Blue Lily, Lily Blue

  Latin hid nothing from Cabeswater; they only meant to spare Gansey.

  “No,” Ronan said. “No, there is not. That is not what is down there.”

  Gansey closed his eyes.

  I saw him, Blue thought. I saw his spirit when he died, and this was not what he was wearing. This is not how it happens. It’s not now, it’s later, it’s later —

  Ronan kept going, his voice louder. “No. Do you hear me, Cabeswater? You promised to keep me safe. Who are we to you? Nothing? If you let him die, that is not keeping me safe. Do you understand? If they die, I die, too.”

  Now Blue could hear the humming sound from the pit, too.

  Adam spoke up, voice half-muffled from the mud. “I made a deal with you, Cabeswater. I’m your hands and your eyes. What do you think I’ll see if he dies?”

  The rustling grew. It sounded numerous.

  It is not hornets, Blue thought, wished, longed, dreamt. Who are we to you, Cabeswater? Who am I to you?

  Out loud, she said, “We’ve been making the ley line stronger. We have been making you stronger. And we’ll keep helping you, but you’ve got to help us —”

  Blackness ate her flashlight beam, rising from the depths. The sound exploded. It was humming; it was wings. They filled the pit, hiding Gansey from view.

  “Gansey!” Blue shouted, or maybe it was Adam, or maybe it was Ronan.

  Then something flapped against her face, and another something. A body careened off the wall. Off the ceiling. The beams of their headlamps were cut into a thousand flickering pieces.

  The sound of their wings. The sound.

  Not hornets.

  Bats?

  No.

  Ravens.

  This was not where ravens lived, and this was not how ravens behaved. But they burst and burst from the pit below Gansey. It seemed as if the flock would never end. Blue had the disorienting sensation that it had always been this way, ravens coursing all around them, feathers brushing her cheeks, claws scraping over her helmet. Then, suddenly, the ravens began to shout, back and forth, back and forth. It grew more and more sing-song, and then it resolved into words.

  Rex Corvus, parate Regis Corvi.

  The Raven King, make way for the Raven King.

  Feathers rained down as the birds careened toward the cave mouth. Blue’s heart burst with how big it was, this moment, and no other.

  Then there was silence, or at least not enough sound to be heard over Blue’s thudding heart. Feathers quivered in the mud beside Adam.

  “Hold on,” Gansey said. “I’m coming out.”

  Adam Parrish was lonesome.

  There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome. One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment, but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.

  Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.

  Adam was not always alone, but he was always lonesome. Even in a group, he was slowly perfecting the skill of holding himself separate. It was easier than one might expect; the others allowed him to do it. He knew he was different since aligning himself more tightly with the ley line this summer. He was himself, but more powerful. Himself, but less human.

  If he were them, he would silently watch him draw away, too.

  It was better this way. He had not fought with anyone for so long. He had not been angry for weeks.

  Now, the day after their excursion into the cave of ravens, Adam drove his small, shitty car away from Henrietta, on his way to do Cabeswater’s work. Through the soles of his shoes, he felt the ley line’s slow pulse. If he didn’t actively focus on it, his heartbeat unconsciously synced up with it. There was something comforting and anxious about the way it twined through him now; he could no longer tell if it was merely a powerful friend or if the power was now actually him.

  Adam eyed the gas gauge warily. The car would make it back, he thought, if he didn’t have to drive too far into the autumnal mountains. He wasn’t yet sure what he was meant to do for Cabeswater. Its needs came to him in restless nights and twinging days, slowly becoming visible like something floating to the surface of a lake. The current feeling, a nagging sense of incompletion, wasn’t really clear yet, but school was about to start, and he was hoping to get it taken care of before classes began. That morning, he’d lined his bathroom sink with tinfoil, filled it with water, and scryed for clarification. He’d only managed to glimpse a vague location.

  The rest will come to me when I get closer. Probably.

