Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Did you ever consider,” Gansey says, and no, Ronan has almost certainly never considered whatever it is that Gansey is about to tell him that he should have considered. “Had you ever considered, that one of your forms should be something useful?”

It had been so overcast all day that it had never felt like the sun had actually risen, so now it feels less like it’s setting, and more fading away, casting the woods into creeping darkness. It grows from the shadows of the trees, and between the rocks, stretching across the path in front of him and Gansey. 

Here at the bottom of this dry river valley, Ronan feels exposed. The trees are getting thicker, the sides of the valley steeper and the craggy rocks of the valley sides hide caves, with any number of bandits, thieves, or worse, hiding within. He and Gansey are primed for ambush, even without the encroaching darkness. They may as well have archer’s targets hanging from their backs.

“Something useful?” Ronan’s barely paying attention. A tree branch cracks up and to the left, and Ronan’s head snaps in the direction of the noise.

“Yes, perhaps a pack horse. Is it too late for you to learn any more forms?” Gansey sounds unaware of the threats that could be gathering, and Ronan would be worried but he can see Gansey has his hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword.

“Yes. If you wanted a pack horse, you could’ve bought one in Ironbridge.” Ronan wants a better view of the woods, to see how much further they have to go. The trees sway ominously above them, and the wind through the bare branches sounds like whispering. The raven flaps its wings inside him, eager to be free.

“A pack horse wouldn’t have made it up that waterfall back there, and –” Gansey cuts himself off as Ronan shifts. 

The raven is his favourite form. He feels more like himself here than he does anywhere else, wheeling high into the sky. He sees Gansey staring up at him, shaking his head as he watches Ronan fly high above the trees. His pack fell to the ground when he shifted, and Gansey sits down on it. 

Ahead, the valley continues its course upwards, cleaving the ragged land in two. The trees fall away as the ground rises, and a rocky crag emerges from the top of the valley. It’s the beginning of a great ridge that scars the land as far as Ronan can see. He lands on the crag, talons scraping the rock and wind ruffling his feathers.

These lands are strange to him. The further north they travel, the further from the land that he and Gansey call home, the more the otherness speaks to him. The wind whispers to him at night and his nightmares here are strange, always of forests, always of something bigger than himself, watching through the trees. 

Far in the distance, the sun has dropped beneath the thick cloud, and it burns on the horizon. If Ronan had ever heeded anything a soothsayer had told him, he would take the blazing red as a warning, a warning of spilt blood in the night. But the warnings of witches are of little consequence to him.

He hears a shout in the distance, back down in the valley. Gansey. Ronan takes off. 

He soars down the valley, as fast as the cold wind will carry him and lands in a tree, just a stone’s throw from where Gansey is attempting to argue with a group of bandits. They don’t look much in the mood for communication though. They all have their swords drawn.

Ronan shifts back to his human form. No one notices him shift, but they notice when he bursts through the trees. He’s unarmed, stupidly so, but the only thought in his head is protecting Gansey, sticking himself between Gansey and the sharp end of any sword that might threaten him. 

It's immediate chaos. What had been a mildly threatening conversation turns instantly into a melee. Ronan manages to wrestle a sword from one of the men, earning a solid punch to the face as he does. The sword is old, brittle iron chipped in many places, and unbalanced, but Ronan makes it work. It’s close quarters, in the valley, so the fight is more fists and daggers, but it suits Ronan just fine. His new sword makes a better shield against quick daggers than it ever did a sword.

“Gansey!” Ronan shouts, when he sees a flash of brown hair and green doublet. “Run, you dumb fuck!”

There’s no answer, and when Ronan spins to where he’d last seen Gansey, it’s with horror that he sees his body lying prone on the ground. There’s a lump, blooming to a bruise on his forehead, but Ronan sees his chest slowly rise and fall. He spends too long trying to check Gansey is okay, and so when the pommel of a sword strikes him across the head, it comes as a shock. Everything goes abruptly black.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” the mage says, calm, intense. His voice is the first thing Ronan hears when he comes to. It’s fully dark now, but through his hazy vision and the light from a distant fire, he can see two bandits walking the mage towards Ronan. He’s young, probably no older than Ronan and Gansey, and he’s dressed in the rough spun clothes of a peasant. Ronan doubts that their captors have even noticed the boy is a mage, but Ronan can sense the magic coming off of him in waves.

