Blue Lily, Lily Blue (11 page)

Because Blue had no cell phone, there was no way for him to break the rules and call her. Instead, he had begun to instead lie in his bed each night, eyes closed, hand resting on his phone, waiting to see if she was going to call him from the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room at her house.

Stop it
, he told himself.
Stop wanting it —
His phone buzzed.
He put it to his ear.
“You’re still not Congress, I see.”
He was wide awake.
Glancing toward Ronan’s closed bedroom door, Gansey got

his wireframes and his journal and climbed out of bed. He shut himself in the kitchen-bathroom-laundry and sat down in front of the refrigerator.

“I’m here,” he said in a low voice. “What do you know about the blue-winged teal?”
A pause. “Is this what you discuss in Congress when the doors are closed?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a duck?”
“Ding! Point to Fox Way. The bank holiday crowd goes wild! Did you know they become flightless for a month during the summer when they molt all of their flight feathers at once?”
Blue asked, “Isn’t that all ducks?”
“Is it?”
“This is the problem with Congress.”
“Don’t be funny with me, Sargent,” Gansey said. “Jane. Did you know that the blue-winged teal has to eat one hundred grams of protein to replace the sixty grams of body and tail feathers shed at this time?”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s about thirty-one thousand invertebrates they have to eat.”
“Are you reading off notes?”
“No.” Gansey closed his journal.
“Well, this was very educational.”
“A lways is.”
“Okay, then.”
There was another pause, and Gansey realized she’d hung up. He leaned back against the fridge, eyes closed, guilty, comforted, wild, contained. In twenty-four hours, he’d be waiting for this again.
You know better you know better you know better
“What the hell, man?” Ronan said.
Gansey’s eyes flew open just as Ronan hit the lights. He stood in the doorway, headphones looped around his neck, Chainsaw hulking like a tender thug on his shoulder. Ronan’s eyes found the phone by Gansey’s leg, but he didn’t ask, and Gansey didn’t say anything. Ronan would hear a lie in a second, and the truth wasn’t an option. Jealousy had ruined Ronan for the first several months of Adam’s introduction into their group; this would hurt him more than that.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Gansey said truthfully. Then, after a pause, “You’re not going to try to kill Greenmantle, are you?”
Ronan’s chin lifted. His smile was sharp and humorless. “No. I’ve thought of a better option.”
“Do I want to know what it is? Is it acceptance of the pointlessness of revenge?”
The smile widened and sharpened yet more. “It’s not your problem, Gansey.”
He was so much more dangerous when he wasn’t angry.
And he was right: Gansey didn’t want to know.
Ronan pulled the fridge door open, shoving Gansey several inches across the floor. He retrieved a soda and handed Chainsaw a cold hot dog. Then he eyed Gansey again.
“Hey, I heard this great song,” he said. Gansey tried to tune out the sound of a raven horking down a hot dog. “Want a listen?”
Gansey and Ronan rarely agreed on music, but Gansey shrugged an agreement.
Removing his headphones from his neck, Ronan placed them on Gansey’s ears — they smelled a little dusty and birdy from proximity to Chainsaw.
Sound came through the headphones: “Squash one, squash tw —”
Gansey tore them off as Ronan dissolved into manic laughter, which Chainsaw echoed, flapping her wings, both of them terrible and amused.
“You bastard,” Gansey said savagely. “You
bastard
. You betrayed my trust.”
“That is the best song invented,” Ronan told him, through breathless laughs. He got himself back together. “Come on, bird, let’s give the man some privacy with his food.” As he departed, he turned off the lights, returning Gansey to the dark. Gansey heard him whistling the remainder of the murder squash song on his way to his room.
Gansey pushed himself to his feet, collecting his phone and his journal, and then he went back to bed. The guilt and the worry had already worn off by the time his head hit the pillow, and all that was left was the happiness.

ansey had forgotten how much time school occupied. Perhaps it was because he now had more to do outside of school, or perhaps it was because, now, he could not

stop thinking about school even when he was not in it. Greenmantle.
“Dick! Gansey! Gansey boy!
Richard Campbell Gansey the Third.
” The Gansey in question strode down the colonnade with

Ronan and Adam after school, headed toward the office. Though he was dimly aware of the shouting, his mind was too noisy for the words to register. Part of it was donated to Greenmantle, part to Maura’s disappearance, part to Malory’s exploration of the perpendicular ley line, part to the cave of ravens, part to the knowledge that in seven hours, Blue might call him. And a final, anxious part — an ever-growing part — was occupied with the color of the fall sky, the leaves on the ground, the sense that time was passing without being replaced, that it was running out and spooling to the end.

