The Raven King
Page 17

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.”
 
 
The moment Blue got back from Cabeswater, she promptly got herself into yet more trouble.
After the boys had dropped her off, Blue stormed into 300 Fox Way’s kitchen and began a one-sided interrogation of Artemus, who was still hidden behind the closed storage closet door. When he failed to reply to her reasonably asked questions about murder-handed women with Blue’s face and about the possible whereabouts of Glendower, she got progressively louder and added door pounding. Her heart was full of the memory of the spattered shoulders of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater – precisely what his spirit had been wearing on the church watch – and her head was full of frustration that Artemus knew more about all of this than he was saying.
Gwenllian delightedly watched the proceedings from a perch on the counter.
“Blue!” Her mother’s voice broke in from somewhere else in the house. “Blooooooooo. Why don’t you come chat with us for a moment?”
The gooeyness of her tone was how Blue knew she was in trouble. She lowered her fist from the kitchen closet door and started up the stairs. Her mother’s voice was coming from the house’s single shared bathroom, and when Blue got there, she found her mother, Calla and Orla all sitting in a full bathtub, all fully clothed and all equally soaking. Jimi was sitting on the closed toilet lid with a burning candle in her hands. They had all been crying but none of them were crying now.
“What?” Blue demanded. Her throat was a little sore, which meant that she’d possibly been shouting even louder than she’d intended.
Her mother peered up at her with more authority than one would think a woman could in her position. “Do you think you would like it if someone pounded on your bedroom door and ordered you to come out?”
“A storage closet is not a bedroom,” Blue said. “For starters.”
“The past decades have been stressful for him,” Maura said.
“The past few centuries have been stressful for Gwenllian, and she’s out on the counter at least!”
From the toilet, Jimi said, “You can’t compare one person’s coping capacity to another, hon.”
Calla snorted.
“Is that why you guys are all in a bathtub?” Blue asked.
“Don’t be mean,” Maura replied. “We were trying to make contact with Persephone. And no, before you ask, it didn’t work. And while we’re on the topic of you doing things that are unwise, where exactly did you disappear to? Being suspended is not a vacation.”
Blue bristled. “I was not on vacation! Ronan dreamt up his inner child, or something, and we had to take her to his mother. While we were there, we saw the three women from that tapestry I told you about, and a tree that looked messed up, and Gansey could have died really easily and I would have been right there beside him!”
The women looked pitying, which maddened Blue further.
She said, “I want to warn him.”
There was silence.
She hadn’t known she was going to say it until it came out of her mouth, but it was out now. She filled the quiet. “I know you said before that it would only ruin someone’s life to know, and it wouldn’t save them. I get that. But this is different. We’re gonna find Glendower, and we’re gonna ask for Gansey’s life to be saved. So we need Gansey to stay alive until then. And that means he has to stop charging into danger!”
Her thin hope couldn’t bear more pity at that point, but luckily, that wasn’t what she got. The women all exchanged looks, considering. It was hard to tell if they were making decisions based upon ordinary means or psychic ones.
Then Maura shrugged. “OK.”
“OK?”
“Sure, OK,” Maura said. She glanced again at Calla for verification; Calla lifted her eyebrows. “Tell him.”
“Really?”
Blue must have expected them to push back harder, because when they didn’t, she felt like she’d had a chair snatched from under her. It was one thing to inform them that she was going to tell Gansey he was going to die. It was another thing to imagine telling him. There was no undoing it once it was done. Blue squeezed her eyes shut – be sensible, get yourself together – and opened them.
Mother looked at daughter. Daughter looked at mother. Maura said, “Blue.”
Blue allowed herself to deflate.
Jimi blew out the candle she was holding and set it beside the toilet. Then she put her arms around Blue’s hips and tugged her on to her lap, like she would have when Blue was small. Well, Blue was still small. When Blue was young. The toilet groaned beneath them.
“You’re going to collapse the toilet,” Blue said, but she let Jimi fold her arms around her and pull her into her ample bosom. She sighed shakily as Jimi rubbed her back and clucked to herself. Blue could not understand how this childish comfort was at once soothing and suffocating. She was both glad for it and wishing that she could be someplace with fewer threads tying her to every challenge or sadness in her life.
“Blue, you know it’s not a bad thing that you want to leave Henrietta, right?” her mother asked from the tub. This was so precisely what Blue had been thinking about that she couldn’t tell if her mother had brought it up because her mother was a good psychic or merely because she knew her well.
Blue shrugged against Jimi. “Pshaw.”
“It’s not always running away,” Jimi said, her voice deep and rumbling through her chest to Blue’s ear. “To leave.”
Calla added, “We’re not going to think you hate Fox Way.”
“I don’t hate Fox Way at all.”
Maura swatted Orla’s hand away; Orla was trying to braid Maura’s damp hair. “I know. Because we’re great. But the difference between a nice house and a nice prison is really small. We chose Fox Way. We made it, Calla and Persephone and I. But it’s only your origin story, not your final destination.”