The bandit he’s threatening, just laughs. The mage’s hands are tied behind his back, and the bandit dumps him on the ground near where Ronan is tied roughly to a post. His magic collides with Ronan’s and bounces off. The wolf inside him snarls, and the raven flaps her wings. The mage must be aware of Ronan too, but he doesn’t look at him.

“Well, this is a new experience isn’t it?” Gansey says. He’s just come around too, dark bruise blooming on his forehead. He’s smiling a little though; Ronan hates his positive outlook. As soon as their captors realise they’ve got an Anglorian prince and a formwalker in their possession, things are going to look a lot less exciting, very quickly.

“Shut up, Gansey,” Ronan says. “Just keep quiet, keep your head down before they find out who you are.”

Worry clouds Gansey’s face. “You think that they’ll—”

“Yes, almost certainly. This is not a thrilling new experience for your writing. This is a situation we need to get out of as quickly as possible.”

Ronan assesses the camp. They’ve been dragged back down the valley, and the camp has been erected at the mouth of it, just on the edge of the trees. Twelve bandits are visible from where Ronan kneels on the ground, but the voices on the other side of the camp, and the number of rudimentary tents suggest more.

If he were alone, Ronan could simply shift, and fly away. But he’s not. Gansey slumps against the post he’s bound too. The bruise doesn’t look too bad, but Ronan would rather be in a position to have a proper look at it as soon as possible. Maybe he can pay this mage to heal Gansey.

The mage is kneeling straight up, and he’s looking around like he’s assessing the camp too. He doesn’t look like any other mage Ronan has met before. He doesn’t have that haughty air, that stuck-up presence that says I studied my craft, and it makes me better than you. That entitlement that all mages have from whatever they put in the soup at the Academy.

No, this boy, this young man, he looks wild. Something about him reminds Ronan of the stories his father had told him as a child, of the hidden folk, who live in the trees, or of the tiny creatures who live in the bogs and lure tired travellers to their deaths. No, that’s not right. Ronan watches the way the firelight catches on the boy’s high cheekbones, the way his steady eyes blaze as they flicker around the camp. Ronan thinks of the stories of sailors lured to their deaths by beautiful sirens, of nymphs luring unsuspecting men into malicious traps. Yes, that’s what this mage reminds him of.

Ronan wonders what he’s doing here. It has to be deliberate. The blood red sunset flashes unbidden in his memory.

Ronan’s been taught to be cautious about striking deals with a mage. The things he’s heard about how they use formwalkers are not just children’s bedtime stories. But gut instincts and fairy-tale warnings aside, Ronan’s going to need his help, if he wants to get himself, and, more importantly, Gansey, out of here alive.

“Hey. Mage,” he says, whispering sharply.

The boy doesn’t turn to look at him, but he says, “Formwalker.”

“Yeah, hi. You have an escape plan?”

“Not one with room for passengers. I take it you do too?” He still hasn’t looked at Ronan.

“Not one with room for passengers,” Ronan parrots, nodding towards where Gansey has slumped into sleep against the post. 

“So leave him,” the mage says, finally looking around at the two of them. His eyes are dark blue, and Ronan thinks of tales of the deep ocean, unknown monsters lurking beneath tiny, vulnerable ships.

“I can’t. I swore an oath.”

The mage huffs. “That was foolish.”

Ronan glares at him. “And I suppose you owe fealty to no one but yourself?”

The corner of the mage’s mouth twitches. “You want my help?”

“Not really.”

“But you need it.”

Ronan doesn’t answer. One of the bandits from the fire is walking back towards them. He’s holding a long blade lazily in his hand. It’s wicked sharp, with a point like a needle. He stops in front of the mage. 

“Something strange about you, boy,” the bandit says. Ronan assumes from his posture, his armour, and his arrogant sneer that he’s in charge. “My men found some curious things in your bag.”

“Careful,” the mage says. His eyes are fixed on the knife, but he smirks like he’s pleased, not afraid.

The bandit lifts the blade, the point of it touches the mage’s face, right at the highest point of his cheekbone.

“You know what this is?”

“Scariat knife.” It’s meaningless to Ronan, but the mage looks happier than most people would with a knife to their face. “Watch where you stick that thing.”

The bandit twitches his hand, and the blade slices the mage’s cheek. A drop of scarlet blood runs down his face. The cut can’t have been deep, but the mage grunts like it was, like he wasn’t expecting it to be. Ronan feels his magic flicker and fade a little.

