“Is this the right place?” she asked. “Do you need our fifteen-dollar map?”
Adam said, “I’ll know in a second. We can get out.”
Before them, the ground dropped sharply into a bottomless ravine; behind them, the mountains ascended darkly. The air was clouded with the pleasant and dangerous scent of woodsmoke: Somewhere, one of these autumn mountains was on fire. Adam squinted until he found its source, smoke shrouding a distant peak. From this far away, it seemed more magical than threatening.
Blue and Noah horsed around as Adam retrieved his tarot cards. Squaring his feet so that he could better feel the line’s pulse, he placed a random card on the warm hood. His unfocused eyes skipped over the image — a black-smudged knight on horseback carrying a vine-wrapped staff — and began to remake it into something wordless and dreamy. Sight was replaced with sensation. A vertiginous feeling of travel, climbing, rightness.
He covered the image with his hand until he got his eyes back, and then he put the card away.
“Knight of wands?” Blue asked him.
Already Adam couldn’t remember what the card had really been. “Was it?”
“Now who’s creepy?” Noah asked.
Adam shouldered his backpack and headed toward the trailhead. “Come on. It’s this way.”
The rocky, narrow trail was dusted with crumbled leaves. The ground fell away abruptly on one side and rose as precipitously on the other. Adam was hyperaware of the massive boulders that jutted into the trail. Beneath a furring of mint-green lichen, the stones felt cool and alive, wild conductors of the ley line. He led Noah and Blue upward until they came to a confusion of boulders. Stepping off the trail, Adam climbed alongside them, finding footholds on jutting stones and exposed tree branches. The big, blue stones were tumbled onto one another like a giant’s playset.
Yes, this is it.
He peered into a man-sized crevice.
Blue said, “Snakes? Nests? Bears?”
“Protected national park,” Noah said, darkly funny. And then, with unexpected valiance, “I’ll go in first. They can’t hurt me.”
He looked smudgy and insubstantial as he slid inside. There was silence, silence.
Blue squinted. “Noah?”
From inside the crevice came a great rustling flurry. All at once, a large puff of oak leaves exploded from the opening, startling both Blue and Adam.
Noah reappeared. He plucked four and a half oak leaves out of Blue’s spiky hair and blew some leaf crumbs from the bridge of Adam’s nose. “It’s safe.”
Adam was glad to have them with him.
Inside was dim but not dark; light came from the entrance, and also from below, where the rocks were stacked imperfectly. In the middle of the small space was a large boulder the size of a desk or an altar. The surface was worn and cupped.
He remembered or recognized it from his insight in the garage.
He felt a little shake of nerves, or anticipation. It was strange to do this with an audience. He didn’t quite know what he looked like from the outside.
“Pour the water in there, Blue.”
Blue ran a hand over the stone to clear out debris. “Oh!” Retrieving a black stone from her pocket, she placed it by the indentation. Then she slowly filled it with water.
The shallow pool reflected the dark ceiling.
Noah backed well away from it, making sure he wasn’t reflected. His fear sucked the warmth from the space. Blue stretched a hand to him, but he shook his head.
So she stayed by Adam, shoulder pressed to his, and Adam found he was glad for this, too. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched him, and it was strangely grounding. After a second, he realized that part of it was probably the fact of Blue’s ability, too, amplifying whatever part of Cabeswater he was tied to.
They eyed the water. He had done this before, but never like this, surrounded by rock. It felt like there was someone else in the room with them. He didn’t want to admit that he was already intimidated by the dark pool even before anything supernatural had happened. Neither of them said anything for a few minutes.
Finally, Blue whispered, “It’s like, if someone said to you, ‘Nice sweater, dude!’ when you were in your Aglionby uniform.”
“What?”
“I wanted you to know why I got so angry at that old guy. I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain it. I know you don’t get it. But that’s why.”
It was true that he hadn’t understood the fuss at the gas station, really, beyond the fact that she was bothered, and he didn’t like for her to be bothered. But she was right about the sweater, too. People assumed things based on the Aglionby sweater or blazer all the time; he’d done it himself. Still did it.
“I get it,” he whispered back. He wasn’t sure why they were whispering, but he did feel better now. More normal. They were in control here. “It’s simplifying.”
“Exactly.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. What now?”
“I’m going to look in and focus,” Adam said. “I might zone out.”
Noah whimpered.
Blue, however, sounded practical. “What do you want us to do if you zone out?”
“I don’t reckon you should do anything. I don’t really know what it will look like from the outside. I guess, use your judgment if something seems wrong.”
Noah hugged his arms around himself.
Leaning over the pool, Adam saw his face. He hadn’t noticed that he didn’t look like everyone else until he got to high school, when everyone else started noticing. He didn’t know if he was good-looking or bad-looking — only that he was different-looking. It was up to interpretation whether the strangeness of his face was beautiful or ugly.
He waited for his features to disappear, to smudge into a sensation. But all he saw was his Henrietta-dirt face with its pulled-down thin mouth. He wished he wouldn’t grow up to look like his parents’ combined genes.
“I don’t think it’s working,” he said.
