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 the 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.