It's the bandit captain’s turn to smirk now, and he does, dark and satisfied. He uses the knife to draw a circle in the dirt around the mage. Ronan can’t feel his magic at all now. Curiosity has him pushing the boundaries of his own, reaching for it, but he can only feel the wall drawn by the knife.

The mage is still kneeling up though, and his glare hardens even more, pleased determination crystallising on his gaunt face as the bandit captain turns and swaggers away.

“What was that?” Ronan asks. He’s never seen a weapon that could take someone’s magic like that.

The mage doesn’t reply. “What have you got then?” he asks, instead.

Ronan pauses, before he answers. Whatever the bandit captain did, it changed the mage’s plan. Ronan’s plan hasn’t changed. If he’s going to get himself and Gansey out of here, he needs this boy’s help. He starts listing his forms, “Raven, snake, wolf—”

“That one. Shift when I signal.”

Ronan nods. “Don’t make me regret this.”

The mage looks at him, full on, blue eyes blazing, and says, “Don’t make me regret this.”

He closes his eyes again, and he doesn’t move. Ronan waits. The wolf paces inside him, ready. He wonders what they’re waiting for.

The ground they’d been knelt on was hard, packed dust, bare of all life, earlier, but now Ronan sees that there are tiny tufts of grass, scattered across it. As he watches, another blade of grass pushes through the packed dirt, closer and closer to the circle around the mage.

“Wake your friend,” the mage says.

Ronan kicks out at him. “Gansey.”

Gansey squints at him. He looks confused about where they are; maybe that knock on his head was worse than it looked.

“What is it?”

“We’re getting out of here.” He turns back to the mage, who has finally opened his eyes. Little patches of grass have broken through the circle, stretching towards him like they’re reaching for him. “You better get him out, mage.”

“My magic is weakened. I need you to cause a distraction.”

“Sure.”

“Now.”

Ronan shifts. He lets his true self drop back, lets the wolf surge forward. His body burns, like leaping through a fire, searing pain, then gone in a second.

The ropes that had bound Ronan’s human form, snap like strings around the wolf. The bandits at the fire shout and scream, and the wolf lunges for them.

He tastes blood, he tastes fear and panic, can smell it on the air. Deep inside the wolf, Ronan hopes that Gansey has already been untied and released by the mage, that he doesn’t have to be here to see Ronan tear through the camp. He has no control over his body anymore, the wolf was confined for so long, and now he’s been set free. He’s a wild animal only.

The bandits fight him, but his jaws are stronger than the brittle steel of their swords. The bandits surround him, but there’s no containing him. Hot blood covers his claws, fills his mouth.

Around the camp, fire is spreading, consuming the tents, the posts where they’d been tied, the wagon of supplies. The fire moves like a living thing, and Ronan recognises mage-controlled fire when he sees it. In his human form, he’d be paralysed by the sight, by the memories it would evoke, but the wolf doesn’t care. Anger is all it knows.

There’s a sudden jolt of pain. Screaming through his left flank. The wolf spins, snapping his jaws towards the source of the pain. The knife, the knife with the needle-point, is sticking sickly out of his side. His animal heart races. Ronan feels lost inside himself. The knife is letting blood, but it’s draining something else too, something essential to who he is, to his shifting, his magic.

The wolf collapses to the ground. Ronan tries to shift back. His vision is coloured red. The bandit captain is stood over him, and he laughs, says something that Ronan can’t make out. He tries to shift again, but the knife is buried deep, and its poison spreads, loosening vital connections.

His vision is going black. Darkness grows at the edges, creeping closer with every frantic beat of his heart. The wolf howls in pain. Above him though, the bandit captain is no longer laughing. He’s hacking at vines, twisting roots, and thorny branches that have him surrounded. The mage controls these too, and he’s there suddenly, one hand reaching towards the captain, twisting the vines around him until he’s consumed. The other hand reaches for Ronan, draws the knife from his wound. Ronan feels the knife leave him, feels the rush of blood that follows. But he also feels his magic again, desperately surging inside him. It’s too late though; the blackness takes over, and every form of Ronan Lynch drops away.

Gansey’s covered in ash. It’s all over his good doublet, and it’s going to take a lot of water to wash it from his hair. He doesn’t care though, really. What he cares about right now is figuring out where he is, where Ronan is, and how he ended up here, instead of in the middle of that burning camp.

