“It’s a nightmare,” Adam said. His right hand held the wrist of his left, thumb pressed into his pulse point. “Mine. I didn’t mean to think of them. Cabeswater, take them away.”
The shadows stretched to the black on the tree, a black-sap pedigree proving their lineage. The black bubbled out of the tree a little faster; a branch above them groaned.
“Make way,” they said.
“Take them away,” the Orphan Girl wailed.
“Cabeswater, dissolvere,” Ronan said. Aurora had stepped in front of him as if she meant to protect her son. There was nothing vague about her now.
The three women came closer. Again, Gansey missed how they accomplished it. They were far, they were close. Now he smelled rot. Not the too-sweet decay of plants or food, but the musky horror of flesh.
Blue jerked away from them. Gansey thought it was fear, but she was only running to get to him. She seized his hand.
“Yes,” Adam said, understanding what she was doing before Gansey did. “Gansey, say it.”
Say it. They wanted him to tell the women to leave. Really tell them. In the cave of bones, Gansey had ordered the bones to wake, and the bones had woken. He had used Blue’s energy and his own intention to speak a command that had to be heard. But Gansey didn’t understand why it worked, and he didn’t understand why it was him, and he didn’t know how Adam or Ronan or Blue ever came to grips with their magical capabilities, because he certainly couldn’t.
“Make way for the Raven King,” the women said again. And then they were in front of Gansey. Three false Blues facing Blue and Gansey.
To Gansey’s astonishment, Blue flicked out a switchblade in her free hand. He had no doubt that she would use it: She’d stabbed Adam with it once, after all. He had a lot of doubt, though, that it would be effective against these three nightmares before him.
Gansey looked into their black eyes. He pressed certainty into his voice and said, “Cabeswater, make it safe.”
The three women rained away.
They splattered on Blue’s clothing and on his shoulders, and then the water dissolved into the ground. Blue let out a little sigh that had a tone to it, her shoulders slumping.
Gansey’s words had worked once again, and he was none the wiser about why or how he was meant to use this ability. Glendower had controlled the weather with his words and spoken to birds; Gansey clung to the possibility that his king, when found and woken, would explain the intricacies of Gansey to Gansey.
“I’m sorry,” Adam said. “Stupid of me. I wasn’t being careful. And this tree is – I think it amplified it.”
“I might be amplifying it, too,” Blue said. She was staring at Gansey’s rain-spattered shoulders; her expression was so stricken that he glanced at his sweater to be certain that the splash had not eaten holes in the material. “Can we … can we get away from it now?”
“I think that’s wise,” Aurora advised. She did not seem particularly concerned, merely pragmatic, and it occurred to Gansey that to a dream, perhaps a nightmare was simply an unpleasant acquaintance rather than anything uncanny.
“You should stay away from it,” Ronan told his mother.
“It finds me,” she said.
“Operae pretium est,” Orphan Girl said.
“Don’t be a weirdo,” Ronan told her. “We’re not in a dream any more. English.”
She didn’t translate, though, and Aurora reached out to pat her skullcap-covered head. “She’ll be my little helper. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”
Back at the forest’s edge, Aurora walked with them to the SUV. It was outside the boundaries of the forest, but she never fell asleep straightaway. Unlike Kavinsky’s dreamt creatures, who fell asleep instantly after his death, Niall Lynch’s wife always managed to persist for a bit of time on her own. She’d stayed awake for three days after his death. She had once stayed awake for an hour outside Cabeswater. But in the end, the dream needed the dreamer.
So now Aurora walked them out to the SUV, looking even more like a dream when removed from Cabeswater, a vision wandered into waking life, clothed in flowers and light.
“Give Matthew my love,” Aurora said, and hugged Ronan. “It was so nice to see all of you again.”
“Stay with her,” Ronan ordered Orphan Girl, who swore at him. “Watch your mouth around my mother.”
The girl said something else, rapid and lovely, and he snapped, “I can’t understand that when I’m awake. You have to use English or Latin. You wanted out; you’re out now. Things are different.”
His tone drew the keen attention of both Aurora and Adam.
Aurora said, “Don’t be sad, Ronan,” which made him look away from all of them, the set of his shoulders unmoving and furious.
She spun in a circle, hands outstretched. “It’s going to rain,” she said, and then she fell gently to her knees.
Ronan, still and dark and very much real, closed his eyes.
Gansey said, “I’ll help you carry her.”