She turned away from the lake — uneasily, because who knew what a mirror might hold — and looked for signs of the others. She saw her great, white beast standing aloof and still, like a part of the cave. And she saw the cavern path that led back up the way she had hurtled.
“You’re here,” Blue said, relieved, because she was not alone: Here was Ronan. It was his ghost light, slung over his shoulder still, that lit the cavern.
He stood as aloof as the elk, eyes wary and dark and foreign as he strode out of the dimness. There was no sign of the creature he must have ridden to gain access, though.
Suddenly full of misgiving, she flicked out her switchblade. “Are you the real Ronan?”
He scoffed.
“I’m serious.”
“Yes, maggot,” Ronan said. He peered around as uneasily as she did, which made her feel a little better about him. It was the lake, or something on the underside of it, that was making her nervous.
“Why didn’t you need to ride in on something?”
“I did. It got away.”
“Got away? To where?”
He stalked closer to her, and then he leaned to scoop up a loose rock from the ground. He tossed it underhand into the lake. There was a sound like air blowing across their ears, and then the rock vanished. Blue saw the moment it hit the water and disappeared — not into the water, but into nothing.
There were no ripples.
“So, you know what?” Ronan asked Blue. “Fuck magic. Fuck this.”
Blue walked slowly toward the lake’s edge.
“Hey! Didn’t you hear me? Don’t do anything stupid. It ate my deer thing.”
“I’m just looking,” Blue said.
She got as close as she dared, and then she looked in, trying to see the bottom.
Once again she saw the golden reflection of the ceiling above, then the black of the water, and then her own face, her eyes hollowed out and strange.
Her face seemed to rise through the water toward her, closer and closer, skin paler and duller, until she saw that it was not her own face at all.
It was her mother’s.
Her eyes were dead, mouth slack, cheeks hollow and water-logged. She floated just below the surface. Face closest, torso falling away, legs lost in the black.
Blue could feel herself begin to shake. It was everything she’d felt after Persephone’s death. It was grief right in the moment, singeing her.
“No,” she said out loud. “No. No.”
But her mother’s face kept floating, deader and deader, after all this, and Blue heard herself making a thin, awful sound.
Be sensible — Blue couldn’t make herself so. Drag her out.
Suddenly, she felt arms around her, yanking her away from the lake’s edge. The arms around her were trembling, too, but they were iron tight, scented with sweat and moss.
“It’s not real,” Ronan told her, voice low. “It’s not real, Blue.”
“I saw her,” Blue said, and she heard the sob in her voice. “My mother.”
He said, “I know. I saw my father.”
“But she was there —”
“My father’s dead in the ground. And Adam saw your mother farther on in this godforsaken cave. That lake is a lie.”
But it felt real to her heart, even if her head knew better.
For a moment they remained that way, Ronan holding her as tightly as he would hold his brother Matthew, his cheek on her shoulder. Every time she thought she could go on, she saw the face of her mother’s corpse again.
Finally, she pulled back, and Ronan stood up. He looked away, but not before she saw the tear he flicked from his chin.
“Fuck this,” he said again.
Blue took great pains to make her voice normal. “Why would it show us that? If it wasn’t real, why would Cabeswater show us something so horrible?”
“This isn’t Cabeswater anymore,” Ronan replied. “This is underneath. The lake belongs to something else.”
They both cast their eyes left and right, looking for some way to cross. But there was nothing in this barren, apocalyptic landscape except for them and the great beast, as still as a cave formation.
“I’m going to look again,” Blue said finally. “I want to see if I can see how deep it really is.”
Ronan did not tell her no, but he did not come with her, either. She walked to the edge, trying not to tremble at the thought of seeing her mother again, or something worse. Leaning, she scooped up another loose stone, and when she got to the edge, she dropped it in immediately, not waiting for a reflection to rise.
The stone vanished on the point of hitting the surface of the water.
Again, there wasn’t so much as a ripple.
And now, undisturbed, the water began once more to form a vision for her, letting it float up from the depth.
As the horror rose, Blue suddenly remembered Gwenllian’s lesson of the mirrors.
Mirror magic is nothing to mirrors.
If the dead lake had shown her Maura and shown Ronan his father, then it was not creating anything — it was using thoughts of theirs and mirroring them back.
It was just a massive scrying bowl.
She began to build up the blocks inside her, just like when she’d cut off Noah and Adam. As the dead corpse face slowly rose toward her, she ignored it and continued.
She was a mirror.
Her gaze focused on the water once more. There was no corpse. There was no face. There was no reflection at all, just as there had been no reflection in Neeve’s mirrors. There was just the still glass surface of the water, and then, if she squinted past the reflection of the roof, the silty, uneven surface of the bottom of the lake.
It was only a few inches deep. One or two. A faultless illusion.
She touched her lip — this reminded her of Gansey, and she stopped.
“I’m going to walk across it,” she said.
Ronan laughed in an unfunny way. “Right, but seriously.”
“Seriously,” Blue told him. Then, hurriedly, “Not you, though. I don’t think you can touch the water. You’d dissolve like that stone.”
“And you won’t?”
She looked at the water. It was unbelievable, really, that she was trusting a crazy person’s wisdom. “I don’t think so. Because of the way I am.”
“Assuming that’s even true,” Ronan said, “you’d go on by yourself?”
“Don’t leave this shore,” Blue said. “Well, not forever. But — promise me you’ll stay a reasonable amount of time. I’ll just see what it looks like on the other side.”