“Stop,” Gansey said. He thought he might throw up. “Jesus, please stop.”
“I just want Ronan to understand that he cannot do anything stupid,” the Gray Man said. “To kill Greenmantle is to end your lives as you know it. And what good will revenge do you?”
“Says the killer,” Ronan said. Now his snarl was back, which meant he was hurting.
“Says the killer, yes, but I’m good at it,” Mr. Gray replied. “Even if he was not a spider in a dazzling web, would you be willing to go to prison for the satisfaction of killing him?”
Without a word, Ronan departed through the front door, slamming it. Gansey didn’t follow. He was torn between the impulse to mitigate Ronan’s pain and the one to let him stay hurt but cautious. Violence was a disease Gansey didn’t think he could catch. But all around him, his friends were slowly infected.
Persephone brought the Gray Man a drink; she had another one of her own. They knocked them back in unison.
“Want this?” Blue asked Gansey. She tipped the yogurt container to him so he could see that all that was left was the fruit in the bottom. He didn’t nod, but she brought it to him anyway, giving him her spoon. It had a grounding effect — the shocking slime of the blueberries, the sugar hitting his stomach, empty from school, the knowledge that her mouth had been the last thing to touch the spoon.
Blue watched him take the first bite and then turned quickly to Mr. Gray. “He’s the one who came for a reading last night, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” Mr. Gray said. “As I thought. And now he is teaching Latin to the boys.”
“Why?” Gansey asked. “Why us?”
“Not you,” Mr. Gray replied. “Me. Clearly, he didn’t believe my story of fleeing with the Greywaren. He came to this house looking for Maura, because he thinks she is important to me. He has infiltrated the school because he has found out that you and I are acquainted. He wants me to know he knows I am still here and he wants me to know how much he knows about my life here.”
“What do we do?” Gansey asked. He was beginning to feel like this day had been a mistake; this was not the real first day of school; he should have stayed in bed until tomorrow and tried again.
“He’s not your problem; he’s mine,” Mr. Gray said tersely.
“He’s in my school, every day. Ronan has to look at his face every day. How is that not my problem?”
Mr. Gray said, “Because it’s not you that he wants. I will address it. Your problem is to let me address it.”
Gansey sank to a crouch. He believed in Mr. Gray’s intention, but not the statement. If he had learned anything in the last year, it was that everything in this town was tangled up.
Calla took Mr. Gray’s wrist and slowly pretended to break his arm. Shaking his head a little, he traded with her, taking her palm in one hand and her wrist in the other. He turned it with slow precision. A few times, so she could see how he was doing it. There was something satisfying about watching him competently demonstrate this act of pretend violence, something controlled and beautiful, like a dance. Everything about his clean, muscled appearance and clean, intentional process said, I’ve got it under control. Where it stood for everything.
How badly Gansey wanted to let Greenmantle be the Gray Man’s problem. But again he saw that narrowing black tunnel and the pit, and at the bottom, a grave.
Calla cursed and held her shoulder.
“Sorry,” Mr. Gray said. To Gansey, “I’ll find out what he wants.”
“Don’t get killed,” Blue said immediately.
“I don’t intend to.”
Persephone finally spoke up in her tiny voice. “I think it’s good you’ve nearly found that king.”
Gansey realized she was speaking to him. “Have I?”
“Surely,” Calla said. “It’s taken you long enough.”
That night, not long after he returned from work, Adam heard a knock at his church apartment door. When he answered it, he was first surprised that the person on the other side was real, and then he was surprised that the person was Gansey and not Ronan.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s late.”
“I know.” Gansey was in his overcoat and his wireframes; he had clearly tried to sleep and failed. “I’m sorry. Have you done your calculus yet? I can’t get number four.”
He did not say the word Greenmantle. There was nothing more to say until they heard more from Mr. Gray.
“I have, but you can look at it.” Adam let Gansey in, sweeping the letter — the letter — behind the little shelf by the door as he did. Unlike Ronan, Gansey appeared out of place inside the apartment. The hipped ceiling cramped him more; the cracks in the plaster were etched more starkly; the utilitarian plastic bins containing Adam’s things seemed even more bereft of aesthetic charm. Gansey belonged with old things, but this place was not just old, but cheap.
The letter was hidden, yes? It was. Adam could feel the outline of it glowing from behind the shelf. Gansey would pity him and hire a lawyer and Adam would feel like dirt and then they would fight —
We will not fight.
Gansey tossed off his overcoat — beneath it, he was in a T-shirt and pajama pants, which was possibly the most metaphorical outfit Adam could imagine for his friend, unless he could manage to wear another overcoat beneath the T-shirt, and another set of pajamas beneath that second overcoat, so on and so on, an endless matryoshka of Ganseys — and cast himself onto the end of the bed.
“Mom called,” Gansey said. “Do I want to meet the governor the weekend after next because it would be great if I did and did I want to bring my friends? No, Mother, I would in fact not like that. Helen will be there! Yes, Mother, I assumed so but hardly consider it a plus, as I am worried she will kidnap Adam. Fine, fine, you don’t have to, I know you’re busy but oh dot dot dot et cetera et cetera. Oh, I forgot, I brought payment for my intrusion.”
