wasn’t sure if something was wrong with her, or if this was just the way she always was.
“She doesn’t want to go in,” Ronan said. Without any ceremony, he leaned in, scooped up the girl, and began to march towards the forest’s edge. It was clear now, with her spidery legs dangling over one of his arms, that they ended in dainty hooves.
On the other side of Adam, Blue put her fingers to her lips and then dropped them again. In a very low voice, she said, “Oh, Ronan!” But it was in the same way one would whisper, Oh man!
Because it was impossible. The dream creature was a girl; she was not; she was an orphan; they were not parents. Adam could not very well judge Ronan for dreaming so vastly; Adam was also trading in magic he didn’t understand perfectly. These days, they all had their hands thrust into the sky, hoping for comets. The only difference was that Ronan Lynch’s wild and expanding universe existed inside his own head.
“Excelsior,” said Gansey.
They followed Ronan in.
Inside the forest, Cabeswater murmured, voices hissing from the old autumn trees, disappearing into the old mossy boulders. This place meant something different to all of them. Adam, the forest’s caretaker, was bound by bargain to be its hands and eyes. Blue’s power of amplification was somehow connected to it. Ronan, the Greywaren, had been here long before the rest of them, early enough to leave his handwriting scrawled on rocks. Gansey – Gansey just loved it, fearfully, awesomely, worshipfully.
Overhead, the trees whispered in a secret language, and in Latin, and then in a corrupted version of both, with English words thrown in. They hadn’t spoken any English when the teens had first found them, but they were learning. Fast. Adam couldn’t help but think that there was some secret hidden beneath this language evolution. Were the teens really the first English speakers to encounter the trees? If not, why were the trees only fumbling through English now? Why Latin?
Adam could almost see the truth hidden behind this puzzle.
“Salve,” Gansey greeted the trees, always polite. Blue reached up to touch a branch; she didn’t need words to greet them.
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