It was a uniform-free day in honor of the school’s win at a regional quiz-bowl, and the lack of uniforms somehow made Gansey’s anxiety worse. His classmates sprawled across the historic campus in down vests and plaid pants and brand-name pullovers. It reminded him that he was existing
now
and no other time. The other students had marked themselves as unmistakable inhabitants of this century, this decade, this year, this season, this income bracket. Human clocks. It wasn’t until they all returned to the identical navy V-neck sweaters that Aglionby slipped out of time and all times started to feel like they were in fact the same time.

Sometimes Gansey felt as if he had spent the last seven years of his life chasing places that made him feel like this.
Greenmantle.
Every morning this week had begun with Greenmantle standing at the front of their Latin class, eternally smiling. Ronan stopped coming to first period. There was no way he would graduate if he failed Latin, but could Gansey blame him?
The walls crumbled.
Adam had asked why Gansey needed to go to the office. Gansey had lied. He was done fighting with Adam Parrish.
“Ganseeeeeeey!”
The night before, Mr. Gray had told Ronan, “Dream me a Greywaren to give Greenmantle.”
And Ronan had replied, “You want me to give that bastard the keys to Cabeswater? Is that what you’re asking?”
So they were at an impasse. “Gansey boy!
DICK.
”
Ronan whirled and walked backward to face the shouter. He spread his arms wide. “Not now, Cheng. The king’s a little busy.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Lynch. I need someone with a soul.”
The light that glinted off Ronan’s snarl caught Gansey’s eye, bringing him back to the present. He checked his stride and his watch before doubling back to Henry, who sat at a card table situated between columns. His hair looked like pitchblack fire.
The two boys exchanged a comradely handshake over the table. They had some things in common: Before quitting last fall, Gansey had once been the captain of the crew team, and Henry had once signed up for the crew team at breakfast before scratching out his name by dinnertime. Gansey had been to Ecuador; Henry had once done a modeling photo shoot with a racehorse named Ecuador in Love. Gansey had once been killed by hornets; Henry’s family business was on the cutting edge of designing robotic drone bees.
The two boys were friendly, but not friends. Henry ran with the Vancouver crowd, and Gansey ran with dead Welsh kings.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Cheng?” Gansey asked pleasantly.
Henry threw a hand at him. “Do you see, Ronan? That is the way you talk to a man. I’m. Glad. You. Asked, Gansey. Look, I need your help. Sign this.”
Gansey observed
this.
The wording was rather official but it seemed to be a petition to establish a student-chosen student council. “You want me to vote for the right to vote?”
“You’ve grasped the salient point of my position much faster than the rest of our peers. I see why you’re always in the newsletter.” Henry offered him a pen, and when Gansey didn’t immediately take it, a Sharpie, and then a pencil.
Instead of accepting a writing tool, Gansey tried to decide if signing the petition promised any of his time.

