This was not how it had looked in his vision, back when he’d stood in Cabeswater’s vision tree. But perhaps that hadn’t been the truth.
Here was the truth. They were looking right at it.
“Stop it, Lynch,” Adam said. He was at the back of the line; Ronan was right in front of him.
“Stop what?”
“Oh, come on.”
Ronan didn’t reply; they kept walking. They had only made it a few more yards, though, when Adam said, “Ronan, come on!”
They came to a slow and stuttering halt. Adam had stopped, and that had jerked Ronan to a stop, which had stopped Blue, and then, finally, Gansey. Chainsaw flapped up, wings grazing the close cavern walls. She came to rest on Ronan’s shoulder again, her head pitched low and wary. She frantically cleaned her beak on his shirt.
“What?” Ronan demanded, flicking thumb and finger in the raven’s direction.
“Singing,” Adam said.
“I’m not doing anything.”
Adam had his fingers pressed against one of his ears. “I know now — I know it’s not you.”
“You think?”
“No,” Adam said, voice thin. “I know it’s not you because I’m hearing it in my deaf ear.”
A little chill scurried across Gansey’s skin.
“What is it singing?” Blue asked.
Chainsaw’s beak parted. In a trilling, sideways little voice completely unlike her coarse raven voice, she sang, “All maidens young and fair, listen to your fathers —”
“Stop that,” Ronan shouted. Not to Chainsaw, but to the cave.
But this was not Cabeswater, and whatever it was did not attend to Ronan Lynch.
Chainsaw kept singing — a feat made more terrible because she never closed her beak. It was as if she was merely a speaker for some sound inside herself. “The men of all his land, they listened to their fathers —”
Ronan shouted again, “Whoever you are, stop that! She’s mine.”
Chainsaw broke off to laugh.
It was a high, cunning laugh, as much a song as the song.
“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, to hide the sound of every hair on his body standing up and both of his testicles retreating.
“Chainsaw,” Ronan snapped.
Her attention darted to him. She peered at him, head cocked, something unfamiliar and intense about her. She had gotten large, her inked feathers ruffled round her throat, her beak savage and expressive. Right then, it was impossible to forget that she was actually a dream creature, not a true raven, and that the workings of her mind were the same mysterious stuff of Ronan Lynch, or of Cabeswater. For a dreadful second, too fast for Gansey to say anything, he thought she was about to stab at Ronan with that fierce beak of hers.
But she merely clicked her beak, and then she took flight down the passage ahead of them.
“Chainsaw!” Ronan called, but she disappeared into the black. “Damn it. Untie me.”
“No,” Adam and Blue said at once.
“No,” agreed Gansey, firmer. “I don’t even know if we should keep going. I’m not interested in feeding ourselves to a cave.”
Chainsaw’s defection felt wrong, too. Turned sideways, somehow, or inside out. Everything seemed unpredictable — which was in itself strange, because it had to mean that everything to this point had been predictable. No — inevitable.
Now it felt like anything could happen.
Ronan’s gaze was still focused down the dark passage, his eyes searching for Chainsaw and not finding her. He sneered, “You can stay if you’re too afraid.”
Gansey knew Ronan too well to let the barb sting. “It’s not myself I’m afraid for, Lynch. Reel it in.”
“I think it’s just trying to frighten us,” Blue pointed out, quite sensibly. “If it really wanted to hurt us, it could have.”
He thought of Chainsaw’s beak, poised so close to Ronan’s eye.
“Adam?” Gansey called down to the end of the line. “Verdict?”
Adam was quiet as he weighed the options. His face was strange and delicate in the sharp light of Gansey’s head beam. Swiftly, and without explanation, he reached out to touch the cavern wall. Although he was not a dream thing, he was now one of Cabeswater’s things, and it was hard not to see it in the way his fingers spidered across the wall and in the blackness of his eyes as they gazed at nothing.
Blue said, “Is he also …”
Possessed.
None of them wanted to say it.
Ronan lifted a finger to his lips.
Adam seemed to listen to the walls — who is this person, is he still your friend, what did he give to Cabeswater, what does he become, why does terror grow so much better away from the sun — and then he said, cautiously, “I vote we go on. I think the frightening is a side effect, not the intention. I think Chainsaw is meant to lure us in.”
So they went on.
Down, and down, a more crooked path than the cavern in Cabeswater. That passage had clearly been worn by water, while this one seemed unnatural, clawed out instead of formed. Ahead of them, Chainsaw cawed. It was a strange, daytime sound to hear from the blackness ahead.
“Chainsaw?” Ronan called, voice rough.
“Kerah!” came the reply, from not too far away. This was the bird’s special name for Ronan.
“Thank goodness,” Blue said.
Gansey, at the head, spotted her first, clinging to a ledge in the rock wall, scrabbling with one foot and flapping a little to keep her position. She didn’t flee as he approached, and when he held out his arm to her, she flew to him, landing heavily. She seemed no worse the wear for her possession. He half-turned. “Here’s your bird, Lynch.”
Ronan’s voice was odd. “And there’s your tomb, Gansey.”
He was looking past Gansey.
Gansey turned. They stood at a stone door. It could have been a door to many things, but it was not. It was a carved tomb door — a stone armored knight with hands crossed over his breast. His head rested on two ravens, his feet, on fleurs-de-lis. He held a shield. Glendower’s shield, with three ravens.
But this was wrong.
It was not wrong because this was not how Gansey would have expected Glendower’s tomb to look. It was wrong because it was not supposed to happen this way, on this day, when his eyes hurt from sleeplessness and it drizzled outside and it was a cave they had only found a few days before.
It was supposed to be a clue, and then another clue, and then another clue.
It was not supposed to be thirty minutes of walking and a tomb door, just like that.
But it was.
“It can’t be,” Adam said, finally, from the back.
“Do we just — push it open?” Blue asked. She, too, sounded uncertain. This was not how it worked. It was the looking, not the finding.
“I feel peculiar about this,” Gansey said finally. “It feels wrong for there to be no … ceremony.”
Be excited.
He turned back to the tomb door as the others drew close. Withdrawing his phone, he took several photos. Then, after a pause, he typed in some location notes as well.
“God, Gansey,” Ronan said, but it had made Gansey feel a little better about himself.
Carefully, he touched the seam around the effigy of the knight. The rock was cool, solid, real; his fingers came away dusted. This was happening. “I don’t think it’s sealed. I think it’s just wedged in. Leverage, maybe?”