She could breathe again.
“Look at me,” she ordered. “There are no hornets.”
“I know,” he muttered. “That’s why I said I think I’m having a panic attack. I know there are no hornets.”
What he wasn’t saying, but what they both knew, was that Cabeswater was a careful listener.
Which meant he needed to stop thinking about hornets.
“Well, you’re making me angry,” Blue said. “Adam is lying on his face in the mud for you. Ronan’s going home.”
Gansey laughed tonelessly. “Keep talking, Jane.”
“I don’t want to. I want you to just grab that rope and pull yourself up here like I know you’re perfectly capable of. What good does me talking do?”
He looked up at her then, his face streaked and unrecognizable. “It’s just that there’s something rustling down below me, and your voice drowns it out.”
A nasty shiver went down Blue’s spine.
Cabeswater was such a good listener.
“Ronan,” she called quietly over her shoulder. “New plan: Adam and I are going to pull Gansey out very quickly.”
“What! That is a f**king terrible idea,” Ronan said. “Why is that the plan?”
Blue didn’t want to shout it out loud.
Adam had been listening, though, and he said, quietly and clearly, “Est aliquid in foramen. I don’t know. Apis? Apibus? Forsitan.”
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.”
2
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.