That night, Ronan dreamt of trees.
It was a massive old forest, oaks and sycamores pushing up through the cold mountain soil. Leaves skittered in the breeze. Ronan could feel the size of the mountain under his feet. The oldness of it. Far below there was a heartbeat that wrapped around the world, slower and stronger and more inexorable than Ronan’s own.
He had been here before, lots of times. He’d grown up with this recurring dream forest. Its roots were tangled in his veins.
The air moved around him, and in it, he heard his name.
Ronan Lynch Ronan Lynch Ronan Lynch
There was no one there but Ronan, the trees, and the things the trees dreamt of.
He danced on the knife’s edge between awareness and sleep. When he dreamt like this, he was a king. The world was his to bend. His to burn.
Ronan Lynch, Greywaren, tu es Greywaren.
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. The word Greywaren made his skin prickle.
“Girl?” he said.
And there she was, peering cautiously from behind a tree. When Ronan had first dreamt of her, she’d had long honey-blond hair, but after a few years it changed to a close-cropped pixie cut, mostly hidden by a white skullcap. Although he had aged, she had not. For some reason she reminded Ronan of the old black-and-white photos of laborers in New York City. She had the same sort of forlorn, orphan look. Her presence made it easier to pull things from his dreams.
He reached a hand toward her, but she didn’t immediately emerge. She peered around fearfully. Ronan couldn’t fault her. There were terrifying things in his head.
“Come on.” He didn’t yet know what he wanted to take from this dream, but he knew that he was so alive and aware in it that it would be easy. But Orphan Girl remained out of reach, her fingers clinging to the bark.
“Ronan, manus vestras!” she said. Ronan, your hands!
His skin shivered and crawled, and he realized it was crawling with hornets, the ones that had killed Gansey all those years ago. There weren’t many this time, only a few hundred. Sometimes he dreamt cars full of them, houses full of them, worlds full of them. Sometimes these hornets killed Ronan, too, in his dreams.
But not tonight. Not when he was the most poisonous thing in these trees. Not when his sleep was clay in his fingers.
They aren’t hornets, he thought.
And they weren’t. When he lifted his hands, his fingers were coated with crimson ladybugs, each as vivid as a blood drop. They whirled into the air with their acrid summer scent. Every wing was a buzzing voice in a simple language.
Orphan Girl, ever a coward, emerged only after they were gone. She and Ronan moved from one part of the forest to the next. She hummed a refrain of a pop song over and over again as the trees murmured overhead.
Ronan Lynch, loquere pro nobis.
Speak for us.
Suddenly, he faced a striated rock nearly as tall as he was. Thorns and berries grew at its base. It was familiar in a way that was too solid to be a dream, and Ronan felt a ripple of uncertainty. Was this a dream he was in now, or was it a memory? Was this really happening?
“You’re sleeping,” the girl reminded him in English.
He clung to her words, a king again. Facing the rock, he knew what he was meant to do — what he had already done. He knew it would hurt.
The girl turned her narrow face away as Ronan seized the thorns and the berries. Every thorn prick was a hornet sting, threatening to wake him. He crushed them until his fingers were dark with juice and blood, dark as the ink on his back. He slowly traced words on the rock: Arbores loqui latine. The trees speak Latin.
“You’ve done this before,” she said.
Time was a circle, a rut, a worn tape Ronan never tired of playing.
The voices whispered to him: Gratias tibi ago. Thank you.
The girl said, “Don’t forget the glasses!”
Ronan followed her gaze. Between the flowers and broken vines and fallen leaves was a gleaming white object. When he plucked it free, Kavinsky’s sunglasses looked back at him, eyeless. He ran his thumb over the smooth surface of the plastic, fogged his breath over the tinted lenses. He did it until he could feel even the etched circle of the tiny screw in the earpiece. Dream to memory to reality.
He lifted his eyes to the girl. She looked afraid. She always looked afraid, these days. The world was a scary place.
She said: “Take me with you.”
He woke up.