Hello, the trees rustled back. The leaves flickered against Blue’s fingertips.
“Adam?” Gansey asked.
“Give me a second.”
They waited for Adam to get his bearings. Because time and space were negotiable on the ley line, it was entirely possible that they could emerge from the forest at an entirely different time or place than they had entered. This phenomenon had seemed capricious at first, but slowly, as Adam became more in tune with the ley line, he had begun to realize that it did follow rules, just not the linear ones they took for granted in the ordinary world. It was more like breathing – you could hold a breath; you could breathe faster or slower; you could match your breaths to someone standing close to you. Moving through Cabeswater in a predictable way meant getting oriented to the current breathing patterns. Moving with it, not against it, as you tried to work your way back to the time and place you had left behind.
Closing his eyes, Adam allowed the ley line to seize his heart for a few beats. Now he knew which direction it ran beneath their feet, and he could feel how it intersected with another line many miles to their left and how it intersected with two even further away to his right. Tilting his head back, he sensed the stars pricking overhead, and he felt how he was oriented in relation to them. Inside him, Cabeswater unfurled careful vines, testing his mood as it did, never pushing boundaries these days unless under duress, and it used his mind and his eyes to search the ground beneath him, digging to find water and rock for further orientation.
Because Adam practised at many things, Adam was good at many things, but this – what was it even called? Scrying, sensing, magic, magic, magic. He was not only good at it, but he longed for it, wanted it, loved it in a way that nearly overwhelmed him with gratitude. He had not known that he could love, not really. Gansey and he had fought about it, once – Gansey had said, with disgust, Stop saying privilege. Love isn’t privilege. But Gansey had always had love, had always been capable of love. Now that Adam had discovered this feeling in himself, he was more certain than ever that he was right. Need was Adam’s baseline, his resting pulse. Love was a privilege. Adam was privileged; he did not want to give it up. He wanted to remember again and again how it felt.
Now that Adam had fully opened his senses, Cabeswater clumsily attempted to communicate with its human magician. It took his memories and turned them sideways and inside out, repurposing them for a hieroglyphic language of dreams: a fungus on a tree; Blue nearly falling over herself in her haste to get away from him; a scab on his wrist; the particular knit of skin that Adam knew was Ronan’s frown just between his eyebrows; a snake disappearing beneath the muddy surface of a lake; Gansey’s thumb on his lower lip; Chainsaw’s beak parted open and a worm crawling out of it instead of in.
“Adam?” Blue asked.
He withdrew from his thoughts. “Oh, yes. I’m ready.”
They proceeded. It was hard to say how long it would take them to get to where Ronan’s mother lived – sometimes it took no time at all and sometimes it took ages, a fact Ronan complained about bitterly as he carried the Orphan Girl. He tried to convince her to walk on her own again, but she crumpled at once into boneless resistance on the forest floor. He didn’t bother to spend minutes fighting with her; he simply scooped her back up again, his expression cross.
The Orphan Girl seemed to divine that she was pressing Ronan’s buttons too hard, however, because as he walked, jostling her with each step, she released a single purposeful note, kicking her hooved legs in time with it. A second later, an unseen bird sang back another note beautifully pitched three steps above hers. The Orphan Girl piped a tone just above her last one, and a different unseen bird sang another one pitched three steps above. A third note: a third bird. Back and forth they all went until a song spun around the teens, a syncopated reel made from a child’s voice and hidden birds that may or may not have really existed.
Ronan glowered at the Orphan Girl, but it was obvious what the scowl really meant. His arms around her were protective.
It did not escape Adam how well they knew each other. The Orphan Girl was no random creature taken from a fitful dream. They had the well-worn emotional ruts of family. She knew just how to navigate his tumultuous moods; he seemed to know just how gruff he could be with her. They were friends, though even Ronan’s dreamed friends were not easy to get along with.
The Orphan Girl kept cawing out her part of the reel, and it was clear that the off-kilter song was working on Gansey’s mood as well as Ronan’s. The argument in the car had obviously slipped from his thoughts, and instead he lifted his arms above his head and swept them in time with the music like a conductor, reaching for falling autumn leaves when they drifted close. Each dead curl that he managed to brush with his fingertips transmuted into a golden fish that swam through the air. Cabeswater listened attentively to his intention; more leaves swirled to him, waiting for his touch. Soon, a flock – school – current of fish surrounded them, flashing and darting and changing colour as their scales caught the light.
“It’s always fish with you,” Blue said, but she laughed as they tickled round her throat and hands. Gansey glanced at her and away, reaching for another leaf to press into service. Joy gleamed between both of them; how purely and simply Blue and Gansey loved the magic of this place.
Easy for them to be so light.
Cabeswater gently prodded Adam’s thoughts, calling up a dozen happy memories in the space of the previous year – well, they would have had to be from just the past year, because even Cabeswater would have had a hard time stirring up glad memories in the time before Gansey and Ronan. When Adam still resisted, images of himself flickered through his mind: himself as seen by the others. His private smile, his surprised laugh, his fingers stretched towards the sun. Cabeswater didn’t quite understand humans, but it learned. Happiness, it insisted. Happiness.
Adam relented. As they kept walking and the Orphan Girl kept piping her song and the fish kept darting through the air around them, he threw out intention of his own.
The volume of the resulting boom surprised even him; he heard it in one ear and felt it in both feet. The others all startled as another bass-heavy boom sounded at the beginning of the next measure of the tune. By the time the third thud came, it was obviously pounding in time with the music. Each of the trees they passed sounded with a processed thud, until the sound around them was the pulsing electronic beat that invariably played in Ronan’s car or headphones.
“Oh God,” Gansey said, but he was laughing. “Do we have to endure that here, too? Ronan! ”
“It wasn’t me,” Ronan said. He looked to Blue, who shrugged. He caught Adam’s eye. When Adam’s mouth quirked, Ronan’s expression stilled for a moment before turning to the loose smile he ordinarily reserved for Matthew’s silliness. Adam felt a surge of both accomplishment and nerves. He skated an edge here. Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These weren’t forces to play with.
The Orphan Girl abruptly fell silent. Adam thought, at first, that she was somehow picking up on his mood. But no: They had reached the rose glen.
Aurora Lynch lived in a clearing bounded on three sides by lush and fruitful roses growing on bushes, vines and trees. Blossoms carpeted the ground and cascaded over the fourth side – a sheer rock ledge built into the mountain. The air was shot through with sun, like light seen through water, and suspended petals floated as if swimming. Everything was blushed pink or tender white or beaming yellow.