Coward.
He had spent a long time learning to put that in the back of his mind, and he did it now.
“I’m going with you,” Calla said, her knuckles tight around a glass. “Enough of this flying solo nonsense. I’m so angry I could …”
She hurled the glass to the kitchen floor; it splintered at Orla’s feet. Orla stared at it and then at Gansey, her expression apologetic, but Gansey had lived with Ronan’s grief for long enough to recognize it.
“There!” Calla shouted. “That’s what it’s like. Just destroyed for no purpose!”
“I’ll get a vacuum,” Jimi said.
“I’ll get a Valium,” Orla said.
Calla stormed into the backyard.
Gansey retreated and crept up the stairs to the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room. It was the only place he’d been on the second floor, and the only other place he knew to look for Blue. She was not in there, though, nor in the adjacent room that was clearly her bedroom. He found her instead in a room at the end of the hall that seemed to be Persephone’s; it smelled like her, and everything was odd and clever in it.
Blue sat beside the bed, chipping aggressively at the polish on her nails. She looked up at him; the afternoon sunlight came in sharp and strong to land on the side of the mattress behind her, causing her to squint.
“That took forever,” she said.
“My phone was off. I’m sorry.”
She chipped another bit of polish onto the shaggy rug. “I guess there was no point to hurrying anyway.”
Ah, Blue.
“Is Mr. Gray here?” she asked.
“I didn’t see him. Look, I told Calla we were going into the cave. To find Maura.” He corrected, more formally, “Your mother.”
“Oh, seriously! Don’t Richard Gansey on me!” Blue snapped, and then, at once, she began to cry.
It was against the rules, but Gansey crouched down beside her, one of his knees against her back, one against her knees, and hugged her. She curled against him, hands balled up against his chest. He felt a hot tear slip into the dip of his collarbone. He closed his eyes against the sun through the window, burning hot in his sweater, foot falling asleep, elbow grinding into the metal bed frame, Blue Sargent pressed up against him, and he didn’t move.
Help, he thought. He remembered Gwenllian saying that it was starting, and he could feel it, winding out faster and faster, a ball of thread caught in the wind.
Starting, starting —
He could not tell who was comforting whom.
“I’m part of the useless new generation,” Blue said finally, the words right on his skin. Desire and dread lay right next to each other in his heart, each sharpening the other. “The computer generation. I keep thinking that I can hit the reset button, restart things.”
He pulled back, wincing through pins and needles, and gave her a mint leaf before sitting back against the bed frame beside her. When he looked up, he realized that Gwenllian stood in the doorway. It was impossible to say how long she’d been there, her arms stretched up above her to the door frame as if she was trying to keep from being pushed into the room.
She waited until she was sure Gansey was looking, and then she sang,
“Queens and kings
Kings and queens
Blue lily, lily blue
Crowns and birds
Swords and things
Blue lily, lily blue”
“Are you trying to make me angry?” he asked.
“Are you angry, knightling?” Gwenllian replied sweetly. She leaned her cheek on her arm, rocking back and forth. “I used to dream of death. I had sung every song I knew so many times while I lay in that box on my face. Every eye! Every eye I could reach I asked to look for me. And what did I get but stupidity and blindness!”
“How did you use other people’s eyes if you’re just like me?” Blue asked. “If you don’t have any psychic powers of your own.”
Gwenllian’s mouth hung in the most dismissive shape possible. “This question! It is like asking how you can smash a nail if you are not a hammer.”
“Whatever,” Blue said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care.”
“Artemus taught me,” Gwenllian said. “When he wasn’t working one-two-three-four my father. Here’s a riddle, my love, my love, my love, what grows, my love, my love, my love, from dark, my love, my love, my love, to dark, my love, my love, my love.”
Blue pushed angrily to her feet. “No more games.”
“A tree at night,” Gansey said.
Gwenllian stopped rocking on her arms and studied him where he still sat on the floor.
“Much of my father,” she replied. “Much of my father in you. That is Artemus, the tree at night. Your mother looks for him, blue lily? Well, then you should seek my father. Artemus will be as near to him as he is able unless something prevents him. The better to whisper.”
She spit on the floorboards by Gansey.
“I am seeking him,” Gansey said. “We’re going underground.”
“Order me to do something for you, little prince-boy,” she told Gansey. “Let’s see your king-mettle.”
“Is that how your father convinced people to do things for him?” he asked.
“No,” Gwenllian said, and looked annoyed about it. “He asked them.”
Even through all of this wrongness, this impossibility, this warmed Gansey. This was right: Glendower should have ruled by request, not by command. This was the king he sought.
“Will you go with us?” he asked.
When Colin Greenmantle went out onto the porch of the historic farmhouse and looked down at the field below, he discovered a herd of cows standing far away and two young men standing very close.
It was, in fact, Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch.
He looked down at them.
They looked up.
Neither party said anything. Both of the boys were unsettling — Adam Parrish, in particular, had a curious face. Not as in, he was a curious person. But rather that there was something peculiar about his facial features. He was an alien, handsome specimen of this western Virginia species; feather-boned, hollow-cheeked, eyebrows fair and barely visible. He was feral and raw-boned by way of those Civil War portraits. Brother fought brother while their farms ran to ruins —
And Ronan Lynch looked like Niall Lynch, which was to say, he looked like an asshole.
Oh, youth.
So Greenmantle broke the ice. He called down, “Are you turning in your exercises?”
They continued standing there, looking like a pair of horror movie twins, one dark, one light.
Adam Parrish smiled a little; it took two years off his age in a second. He had teeth on both his top and bottom jaw. “I know what you are.”
This was interesting. “And what am I?”
“Don’t you know?” Adam Parrish asked it with bland insouciance.
Greenmantle narrowed his eyes. “Are we playing a game, Mr. Parrish?”
“Possibly.”
Games, at least, were one of Greenmantle’s specialties. He leaned against the railing. “In that case, I know what you are, too.”
Ronan Lynch handed Adam Parrish an oversized, bulging manila envelope.
“Oh, I don’t think you do,” Adam replied.