Before, Blue had had half of the bus line’s attention. Now she had all of it.
Gansey leaned across the passenger seat. Unlike Henry, he at least had the good grace to acknowledge the school’s attention with a grimace. “Jane, I’m sorry this couldn’t wait. But Ronan just called me.”
“He called you?”
“Yes. He wants us. Can you come?”
The letters BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE were most certainly scrawled in her own handwriting. She felt she had some self-examination to do later.
There was relative silence.
The self-examination was happening now.
“Stupid raven boys,” she said, and got in the car.
No one could quite believe that Ronan had used his phone.
Ronan Lynch had many habits that irritated his friends and loved ones – swearing, drinking, street-racing – but the one that maddened his acquaintances the most was his inability to answer phone calls or send texts. When Adam had first met Ronan, he had found Ronan’s aversion to the fancy phone so complete that he assumed there must have been a story behind it. Some reason why, even in the press of an emergency, Ronan’s first response was to hand his phone to someone else. Now that Adam knew him better, he realized it had more to do with a phone not allowing for any posturing. Ninety per cent of how Ronan conveyed his feelings was through his body language, and a phone simply didn’t care.
And yet he’d used it. While waiting for Declan to be done with Ronan, Adam had gone to Boyd’s to get a few oil changes out of the way. He’d been there a few hours when Ronan had called. Then Ronan had texted Gansey and called Fox Way. He said the same thing to each of them: Come to the Barns, he’d said. We need to talk.
And because Ronan had never really asked them to do anything by phone, they all dropped everything to go.
By the time Adam got to the Barns, the others had already arrived – or at least the Camaro was there, and Adam assumed Gansey would have brought Blue, especially now that their secret was out. Ronan’s BMW was parked sideways with the wheels jacked in a way that suggested it had slid into its current position. And to Adam’s astonishment, Declan’s Volvo was also parked there, backed into a spot, already ready to leave.
Adam got out.
The Barns had a strange effect on Adam. He had not known how to diagnose this feeling the first few times he had visited, because he had not truly believed in the two things that the Barns was made of: magic and love. Now that he had at least a passing acquaintance with both of those things, it affected him in a different way. He used to wonder what he would have looked like if he had grown up in a place like this. Now he thought about how, if he wanted it, he could one day live in a place like this. He did not quite understand what had changed.
Inside, he found the others in various states of celebration. It took Adam a moment to realize that this was Ronan’s birthday: The grill smoked out back and there were store-bought cupcakes on the kitchen table and a few inflated balloons rolling around the corners of the room. Blue was sitting on the tiles tying strings on to balloons, her bad eye squinted shut, while Gansey and Declan stood by the counter, heads lowered, talking in low, serious voices that made them seem older than they were. Ronan and Matthew jostled into the kitchen from the backyard. They were noisy and brotherly, horsing around, impossibly physical. Was this what it was to have brothers?
Ronan looked up and caught Adam’s eye.
“Take your shoes off before you go wandering around, shit-head,” Ronan said.
Adam checked himself and leaned to untie his shoe.
“Not you – I meant Matthew.” Ronan held Adam’s gaze a moment longer and then watched Matthew chuck off his shoes. As he closely attended to Matthew skidding into the dining room on sock feet, Adam understood: This celebration was for Matthew’s benefit.
Blue clambered to her feet to join Adam. In a low voice, she explained, “Matthew is going to stay with Declan. He’s moving from Aglionby.”
The picture grew clearer: This was a going-away celebration.
Slowly, over the next hour, the story came out in fits and starts, delivered in fragments by each of the people there. The upshot was this: The Barns was changing hands by way of a bloodless revolution, the crown passing from father to middle son as the eldest son abdicated. And if Declan was to be believed, rival states slavered just on the other side of the border.
This was both a goodbye party and a war council.