  Instead, though, as he drew nearer, his mind kept drifting back to Gansey’s voice in the cave the day before. The tremulous note in it. The fear — a fear so profound that Gansey could not bring himself to climb out of the pit, though there was nothing physically preventing him.

  He had not known that Richard Gansey III had it in him to be a coward.

  Adam remembered crouching on the kitchen floor of his parents’ double-wide, telling himself to take Gansey’s oft-repeated advice to leave. Just put what you need in the car, Adam.

  But he had stayed. Hung in the pit of his father’s anger. A coward, too.

  Adam felt like he needed to reconfigure every conversation he’d ever had with Gansey in light of this new knowledge.

  As the entrance for Skyline Drive came into view, his thoughts switched abruptly to Cabeswater. Adam had not been to the park, but he knew from a lifetime in Henrietta that it was a national park that stretched along the Blue Ridge Mountains, following the ley line with an almost eerie precision. In front of him, three lanes fed into three squat brown booths. A short line of cars waited.

  His gaze found the fee board. He hadn’t realized he needed to pay to enter. Fifteen dollars.

  Although he hadn’t been able to pinpoint a precise location for Cabeswater’s task, he was sure it was on the other side of these toll booths. There was no other way in.

  But he also knew the contents of his pockets, and it was not fifteen dollars.

  I can come back another day.

  He was so tired of doing things another day, another way, a cheaper way, a day when Gansey could tidy the edges. This was supposed to be something he could do by himself, his power as the magician, tapped into the ley line.

  But the ley line couldn’t get him through a toll plaza.

  If Gansey had been here, he would have breezily tossed the bills out of the Camaro. He wouldn’t have even thought about it.

  One day, Adam thought. One day.

  As he sat in line, he plucked his wallet free, and then, when it failed to produce enough, he began digging for change under the seats. It was a moment that would have been both easier and worse if he’d been with Gansey, Ronan, and Blue. Because then IOUs would have had to be created, the haves assuring them it wasn’t necessary to be paid back, the have-nots insisting that it was.

  But since it was only Adam, lonesome Adam, he just silently looked at the meager sum he’d managed to scrape together.

  $12.38.

  He would not beg at the booth. He had very little of anything except for some damned dignity, and he couldn’t bring himself to hand that through the driver’s side window.

  It would have to be another day.

  He didn’t get angry. There was no one to get angry at. He just allowed himself a brief moment of leaning his temple against the driver’s side window, and then he pulled out of line and backed onto the shoulder to turn around.

  As he did, his attention was drawn to the vehicles still in line. Two of the cars were exactly what Adam might imagine: a minivan with a young family in it, a sedan with a laughing college-aged couple in it. But the third car was not quite right. It was a rental car — he could see the bar code sticker stuck in the corner of the windshield. Perhaps that was not strange; a tourist might fly in and visit the park. But on the dashboard was a devi
ce Adam was very familiar with: an electromagnetic frequency reader. Another device sat next to it, although he wasn’t sure what that one was. A geophone, maybe.

  The sort of tools Gansey and the others had used for hunting for the ley line. The sort they’d used to find Cabeswater.

  Then he blinked, and the dashboard of the car was empty. Had always been empty. It was just a rental car with a bored family in it. A month ago, Adam wouldn’t have understood why he was seeing things that weren’t real. But now he knew Cabeswater better, and he understood that what he had just seen was real — just real in a different place, or a different time.

  Someone else had come to Henrietta looking for the ley line.

  Mapey neat downer,” Blue said, “to see how far it goes.”

  “How far what goes?” Gansey demanded. He replayed her words, but they remained nonsense. “Lynch, turn that down.”

  It had been several days since their trip into the cave of ravens and now they were on the way to the airport to pick up Dr. Roger Malory, international ley line expert and aged mentor of Gansey’s. Ronan lounged in the passenger seat. Adam keeled against a window in the back, his mouth parted in the unaware sleep of the exhausted. Blue sat behind Gansey, clutching his headrest in an effort to be heard.

  “This car,” she despaired.

