But it didn’t feel like a game, if he was being honest. Adrenaline whispered in his heart.
Aurora Lynch appeared.
She did not step out of the living area, nor from the path they had used. Instead, she emerged from the wall of roses cascading over the rock. It was impossible for a woman to step through rock and rose, but she did it anyway. Her golden hair hung in a sheet around her head, caught through with rosebuds and braided with pearls. For a brief moment, she was at once the roses and a woman, and then she was fully Aurora. Cabeswater behaved differently for Aurora Lynch than it did for the rest of them; they were human, after all, and she was a dream thing. They vacationed here. Aurora belonged.
“Ronan,” Aurora said, genuinely happy, as she was always genuinely happy. “Where’s my Matthew?”
“Lacrosse or some shit,” Ronan replied. “Something sweaty.”
“And how about Declan?” Aurora asked.
There was a pause, just a breath too long.
“Working,” Ronan lied.
Everyone in the rose glen looked at Ronan.
“Oh well. He’s always been so diligent,” Aurora said. She waved at Adam, Blue and Gansey. Adam, Blue, and Gansey waved back. “Have you found that king yet, Gansey?”
“No,” replied Gansey.
“Oh well,” Aurora said again. She hugged Ronan’s neck, pressing her pale cheek to his pale cheek, as if he was holding an armful of groceries instead of a strange little girl. “What have you brought me this time?”
Ronan put the girl down without ceremony. She folded up against his legs, all sweater, and wailed in faintly accented English, “I want to go!”
“And I want to feel my right arm again,” Ronan snapped.
“Amabo te, Greywaren!” she said. Please, Greywaren.
“Oh, stand up.” He took her hand and she stood, rail-rod straight beside him, her brown dainty hooves splayed.
Aurora knelt so that she was on eye level with the Orphan Girl. “How beautiful you are!”
The girl didn’t look at Aurora. She didn’t move at all.
“Here’s a lovely flower the colour of your eyes – would you like to hold it?” Aurora offered a rose in her palm. It was indeed the colour of the girl’s eyes – a dull, stormy blue. Roses did not occur in that colour, but they did now.
The girl did not so much as turn her head in the direction of the rose. Instead, her eyes were fixed upon some point just past Adam’s head, her expression blank or bored. Adam felt a prickle of recognition. There was no petulance or anger in the girl’s expression. She was not tantrumming.
Adam had been there, crouched beside the kitchen cabinets, looking at the light fixture across the room, his father spitting in his ear. He recognized this sort of fear when he saw it.
He could not quite bear to look at her.
As Adam gazed up at the autumn-thin branches instead, Ronan and his mother spoke in low voices. Unbelievably, Gansey’s phone buzzed; he pulled it out to look at it. Cabeswater pressed at Adam. Blue lined spent rose petals along her arm. The big trees outside the glen kept whispering to them in Latin.
“No, Mom,” Ronan said, impatient, this brand-new tone capturing the others’ attention. “This wasn’t like before. This was an accident.”
Aurora looked gently tolerant, which clearly infuriated her middle son.
“It was,” he insisted, even though she hadn’t said anything. “It was a nightmare, and something was different about it.”
Blue swiftly interjected, “Different how?”
“Something in this one was f— messed up. There was something black in the dream that felt weird.” Ronan scowled at the trees as if they might give him the words to explain it. He added finally, “Decayed.”
This word affected them all. Blue and Gansey looked at each other as if it continued a previous conversation. Adam recalled the troubled images Cabeswater had shown him when he first stepped into the forest. Aurora’s golden expression tarnished.
She said, “I think I’d better show you all something.”
Much to Gansey’s annoyance, he had phone reception.
Ordinarily, something about Cabeswater interfered with mobile signal, but today his phone vibrated with incoming texts about black-tie Aglionby fund-raisers as he climbed up and then down a mountain.
His mother’s texts looked like state documents.
Headmaster Child agrees that the timing will be tight but luckily my team has enough practice by now to bring it together quickly. It will be so wonderful to do this with you and the school.
His father’s texts were jovial, man-to-man.
The money’s not the point, it’s just going to be a “do.” Don’t call it a fund-raiser? it’s just a swingin’ good time
His sister Helen’s cut through to the important details.