Rex Corvus, parate Regis Corvi.
“Gansey, come on,” Henry said. “They’ll listen to you. Your vote counts double because you’re a Caucasian with great hair. You’re Aglionby’s golden boy. The only way you could score more points is if your mom gets that seat.”
Ronan smirked at Adam. Gansey rubbed a thumb over his lower lip, unpleasantly aware that Henry hadn’t said anything untrue. He would never know how much of his place here was fairly earned and how much had been bequeathed with his gilded pedigree. It used to bother him, a little.
Now it bothered him a lot.
“I’ll sign, but I want to be exempt from nominations.” Gansey accepted a pen. “My plate’s full.”
Henry rubbed his hands together. “Sure thing, old man. Parrish?”
Adam merely shook his head. He did it in a remote, cool way that didn’t invite Henry to ask again.
Henry said, “Lynch?”
Ronan flicked his gaze from Adam to Henry. “I thought you said I didn’t have a soul.”
He didn’t look at all Aglionby just then, with his shaved head and black biker jacket and expensive jeans. He looked altogether very grown-up. It was, Gansey thought, as if time had carried Ronan a little more swiftly than the rest of them this summer.
Who are these two?
Gansey wondered.
What are we doing?
“It turns out politics have already eroded my principles,” Henry said.
Ronan selected a large caliber marker and leaned deep over the petition. He wrote
ANARCHY
in enormous letters and then tossed the instrument of war at Henry’s chest.
“Hey!” Henry cried, as the marker bounced off him. “You
thug
.”
“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.
Gansey spared Henry a pitying glance. “Sorry, he didn’t get enough exercise today. Or there’s something wrong with his diet. I’ll take him away now.”
“When I get elected president,” Henry told Ronan, “I’m making your face illegal.”
Ronan’s smile was thin and dark. “Litigation’s a farce.”
As they headed back down the shadowed colonnade, Gansey asked, “Do you ever consider the possibility that you might be growing up to be an asshole?”
Ronan kicked a piece of gravel. It skittered across the bricks in front of them before skipping off into the grassy courtyard. “Rumor has it that his father gave him a Fisker for his birthday and he’s too afraid to drive it. I want to see it if he has it. Rumor has it he biked here.”
“From Vancouver?” Adam asked.
Gansey frowned as a pair of impossibly young ninth graders ran across the courtyard— had he ever been that small? He knocked on the headmaster’s door.
Am I doing this?
He was. “Are you waiting out here for me?”
“No,” said Ronan. “Parrish and I are going for a drive.”
“We are?” Adam asked.
“Good,” Gansey said. He was relieved that they would be doing something, not thinking about the headmaster, not wondering if Gansey was, after all, behaving like a Gansey. “I’ll see you later.”
And before they could say anything else, he let himself in and shut the door.

