They bundled into the car with the comfort of routine, climbing into the Camaro though all logic suggested they take the BMW instead. Ronan and Gansey scuffled briefly over his keys (Gansey won, as he won everything). Adam, Blue, and Noah climbed into the tiny backseat, in that order. Noah shrank up the side of the car, trying desperately not to touch Blue. Adam didn’t take quite so much care. For the first ten minutes on the first day, Adam had been polite, but it quickly become clear that Blue didn’t mind when his leg touched hers.
Adam was all right with that.
Everything was the same as before, but for some reason, Adam’s heart was thumping. New spring leaves, jerked from the trees by the suddenly cold wind, scurried across the lot. He saw goose bumps through the loopy crocheted cardigan Blue wore. She reached to take a handful of both his shirt and Noah’s, and tugged them both to her like blankets.
"You’re always cold, though, Noah," she said.
"I know," he replied, bleak.
Adam wasn’t certain what came first with Blue — her treating the boys as friends, or them all becoming friends. It seemed to Adam that this circular way to build relationships required a healthy amount of self-confidence to undertake. And it was a strange sort of magic that it felt like she’d always been hunting for Glendower with them.
With his shoulder pressed against Blue’s crocheted one, Adam leaned forward between the two front seats and asked, "Gansey, don’t we have any heat?"
"If it starts."
The engine was turning over, over, over, over. Adam felt cold enough for his teeth to chatter, though there was no way that the temperature was that low. He was cold on the inside. He ordered, "Gas. Give it more gas."
"That is with gas."
Ronan punched Gansey’s right leg down, his palm on Gansey’s knee. The engine wailed high and caught. Gansey drily thanked Ronan for his assistance.
"Your heart," Blue said in Adam’s ear. "I can feel it in your arm. Are you nervous?"
"It’s just," he replied, "I’m not sure where we’re going."
Because they were traveling by Camaro, not by helicopter, it took longer to get to the coordinates Gansey had marked in his journal. When they arrived, parking the car at an empty vacation cabin and walking the rest of the way, they found the woods had a far different character under a cloudy sky. The raven was stark and dead among the grass, bony white shells in the foliage. The trees at the forest’s edge seemed taller than before, giants even among the towering mountain trees. Everything was in shadow on the sunless day, but the stretch of scrubby grass at the edge of the forest seemed darker still.
Adam’s heart was still a flighty thing. He had to confess to himself that until now he probably had never really believed Gansey’s supernatural explanation for the ley line, not in a way that he’d really internalized. Now, it was real. Magic existed, and Adam didn’t know how much that changed the world.
For a long moment, they all silently stared into the woods as if facing an adversary. Gansey rubbed a finger over his lip. Blue clutched her arms around herself, jaw clenched with the cold. Even Ronan seemed disquieted. Only Noah looked as he always did, his arms loose, shoulders hunched.
"I feel watched," Blue said finally.
Gansey replied, "High EMF readings can do that. Haunting cases have often come down to old, exposed wiring. High readings can make you feel watched. Unnerved. Nauseous, suspicious. It plays with the hardwiring of your brain."
Noah tipped his head far back to look at the slowly moving tops of the trees. It was the opposite of Adam’s instinct, which was to search between the trunks of the trees for movement.
"But," Adam added, "it can go the other way, too. High readings can give spirits the power they need to manifest, right? So you are more likely to be watched or haunted even as you’re feeling watched or haunted."
Gansey said, "And of course water can reverse that, too. Makes EMF and energy into positive feelings."
"Hence," Ronan chipped in, not to be outdone, "all the healing springs crap out there."
Blue rubbed her arms. "Well, the water’s in there, not out here. Are we going in?"
The trees sighed. Gansey narrowed his eyes.
"Are we invited?" Adam asked.
"I think," Noah replied, "you invite yourself."
He was the first to step in. Ronan muttered angrily, probably because Noah — Noah — had more courage than any of them. He plunged in after him.
"Wait." Gansey looked at his watch. "It’s 4:13. We need to remember that later." He followed Noah and Ronan in.
Adam’s heart pounded. Blue stretched out her hand, and he took it. Don’t crush her fingers, he thought.
And they went in.
Under the canopy, it was even dimmer than in the field. The shadows beneath fallen trees were flat black, and the trunks were painted in chocolate, charcoal, onyx.
"Noah," whispered Gansey. "Noah, where did you go?"
Noah’s voice came from behind them. "I didn’t go anywhere."
Adam spun, still clutching Blue’s hand, but there was nothing there but branches quivering in the faint breeze.
"What did you see?" Gansey asked. When Adam turned back, Noah was standing just ahead of Gansey.
Plays with the hardwiring of your brain.
"Nothing."
Ronan, a hunched black shape a few yards off, asked, "Where are we going?"
Anywhere but that tree, Adam thought. I don’t want to see that again.