  Gansey knew his reliable and enormous Suburban would have been a more logical choice for the trip, but he wanted the old Camaro to be the first thing the professor saw, not the expensive new SUV. The Camaro was shorthand for the person he had become, and he wanted, more than anything, for Malory to feel that person had been worth the trip. The professor did not fly, but he had flown three thousand miles for him. Gansey couldn’t fathom how to repay such a kindness, especially considering the circumstances under which he had left England.

  “I said maybe we should just rappel down into that pit you helpfully found.” Blue’s voice warred with the engine and Ronan’s still-abusive electronica. It seemed impossible that Adam could sleep through it.

  “I just don’t — Ronan. My ears are bleeding!”

  Ronan turned down the music.

  Gansey started again. “I just can’t imagine why Glendower’s men would have gone to the trouble of lowering him into that hole. I just can’t, Jane.”

  Even thinking about the pit made long-ago venom hum and burn in his throat; effortlessly, he conjured the image of warning-striped insects prowling the thin skin between his fingers. He had nearly forgotten how horrifying and compelling it was to relive the moment.

  Eyes on the road, Gansey.

  “Maybe it’s a recent hole,” she suggested. “The collapsed roof of a lower cavern.”

  “If that’s true, we’d have to get across it, not in it. Ronan and I would have to climb the walls like spiders. Unless you and Adam have rock climbing experience I don’t know about.”

  Outside the car, Washington, D.C., slunk closer; the deep-blue sky got smaller. The widening interstate grew guardrails, streetlights, BMWs, airport taxis. In the rearview mirror, Gansey saw a corner of Blue’s face. Her wide-awake gaze snagged on something outside, fast, and she craned to look out the window, like this was another country.

  It kind of was. He was, as ever, a reluctantly returning expatriate. He felt a pang, a longing to run, and it surprised him. It had been a long time.

  Blue said, “Ronan could dream a bridge for us.”

  Ronan made a noise of glorious disdain.

  “Don’t just snort at me! Tell me why not. You’re a magical creature. Why can’t you do magic?”

  With acidic precision, Ronan replied, “For starters, I’d have to sleep right there by the pit, since I have to be touching something to pull it out of a dream. And I’d have to know what was on the other side to even know what kind of bridge to make. And then, even if I pulled all that off, if I took something that big out of my dream, it would drain the ley line, possibly making Cabeswater disappear again, this time with us in it, sending us all to some never-never land of time-space fuckery that we might never escape from. I figured after the events of this summer, all this was self-evident, which was why I summed it up before like so —”

  Ronan repeated the noise of glorious disdain.

  “Thanks for the super helpful alternative suggestions, Ronan Lynch. Your contribution at the end of the world will be tallied accordingly,” Blue said. She turned her attention back to Gansey, persisting, “So, then, what? It has to be important, or Cabeswater wouldn’t have shown it to us.”

  That, Gansey thought, assumes Cabeswater’s priorities are the same as ours. Out loud, he said, “We find another way in. One that brings us in on the other side of that hole. Since it’s not a normal cave — it’s all tied in with the ley line — Malory can help us.”

  He couldn’t believe Malory was really here. He’d spent nearly a year with the professor, the longest he had stayed anywhere, and it had started to feel like there would never be a time when he wasn’t searching. Now he was looking in a narrowing grave, and somewhere in that vast darkness was Glendower and the end.

  Gansey felt off-kilter; time played in jittery fast-forward.

  In the rearview mirror, he caught Blue’s eyes by accident. Strangely enough, he saw his own thoughts reflected in her face: excitement and consternation. Casually, out of view of Ronan, making sure Adam was still sleeping, Gansey dangled his hand between the driver’s seat and the door. Palm up, fingers stretched back to Blue.

  This was not allowed.

  He knew it was not allowed, by rules he himself had set. He would not permit himself to play favorites between Adam and Ronan; he and Blue couldn’t play favorites in this way, either. She would not see the gesture, anyway. She would ignore it if she did. His heart hummed.

  Blue touched his fingertips.