He remembers Ronan shifting. The wolf leaping away in a great, grey arc from where his friend had been a moment ago. And he remembers the mage.

The mage. The fire, the way he’d controlled it, so unlike anything Gansey has ever seen before. And the vines, the roots of the trees and the way they’d bent to his whims. He needs to find his journal, write down as much as he can remember. He needs to find Ronan.

Gansey stumbles through the thicket of trees, back towards where he can see smoke rising. The sun is peering over the horizon in the distance, and everything is grey. It feels impossible for it to be morning already. The nights are short this far north but Gansey must have been asleep in the trees for hours. He bursts out of the woods and into the open, scaring a small bird from the bush he has to trip through. 

The camp where he’d been held captive the night before is a smoking ruin in the open. He runs down the hill towards it, wondering if there will be some sign of Ronan, or of the mage amongst the mess.

There is. There’s more than a sign. Gansey pauses, to understand what he sees. The mage is knelt in the middle of the camp and Ronan is… Ronan’s still in his wolf form. 

“No,” Gansey breathes, and he’s running again before he’s even given his feet the order. The mage looks up, wary as he approaches, but he relaxes when he sees it’s Gansey. “Ronan! What’s happened? Why hasn’t he shifted?”

“He can’t.” The mage doesn’t look up from where he’s working on the deep wound on Ronan’s flank. His silver fur is matted with blood, and it runs deep red across his body, gore mixing with the strange dark markings that cover the back of the wolf.

Gansey’s heart is threatening to smash through his ribs. “Why not? Why can’t you use magic to heal him?”

“He was stabbed with a Scariat knife.” The mage presses a wad of herbs into the wound, and Ronan shudders and growls. Gansey kneels by Ronan, and carefully lifts his head, so it rests in his lap.

“What is that?” Gansey asks. He rummages in his pockets for the journal he keeps close to him. He leafs through the pages until he finds the notes he has written on magical weapons. 

The mage is looking at him, wary again. “It’s a cursed weapon. I don’t know where they come from, out west maybe. But they drain magic as well as blood.”

“Will Ronan be okay?” Gansey asks. He watches the mage take a green glass bottle from his back. He uncorks it and deftly tips the contents onto a rag.

“He’ll live.” His tone is harsh, but Gansey is reassured anyway. The mage daubs the wound with the rag. “I’ve applied a salve to the wound. When he wakes, he’ll be able to shift, but if he does you have to make sure it’s to a form that’s big enough to handle that wound. If he shifts to a raven, he’ll die.”

With that, the mage turns away, packing up his things. Gansey panics, he has so many questions.

“Wait, wait!” he says. The mage pauses halfway to standing. He raises an eyebrow, expectant. Gansey means to ask more about what happened to Ronan, but what comes out instead is, “How much do you know about legendary kings of the continent?”

It’s the question that’s the most familiar to him, when meeting someone new, especially someone so clearly at home in this wild country.

“Some. Not a lot,” the mage says.

“Oh! I would have thought they would teach you about them at the Academy.”

The mage frowns, his features are at home in the expression. “I didn’t go to the Academy.”

Gansey tries to stop the shock crossing his face. “But you’re so powerful!” he says, looking around the destroyed camp, thinking of the way the fire had built and then died so quickly. And the trees.

A tiny smile flickers at the corner of the mage’s mouth. “Tell me about them then,” he says, ignoring Gansey’s compliment.

“There’s one specific one. Glendower. Have you heard of him?”

The mage nods but doesn’t offer anything else.

“Well, the legend goes that he was the first king to cross the Falchion River, long before any bridges were built. He wanted to map the northlands, you see, to create the first true map of the continent. All the others used to stop at the Falchion.”

“What happened to him?” The mage sounds like he already knows the answer, but Gansey presses on with the story.

“He made it over the Falchion, of course. There are records of him that travelling all over this part of the continent. Even up this very valley!” Gansey looks around them excitedly. He knows the way Glendower went, and all day yesterday he felt as though he were walking a familiar path. The trees and rocks were recognisable, as though Gansey had seen them in a dream.

