The dread was like blood filling her stomach.
Did they trust Cabeswater?
That was the question.
Did that pit stretch out of Cabeswater’s reach?
That was the second question.
“I can’t live with this,” Gansey said. “If anything has happened.”
“You’ll never be a king,” Gwenllian said. “Don’t you know how war works?”
But her bitterness wasn’t really for Gansey; it was a jeer for someone who had buried her or been buried with her long ago.
Suddenly, a voice came from down below.
“Gansey?”
“Adam,” Gansey shouted. “Adam?”
The voice came up again. “We’re coming back to show you the way down!”
47
They had found a valley of skeletons.
The pit was not bottomless, although it was vast and deep. The bottom had slanted and narrowed, shuttling them away from Gansey and the others, sliding them surprisingly and abruptly away from the surface. Under the diffuse gaze of the ghost light, Adam caught a glimpse of strange nests clinging to the wall. He flung his hands out, trying to slow himself. The holes of the nests heaved with something black and restless, but Adam couldn’t see what. They might have been insect nests, but then he heard Ronan, skittering ahead of him, speaking rapidly in Latin, and even as Adam skidded by them, he saw them transmuting to twiggy birds’ nests.
This was their job, Adam realized. This was what they had to offer: making it safe for the others. That was what they had promised: to be Gansey’s magicians.
So they had slid, and they had whispered, and they had asked, and together they’d convinced Cabeswater to transform the nests to something harmless. At least for a while.
Then they had shot out the bottom of the slope into a cavern.
Now the others had joined them, and they all gazed at the underground valley.
In between them and the faraway opposite wall was a herd of bones, an army of bones, a tragedy of bones. There were horse skeletons and deer skeletons, tiny cat skeletons and sinuous weasel skeletons. Every one of them was caught mid-run, all pointed toward the teens standing by the valley entrance.
Somehow the effect was of awe, not terror.
The room itself was a wonder, too. It was a vast bowl of a cavern room, twice as long as it was wide. Godfingers of light streamed down from holes in the cavern ceiling hundreds of feet overhead. Unlike the cavern they had just left behind, this valley had color: ferns and moss reached for the unreachable sunlight.
“Clouds,” whispered Blue.
It was true; the ceiling was so far overhead that mist clung to the roof, pierced by stalactites.
Adam felt as if he’d slid into one of Ronan’s dreams.
Gwenllian began to laugh and clap her hands. The laugh, a song itself, echoed off the ceilings.
“Shut her up, someone,” Ronan said. “Before I do.”
“What is this place?” Blue asked.
Adam was the first to step down.
“Careful —” Gansey warned.
Gwenllian danced ahead. “What are you afraid of? Some bones?”
She kicked one of the cat skeletons; bones flew. Adam winced.
“Don’t do that!” Blue said.
“The dead stay dead stay dead,” Gwenllian replied, and used a femur to crash through another skeleton.
“Not always,” Gansey warned. “Have a care.”
“Yes, Father!” But she wound up for another great kick.
“Ronan,” Gansey said sharply, and Ronan moved to stop her, binding her arms behind her without malice or squeamishness.
Adam stopped by one of the beasts near the front; its shoulder was taller than him, its great skull even higher, and above it all spread a set of antlers that seemed massive in comparison even to the giant skeleton. It was beautiful.
Blue’s voice came from very close. “It’s an Irish elk.”
He turned to find her beside him, touching one of the great white bones. She ran her finger along it so tenderly that it was as if it were alive.
“They’re extinct,” she added. “I always felt bad that I’d never get to see one. Look how many of them there are.”
Adam did look; there were many. But to look at them was to see beyond them, and to see beyond them was to be dazzled again by this spectacle of bones. A thousand animals, suspended on their toes. It was reminding him of something, though he couldn’t think what.
He craned to look at the entrance, then at Ronan and Gwenllian. Gansey moved through the skeletons as if in a dream, his face caught with wonder and caution. He touched the arched neck of a skeletal creature with respect, and Adam remembered him telling Ronan that he had never left a place worse for being there. Adam understood, then, that Gansey and Blue’s awe changed this place. Ronan and Adam may have seen this place as magical, but Gansey and Blue’s wonder made it holy. It became a cathedral of bones.
They slowly walked through the valley, searching for answers and clues. There was no other exit to the room. There was only this vast space, and a stream running along its floor, disappearing beneath a rock wall.
“What is the point of this?”
“Tricks and more tricks,” Gwenllian snarled. “All brave, young, and handsome — all noble and true —”
“Whosoever pulls this sword from this stone,” Gansey muttered. Blue nodded. “This is a test.”
“We wake them,” Ronan said suddenly. He released Gwenllian. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“It’s not my test, bold sir knight,” Gwenllian said. “You’re up.” She made cowboy shooters at him.
Blue’s eyes were on the Irish elk; she was quite taken by it. “How do you wake bones?”
“Same as you’d wake a dreamer,” Gwenllian cooed, her words for Ronan. “If you cannot wake these bones, how can you expect to raise my father? But what do I see on your shoulders? Oh, failure is what you’re wearing these days, I see — it matches your eyes. You’ve tried this before, faulty dreamer, but you’ve got more passion than accuracy, don’t you?”
“Stop,” Gansey said.
He said it in such a way that they all stopped and looked at him.
There was no anger in his voice, no unfairness. He stood beside a brace of massive skeletal stags, his shoulders square and his eyes serious. For a moment, Adam saw the present, but he also saw the past, and the future, stretched out as when Persephone had inspired him to see his own death. He saw Gansey here now, but somehow here always, just about to leave this moment, or just about to enter it, or living it.