Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Blue, too, was sullenly quiet, with bags under her eyes to match Gansey’s. Last night his coat collar had still been scented with her hair; now, he kept turning his head in hopes of catching it, but like everything else in the wretched day, it had gone muted and dusty.

At the Dittley farm, Malory, the Dog, and Jesse settled in the house (Malory, unhopeful: “I don’t suppose you have any tea?” Jesse: “DO YOU WANT EARL GREY OR DARJEELING?” Malory: “Oh, sweet heavens!”) and the teens trekked across the damp field to the cave.

Adam asked, “Are you really bringing that bird into a cave?”

“Yes, Parrish,” Ronan replied, “I believe I am.”

There was no way to ask Blue about the night before.

He was too dull-edged to analyze it anymore. He just wanted to know. Were they still fighting?

Gansey remained in a bad mood as they applied their caving equipment and checked and double-checked their flashlights. Blue had acquired a used set of coveralls from somewhere and the sheer effort of not looking at her in them was taking what little concentration he could dredge up.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to be crammed in between school events and Congressional tasks. It shouldn’t have been a murky fall day, too humid for the season. It should have been a day where he had slept enough to properly feel things. It wasn’t supposed to be any of the things that it was, and instead, it was all of them.

This was not, he thought as they descended, even how the cavern was supposed to look. Of course Glendower was underground — of course Gansey had known that he would have to be buried — but somehow he had imagined it lighter. This was just a hole in the ground like the rest. Dirt walls pressing in close, clawed and chiseled out when they grew too narrow to admit a coffin. A rabbit hole, down and down.

This was not how it had looked in his vision, back when he’d stood in Cabeswater’s vision tree. But perhaps that hadn’t been the truth.

Here was the truth. They were looking right at it.

“Stop it, Lynch,” Adam said. He was at the back of the line; Ronan was right in front of him.

“Stop what?”

“Oh, come on.”

Ronan didn’t reply; they kept walking. They had only made it a few more yards, though, when Adam said, “Ronan, come on!”

They came to a slow and stuttering halt. Adam had stopped, and that had jerked Ronan to a stop, which had stopped Blue, and then, finally, Gansey. Chainsaw flapped up, wings grazing the close cavern walls. She came to rest on Ronan’s shoulder again, her head pitched low and wary. She frantically cleaned her beak on his shirt.

“What?” Ronan demanded, flicking thumb and finger in the raven’s direction.

“Singing,” Adam said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

Adam had his fingers pressed against one of his ears. “I know now — I know it’s not you.”

“You think?”

“No,” Adam said, voice thin. “I know it’s not you because I’m hearing it in my deaf ear.”

A little chill scurried across Gansey’s skin.

“What is it singing?” Blue asked.

Chainsaw’s beak parted. In a trilling, sideways little voice completely unlike her coarse raven voice, she sang, “All maidens young and fair, listen to your fathers —”

“Stop that,” Ronan shouted. Not to Chainsaw, but to the cave.

But this was not Cabeswater, and whatever it was did not attend to Ronan Lynch.

Chainsaw kept singing — a feat made more terrible because she never closed her beak. It was as if she was merely a speaker for some sound inside herself. “The men of all his land, they listened to their fathers —”

Ronan shouted again, “Whoever you are, stop that! She’s mine.”

Chainsaw broke off to laugh.

It was a high, cunning laugh, as much a song as the song.

“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, to hide the sound of every hair on his body standing up and both of his testicles retreating.

“Chainsaw,” Ronan snapped.

Her attention darted to him. She peered at him, head cocked, something unfamiliar and intense about her. She had gotten large, her inked feathers ruffled round her throat, her beak savage and expressive. Right then, it was impossible to forget that she was actually a dream creature, not a true raven, and that the workings of her mind were the same mysterious stuff of Ronan Lynch, or of Cabeswater. For a dreadful second, too fast for Gansey to say anything, he thought she was about to stab at Ronan with that fierce beak of hers.

But she merely clicked her beak, and then she took flight down the passage ahead of them.

“Chainsaw!” Ronan called, but she disappeared into the black. “Damn it. Untie me.”

“No,” Adam and Blue said at once.

“No,” agreed Gansey, firmer. “I don’t even know if we should keep going. I’m not interested in feeding ourselves to a cave.”

Chainsaw’s defection felt wrong, too. Turned sideways, somehow, or inside out. Everything seemed unpredictable — which was in itself strange, because it had to mean that everything to this point had been predictable. No — inevitable.

Now it felt like anything could happen.

Ronan’s gaze was still focused down the dark passage, his eyes searching for Chainsaw and not finding her. He sneered, “You can stay if you’re too afraid.”

Gansey knew Ronan too well to let the barb sting. “It’s not myself I’m afraid for, Lynch. Reel it in.”

“I think it’s just trying to frighten us,” Blue pointed out, quite sensibly. “If it really wanted to hurt us, it could have.”

He thought of Chainsaw’s beak, poised so close to Ronan’s eye.

“Adam?” Gansey called down to the end of the line. “Verdict?”

Adam was quiet as he weighed the options. His face was strange and delicate in the sharp light of Gansey’s head beam. Swiftly, and without explanation, he reached out to touch the cavern wall. Although he was not a dream thing, he was now one of Cabeswater’s things, and it was hard not to see it in the way his fingers spidered across the wall and in the blackness of his eyes as they gazed at nothing.

Blue said, “Is he also …”

Possessed.

None of them wanted to say it.

Ronan lifted a finger to his lips.

Adam seemed to listen to the walls — who is this person, is he still your friend, what did he give to Cabeswater, what does he become, why does terror grow so much better away from the sun — and then he said, cautiously, “I vote we go on. I think the frightening is a side effect, not the intention. I think Chainsaw is meant to lure us in.”