He continues the story. “But the legends all say that he disappeared. He went into a forest with a small company of his men and was never seen again. But then here’s where it gets especially interesting. Two hundred years after Glendower’s disappearance, six of his men came stumbling out of the forest and crossed back over the Falchion. When they were asked where the King and the rest of the men were, the only answer they could give was that they were sleeping.”

“Good story,” the mage comments.

“But it isn’t just a story! The legend crops up in many places across the continent, and it’s always got different variations. Some stories say he’s sleeping, but others say he found a spring of the waters of eternal life, but it made him forget what it was to be a man. Some stories say he’s still wandering the forest. But they all have the same ending. They all say that whoever finds Glendower’s resting place, and wakes him from his slumber, or brings him from the forest, will earn a favour from him, and the favour of the forest he slumbers within.”

The mage smirks, as if Gansey has said something funny. “And that’s why you’re here?”

“Well, mostly. I’ve been travelling all over the continent, collecting the stories about Glendower.” He doesn’t tell the mage that he’s yet to hear a story that he doesn’t know the ending to. “And now I’ve come north, across the Falchion, to retrace his path. Find that forest. Have you heard of it? Cabeswater, I think they call it.”

The mildly amused expression drops off the mage’s face. “I have. Stay away from it.”

Gansey grins and nods. “A lot of people here have told me that.” 

“You should heed them.” The mage stands. He picks his bag off the ground and swings it across his shoulder. As he turns, Gansey notices the knife strapped to his belt. It must be the cursed one, the one that had injured Ronan.

“You’re keeping that knife?” he asks.

“Of course.” The mage starts to walk away. As he leaves, Ronan twitches and growls again. His front foot paws at the ground.

“Wait! You saved his life! At least let me pay you.”

“I did. And I don’t want payment. I want you to forget you ever met me.” The mage keeps walking.

“But…there could be a covenant! That amount of magic… It could be important! We don’t even know your name!” Gansey shouts after him. He curses himself internally; he’s a fool for letting his own excitement about Glendower get in the way of looking out for Ronan. A covenant with this mage could alter the course of Ronan’s life forever.

The mage stops at that. He turns back to Gansey and he looks enraged. Gansey wraps his arms protectively over Ronan. In theory, Gansey knows he cannot harm Ronan, not now, but equally, Gansey doesn’t trust whatever kind of magic this boy knows. It’s not like any magic he’s seen before.

“It won't be important,” the mage insists, spitting the words.

Gansey swallows. He knows too much about destiny: running from his own, chasing his own. He’s not about to lecture this wild boy. “At least tell me your name?”

The mage considers him for a second, eyes narrowed. “Adam Parrish,” he says, at last.

Gansey nods, and rises to stand, putting himself between Ronan and the mage. “Richard Campbell Gansey III, Prince of Angloria. But you can call me Gansey.” He should’ve led with this. His adventures have pushed all thoughts of courtly decorum out of his head. He holds his hand out to Adam, stepping forward to close the gap between them.

Adam looks at his outstretched hand. He takes it and shakes it once, firmly. When Gansey pulls his hand away, it tingles.

“I shan’t be calling you anything,” Adam says, and he turns and finally walks away.

Gansey lets him go this time. As he walks away, he calls to Adam, “I’m sure we’ll meet again!”

“We won’t. You should stay away from that forest.”

“But... Finding Glendower... It’s my destiny.”

“Find a different one.”

Gansey watches him stride away down the hill. He walks purposefully away, and suddenly there’s a flash of green light, and he’s gone.

Gansey’s things are piled up next to Ronan, the things the bandits took from him when they were captured. Gansey had expected them to have gone up in flames with the camp, but they remained untouched by the fire, not a mark on them. 

Gansey rummages through his bag until he finds an ink pot. He sets about writing down the night’s events, writing about Adam, waiting until Ronan has healed enough to shift back to himself.

Adam takes the knife all the way back to Cabeswater with him. He worries that maybe he’s becoming a little obsessed with it, but the mysterious symbols carved in the handle, the pearlescent sheen of the blade, the way the tip of it is so fine, it’s almost invisible, is captivating. He’s been tracking this knife for months now, and now he has it, it’s hard to want to give it up to the forest.

He wonders if it will do any damage to the forest. If that’s why it wants it so badly. In the wrong hands, could this knife destroy something as eternal and ageless as Cabeswater?

Perhaps it will ask him to destroy it. Or hide it, deep within a cave inside a cave. Persephone will know what it wants, either way.