Gansey poked in the dirt for signs of the stream they’d followed before. "Back the same way, I guess. Proper experiment re-creates the conditions, doesn’t it? The creek’s shallower this time, though. Harder to see. It wasn’t far, was it?"
They had only been walking along the shallow stream bed for a few minutes, however, when it became apparent that the landscape was unfamiliar. The trees were tall, thin, and spindly, all slanted as if from some great wind. Great crags of rock shoved up from the poor soil. There was no sign of the streambed, the pool, the dreaming tree.
"We’ve been misdirected," Gansey said.
His tone was at once blunt and accusatory, as if the wood itself had done it.
"Also," Blue pointed out, dropping Adam’s hand, "did you notice the trees?"
It took Adam a moment to realize what she meant. A few of the leaves that clung to the branches were still pale yellow, but now it was the yellow of fall, not spring. Most of the leaves that surrounded them were the dusky red-green of shifting autumn. The leaf litter at their feet was brown and orange, leaves killed by the early frost of a winter that shouldn’t be near.
Adam was torn by wonder and anxiety.
"Gansey," he said, "what time do you have?"
Gansey twisted his wrist. "It’s 5:27 P.M. Second hand’s still running."
In a little over an hour, they’d walked through two seasons. Adam caught Blue’s eye. She just shook her head. What else was there to do?
"Gansey!" Noah called. "There’s writing over here!"
On the other side of a rock outcropping, Noah stood by a great block of chin-height stone. Its face was sheared and cracked, striated with lines like Gansey’s ley sketches. Noah pointed at a few dozen words painted low on the rock. Whatever ink the author had used, it was worn and uneven: black in some places, deep plum in others.
"What language is that?" Blue asked.
Adam and Ronan answered as one: "Latin."
Ronan crouched swiftly by the rock.
"What does it say?" Gansey asked.
Ronan’s eyes darted back and forth as he scanned the text. Unexpectedly, he smirked. "It’s a joke. This first part. The Latin is pretty crappy."
"A joke?" Gansey echoed. "About what?"
"You wouldn’t find it funny."
The Latin was difficult, and Adam gave up trying to read it. Something about the letters, however, disturbed him. He couldn’t put his finger on it. The very shape of them …
Warily, he asked, "Why is there a joke written on a random stone?"
The mirth had run out of Ronan’s face. He touched the words, traced the letters. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell.
"Ronan?" asked Gansey.
"There’s a joke," Ronan answered finally, not looking away from the words, "in case I didn’t recognize my own handwriting."
This, Adam realized, was what had distressed him about the words. Now that it had been pointed out, it was obvious that the handwriting was Ronan’s. It was just so out of context, painted on this rock with an arcane pigment, smudged and worn by the weather.
"I don’t understand," Ronan said. He kept tracing and retracing the letters. He was badly shaken.
Gansey rallied. He couldn’t bear to see any of his number rattled. Voice firm, like he was certain, like he was lecturing on world history, he said, "We saw before how the ley line played with time. We can see it right now on my watch. It’s flexible. You haven’t been here before, Ronan, but it doesn’t mean you didn’t come here later. Minutes later. Days, years, leave yourself a message, write a joke so you’d believe it was you. Knowing there was a chance time might fold you here to find it."
Well done, Gansey, Adam thought. Gansey had crafted his explanation to steady Ronan, but Adam, too, felt more reasonable. They were explorers, scientists, anthropologists of historical magic. This was what they wanted.
Blue asked, "Then what does it say after the joke?"
"Arbores loqui latine," Ronan replied. "The trees speak Latin."
It was meaningless, a riddle perhaps, but nonetheless, Adam felt the hairs of his neck crawl. They all glanced at the trees that surrounded them; they were fenced by one thousand different shades of green fastened to a million wind-blown claws.
"And the last line?" Gansey asked. "That last word doesn’t look like Latin."
"Nomine appellant," Ronan read. "Call it by name." He paused. "Cabeswater."
Chapter 26
"Cabeswater," Gansey repeated.
There was something about the word itself that was magical. Cabeswater. Something old and enigmatic, a word that didn’t seem to belong in the New World. Gansey read the Latin on the rock again — the translation seemed obvious, once Ronan had done the heavy lifting — and then, like the others, he looked around at the surrounding trees.
What is this thing you’ve done? he asked himself. Where have you brought them?
"I vote we find water," Blue said. "To make the energy do whatever Ronan said it would do that was better. And then … I think we should say something in Latin."
"It sounds like a plan," Gansey agreed, wondering at the strangeness of this place, that such a nonsensical suggestion should seem so practical. "Should we go back the way we came, or go farther in?"
Noah said, "Farther."
Since Noah rarely expressed an opinion, his word reigned. Setting off again, they doubled back and forth across their own trail in search of water. And as they walked, the leaves fell around them, red and then brown and then gray, until the trees were naked. Frost appeared in the shadows.