He dragged his coat closer by the arm and retrieved two candy bars from the pocket. He chucked one onto Adam’s lap and peeled the other for himself.
Adam badly wanted to eat it, but he put it aside to eat during his break at work tomorrow evening. “It’ll keep me up.” He liked the notion that Gansey’s elegant older sister found him handsome. The impossibility of her rendered it merely a pleasant ego stroke. “Are you going?”
“I don’t know. If I do, will you come?”
Adam felt an instinctive pang of nerves. Muscle memory, from the last time he had traveled to a Gansey political event. “Better invite Blue, too. She reamed me out for not getting invited to the last one.”
Gansey blinked up, eyes startled behind his glasses. “Because I didn’t invite her?”
“No, me. But she’ll want to go. Trust me. She was something fearful.”
“I believe you. Oh, Jesus, I just imagined her meeting the governor. I have a slideshow of her questions playing in my head.”
Adam grinned. “He deserves all of them.”
Gansey ran a pencil down his homework, checking it against Adam’s, although Adam could see that he had done number four quite adequately before he arrived. Adam eyed the candy bar and rubbed the backs of his hands. Every winter they chapped hideously despite his best efforts, and they had already begun to dry. He realized the tapping had ceased, and when he looked up, he saw that Gansey was frowning into space.
“Everyone says, Just find Glendower,” Gansey said suddenly, “but all around me the cave walls are crumbling.”
It was not the cave walls that crumbled. Now that Adam had heard Gansey’s anxiety in the cave, he was acutely attuned to its reappearance now. He looked away to give Gansey a chance to compose himself and then he asked, “What does Malory say to do next?”
“He seems enthused about Giant’s Grave for no reason I can fathom.” Gansey had indeed taken the moment Adam granted him to carefully school his tone; anxiety transubstantiated to wry deprecation in an oft-practiced ritual. “He’s talking about visual cues and energy readings and how they all point there. How he adore
s our ley line, he says. He’s all starry-eyed over it.”
“You were once,” Adam reminded him. They both had been. How ungrateful they’d become, how greedy for better wonders.
Gansey tapped his pencil in wordless agreement.
In the quiet, Adam heard whispers from the direction of the bathroom. From experience, he knew they came from the water that dripped from the tap and that the language was gibberish to him. Ronan might have been able to identify a word or two; he had his puzzle box that translated whatever the old language was. But Adam still listened, waiting to hear if the voices would ascend or ebb, waiting to hear if the ley line was surging or if Cabeswater was trying to communicate.
He realized Gansey was looking at him, brow furrowed. Adam wasn’t sure what his expression had been or how long he had been focused on something Gansey couldn’t hear. From Gansey’s face, a while.
“Is Malory trapped in Monmouth all day?” Adam quickly asked.
Gansey’s face cleared. “I’ve given him the Suburban to drive around in. God help us; he drives like he walks. Oh, but I can tell he doesn’t like Monmouth.”
“Treason,” said Adam, because he knew it would please Gansey, and he saw that it did. “Where’s Ronan at?”
“To the Barns, he said.”
“You believe him?”
“Probably. He took Chainsaw,” Gansey said. “I don’t think he’ll mess with Greenmantle — Mr. Gray was very persuasive. And what else would he get into? Kavinsky’s dead, so — Jesus Christ, listen to me. Jesus Christ.”
The cave walls crumbled yet more; the ritual before had been imperfect. Gansey sat back against the wall and closed his eyes. Adam watched him swallow.
Again he heard Gansey’s voice in the cave.
“It’s okay,” Adam said. He did not care that Joseph Kavinsky was dead, but he liked that Gansey did. “I know what you meant.”
“No, it’s not. It’s disgusting of me.” Gansey didn’t open his eyes. “Everything has gotten so ugly. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Everything had begun ugly for Adam, but he knew what Gansey meant. His noble and oblivious and optimistic friend was slowly opening his eyes and seeing the world for what it was, and it was filthy, and violent, and profane, and unfair. Adam had always thought that was what he wanted — for Gansey to know. But now he wasn’t sure. Gansey wasn’t like anyone else, and suddenly Adam wasn’t sure that he really wanted him to be.
“Here,” Adam said, standing, fetching their history text. “Do the reading. Out loud. I’ll take notes.”
An hour passed this way, Gansey reading out loud in his lovely old voice, and Adam jotting in his overambitious hand, and when Gansey reached the end of the assignment, he closed the text carefully and set it on the upside-down plastic bin Adam used as a bedside table.
Gansey stood and put on his coat.
“I think,” he said, “that if — when — we find Glendower, I will ask him for Noah’s life. Do you think that would work?”
It was such a non sequitur from the previous conversation topic that Adam didn’t immediately answer. He merely looked at Gansey. Something was different about him; he’d changed while Adam’s back had been turned. The crease between his eyebrows? The way he ducked his chin? The tighter set to his mouth, perhaps, as responsibility tugged the corners down.