He lays on his bedroll, tiny fire crackling next to him, and holds the knife above him. Adam can feel it call to him. The way the blade catches the firelight and turns it as blue as the light from the full moon hanging above. It looks like water. Adam touches his smallest finger to the tip of the blade. He flinches when it breaks the skin. He feels the pulse of his magic fall out of time with the beat of his heart. It recovers quickly; a tiny pinprick is nothing.

“Stupid,” he says to himself, remembering the way the magic had ebbed from him, just from the tiny cut to his cheek, the way just a circle drawn in the mud had almost entirely contained his power. The knife was a far more powerful object than Adam had anticipated. It had almost killed the formwalker, stopped him from shifting, stopped him from healing himself. 

The formwalker. Fuck. Adam was a fool to save his life. He should’ve brought the prince back, got the prince to kill the bandit captain, let them add another layer to their bond. But Adam just had to have the knife and he hadn’t had time to think, and really, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t let the man die, not when he had, effectively, also saved Adam. 

Adam thinks about what the prince said. He sits up. He has to know now if he was right, if a covenant was formed. If his fate, his life is now tied to the formwalker’s. The overlap of that amount of magic… There’ll be no way to escape it.

 His runestones are in a pouch in his pack, and he tips them out into his hand. It’s the quickest way to answer the question, especially here on the edge of the forest where his power is strongest.

Adam draws a square on the ground, between him and the fire. As he shakes the stones in the palm of his hand, he thinks of the formwalker, of Ronan. Adam looks to the stars as he scatters the stones into the square.

They all land face down. They all land face down, save for one stone.

Destiny.

“Fuck.”

Chapter Text

Blue knows a lot of cursed people. Maybe the villages around Cabeswater attract cursed people, or maybe living in the villages around Cabeswater attracted curses to you. Either way, the number of people that came to the Fox Mill looking for ways to lift their curses meant that Blue had met a lot of other curse-bearers.

Something in the water, Maura said. Something in the forest, Calla laughed. Something in everyone, Persephone sighed.

Blue was sure her curse was the worst though. The worst because it wasn’t very interesting, she didn’t transform into anything cool at midnight, and the worst because it came with an exceptionally heavy moral dilemma.

She’d asked Adam once, if he was cursed. She already knew then that it was rude to ask other people about their curses; hated it when people asked about hers. But Adam had never been forthcoming about… well, anything. And he hadn’t seen offended when she asked, he’d just snorted and thrown a pebble into the stream. “Maybe,” he’d said, and she’d never asked again. 

Adam has always been uncanny. For as long as Blue’s known him, he’d been strange, but then she knew more strange people than she knew cursed people. The Fox Mill was a house of soothsayers and witches, and while Blue’s own powers of clairvoyance were hindered by her curse, she’d grown up surrounded by people that others would usually find unsettling.

Right now, in fact, Blue sits in the small herb garden by the side of the mill, while Persephone scries into a murky puddle. Her eyes are entirely black, and she hasn’t moved in all the time it’s taken for Blue to pull all the weeds in the garden.

Adam’s supposed to be back today. Or back soon at least. Persephone had said he’d be back before it rained, and the air is heavy with imminent rain.

Blue’s moved on to chopping firewood out the front of the mill house when she first spots him trudging up the dusty path to the house. He raises a hand in greeting, his face not betraying any sort of happiness at returning to the mill, but Blue grins broadly at him anyway. She swings the axe into the chopping block with a resounding thud, and leaves it there.

“Persephone said you’d be back today,” she tells him, when he’s close enough.

“That specific?” he asks.

Blue cocks her head at him. People should look different when they spend months away travelling, and come home again, she thinks. She will, Blue tells herself. When she leaves, she’ll come back, and no one will recognise her at first. Adam looks the same though, maybe a little older, maybe a little more tired, but no less tense and no less poised to bolt than he’s ever been.

“Well, she said before it rains, and…” Blue looks up at the darkening sky. “Did you get that knife?”

Adam nods. There’s a scratch high on his cheek, Blue notices. One small change then. It looks a few days old, and Blue wonders why he hasn’t healed it. “Is Persephone around?”

“She was making a pie. I told her you wouldn’t eat it.”

“Maybe I will this time,” he says, and there’s a flicker of a smile on his elegant face.

Blue grins at him again. “If you do, it’ll only be to spite me.”

