Blue cheerfully spit a mouthful of brown water on his boat shoes. It pooled in the canvas over his toes.
“Good God,” he said.
“Now they’re really boat shoes,” she replied. Swinging her free arm, she tossed her prize in; it landed on the boards with a dense thud. Chainsaw immediately leapt down from Ronan’s shoulder to investigate. “There’s something else down there. I’m going back for it.”
Before Gansey had time to say anything to her, the murky water closed over her head. He was struck by what a glorious and fearless animal Blue Sargent was, and he made a mental note to tell her that very thing, if she didn’t drown getting whatever the second thing was.
She was only gone for a moment this time. The boat surged as she emerged again, gasping and triumphant. She hooked an elbow over the side. “Help me in!”
Adam hauled Blue in as if she were the catch of the day, stretched out on the base of the boat. Although she wore much more clothing than Orla, Gansey still felt he ought to avert his eyes. Everything was wet and clinging in ways that seemed more titillating than he’d come to expect from Blue’s wardrobe.
Out of breath, Blue asked, “What’s the first thing? Do you know?”
He accepted the first object from Ronan. Yes, he knew. Gansey rubbed his fingers over the slimy surface. It was a scarred metal disc about seven inches in diameter. There were three ravens embossed on it. The others must’ve been too buried in the silt to show on the sonar display. It was incredible that they’d seen even one of them. It would have been so easy for the disc to be completely obscured. Even easier for the identifying bird to be crusted and hidden by algae.
Some things want to be found.
“It’s a boss,” Gansey said with wonder. He ran his thumb around the uneven edge of it. Everything about it spoke to age. “Or an umbo. From a shield. This bit reinforced the middle of the shield. The rest of it must’ve rotted away. It would’ve been wood and leather, probably.”
It wasn’t what he would’ve expected to find here, or at all. From what he could remember of his history, shields like this weren’t in popular use by Glendower’s time. Good armor had rendered them unnecessary. It could’ve been a ceremonial shield, though. Certainly the fine workmanship seemed excessive for a working piece of weaponry. And it did seem like the sort of thing that would be brought along to bury with a king. He traced the ravens. Three ravens marked in a triangle — the coat of arms of Urien, Glendower’s mythological father.
Who else had touched this boss? A craftsman, his mind busy with Glendower’s purpose. A soldier, loading it into a boat to cross the Atlantic.
Maybe even Glendower himself.
His heart was on fire with it.
“So, it’s ancient,” Blue said from the other end of the boat.
“Right.”
“And what about this?”
At the tone in her voice, he lifted his eyes to the large object that rested upright against the tops of her thighs.
He knew what it was. He just didn’t know why it was.
He said, “Well, that’s a wheel off the Camaro.”
And it was.
It looked identical to the wheels currently residing on the Pig — except this wheel was clearly several hundred years old. The discolored surface was pocked and lumpy. With all of the deterioration, the elegantly symmetrical wheel didn’t appear that out of place beside the shield boss. If you overlooked the tattered Chevrolet logo in the middle.
“Do you remember losing one a little while ago?” Ronan asked. “Like, five hundred years or so?”
“We know the ley line messes with time,” Gansey said immediately, but he felt undone. Not exactly undone, but unmoored. Released from the ruts of logic. When the rules of time became flexible, the future seemed to hold too many possibilities to bear. This wheel promised a past with the Camaro in it, a past that both hadn’t happened and had. Hadn’t because the keys were still in Gansey’s pocket and the car was still parked back at Monmouth Manufacturing. And had because Blue held the wheel in her still-damp hands.
“I think you should leave these with me while you go to your mom’s this weekend,” Blue said. “And I’ll see if I can convince Calla to do her thing on them.”
The boat was steered back toward shore, Orla was handed her bell-bottoms, the laptop was packed back into a bag, and the sonar device was dredged from the water. Adam wearily helped fix the boat to the trailer before climbing into the truck — Gansey was going to have to talk to him, though he didn’t know what he would say; it would be good for them to get out of town together — and Ronan retreated to the BMW to drive back by himself. Probably Gansey needed to talk to him, too, though he didn’t know what he would say to him, either.
Blue joined him in the shade of the boat, the shield boss in her hand. This discovery was not Cabeswater, and it was not Glendower, but it was something. Gansey was getting greedy, he realized, hungry for Glendower and Glendower alone. These tantalizing clues used to be enough to sustain him. Now it was only the grail he wanted. He felt grown old inside his young skin. I tire of wonders, he thought.
He watched Orla’s orange bikini disappear hopefully into the BMW. His mind was far away, though: still absorbed with the mystery of the ancient Camaro wheel.
In a low voice, Blue asked meaningfully, “Seen enough?”
“Of — oh, Orla?”
“Yeah.”
The question annoyed him. It judged him, and in this case, he didn’t feel he’d done anything to deserve it. He was not Blue’s business, not in that way.
“What care is it of yours,” he asked, “what I think of Orla?”
This felt dangerous, for some reason. He possibly shouldn’t have asked it. In retrospect, it wasn’t the question itself at fault. It was the way that he’d asked it. His thoughts had been far away, and he hadn’t been minding how he looked on the outside, and now, too late, he heard the dip of his own words. How the inflection seemed to contain a dare.
Come on, Gansey, he thought. Don’t ruin things.
Blue held his gaze, unflinching. Crisp, she replied, “None at all.”
And it was a lie.
It should not have been, but it was, and Gansey, who prized honesty above nearly every other thing, knew it when he heard it. Blue Sargent cared whether or not he was interested in Orla. She cared a lot. As she whirled toward the truck with a dismissive shake of her head, he felt a dirty sort of thrill.
Summer dug its way into his veins. He got into the truck.
“Let’s go,” he told the others, and he slid on his sunglasses.