian.”
“Oh,” said Gansey, in a very small voice.
“Yes, little knight, I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?” Calla asked suspiciously.
Gansey’s expression was troubled. “You’re Owen Glendower’s daughter.”
I don’t even know what to get. A kennel?” Ronan asked.
Adam didn’t reply. They were in a large, glowing big box store looking at toiletries. He picked up a bottle of shampoo and put it back down. His clothing was still flecked with blood from the apocalyptic drizzle and his soul still smarted from the mongrel comment. Gwenllian — Gansey had texted Ronan her identity — had been in a cave for six hundred years and had gotten his number at once. How?
Ronan picked up a bottle of shampoo and tossed it in the cart Adam pushed.
“That one’s fourteen dollars,” Adam said. He found it impossible to turn off the part of his brain that added up the sum of groceries. Perhaps this was what Gwenllian could see in the furrow of his eyebrows.
The other boy didn’t even turn around. “What else? Flea collar?”
“You already did a dog joke. With ‘kennel.’ ”
“So I did, Parrish.” He continued down the aisle, shoulders square, chin tilted haughtily. He did not look like he was shopping. He looked like he was committing larceny. He swept some toothpaste into the basket. “Which toothbrush? This one looks fast.” He sent it plummeting in with the other supplies.
The discovery of Gwenllian was doing odd things to Adam’s brain. Disbelief shouldn’t have been an option after all of the things that had happened with the ley line and Cabeswater, but Adam realized that he still hadn’t truly believed that Glendower might still be sleeping under a mountain somewhere. And yet here was Gwenllian, buried in the same legendary way. His final skepticism had been taken from him.
“What do we do now?” Adam asked.
“Get a doghouse. Damn. You’re right. I really can’t think of another joke.”
“I mean now that we have Gwenllian.”
Ronan made a sound that indicated he didn’t find this line of thought interesting. “Do what we were doing before. She doesn’t matter.”
“Everything matters,” Adam replied, recalling his sessions with Persephone. He contemplated adding deodorant to the cart, but he wasn’t sure if there was any point getting it for someone who had been born before it was invented.
“Gansey wants Glendower. She’s not Glendower.” Ronan started to say something and then didn’t. He hurled a bottle of shave cream into the cart, but no razor. It was possible it was for him, not Gwenllian. “I’m not sure we shouldn’t stop while we’re ahead, anyway. We have Cabeswater. Why do we need Glendower?”
Adam thought of the vision of Gansey dying on the ground. He said, “I want the favor.”
Ronan stopped so abruptly in the middle of the aisle that Adam nearly ran the cart into the back of his legs. The six items in the bottom skittered forward. “Come on, Parrish. You still think you need that?”
“I don’t question the things that moti —”
“Blah blah blah. Right, I know. Hey, look at that,” Ronan said.
The two of them observed a beautiful woman standing by the garden section, attended by three male store workers. Her cart was full of tarps and hedge trimmers and various things that looked as if they might be easily weaponized. The men held shovels and flagpoles that didn’t fit in the cart. They seemed very eager to help.
It was Piper Greenmantle. Adam said wryly, “She doesn’t strike me as your type.”
Ronan hissed, “That’s Greenmantle’s wife.”
“How do you know what she looks like?”
“Oh, please. Now that’s what we should be thinking about. Have you researched him yet?”
“No,” Adam said, but it was a lie. It was difficult for him to ignore a question once it had been posed, and Greenmantle was a bigger question than most. He admitted, “Some.”
“A lot,” Ronan translated, and he was right, because, strangely enough, Ronan knew a great deal about how Adam worked. It was possible Adam had always been aware of this but had preferred to consider himself — particularly the more unsightly parts of himself — impenetrable.
With a last glance at the blonder Greenmantle, they made their way through the checkout line. Ronan swiped a card without even looking at the total — one day, one day, one day — and then they headed back out into the bright afternoon. At the curb, Adam realized he was still pushing the cart with its single bag nestled in the corner. He wondered if they were supposed to have gotten more things, but he couldn’t imagine what they would have been.
Ronan pointed at the cart. “Get in there.”
“What?”
He just continued pointing.
Adam said, “Give me a break. This is a public parking lot.”
“Don’t make this ugly, Parrish.”
As an old lady headed past them, Adam sighed and climbed into the basket of the shopping cart. He drew his knees up so that he would fit. He was full of the knowledge that this was probably going to end with scabs.
Ronan gripped the handle with the skittish concentration of a motorcycle racer and eyed the line between them and the BMW parked on the far side of the lot. “What do you think the grade is on this parking lot?”
“C plus, maybe a B. Oh. I don’t know. Ten degrees?” Adam held the sides of the cart and then thought better of it. He held himself instead.
With a savage smile, Ronan shoved the cart off the curb and belted toward the BMW. As they picked up speed, Ronan called out a joyful and awful swear and then jumped onto the back of the cart himself. As they hurtled toward the BMW, Adam realized that Ronan, as usual, had no intention of stopping before something bad happened. He cupped a hand over his nose just as they glanced off the side of the BMW. The unseated cart wobbled once, twice, and then tipped catastrophically onto its side. It kept skidding, the boys skidding along with it.
The three of them came to a stop.
“Oh, God,” Adam said, touching the road burn on his elbow. It wasn’t that bad, really. “God, God. I can feel my teeth.”
Ronan lay on his back a few feet away. A box of toothpaste rested on his chest and the cart keeled beside him. He looked profoundly happy.
“You should tell me what you’ve found out about Greenmantle,” Ronan said, “so that I can get started on my dreaming.”
Adam picked himself up before he got driven over. “When?”
Ronan grinned.
This house
is lovely. So many walls. So, so many walls,” Malory said as Blue entered the living room a little later. The cushions of the couch ate him gratefully. The Dog lay stiffly on the floor beside the couch, crossing his paws and looking generally judgmental.
Behind the closed door of the reading room, the murmur of Gansey’s voice rose briefly before being buried by Calla’s. They were fighting with Persephone, or talking while she was in the same room with them. It was hard to tell the difference.
“Thanks,” said Blue.
“Where is that insane woman?”
Blue had just finished hauling all Neeve’s things off the mattress in the attic so that Gwenllian could stay up there. Her hands still smelled like the herbs Neeve had used for her divination and the herbs Jimi had used to try to vanquish the herbs Neeve had used for divination. “She’s up in the attic, I guess. Do you really think she’s Glendower’s daughter?”
“I see no reason to disbelieve,” Malory said. “She does seem to be outfitted in a period dress. It’s rather a lot to take in. It’s a pity one can’t publish it in a journal. Well, I suppose one could, if one wanted his career to be over in a conclusive way.”
“I wish she would just talk straight,” Blue said. “She says my father was the one who tied her up and put her to sleep, only she told us that she never slept. But that’s impossible, isn’t it? How can you just be alive and awake for six hundred years?”
The Dog gave Blue a thin, wry look that indicated he believed that was how Gwenllian had come to be the way that she was.
“It seems likely that this Artemus was also the individual who sent Glendower to sleep,” Malory observed. “I don’t mean to be rude, but the idea that he also fathered you strains the credulity rather.”
“Rather,” Blue echoed. She didn’t have an emotional stake in it either way: Her father had always been a stranger to her, and whether or not he also turned out to be a six-hundred-year-old crazy person didn’t change that. It was interesting that Gwenllian had been tied up and sent to sleep by someone named Artemus, and interesting that this Artemus person apparently looked a lot like Blue, and interesting that Maura had also said that Blue’s father was named Artemus, but interesting wouldn’t find Maura.