“That’s as good a reason as any,” Adam says, as he wanders around the back of the mill house, along the narrow path where it clings to the riverbank. As a child, Blue had wondered if one day the house would tumble into the river, but as she’d grown, she’d realised the crooked little house was supported by more than just the soft clay riverbank.

The back door is stood open, and Blue follows Adam inside. Persephone is sliding the pie out of the great stone oven, the one Blue slept on top of in the winter as a child. 

“Pie, Adam?” she says, without turning around.

“Please,” he says, and Persephone gives Blue a tiny, secret smirk. She cuts slices for herself, for Adam and for Blue.

Blue slumps down onto a rickety chair, at the old oak table, but Adam stays standing by the open door. It’s not unusual, it had been years before Adam had ever entered the house, and the first time it had only been under the duress of a heavy rainstorm. Even now, he stands by the open door, always about to leave. No one’s ever asked if they could close it while he’s here, and Blue’s not about to start asking why. Not again, anyway.

“I came to ask, Persephone, if you knew what I should do with the knife.” Adam slides a knife out of his belt. It’s long, its blade is needle thin at the tip and Blue immediately wants to pick it up.

“It’s magic, right?” she says. She can’t feel the magic, like the others can, but the way the runes on the handle twist together, the way the point disappears into the air… Blue doesn’t need to be a mage to know an occult object when she sees one. “Is this the one that drains magic. Do you think it’ll get rid of my curse?”

“Yeah, if being dead counts as not being cursed,” Adam says, blandly. Persephone picks the knife up and turns it back and forth.

“If that was supposed to be a joke, it wasn’t funny,” Blue replies, trying to settle the uneasy churning in her gut, spawned by the light from the setting sun catching on the blade of the knife.

“You’d best hold onto it for now,” Persephone says, sliding it back across the table to Adam. “It’ll be useful. The knife isn’t the only thing you came to ask about though.”

“I--” Adam starts. “No. I wanted to ask about…” he trails off. Blue can see him struggle to find the words and the more he struggles, the more uncanny he looks. The potted basil on the table reaches for him, threatening to spill over the edges of its pot. 

Persephone raises a pale eyebrow and waits. 

“Blue, did you finish chopping that wood?” Calla bursts through the kitchen door from the front of the house. She surveys the scene in front of her with sharp eyes; Persephone and Blue quietly and expectantly watching Adam open and close his mouth, weighing up words that never quite make it past his lips. The basil plant stretching to him like he’s the sun. “Apparently not.”

Calla snatches the knife from the table. Her fingers have barely closed around it before she drops it again. The point of the blade catches a knot in the wood, and leaves a tiny nick in the table, although Blue would have expected the robust table to snap the delicate tip.

Calla’s expression is unimpressed when she looks at Adam. “You didn’t have to save his life, really, did you?”

Adam looks away. “Couldn’t just leave him to die.”

“Well, you’ve only got yourself to blame for what happens next.” Calla takes Persephone’s outstretched hand and Blue lets the familiar jealousy surge and fall away inside her as she watches the thought transfer take place.

“It was always going to happen,” Persephone says. “Some things are fixed points.”

“Am I allowed to be included in this conversation?” Blue says, trying not to sound too petulant. “Or is it only for mages?”

“Adam saved the life of a formwalker,” Calla tells her, turning away to cut herself a slice of pie.

“A formwalker? I thought there were none left?” Blue’s familiar with the stories, men and women from the south of the continent who could change into animals as easily as breathing. In one of the games she’d played as a child, she’d pretended she could transform into an eagle and soar high into the sky, or into an otter and play with the other otters she saw in the river sometimes. 

“Not many, not anymore,” Calla says. “Adam probably met the last one that will ever come this far north.”

Blue frowns. “But then, that’s good isn’t it? To save his life?”

Adam huffs. The looks he gives Blue says, you really don’t know anything about magic, but out loud, he says, “In a way. But it formed a covenant. You know, an overlap of powerful magic that—”

“That ties fates, I know. Not like I was raised in a house of magic users or anything,” Blue says, rolling her eyes.

“It would have formed anyway, eventually,” Persephone says. Adam doesn’t look cheered up by this revelation.

“That’s an awfully specific assertion,” Blue comments.

“You couldn’t have stopped it any more than you could stop the sun from setting,” Calla says.

“I could have let him die,” Adam points out.

