Just tell me how much public debauchery the press is going to have on your classbros so I can start spinning the situation now.
Gansey kept thinking the signal would cut out, but it stayed strong and true. It meant that he was simultaneously getting a text about the Henrietta hotel situation for out-of-town guests while also observing a magical tree seeping some kind of black, toxic-looking liquid.
Greywaren, whispered a voice from distant branches. Greywaren.
The liquid beaded from the bark like sweat, collecting into a slow and viscous cascade. They all regarded it, except for the strange girl, who pressed her face into Ronan’s side. Gansey did not blame her. The tree was a little … difficult to look at straight on. He had not considered how few things in nature were purely black until he saw the tarry sap. The absolute darkness bubbling on the trunk looked poisonous, or artificial.
Gansey’s phone buzzed again.
“Gansey, man, is this diseased tree cutting into your digital time?” Ronan asked.
The fact was the digital time was cutting into his diseased tree time. Cabeswater was a haven for him. The presence of the texts here felt as out of place as the darkness oozing from the tree. He switched his phone off and asked, “Is this the only one like this?”
“That I’ve found in my walks,” Aurora replied. Her expression was untroubled, but she kept running a hand over the length of her hair.
“It’s hurting the tree,” Blue said, craning her head back to look at the wilting canopy.
The dark tree was the opposite of Cabeswater. The longer Gansey spent in Cabeswater, the more awed he was by it. The longer he spent looking at the black sap, the more distressed he was by it. He asked, “Does it do anything?”
Aurora tilted her head. “What do you mean? Other than what it’s doing?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what I meant. Is it just an ugly disease, or is it something magical?”
Aurora shrugged. Her problem solving only went as far as finding someone else to solve the problem. As Gansey circled the tree, trying to look useful if nothing else, he saw Adam crouch in front of the hooved orphan girl. She continued staring past him as he unbuckled his cheap watch. He tapped the top of her hand, lightly, just so that she marked that he was offering the watch to her. Gansey expected her to ignore him or to reject the gift like she had Aurora’s rose, but the girl accepted it without hesitation. She began to wind it with intense concentration as Adam remained crouched before her for a moment longer, eyebrows knitted.
Gansey joined Ronan directly by the tree. This close, the darkness hummed with an absence of sound. Ronan said something in Latin to the tree. There was no audible response.
“It doesn’t seem to have a voice,” Aurora said. “It just feels very odd. I keep finding myself returning to it, even if I don’t mean to.”
“It reminds me of Noah,” Blue said. “Decaying.”
Her voice was so melancholy that Gansey was struck all at once by what he and Blue really lost by keeping their relationship a secret. Blue radiated psychic energy for others, but touch was where she gained hers back. She was always hugging her mother or holding Noah’s hand or linking her elbow in Adam’s or resting her boots on Ronan’s legs as they sat on the sofa. Touching Gansey’s neck just between his hair and his collar. This worry in her tone demanded fingers braided together, arms on shoulders, cheeks rested against chests.
But because Gansey was too cowardly to tell Adam about falling in love with her, she had to stand there with her sadness by herself.
Aurora took Blue’s hand.
Shame diffused through him, black as the tree sap.
Is this really how you want to spend the rest of your time?
A sudden movement between the trees caught Gansey’s attention.
“Oh,” Blue said.
Three figures. Familiar, impossible.
It was three women wearing Blue’s face – sort of. It was not so much Blue’s face as the way one might remember Blue’s face. Perhaps the difference between those two things might not have been as obvious if Blue herself had not been there with them. She was the reality; they were the dream.
They approached in the way of things in a dream, too. Were they walking? Gansey couldn’t remember, even though he was watching it happen. They were getting closer. That was all he knew. Their hands were up by either side of their faces; their palms were red.
“Make way,” they said together.
Ronan’s eyes darted to Gansey.
“Make way for the Raven King,” they said together.
The Orphan Girl began to cry.
Gansey asked in a low voice, “Is Cabeswater trying to tell us something?”
They were closer. Their shadows were black and the ferns beneath them were dying.