He glanced behind to make sure Adam was following; he was, looking at Ronan with narrowed eyes.
“Do you think your dream is wrong because Cabeswater is wrong?” Adam asked.
“Probably.”
“So if we fix Cabeswater, we would fix your dreams.”
“Probably.”
Adam was still processing, thinking so hard that Ronan imagined he could feel it. Actually, in Cabeswater, with Adam so close to him, it was possible he really did.
“You could dream things into being before we found Cabeswater, right? Can you do it without Cabeswater?”
Ronan stopped and squinted through the gloom. About fifteen yards below, the slanted rock slide they’d been walking along ended in a pool of perfectly clear water. It was tinted green because the air was green, because everything was green, but otherwise the water was clear. Ronan could see all the way to its rocky bottom. It was clearly far deeper than it was wide, a chasm filled with water. It held his attention. “Why?”
“If you cut yourself off from Cabeswater, somehow, until I fixed it, would your dreams be normal?”
Here it was. Adam was finally asking the right questions; the questions that meant he probably already knew the answer. The longer they spent in Cabeswater, the more they worked together with Ronan’s dreams, the more Cabeswater’s nightmares were reflected in Ronan’s and vice versa. The more the evidence piled up.
But now that they were to it, Ronan wasn’t sure he wanted to be on the other side. So many days on a pew with his knuckles pressed to his forehead, silently asking what am I am I the only one what does this mean —
He said, “I can do it better with Cabeswater. With Orphan Girl, too. But —”
He stopped. He looked at the ground.
“Ask me,” he said. “Just do it. Just —”
“Ask you what?”
Ronan didn’t reply, just looked at the ground. The green air moved all around him, tinting his pale skin, and the trees curved black and real around him, everything in this place looking like his dreams, or everything in his dreams looking like this place.
Adam pressed his lips together, and then he asked, “Did you dream Cabeswater?”
Ronan’s blue eyes flicked up to Adam.
It was 6:21.
“When?” Adam asked. “When did you know that you dreamt Cabeswater? Right away?”
They faced each other at the top of the slanted rock face, that clear pool far down below. Adam’s heart was racing with either adrenaline or with sheer proximity to the ley line.
“Always,” said Ronan.
It should not have changed the way he saw Ronan. The dreaming had always been impressive, unusual, a god-glitch, a trick of the ley line that allowed a young man to make his thoughts into concrete objects. Magic, but a reasonable magic. But this – to not only dream an entire forest into being, but to create a dreamspace outside of one’s own head. Adam stood in Ronan’s dreams; that was what this realization meant.
Ronan corrected himself. “Sort of always. Just – the moment we got here, I recognized it. My handwriting on that rock. I guess I knew right away. It just took me longer to believe it.”
Every one of Adam’s memories of those early forays into the forest were slowly shifting inside him. Pieces falling into place. “That’s why it calls you the Greywaren. That’s why you’re different to it.”
Ronan shrugged, but it was a shrug from caring too much instead of too little.
“That’s why its Latin grammar is terrible. It’s your grammar.”
Ronan shrugged again. Questions cascaded through Adam, too difficult to say aloud. Was Ronan even human? Half a dreamer, half a dream, maker of ravens and hoofed girls and entire lands. No wonder his Aglionby uniform had choked him, no wonder his father had sworn him to secrecy, no wonder he could not make himself focus on classes. Adam had realized this before, but now he realized it again, more fully, larger, the ridiculousness of Ronan Lynch in a classroom for aspiring politicians.
Adam felt a little hysterical. “That’s why it speaks Latin at all, and not Portuguese, or Welsh. Oh, God. Did I —”
He had made a bargain with this forest. When he fell asleep and Cabeswater was in his thoughts, tangled through his dreams, was that Ronan — “No,” Ronan said, fast, his tone unschooled. “No, I didn’t invent it. I asked the trees after I figured it out, why the hell – how the hell this happened. Cabeswater existed, somehow, before me. I just dreamt it. I mean, I made it look this way. I chose these trees and this language and all that shit for it, without knowing. Wherever it was on the ley line before, it got destroyed, and then it didn’t have a body, a shape – when I dreamt it, I brought it back into physical form, that’s all. What did they call it? Manifested it. I just manifested it from whatever other fucking plane it was on. It’s not me.”
Adam’s thoughts spun in the mud; he made no progress.