The Raven King
Page 15

“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.
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.”