onan took Adam to the Barns.
Ever since the disastrous Fourth of July party,
Ronan had taken to disappearing to his family home, returning late without an explanation. Adam would have never pried— secrets were secrets— but he couldn’t deny that he’d been curious.
Now it seemed he would find out.
He had always found the Barns disconcerting. The Lynch family property might not have carried the patina of lush wealth that the Gansey house did, but it more than made up for it with a sense of claustrophobic history. These barn-studded fields were an island, untouched by the rest of the valley, seeded by Niall Lynch’s imagination and grazed by his dreams.
It was another world.
Ronan navigated the narrow driveway. The gravel cut through an embankment and a tangle of twisted trees. Cherry-red leaves of poison ivy and blood-spikes of raspberry vines flashed between the trunks. Everything else was green here: canopy dense enough to block out the afternoon sun, grass rippling up the banks, moss clinging damply.
And then they were through the forest and in the vast, protected fields. Here it was more saturated still: pastures green and gold; barns red and white; dense, messy autumn roses hanging on crowded bushes; purple, drowsy mountains half-hidden behind the tree line. Yellow apples, bright as butter, peeked from trees on one side of the drive. Some sort of blue flower, improbable, dreamed, ran amok through the grass on the other side.
Everything was wild and raw.
But that was the Lynches.
Ronan made a big showy sideways slide at the end of
the drive — Adam silently reached up to hold the strap on the
ceiling — and the BMW scuffed sloppily into the gravel parking area in front of the white farmhouse.
“One day, you’re going to blow out a sidewall,” Adam said as
he got out of the car.
“Sure,” Ronan agreed. Climbing out of the car, he peered up
into the branches of the plum trees beside the parking area. As
always, Adam was reminded of how Ronan
belonged
in this place.
Something about the familiar way he stood as he searched for
ripe fruit implied that he had done it many times before. It made
it easy to understand that Ronan had grown up here and would
grow old here. Easy to see how to exile him was to excise his soul. Adam allowed himself a wistful moment to imagine an
Adam Parrish grown from these fields instead of the dusty park
outside Henrietta — an Adam Parrish who was allowed to want
this home for himself. But it was as impossible as trying to imagine Ronan as an Aglionby teacher.
He couldn’t figure how Ronan had learned to be fierce in
this protected place.
Ronan found two black-purple plums that he liked. He
tossed one to Adam and then jerked his chin to indicate Adam
should follow.
For some reason, Adam had gotten it in his mind that all of
the times Ronan had vanished to the Barns, he had been preparing the house for himself and Matthew. It was so convincing an
idea that he was surprised when Ronan led him around the farmhouse to one of the many barns that were built on the property. It was a grand, long barn that was probably supposed to hold
horses or cattle but instead contained junk. A closer inspection
revealed that it was in fact dream junk, subtly dated by dust and
fading.
Ronan moved through the dim expanse with ease, picking up
a clock, a lantern, a bolt of strange cloth that somehow hurt
Adam to look at. Ronan found a sort of ghostly light on a strap;
he slung it over his shoulder to bring with him. He had already
scarfed his plum.
Adam lingered in the doorway, watching through the dust
motes, making the plum last. “This is what you’ve been working on?”
“No, this is Dad’s.” Ronan picked up a little stringed instrument. He turned it so Adam could see that its strings were pure
gold. “Look at this.”
Adam joined him. Although he had homework to do and
Cabeswater to tend, it was difficult to feel hurried. The air in the
barn was drowsy and timeless, and there was nothing disagreeable about rifling through the wonders and follies. Some of the
things in the barn were machines that still ran by means mysterious. But others were things that Niall Lynch must have dreamed
into life, because now they slept. They found sleeping birds
among the clutter, and a sleeping cat, and an old-fashioned
stuffed bear that must have been alive, too, because its chest rose and fell. With their creator dead, all of them were beyond waking— unless, like Ronan’s mother, they were returned to
Cabeswater.
As they moved through the old barn, Adam felt Ronan’s eyes
glance off him and away, his disinterest practiced but incomplete.
Adam wondered if anyone else noticed. Part of him wished
they did and immediately felt bad, because it was vanity, really:
See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone
like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his
hungry eyes
.
Maybe he was wrong. He could be wrong.
I am unknowable, Ronan Lynch.
“You want to see what I’ve been working on?” Ronan asked.
All casual.
“Sure,” Adam replied. All casual.
Pausing only to sling the ghost light over a fence post for
later retrieval, Ronan led Adam across the damp fields to a barn
they had visited before. Adam knew what he would find before
Ronan pulled open the big, rusted door, and sure enough, inside
was a vast herd of cattle of all colors. Like all the other living
things in these barns, they slept. Waited.
Inside, the light was dull and brown, filtered through dirtcovered skylights in the far-above roof. It smelled warm, alive,
familiar, like fur and crap and humidity. Who dreamt a herd of
cattle? No wonder Cabeswater had been unable to appear until
Ronan’s father died. Even Ronan’s and Kavinsky’s careless dreaming had drained the ley line of enough energy to make the forest
disappear. That had been trinkets, drugs, cars.