Adam couldn’t remember how they had managed to fight so continuously over the summer. Gansey, his best friend, his stupid and kind and marvelous best friend.
He replied, “No. But I think it is worth asking.”
Gansey nodded, once. Twice. “Sorry for keeping you up late. See you tomorrow?”
“First thing.”
After Gansey had gone, Adam fetched the hidden letter. In it was his father’s rescheduled court date. A remote part of Adam marveled that the mere sight of the words Robert Parrish could twist his stomach in a muddy, homesick way.
Eyes forward, Adam. Soon it would be behind him. Soon this school year, too, would be behind him. Soon they would find Glendower, soon they would all be kings. Soon, soon.
The next day after school, Blue sat at the table with a spoon in one hand and Lysistrata, the play she’d chosen to analyze for English, in the other. (It’s not easy, you know, for women to get away. One’s busy pottering about her husband; poking the servant awake; putting her child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.) Gray drizzle pressed against the windows of the cluttered kitchen.
Blue was not thinking about Lysistrata. She was thinking about Gansey and the Gray Man, Maura and the cave of ravens.
Suddenly, a shadow the exact size and shape of her cousin Orla fell across the table.
“I get that Maura is away, but that is no reason to go around being a social tard,” Orla said by way of hello. “Also, when was the last time you ate a food that wasn’t yogurt?”
Sometimes Blue couldn’t take Orla. This was one of those times. She didn’t look up. “Don’t be offensive.”
“Charity told me that T.J. asked you out today and you just stared at him.”
“What?”
“T.J. asked you out. You just stared at him. Ringing bells?” Orla had long since graduated from Mountain View High, but she was still friends or ex-girlfriends with her entire class, and the collective power of all of those younger siblings served to provide Orla with a view, somewhat incomplete, of Blue’s current high school life.
Blue looked up (and up, and up) at her tall cousin. “At lunch, T.J. came over to my table and drew a penis on the unicorn on my binder. Is that the incident Charity is referring to?”
“Don’t Richard Gansey the Third at me,” Orla replied.
“Because if that’s what she meant, then yes, I just stared at him. I didn’t realize it was a conversation because penis.”
Orla flared her nostrils magnificently. “Here’s some advice: Sometimes people are just trying to be friendly. You can’t expect everyone to be profound all the time. There’s just chatting.”
“I chat,” Blue retorted. The T.J. incident hadn’t offended her, although she’d preferred her unicorn non-gendered. It had just made her feel wearily older than everyone in the school. “Do you mind? I’m trying to get this done before Gansey gets here.” (O Zeus, what throbbing suffering!)
“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.”
Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.
Orla snapped her fingers in between Blue and her book. “Blue. This is what I was just talking about.”
Blue folded her finger in the pages to keep her place. “I didn’t ask for any advice.”
“No, but you should,” Orla said. “What do you think’s going to happen in a year? All of your boys are going to go off to fancy schools, and where will you be? Here in Henrietta with the people you didn’t chat with.”
Blue opened her mouth and closed it, and Orla’s eyes flashed with victory. She knew she’d dug down to marrow.
Outside, the familiar grumble of an old Camaro sounded, and Blue leapt up. She dumped her spoon in the sink. “My ride’s here.”
“Temporary ride.”
Blue exploded, hurling her yogurt container into the recycling bin. “What is it, Orla? Jealousy? Or what? You just don’t want me to like them as well as I do because … you’re trying to save me from being hurt? You know what else is temporary? Life.”
“Oh, plea
se, don’t you think you’re taking this a bit —”
“So maybe I should have spread my love out through some other mothers, too!” Blue snatched up her jacket and stormed down the hall toward the door. “If I didn’t love her as much, then it wouldn’t feel so bad when she was gone! I could have some fallback parents, each containing a tiny piece of my affection so that when one goes away, I barely notice! Or maybe I should just not love anyone or anything! That makes it the easiest, really, because then I’ll never get let down! I will build a tower for my heart!”
“Oh, calm your ass down,” Orla said, clomping after Blue in her platform clogs. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“You know what I think, Orla? I think you’re a big, fat bully —” Blue barreled right into Gansey, who had stepped inside the front hall. For a moment she smelled mint, felt the solidness of his chest, and then she wheeled back.
Gansey untangled his watch from Blue’s crochet jacket. “Hi. Oh, Orla.”
“Oh, Orla,” echoed Orla, not pleasantly. It was not at him, but he didn’t know that; he flinched.
From upstairs, Calla roared, “SHUT UP!”
“You’ll remember this conversation later and say sorry to me,” Orla told Blue. “You forget who you are.” She whirled with as much grace as she could manage on her long legs and massive shoes.
Gansey was too gracious to inquire after the source of the argument.
“Get me out of here,” Blue said.
Outside, it was a miserable day, soggy and cool, late fall come too early. Malory was already installed in the Pig’s front seat; Blue was at once regretful and glad that he was along. He would keep her from doing something stupid.