Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“I’m at work. Two hours from now, I’m going to my next job for another four hours. If you’re trying to convince me that I don’t need Aglionby after I have killed myself over it for a year, you’re wasting your breath. Be a loser if you want to, but don’t make me part of it to make yourself feel better.”

Ronan’s expression was cool over the top of the Pontiac. “Well,” he said, “fuck you, Parrish.”

Adam just looked at him witheringly. “Do your homework.”

“Whatever. I’m getting out of here.”

By the time Adam had leaned to get a rag to get the grease out of his ear, the other boy had gone. It was as if he had taken all of the noise of the garage with him; the wind had died down, so the leaves no longer rattled, and the radio’s tuning had shifted so that the station was ever so slightly fuzzy. It felt safer, but also lonelier.

Later, Adam walked out through the cool, damp night to his small, shitty car. As he sank into the driver’s seat, he found something already sitting on the seat.

He retrieved the object and held it up under the feeble interior cab light. It was a small white plastic container. Adam twisted off the lid. Inside was a colorless lotion that smelled of mist and moss. Replacing the lid with a frown, he turned the container over, looking for more identifying features. On the bottom, Ronan’s handwriting labeled it merely: manibus.

For your hands.

16

I mean this in the kindest possible way,” Malory said, reclined in Gansey’s desk chair, “but you cannot make tea for love or money.”

The night outside the wall of windows was black and damp; the lights of Henrietta seemed to move as the dark trees blew back and forth before them. Gansey sat on the floor beside his model of town, working slowly at it. He hadn’t had time to add anything new; instead he’d snatched minutes here and there to repair the damage incurred that summer. It was distinctly less satisfying to restore something to what it had been than to grow it.

“I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong,” Gansey admitted. “It seems like a straightforward process.”

“If I wasn’t terrified to spend time in that bathroom you call a kitchen, I would advise you,” Malory said. “But I’m afraid that one day I will enter that room and never come out.”

Gansey fixed a tiny cardboard staircase with a tube of glue and looked up to find the Dog watching him with narrow eyes. The Dog wasn’t wrong; he’d placed the stairs a little crookedly. Gansey straightened them.

“Better?” he asked.

“Don’t mind him,” Malory replied. “He’s highly strung. I’m bemused, Gansey, by the lack of thought you’ve put into the action of sending Glendower to sleep for six hundred years.”

“I’ve put thought into it,” Gansey said. “Well. Conjecture. I have no way of proving or disproving theories. And even though it’s interesting, it’s ultimately irrelevant.”

“I disagree, from the point of view of a scholar, as should you.”

“Oh, should I?”

“By your own assumption, Glendower traveled here via ley line. A perfectly straight line across the sea, not an easy thing to accomplish. Quite a lot of fuss to undergo to hide a prince. Why not hide him on a Welsh line?”

“The English would not have rested until they found him,” Gansey said. “Wales is too small for a secret like that.”

“Is it? You and I walked Wales. Tell me there are not places in those mountains that would have hid him.”

Gansey could not.

“So why sail three thousand miles on a one-way trip to a new world where no one can make a decent cup of tea?” Malory trundled to the pool table maps. As Gansey joined him, he trailed a finger across an overflowing sea, from Wales to tiny Henrietta. “Why would one undertake the nearly impossible task of sailing a perfectly straight line across this sea?”

Gansey said nothing. This map was unmarked, but he could not unsee all of the places he had been on it. Outside, wind gusted abruptly, plastering damp, dead leaves against the windowpanes.

“The ley lines, the corpse roads, the death roads, Doodwegen if you believe the Dutch, but who does, this is how we used to carry our dead,” Malory said. “Coffin-bearers traveled along the funeral roads in order to keep the souls intact. To take a crooked path was to unseat the soul and create a haunting, or worse. So when they traveled in a straight line with Glendower, it was because he was to be handled like the dead.”

“So he was already sleeping when they left,” Gansey said, although now sleeping seemed like too light a word for it. He had a flash of memory, though it was not a true memory; it was a vision he’d had in Cabeswater. Glendower supine in his coffin, arms folded over his chest, sword by one hand, cup by the other. Gansey, hand hovering over the helmet, afraid and ecstatic to finally look into the face of his king after six hundred years. “They were keeping his soul with his body.”

“Precisely. And now that I am here, now that I have seen your line — I believe they sailed all this way because they were looking for this place.” Malory tapped on the map.

“Virginia?”

“Cabeswater.”

The word hung in the room.

“If not Cabeswater itself, then a place like it,” Malory continued. “They may have merely followed energy readings until they could find a place with enough force to maintain a soul in stasis for hundreds of years. Or at least for longer than his attendants thought they themselves would live.”

Gansey considered all of this. “The psychics have said there are three sleepers. Not just Glendower, but two others. I suppose what you’re saying would explain why there might be others here, too. Not necessarily because no one has tried to put anyone else to sleep elsewhere, but because it has failed anywhere but here.”

This inspired a shivery, unpleasant thought, of imagining you were being sent to sleep and instead being sent off to a trusting, accidental death.

The two of them gazed at the map for several minutes. Then Malory said, “I’m off to bed. Are we exploring tomorrow, or may I drive to that other Virginia again for some more cartography?”

“Other —? West. West Virginia. I think we should be able to come with you after class.”

“Excellent.”

Malory left his substandard cup of tea on the pool table and retired with the Dog.

Gansey stood unmoving in the warehouse after the door had shut. He stood so long that he felt disoriented; he could have been standing a minute, he could have been standing an hour. It could be now, it could be a year ago. He was as much a part of this room as his telescope and his stacks of books. Unchanging. Unable to change.