Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“They are,” Blue answered Gansey, but she didn’t look away from the woman’s eyes. The woman was still smiling, smiling, as if she were waiting for Blue to break and look away. But Blue had good practice with this, thanks to Ronan. So she just kept frowning back. She wanted to ask the woman how she spoke English, and who she was, and was she okay after being in a box for quite a while, but the woman didn’t really seem like a question-answering sort.

“I’m going to help you up,” Gansey told the woman, “but if you bite me, I’m putting you back in that coffin. Do you understand?”

“Oh, you little rooster,” said the woman. “You remind me of my father. Which is too bad.”

Ronan was still staring at the woman, aghast, so Blue hurried forward to help Gansey. The woman was both warmer and realer than Blue had imagined. She was very tall; probably she’d eaten her greens. As Blue lifted her by an elbow, her enormously vertical nest of black hair tickled Blue’s face, smelling of dirt and metal. She sang a little song about gifts and kings and internal organs.

“Okay, Gansey,” Adam said warily, “what’s your plan now?”

“We take her out, obviously,” Gansey said. He turned to the woman. “Unless you’d prefer to stay.”

She rolled her head back so that her hair crushed down flat upon his shoulder and her face was inches from his. “Does the sun still exist?” the woman asked.

Gansey used her hair to remove her head from his shoulder. “As of a few hours ago.”

“Then take me! Take me!”

Adam was just shaking his head.

“I cannot wait,” Ronan said, “to hear you explain this to Malory.”

The clouds had disappeared when they emerged, replaced by a sky so bright and blue and wind-seared that they all had to duck their heads against the grit hurled through the air. The wind was so ferocious that it snapped Blue’s bangs painfully against her cheeks. A flock of crows or ravens flew high overhead, tossed and catapulted. Ronan held Chainsaw to his chest as if she were still a young raven, protecting her from the wind.

As they walked back toward the Dittley house, leaning into the gusts, rain spattered intermittently out of the cloudless sky. Adam reached to wipe it from his cheek, and Blue said, “Adam, your face —”

Adam pulled his finger away; the tip was red. Blue held out her hand to catch another stray drop. Red.

“Blood,” Ronan said, sounding factual rather than concerned.

Blue shuddered. “Whose?”

Gansey studied a red spatter on the shoulder of his jacket, lips parted in astonishment.

“Gansey,” Adam called, pointing. “Look.”

They stopped in the middle of the beaten-down grass to gaze into the bright day sky. On the horizon, something glinted furiously, like the sun off a faraway plane. Blue shielded her eyes and saw that the object had a fiery tail. She couldn’t quite imagine what it would be, so visible in this bright daytime.

“A plane crash?” she asked.

“A comet,” Ronan said with certainty.

“A comet?” echoed Adam.

Blue was more afraid now than when they’d been in possible danger in the cave. What were they doing?

“It starts!” the woman shouted. “It starts again! Round and round and round!”

She twirled in the field, her hands still bound behind her back. In the sunlight, the woman’s regal beauty was more apparent. She had a rather large nose that was lovely in shape, sloping cheeks and forehead, dark quizzical eyebrows, and of course that impossibly tall hair snarling out above her already tall body. Her purple-red robe was like a smear of paint in the field.

Gansey watched the heavenly body burn a slow trail across the blue. He said, “Signs and portents. A comet was seen in 1402, when Glendower was beginning to rise.”

“Ha!” shouted the woman. “Rise, rise, rise! Plenty of blood to be had then, too, plenty of blood to be had by all!”

This last bit had fallen into song once more.

Adam grabbed the woman’s shoulder, stopping her from spinning. She rolled her body away from his hand like a drunk dancer and then fixed him with a wild-eyed gaze.

“You,” she said, “are my least favorite. You remind me of both a man and a dog that I never liked.”

“Noted,” he replied. “Do we get a favor? For waking you?”

Of course, Blue thought stupidly. Of course we should have thought to ask that at once. It was all sleepers who supposedly granted a favor in the legends, not just Glendower. It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t have occurred to all of them, but everything that had seemed obvious in theory was muddy and loud and frightening in practice.

The woman shrieked like the crows overhead, and then she shrieked again, and then Blue realized it was laughter. “A favor! For waking me? Little mongrel, I never slept.”

Adam stared at her, raw, unmoving. He had let a single word — mongrel — slice down to his spine.

Gansey cut in, fearsomely polite. “We’ve been nothing but kind to you. His name is Adam Parrish, and that’s what you can call him.”

She bowed cartoonishly to Gansey, stumbling to a knee with her hands still tied.

“Forgive me,” she sneered, “my lord.”

He pursed his lips, dismissive of the gesture. “What do you mean that you didn’t sleep?”

“Go to sleep, my little daughter,” said the woman sweetly. “Dream of war. Only I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’ve always been a restless sleeper!” She cast a dramatic pose, legs spread to balance herself. A drop of blood had peppered her cheek like a tear. In a high-pitched voice, she called, “Help! Help! I’m not asleep! Come back! Come back!” Lower: “Did you hear something? Only the sound of my blood throbbing in my manhood! Let’s go!”

Ronan’s lip curled.

Blue was pretty sure she’d heard that sound in the halls of her high school. She asked, “Do you mean to say you’ve been awake for six hundred years?”

She chanted, “Give or take two hundred.”

“No wonder she’s mad as a cow’s tit,” Ronan said.

“Ronan,” Gansey started, but then he clearly couldn’t think of a good rebuke. “Let’s go.”

Inside the house, Jesse Dittley peered at the woman. She was nearly as tall as he was. “WHAT’S THIS?”

“Your curse,” Gansey replied.

Jesse looked dubious. He asked her, “NOW TELL ME THIS: DID YOU EVER MAKE MY WALLS WEEP?”