  Just this —

  He pinched her fingers lightly, just for a moment, and then he withdrew his hand and put it back on the wheel. His chest felt warm.

  This was not allowed.

  Ronan had not seen; Adam was still sleeping. The only casualty was his pulse.

  “Your exit, dick!” Ronan snapped. Or Dick. It could have been either, really.

  Gansey steered in a hurry. Adam blinked awake. Ronan swore. Gansey’s heart restarted.

  Eyes on the road, Gansey.

  At the airport, the professor was not waiting at the outdoor passenger pick-up area as arranged, nor did he pick up his phone. They finally found him sitting by the baggage carousel, near a group of chattering people, a tower of luggage, and an irritable-looking service dog. He looked precisely as Gansey remembered him. There was something of a turtle in his visage, and he had not only one chin, but another waiting in line behind it. His nose and his ears appeared to be fashioned whimsically from rubber. The round bags beneath his eyes perfectly mirrored his round brow lines. His expression was befuddled.

  “Mr. Malory!” Gansey said gladly.

  “Oh, God,” Ronan said under his breath. “He’s so old.”

  Adam punched Ronan, saving Gansey the trouble.

  “Gansey,” Malory said, clasping hands with him. “What a relief.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to keep you waiting — I called!”

  “My blasted phone. The battery on these things is rubbish. It is like a conspiracy to sell us something. Blood pressure medication, possibly. Are airplanes always like that? So full of people?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Gansey said. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Adam was regarding Malory in a not entirely Adam sort of way, his head cocked, pensive concentration in his eyes. Disconcerted, Gansey hurried on. “Let me introduce you. These are my friends: Ronan, Adam Parrish, and Jane.”

  Adam’s expression focused. Became Adam-like. He blinked over to Gansey.

  “Blue,” Blue corrected.

  “Oh, yes, you are blue,” Malory agreed. “How perceptive you are. What was the name? Jane? This is the lady I spoke to on the phone all those months ago, right? How small she is. Are you
done growing?”

  “What!” Blue said.

  Gansey felt it was time to remove Malory from the terminal. “Which of these is your bag?”

  “All of them,” Malory said tragically.

  Ronan was trying his best to meaningfully catch Gansey’s eye, but Gansey wouldn’t let him. The teens collected the bags. The service dog got up.

  Blue, friend to all canines, said, “Whoa there, fellow. You stay here.”

  “Oh, no,” Malory protested. “The Dog is mine.”

  They eyed the Dog. It wore a smart blue vest that advertised its usefulness without providing further details.

  “Okay,” Gansey said.

  He avoided another meaningful look from Ronan. On the curb outside, they all stopped for Malory to remove the Dog’s vest and then they watched the Dog relieve itself on the sign for the rental car shuttle.

  Ronan asked, “What’s the Dog for?”

  Malory’s turtle mouth got very small. “He is a service animal.”

  “What nature of service does he provide?”

  “Excuse you,” Malory replied.

  Gansey avoided a third meaningful look from both Adam and Malory.

  They reached the car, which had gotten no larger since they entered the terminal. Gansey disliked confronting the consequences of his folly so directly.

  Ladies and gentlemen, my trick for you today will be to take this 1973 Camaro —

  Removing the spare tire from the trunk, Gansey abandoned it beside a streetlight. The price of Malory’s visit.

  — and fit five people, a dog, and a hell of a lot of luggage inside.

  After performing this magic trick, he sank into the driver’s seat. The Dog was panting anxiously. Gansey knew how it felt.

  “May I pet her? Him?” Blue asked.

  “Yes,” Malory replied. “But he won’t enjoy it. He’s very highly strung.”

  Gansey allowed Blue to exchange a meaningful glance with him in the rearview mirror as they got back onto the interstate.

  “The food on the plane was appalling; it is amazing the staff has not perished of bleeding ulcers,” said Malory. He slapped Gansey’s arm so suddenly that both Gansey and the Dog jumped in surprise. “Do you know anything about the drapery that was lost to the English in Mawddwy?”