Not fields full of living creatures. Not an invented valley. This was why Greenmantle could not have even a forged
Greywaren. Ferocious Cabeswater was also strangely fragile. Ronan had come to a door inside the barn; behind it was a
tattered office. Everywhere was dust thick enough to be dirt. Vet
records and feed receipts yellowed on the desktop. A garbage can
held ancient Coke cans. Unframed prints were tacked to the
walls — a flier for some Irish folk band playing in New York, a
vintage print of some children running on a faraway, older pier
in a faraway, older country. It was so different from what Adam’s
father had pinned to his workspace walls that again Adam considered Ronan’s admiration of him. Someone like him treating
someone like Adam as someone worthy —
Ronan swore as he tripped. He found the light switch, and a
benevolent fluorescent came on overhead. It was full of dead
flies.
In the slightly improved light, Adam saw dustless trails leading from the desk to an office chair by the wall. A blanket — not
dusty — nested on the chair, and it was not difficult to imagine
the shape of a young man sleeping in it. There was something
unexpectedly lonely about the image.
Ronan dragged a metal tack box out from the wall and
flipped up the lid with a terrific crash. “I’ve been trying to wake
my father’s dreams.”
“What?”
“They aren’t dead. They’re sleeping. If I dragged them all to
Cabeswater, they’d get up and walk away. So I began to think,
what if I brought Cabeswater to them?”
Adam wasn’t sure what he’d expected as a reveal, but it wasn’t
this. “To the cows.”
“Some of us have family, Parrish.”
Aurora was trapped in Cabeswater. Of course Ronan would
want her to be able to come and go. Shamed, Adam replied,
“Sorry. Got it.”
“It’s not just that. It’s Matthew —” Ronan broke off, very
completely, and Adam understood. This was another secret, one
Ronan wasn’t ready to tell.
After a moment of rummaging in the box, Ronan turned
around, a clear glass ball in his hand. The air inside it shimmered mistily. It was pretty, something you’d hang in a garden
or in an old lady’s kitchen. It struck Adam as
safe.
Not very
Ronan-like
.
Ronan held it up to the light. The air inside rolled from one
side to the other. Maybe not air at all. Maybe a liquid. Adam
could see it reflected in his blue eyes. Ronan said, “This was my
first attempt.”
“You dreamed it.”
“Of course.”
“Mm. And Cabeswater?”
Ronan sounded offended. “I asked.”
He asked. So easy. As if it was a simple thing for him to
communicate with this entity that could only make itself known
to Adam through grand and violent gestures.
“In the dream, it had some of Cabeswater inside it,” Ronan
continued, and intoned, “If it works in the dream, it works in
real life.”
“Does it work? Give me the short version.”
“Asshole. No. It doesn’t. It does, in fact, jack shit.” Ronan
dug back through the tack box, lifting out various other failed attempts, all of them puzzling. A shimmering ribbon, a tuft of grass still growing from a lump of dirt, a forked branch. He let Adam hold some of them; they all felt strange. Too heavy, like gravity weighted them more than it should. And they smelled
vaguely familiar, like Ronan, or like Cabeswater.
If Adam thought about it — or rather, if he
didn’t
think about
it — he could feel the pulse of the ley line in each.
“I had a bag of sand, too,” Ronan said, “but I spilled it.” Hours of dreaming. He had driven an hour each day to park
his car and curl in this chair and sleep alone.
“Why here? Why do you come here to do it?”
Voice toneless, Ronan said, “Sometimes I dream of wasps.” Adam imagined it then: Ronan waking in Monmouth
Manufacturing, a dream object clutched in his hands, wasps
crawling in his bedsheets, Gansey unaware in the other room. No, he could not dream wildly in Monmouth.
Lonesome.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get hurt out here by yourself?”
Adam asked.
Ronan scoffed. Him, fear for his own life. But there was
something in his eyes, still. He studied his hands and admitted,
“I’ve dreamt him a box of EpiPens. I dream cures for stings all
the time. I carry one. I put them in the Pig. I have them all over
Monmouth.”
Adam felt a ferocious and cruel hope. “Do they work?” “I don’t know. And there’s no way to find out before it actually happens. There won’t be a rematch.” Ronan took two objects
from the tack box and stood. “Here. Field trip time. Let’s go to
the lab.”
With one arm he braced a bright blue polar fleece blanket
against his body. On the other he draped a slab of moss like a
waiter’s towel.
“Do you want me to carry one?” Adam asked.
“Fuck, no.”
Adam got the door for him.
In the main room of the barn, Ronan took his time walking
among the cows, pausing to look into their faces or cocking his
head to observe their markings. Finally, he stopped by a chocolate brown cow with a jagged stripe down her friendly face. He
shoved her motionless side with the toe of his boot and explained,
“It works better if they seem more . . . I don’t know. Particular. If
it looks like something I might have dreamt myself.” It looked like a cow to Adam. “So what is it about this one?” “Looks fucking friendly. Bovine the boy wizard.” He set the
blue blanket on the floor. Carefully. Then he ordered, “Feel its
pulse. Don’t just stare at it. Pulse. On its face. There. There,
Parrish, God. There.”
Adam gingerly trailed his fingers across the cow’s short facial
hair until he felt the animal’s slow pulse.
Ronan hefted the blanket of moss across the cow’s withers.
“And now?”
Adam wasn’t sure what he was supposed to see. He felt nothing, nothing, nothing — Ah, but there it was. The cow’s pulse
had accelerated fractionally. Again, he imagined Ronan here on
his own, so hopeful for a change that he would have noted such
a subtle difference. It was far more dedication than he had
thought Ronan Lynch capable of.
Lonesome.