But Blue didn’t reply, and after half a heartbeat, Adam realized that his mouth hadn’t moved in the reflection when he spoke. His face just stared back, eyebrows drawn into suspicion and worry.
His thoughts churned up inside him, silt clouding a pool of water. Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck. How arrogant we are, Adam thought, to deliver babies who can’t walk or talk or feed themselves. How sure we are that nothing will destroy them before they can take care of themselves. How fragile they were, how easily abandoned and neglected and beaten and hated. Prey animals were born afraid.
He had not known to be born afraid, but he’d learned.
Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.
Outside yourself, Persephone’s voice reminded him.
It was difficult to tear himself away; there was a strange, hideous comfort to wearing the edges off his interior.
With effort, he recalled Cabeswater. He felt along the field of the energy in his mind. Somewhere there would be a fray or dispersion, some ailment he could cure.
There it was. Far down the ley line, the energy was fractured. If he concentrated, he could even see why: A highway had been cut into a mountain, gouging out rock and breaking the natural line of the ley. Now it sputtered unevenly as it leapt across and under the highway. If Adam could realign a few of the charged stones at the top of this mountain, it would cause a chain reaction that would eventually make the line dig underground, beneath the highway, joining the frayed ends again.
He asked, “Why do you want me to do this? Rogo aliquem aliquid.”
He didn’t really expect an answer, but he heard a babble of speech, incomprehensible but for one word: Greywaren.
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Ronan, who effortlessly spoke Cabeswater’s language. Not Adam, who struggled.
But not in the Aglionby courtyard. He hadn’t struggled then. There hadn’t been a language. Just him and Cabeswater.
“Not Ronan,” Adam said. “Me. I’m the one who’s doing this for you. Tell me. Show me.”
Images barraged him. Connections darted electric. Veins. Roots. Forked lightning. Tributaries. Branches. Vines snaked around trees, herds of animals, drops of water running together.
I don’t understand.
Fingers twined together. Shoulder leaned on shoulder. Fist bumping fist. Hand dragging Adam up from the dirt.
Cabeswater rifled madly through Adam’s own memories and flashed them through his mind. It hurled images of Gansey, Ronan, Noah, and Blue so fast that Adam couldn’t keep up with all of them.
Then the grid of lightning blasted across the world, an illuminated grid of energy.
Adam still did not understand, and then he did.
There was more than one Cabeswater. Or more of whatever it was.
How many? He didn’t know. How alive was it? He didn’t know that, either. Did it think, was it an alien, did it die, was it good, was it right? He didn’t know. But he knew there was more than one, and this one stretched its fingers out as hard as it could to reach the other.
The enormity of the world grew and grew inside Adam, and he didn’t know if he could hold it. He was just a boy. Was he meant to know this?
They had transformed Henrietta already by waking this ley line and strengthening Cabeswater. What would a world look like with more forests woken all over it? Would it tear itself apart with crackling electricity and magic, or was this a pendulum swing, a result of hundreds of years of sleep?
How many kings slept?
I can’t do this. This is too big. I was not made for this.
Doubt suddenly tore blackly through him. It was a thing, this doubt, it had weight, and body, and legs —
What? Adam thought he said it out loud, but he couldn’t quite remember how doing was different than imagining. He’d wandered too far from his own body.
Again, he felt that doubtful thing reaching at him, speaking to him. It didn’t believe in his power here. It knew he was a pretender.
Adam dragged at words. Are you Cabeswater? Are you Glendower? But words seemed like the wrong medium for this place. Words were for mouths, and he didn’t have one anymore. He stretched through the world; he couldn’t seem to find his way back to the cave. He was in an ocean, sinking, darkly.
He was alone except for this thing, and he thought it hated him, or wanted him, or both. He longed to see it; seeing it would be the worst thing.
Adam flailed in the black. All directions looked the same. Something was crawling on his skin.
He was in a cavern. Crouched. The ceiling was low and the stalactites touched his back. When he reached to touch the wall, it felt real under his fingers. Or like it was real and he wasn’t.
Adam
He turned to the voice, and it was a woman he recognized but couldn’t name. He was too far from his thoughts.
Even though he was certain it had been her voice, she didn’t look at him. She was crouched in the cavern beside him, eyebrows knitted in concentration, a fist pressed to her lips. A man knelt adjacent to her, but everything about his folded-over, lanky body suggested that he wasn’t in communication with the woman. They were both motionless as they faced a door set into the stone.
Adam, go
The door told him to touch it. It described the satisfaction of the handle turning beneath his hand. It promised an understanding of the blackness inside him if he pushed it open. It pulsed in him, the hunger, the ascending desire.
He had never wanted anything so badly.
He was in front of it. He didn’t remember crossing the distance, but somehow he had. The door was dark red and carved with roots and knots and crowns. The handle was oily black.
He had come so far from his body that he couldn’t imagine how to even begin going back.
The door needs three to open
Go
Adam crouched motionless, fingers braced against the stone, afraid and desirous.
Somewhere far away, he felt his body getting older.
Adam, go
I can’t, he thought. I’m lost.
