“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 he was right. Need was Adam’s baseline, his resting pulse. Love was a privilege. Adam was privileged; he did not want to give it up. He wanted to remember again and again how it felt.
Now that Adam had fully opened his senses, Cabeswater clumsily attempted to communicate with its human magician. It took his memories and turned them sideways and inside out, repurposing them for a hieroglyphic language of dreams: a fungus on a tree; Blue nearly falling over herself in her haste to get away from him; a scab on his wrist; the particular knit of skin that Adam knew was Ronan’s frown just between his eyebrows; a snake disappearing beneath the muddy surface of a lake; Gansey’s thumb on his lower lip; Chainsaw’s beak parted open and a worm crawling out of it instead of in.
“Adam?” Blue asked.
He withdrew from his thoughts. “Oh, yes. I’m ready.”
They proceeded. It was hard to say how long it would take them to get to where Ronan’s mother lived – sometimes it took no time at all and sometimes it took ages, a fact Ronan complained about bitterly as he carried the Orphan Girl. He tried to convince her to walk on her own again, but she crumpled at once into boneless resistance on the forest floor. He didn’t bother to spend minutes fighting with her; he simply scooped her back up again, his expression cross.
The Orphan Girl seemed to divine that she was pressing Ronan’s buttons too hard, however, because as he walked, jostling her with each step, she released a single purposeful note, kicking her hooved legs in time with it. A second later, an unseen bird sang back another note beautifully pitched three steps above hers. The Orphan Girl piped a tone just above her last one, and a different unseen bird sang another one pitched three steps above. A third note: a third bird. Back and forth they all went until a song spun around the teens, a syncopated reel made from a child’s voice and hidden birds that may or may not have really existed.
Ronan glowered at the Orphan Girl, but it was obvious what the scowl really meant. His arms around her were protective.