Then his thoughts hitched and time moved again.
“Stop goading them, Gwenllian,” Gansey said. “Do you think you’re the only one with a right to bitterness here? Why don’t you use your skills of seeing beneath to encourage instead of tear down?”
“I would like to see quite a bit of what’s going on beneath all of the young men here,” Gwenllian said. “You may volunteer first for my attention if you’d like.”
Then Gansey rolled his eyes and blew out a breath in a very unkingly way. “Ignore her. Adam, give me an idea.”
Adam was always called on, even when he didn’t lift his hand. He thought of what Ronan had already failed to accomplish, and he thought of the moment on the mountaintop with Blue and Noah, and then, finally, he remembered what Persephone had said about the power of three. Then he said, “Ronan, did you bring your dream thing?”
Ronan gestured to the bag that hung below the dream light.
“The what?” Blue asked.
Adam waved his hand; this wasn’t the time to explain. “Remember the Barns? You try to wake them like the cows, Ronan. I’ll see if I can redirect the ley line to give you more energy to work with; Blue will amplify. Gansey can … move stones?”
Gansey nodded his approval. He didn’t understand the plan, but he didn’t need to: He trusted Adam’s judgment.
Ronan unslung his bag, carefully unwrapping his dream thing from the now rather manky polar fleece. He hid it mostly from view as Adam crouched and pressed his fingers to the rock. He knew as soon as he touched it that they were not properly in Cabeswater anymore; they’d dug beneath it. The ley line was still there, though, and if he moved some of the stones, he might be able to point it at the skeletons.
“Blue, Gansey, help me,” he said, directing them.
Gwenllian watched with curled lip.
“You could help, too,” he told her.
“No,” she replied. “I couldn’t.”
She didn’t say that she couldn’t help him, but it was understood. Gansey didn’t even bother to chastise her this time. He merely worked with Blue to move the stones Adam indicated. Then they returned to the beast at the very front of the herd.
Ronan waited with the dream thing, eyes averted. Then, as they stood around it, he breathed over the top of the dream word, just as he had at the Barns.
His breath passed through it and on to the skeleton.
There was silence.
Adam could feel it, though. This vast underground valley was charged with energy, pulsing with life. It murmured against the walls. It darted from bone to bone in each skeleton, and then from one skeleton to the next. They wanted to spring; they remembered life. They remembered their bodies.
But there was still silence.
Adam felt the power of the ley line shaking and pulling at him, magnified by Blue. It was not destroying him, but it was diffusing. He was not the truest vessel for this energy, and he wouldn’t be able to keep it focused for much longer.
Blue’s lips were pressed together, and Adam knew she was feeling it, too.
Why wasn’t it working?
Perhaps it was just as it had been at the Barns. They were close, but not close enough. Perhaps Gwenllian was right; they were not worthy.
Gwenllian was backing up from them, her arms stretched by her sides, her eyes darting from beast to beast as if she expected one to break first and wanted to be watching.
Gansey’s eyebrows drew together as he surveyed the herds and flocks, Gwenllian and the streaming light, his friends frozen in an invisible battle.
Adam could not stop seeing his fallible king, hanging in the pit of the ravens.
Gansey touched his lower lip very gently. He lowered his hand, and he said, “Wake up.”
He said it like he had said stop earlier. He said it in a voice Adam had heard countless times, a voice he could never not listen to.
The beasts woke.
The stags and the horses, the lions and the hawks, the goats and the unicorns, and the creatures that Adam could not name.
One moment they were bones, and the next they were whole. Adam missed the moment of transformation. It was like Noah from smudged ghost to boy, from impossible to possible. Every creature was alive and shimmery and more beautiful than anything Adam could have ever imagined.
They reared and they called and they whinnied and they leapt.
Adam could see Gansey’s chest heave with disbelief.
They had done this. Were still doing this.
“We have to go!” Blue shouted. “Look!”
The creatures were galloping away. Not as one, but as a hundred disparate minds with one goal, and that goal was a cave passage that had appeared on the other side of the valley. It was like a gaping mouth, though, slowly closing. If they didn’t go through it, soon, it would disappear.
But no human could run that fast.
“This!” Blue shouted, and she flung herself onto the Irish elk. It tossed its massive antlers and twisted, but she clung on.
Adam couldn’t believe it.
“Yes —” Ronan said, and snatched at a deer, and another, before he seized the ruff of a primordial creature and pulled himself on.
It was easier said than done, though. The beasts were fast and skittish, and Adam came away with handfuls of fur. A few yards away, he saw Gansey, frustrated, show him a palm coated with fur, too. Gwenllian laughed and ran after the creatures, clapping her hands and herding them.
“Run along, little creatures! Run! Run!”
Adam suddenly pitched forward, his shoulder stinging, as some sort of creature half-leapt over him. He rolled, covering his head. Another hoof knocked him — he thought of his old Latin teacher trampled to death in Cabeswater.
The difference was that Cabeswater wouldn’t let Adam die.
It would let him get hurt, though. He scrambled farther out of the way and then back to his feet.
“Adam,” Gansey said, pointing.
Adam’s eyes found what he gestured to: Ronan’s and Blue’s beasts leaping through the diminished cave passage, right before it disappeared.
48
Blue found herself in a strange, low-ceilinged cavern of indeterminate space. Light from behind illuminated the ground as it sloped away from her and to a jagged-floored pit.
No. That was not the floor. That was the ceiling, reflected.
She was looking at a vast, still lake. The water mirrored the spiked ceiling perfectly, hiding the true depth of the dead lake. There was something dead and uncomforting about it. On the other side of the lake was another tunnel, barely visible in the dim light.
Blue shivered. Her shoulder ached where she had fallen on it, and so did her butt.