Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Blue was scandalized. “His own daughter?”

“Illegitimate,” Gansey said, but he was unhappy as he did. “You heard her. As punishment for something. It is all so distasteful. I am starving. Where did Par — Adam and Ronan go?”

“To get supplies for Gwenllian.”

He looked at his enormous and handsome watch with an enormous and puzzled frown. “Has it been long?”

She made a face. “Ish?”

“What do we do now?” Gansey asked.

From the other room, Calla bellowed, “GO BUY US PIZZA. WITH EXTRA CHEESE, RICHIE RICH.”

Blue said, “I think she’s starting to like you.”

31

Ronan drove back to St. Agnes. Adam thought he meant to go to Adam’s apartment above the church office, but when they got out at the street, Ronan veered off and headed to the main entrance of the church itself.

Although Adam lived above the church, he had not been inside it since he’d moved into his apartment. The Parrishes had never been churchgoers, and although Adam himself suspected there might be a God, he also suspected it didn’t matter.

“Lynch,” he said as Ronan opened the door to the dusky sanctuary. “I thought we were going to talk.”

Ronan dipped his fingers into the holy water and touched his forehead. “It’s empty.”

But the church didn’t feel empty. It was claustrophobic with the scent of incense, vases of foreign lilies, reams of white cloth, the broken gaze of a sorrowing Christ. It bled with stories Adam didn’t know, rituals he would never do, connections he would never share. It was dense with a humming sort of history that made him feel light-headed.

Ronan hit Adam’s arm with the back of his hand. “Come on.”

He walked along the back of the dim church and opened a door to a steep staircase. At the top, Adam found himself on a hidden balcony populated by two pews and a pipe organ. A statue of Mary — probably Mary? — held its hands out to him, but that was because she didn’t know him. Then again, she entreated Ronan, too, and she probably did know him. A few small candles burned at her feet.

“The choir sits up here,” Ronan said, sitting at the organ. Without warning, he played a terrifically loud and shockingly sonorous fragment.

“Ronan!” hissed Adam. He looked at Mary, but she didn’t seem bothered.

“I told you. No one’s here.” When Ronan saw that Adam still did not believe, he explained, “It’s confession day up in Woodville, and they share our priest. This is when Matthew used to have his organ lessons because no one would be around to care how bad he sucked.”

Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father’s world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn’t known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.

The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he’d been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him.

“So, Greenmantle,” he said, and Ronan looked away.

“Fucker. Yeah.”

“I looked up all the public stuff that first night.” It would have been easy enough for Ronan to do it himself, but perhaps he had known that Adam would like the mind-occupying puzzle of it. “Double PhD, home in Boston, three speeding tickets in the last eighteen months, blah blah blah.”

“What about the spider-in-web stuff?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Adam replied. It had taken him only a little bit of time to get the readily available version of Colin Greenmantle’s life story. And only a little bit more time to realize that it wasn’t really the life story he needed. He didn’t need to undo the web — probably couldn’t undo the web. He needed to spin a new web.

“Of course it matters. It’s all that matters.”

“No, Ronan, look — come here.”

Adam began to write in the dust on the pew beside him. Ronan joined him, crouching to read it.

“What’s that?”

“The things we would put into place,” Adam said. He’d worked it all out in his head. Though it would have been easier to write it down, he’d thought better of it. Better to have no paper trail or electronic record. Only Cabeswater could hack into the record of Adam’s mind. “This is all of the bits of evidence you’d need to dream and how we’d need to bury them.”

Some of the things needed to be literally buried. The plan was tidy in conception but not in execution; it was filthy business framing someone, and murders required bodies. Or at least parts of bodies.

“It looks like a lot,” Adam admitted, because it did, once he had written it all down in the dust. “I guess it kind of is. But it’s mostly small things.”

Ronan finished reading Adam’s plan. He had his face slightly turned away from the horror of it, just as he had turned his face away from his dream object. He said, “But — this isn’t what happened. This isn’t what Greenmantle did.”

Ronan didn’t have to say it: This is a lie.

Adam should have known this would be a problem for him. He struggled to explain. “I know it’s not. But it’s too hard to frame him for having your father killed. It’s too subtle and it has too many pieces I don’t know. He could refute one of our pieces with a real piece, or something real, like the real timeline of what he actually did, could ruin something we’d come up with. But if I invent the crime, I can control all the pieces.”

Ronan just stared at him.

“Look, and it has to be something really horrible, something he wouldn’t want to go to prison for,” Adam said. Now he was feeling a little dirty; he couldn’t tell if Ronan’s visible distaste was just from the nature of the crime Adam had suggested, or from Adam being able to contemplate such a crime at all. But he persisted, because it was too late to back out now. “We want him too threatened to even think about opening his mouth or countering. If he was even accused of this, he’d be ruined, and he’ll know that. And if he did get nailed for it, people who commit crimes against children are treated badly in jail, and he’ll know that, too.”

Adam could see the two sides of Ronan warring. Could see, unbelievably, that the lie was going to lose.