“Adam! Adam. Adam Parrish.”
He came to in a fury of pain. His face felt wet; his hand felt wet; his veins felt too full of blood.
Noah’s voice rose. “Why did you cut him so deep!”
“I didn’t measure!” Blue said. “Adam, you jerk, say something.”
Pain made every possible response meaner than it would have been otherwise. Instead, he hissed and rocked himself upright, gripping one hand with the other. His surroundings were slowly representing themselves to him; he’d forgotten that they’d crawled in between these boulders. Noah crouched an inch away, eyes on Adam’s. Blue stood a little bit behind him.
Things were starting to come together. He was very aware of his fingers and mouth and skin and eyes and himself. He couldn’t remember ever being so glad to be Adam Parrish.
His eyes focused on the pink switchblade knife in Blue’s hand.
“You cut me?” he said.
Noah’s shoulders slumped in relief at his voice.
Adam studied his hand. A clean slice marred the back of it. It was bleeding like nobody’s business, but it didn’t hurt badly unless he moved it. The knife must’ve been very sharp.
Noah touched the edge of the wound with his freezing fingers, and Adam slapped him away. He struggled to remember everything the voice had just said, but already it was sliding out of his head like a dream.
Had there even been words? Why did he think there had been words?
“I didn’t know what else to try to get you back,” Blue admitted. “Noah said to cut you.”
He was confused by the switchblade. It seemed to represent a different side of her; a side that he had not thought existed. His brain wearied when he tried to fit it in with the rest of her. “Why did you stop me? What was I doing?”
She said “nothing” at the same time that Noah said “dying.”
“Your face went sort of empty,” she went on. “And then your eyes just … stopped. Blinking? Moving? I tried to get you back.”
“And then you stopped breathing,” Noah said. He slunk to his feet. “I told you. I told you it was a bad idea, and nobody ever listens to me. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, Noah, you’re such a worrywart’ and next thing you know you’re in some kind of death thrall. Nobody ever says, ‘Noah, you know what you were right thanks for saving my life because being dead would suck.’ They just always —”
“Stop,” Adam interrupted. “I’m trying to remember everything that happened.”
There had been someone important — three — a door — a woman he recognized —
It was fading. Everything except for the terror.
“Next time I’ll let you die,” Blue said. “You forget, Adam, when you’re pulling your special snowflake act, where I grew up. Do you know what the phrase is for when someone helps you during a ritual or a reading? It’s thank you. You shouldn’t have brought us if you wanted to do it alone.”
He remembered this: He had been lost.
Which meant that if he had come alone, he would have been dead now.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was being sort of a dick.”
Noah replied, “We weren’t going to say it.”
“I was,” Blue said.
Then they climbed to the top of the mountain and, as the sun blasted them from above, found the stones Adam had seen in the scrying pool. It took all of their combined strength to shove the rocks just a few bare inches. Adam didn’t know how he would have managed this part without help, either. Possibly he was doing it wrong, and there was a better, more proper magician way.
He left bloody fingerprints on the rock, but there was something satisfying about that.
> I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.
He hadn’t stopped being thankful for his body. Hello, Adam Parrish’s formerly chapped hands, I’m happy to have you.
They knew the precise moment they’d solved the alignment, because Noah said, “Ah!” and stretched his fingers up to the air. For a few minutes, anyway, he was silhouetted against the livid sky, and there was no difference between him and Blue and Adam. There was nothing to say that he was anything less than fully living.
As the winds buffeted them, Noah slung a comradely arm around Blue’s shoulders and another around Adam’s and pulled them to him. They staggered back toward the trail. Blue’s arm was linked around the back of Noah, and her fingers grabbed Adam’s T-shirt so that they were one creature, a drunken six-legged animal. Adam’s hand was throbbing with the beat of his heart. Probably he was going to bleed to death on the way back down the mountain, but he was okay with that.
Suddenly, with Noah to his side and Blue next to him, three strong, Adam remembered the woman he had seen in the pool.
He knew all at once who she was.
“Blue,” he said. “I saw your mother.”
This is one of my favorite places,” Persephone said, tipping her rocking chair to and fro with her bare feet. Her hair cascaded over the arms. “It’s so homey.”
Adam perched on the edge of the rocking chair beside her. He did not much like the place, but he did not say it. She had asked him to meet her here, and she nearly never made the decision of where to meet; she left it up to him, which always felt like a test.
It was a strange old general store of the sort that had died everywhere else but was not uncommon around Henrietta. The outside usually looked like this one: a sweeping, low porch lined with rocking chairs facing the road, a rutted gravel parking lot, signs for bait and cigarettes in the windows. The inside usually held convenience store foods in brands one had never heard of, T-shirts Adam would not wear, fishing supplies, toys from another decade, and the occasional taxidermied deer head. It was a place that Adam, a hick, found to be populated by people he considered even more hickish.
Gansey would probably like it, though. It was one of those places where time seemed irrelevant, especially on an evening like this: dappled light fuzzing through leaves, starlings calling from the close-strung telephone wires, old men in old trucks driving slowly past, all of it looking like it could have happened twenty years before.