Ronan scoffed. “Did you think I would bother showing you just this? There’s one more. Do you need to piss first?”
“Ha.”
“No, seriously.”
“I’m good.”
Ronan turned to the other object he’d brought out. It was not the blue blanket, as Adam had expected, but rather something wrapped inside the blanket. Whatever was inside couldn’t be larger than a shoe box or a large book. It didn’t seem very heavy.
And if Adam’s eyes didn’t deceive him, Ronan Lynch was afraid of it.
Ronan took a deep breath. “Okay, Parrish.”
He unwrapped it.
Adam looked.
Then he looked away.
Then he looked back.
It was a book, he thought. And then he didn’t know why he thought it was a book; it was a bird. No, a planet. A mirror.
It was none of those things. It was a word. It was a cupped word in Ronan’s hand that wanted to be said out loud, but he didn’t want to, but actually he did —
Then Adam looked away again, because he couldn’t keep his eyes on it anymore. He could feel himself going mad trying to name it.
“What is it?” he asked.
Ronan eyed it, but sideways, with his chin tilted away from it. He looked younger than he usually did, his face softened by uncertainty and caution. Sometimes Gansey would tell stories of the Ronan he had known before Niall had died; now, looking at this fallible Ronan, Adam thought he might be able to believe them.
Ronan said, “A piece of Cabeswater. A piece of a dream. It’s what I asked for. And this is . . . this is what I think it should look like, probably.”
Adam felt the truth of it. This awful and impossible and lovely object was what a dream was when it had nothing to inhabit. Who was this person who could dream a dream into a concrete shape? No wonder Aglionby bored Ronan.
Adam looked at it. He looked away.
He asked, “Does it work?”
Ronan’s expression sharpened. He held the dream
thing
beside the cow’s face. Light, or something like light, reflected off it onto Ronan’s chin and cheeks, rendering him stark and handsome and terrifying and someone else. Then he blew on it. His breath passed through the word, the mirror, the unwritten line.
Adam heard a whisper in his ear. Something moved and stirred inside him. Ronan’s eyelashes fluttered darkly.
What are we doing —
The cow shifted.
Not a lot. But her head tilted; one ear flicked. Like she was sleepily jostling a fly from it. A muscle shivered near her spine.
Ronan’s eyes were open; fires burned in them. He breathed again, and again the cow twitched her ear. Tensed her lips.
But she did not wake, and she did not rise.
He retreated, hiding the dream from Adam’s maddened sight.
“I’m missing something still,” Ronan said. “Tell me what I’m missing.”
“Maybe you just can’t wake someone else’s dream.”
Ronan shook his head. He didn’t care if it was impossible. He was going to do it anyway.
Adam gave in. “Power. It takes a lot of power. Most of what I’m doing when I repair the ley line is making better connections so the energy can run more efficiently. Maybe you could find a way to direct a stub of the line out here.”
“Already thought of it. Not interested. I don’t want to make a bigger cage. I want to open the door.”
They regarded each other. Adam fair and cautious, Ronan dark and incendiary. This was Ronan at his most truthful.
Adam asked, “Why? Tell me the real reason.”
“Matthew —” Ronan began again, and stopped again.
Adam waited.
Ronan said, “Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.”
Adam didn’t understand.
“I
dreamt
him, Adam!” Ronan was angry — every one of his emotions that wasn’t happiness was anger. “That means that when — if something happens to me, he becomes just like them. Just like Mom.”
Every memory Adam possessed of Ronan and his younger brother reframed itself. Ronan’s tireless devotion. Matthew’s similarity to Aurora, a dream creature herself. Declan’s eternal position as an outsider, neither a dreamer nor a dream.
Only half of Ronan’s surviving family was real.
“Declan told me,” Ronan said. “A few Sundays ago.” Declan had left for college in D.C., but he still made the four-hour drive each Sunday to attend church with his brothers, a gesture so extravagant that even Ronan seemed force to admit that it was kindness.
“
You
didn’t know?”
“I was three. What did I know?” Ronan turned away, lashes low over his eyes, expression hidden, burdened by being born, not made.
Lonesome.
Adam sighed and sat down beside the cow, leaning against her warm body, letting her slow breaths lift him. After a moment, Ronan slipped down beside him and the two of them looked out over the sleepers. Adam felt Ronan glance at him and away. Their shoulders were close. Overhead, rain began to tap on the roof again, another sudden storm. Possibly their fault. Possibly not.
“Greenmantle,” Ronan said abruptly. “His web. I want to wrap it around his neck.”
“Mr. Gray’s right, though. You can’t kill him.”
“I don’t want to kill him. I want to do to him what he’s threatening to do to Mr. Gray. To show him how I could make his life hell. If I can dream
that
” — Ronan jerked his chin toward the blanket that held his dream object — “surely I can dream something to blackmail him with.”
Adam considered this. How difficult would it be to frame someone if you could create any kind of evidence you needed? Could it be done in such a way that Greenmantle couldn’t undo it and come after them twice as dangerous?
“You’re smarter than I am,” Ronan said. “Figure it out.”
Adam made a noise of disbelief. “Didn’t you just ask me to research Greenmantle in all my spare time?”
“Yeah, and now I’m telling you why I asked you.” “Why me?”
Ronan laughed suddenly. That sound, as crooked and joyful and terrible as the dream in his hand, should have woken these cattle if nothing else did.
“I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”