Gansey did not reply.
It was not what Glendower was supposed to look like, and yet it did not feel untrue. Everything that day had felt lived before, dreamt, redone. How many times had Gansey feared that he would find Glendower, only to discover him dead? The only thing was that Gansey had always feared that he would find Glendower just a little too late. Minutes, days, months after death. But this man had been dead for centuries. The helmet and skull were only metal and bone. The gambeson beneath the plate mail was threads and dust.
“Are we …” Adam started and then stopped, uncertain. He put his hand on the wall of the tomb.
Gansey covered his mouth with his hand; he felt his breath would blast the remainder of Glendower away. The others still stood in shocked assembly. None of them had words. It had been longer for him, but they had been just as hopeful.
“Are we supposed to wake his bones?” Blue asked. “Like the skeletons in the cave of bones?”
Adam said, “That’s what I was going to say, but …”
He trailed off again, and Gansey knew why. The cave of bones had been filled with skeletons, but it had still felt inherently vital. Magic and possibility had crackled in the air. The idea of waking those bones had felt incredible, but not impossible.
“I don’t have my dream amplifier,” Ronan said.
“Wake. His. Bones,” echoed Henry. “I really don’t mean to sound like the naysayer here, as you are all clearly experts at this, but.”
But.
Ronan said, “Then let’s do it. Let’s do it fast. I hate this place. It feels like it’s eating my life.”
This vehemence served to focus Gansey’s clouded thoughts.
“Yes,” he said, although he didn’t feel remotely certain. “Let’s do it. Perhaps the cave of bones was a practice run for this and that’s why Cabeswater led us there.” The bones hadn’t stayed alive long in that cave, but it didn’t matter, he supposed. They only needed Glendower to be awake long enough to grant a favour.
Gansey’s heart stumbled inside him at the idea of trying to extract both a favour and a purpose for his existence before Glendower turned to dust.
Better than nothing.
So the teens attempted to assemble as they had in the cave of bones, with Henry standing back, curious or wary. Adam splayed his fingers on the tomb walls, feeling for some semblance of energy to project. He moved around and around the tomb, clearly unhappy with what he was finding. Eventually, he stopped where he had begun and put his hand on the wall.
“Here is as good as any place,” he said, but he didn’t sound hopeful. Blue took his hand. Ronan crossed his arms. Gansey carefully put his hand on Glendower’s chest.
It felt pretend. Ridiculous. Gansey tried to summon up intention, but he felt empty. His knees were knocking, not out of fear or anger, but some more vast emotion that he refused to acknowledge as grief.
Grief meant he’d already given up.
“Wake up,” he said. Then, again, trying a little harder, “Wake up.”
But they were just words.
“Wake,” Gansey said again. “Up.”
A voice and nothing more. Vox et praeterea nihil.
The first moment of realization was giving way to a second, and third, and each new minute revealed some facet that Gansey had not yet let himself consider. There would be no waking of Glendower, so there was no favour. Noah’s life would not be begged for, the demon would not be bargained away. There may have never been magic involved with Glendower; his corpse may have been brought to the New World only to be buried out of reach of the English; it was possible that Gansey needed to notify the historian community of this find, if it was even findable by normal means. If Glendower had always been dead, it could not have been him who spared Gansey.
If Glendower had not saved Gansey’s life, he did not know who to thank, or who to be, or how to live.
No one said anything.
Gansey touched the skull, the raised cheekbone, the face of his promised and ruined king. Everything was dry and gray.
It was over.
This man was not going to ever be anything to Gansey.
“Gansey?” Blue asked.
Every minute was giving way to another and then another, and slowly it sank into his heart, all the way to the centre: It was over.
Gansey had forgotten how many times he had been told he was destined for greatness.
Was this all there was?
They had emerged into sun. The tricky ley line had stolen hours from them without them feeling it, and now they sat in the tattered Green House, just a few hundred yards away from where Gansey had died. Gansey sat in the ballroom, leaning against the wall, all of him contained in a square of sunlight coming through the dusty, many-paned windows. He rubbed a hand over his forehead, although he wasn’t tired – he was so awake that he was certain the ley line had somehow affected that as well.
It was over.