They’re all thinking it, but it’s Blue that says, “That’s not you though.”

Persephone hums to herself. “A covenant. The strangest kind of magic.”

“Maura!” Calla shouts. Footsteps echo on the wooden floor above them, and Blue watches Adam look at the ceiling and track their path to the stairs.

“I have to go. Thanks for the pie,” he says, even though his piece lies untouched on the plate.

“Adam. We’ve talked about this before,” Persephone says, as Adam tucks the knife back into his belt. “Some things are fixed points in the ever changing landscape of time. Some actions have to happen so all the other points know what to revolve around.”

“Why did it have to be this though?” Blue’s relieved to hear she’s not the only one accidentally slips into petulance.

“If it helps, he’s not too happy about it either.” Blue’s mother, Maura, sweeps into the room, seamlessly joining the conversation as if she’s heard the whole thing. “In fact, I think he’s got more reason to dislike the situation than you.”

Adam frowns, opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, and then thinks better of it.

“There’s no running from it now,” Maura says. “This is the path you’re on.”

“He’ll never trust me,” Adam points out and once again, Blue feels like they’re talking around her.

“He already has once,” Maura says, softly.

Adam looks away, out the window again. “I really do have to leave,” he says. His leaving always stirs something inside of Blue. Jealousy, she thinks, at his ability to come and go. She’d once thought that Adam could take her with him when he left. Her curse amplifies magic, and she could be useful, maybe. Blue had also idly wondered if the fact of their lonely existences was enough to build a relationship. If, despite her curse, and his self-imposed isolation, they could be happy together, somehow.

But no. Wanting someone to be what you expected them to be, wanting someone because of the person you thought they could be for you… Wanting someone because they were the only one there… It’s not a life Blue wants. Not really.

There’s more out there, for her. One day, she’d been told as a child. Not long now, more recently. And then, last time she’d asked, it was soon.

When Adam leaves, Blue stands at the front window and watches him disappear into the thick, swaying arms of the forest. She feels her gut clench, a familiar ache to her, that longing for something more. 

She needs to lift her curse. The answer is out there, somewhere in that forest. It calls to her. Soon.

That morning, Gansey had watched Ronan shift, agonisingly slowly, from the wolf back into himself. He hadn’t been able to do anything to help the change, and he’d never before seen it happen so slowly. His fur shrank back in tiny increments, and Gansey had watched Ronan’s bones shift beneath his skin, until he was back in his human form. The wound on his side looked worse, without the fur covering it. Gansey pulled Ronan’s shirt down over it, if only so he didn’t have to look it, at the black spread of the curse through his pale skin.

It’s going to take the rest of the day to get back to the inn that they’d left the night before.

While they walk, Ronan pokes at his wound. Gansey wants to tell him to knock it off. The injury itself is nothing much to speak of anymore; a single puncture wound, cleaned and patched with a wad of herbs. Ronan’s skin surrounding it is a different story though. His veins are stark beneath his pale skin, black lines spidering out from the puncture point, spreading across his torso. Ronan pokes at one of the darkest ones and watches the blackness fade away and then flood back in.

“If I can shift again, might be easier to get out of here,” Ronan says.

Gansey panics, thinking he might try. “No, Adam said you can’t!”

Ronan frowns. “Who the fuck is Adam?”

“The mage,” Gansey says. He’s walking a pace or so behind Ronan and from the way Ronan has his shirt pulled up, Gansey can see the way the black curse from the weapon twists into the dark formwalker mark on his back. The bared teeth of the wolf are visible, almost snarling at the injury. “He patched you up, but he said not to shift, not to anything small. The wound won’t shrink.”

Ronan drops his shirt, and whirls around to face Gansey on the path. “You spoke to him?”

“Yes, of course.” Gansey stops abruptly too, and blinks at Ronan. “He was still healing you when I came back.”

“What did he want? What did you pay him with?” Ronan’s close to him and his fear is evident. Unfounded though, Gansey thinks.

“Nothing, he just left. He didn’t want payment.” Unfounded fear, yes, but Gansey knows what Ronan’s thinking. He wasn’t brought up to be mistrustful of mages, neither of them were. But they’d learnt. 

They trudge on through the day. Ronan becomes less talkative, the lower the sun gets in the sky, and it’s a relief, when the crooked inn comes into view.

It’s set back from the road slightly, and Gansey thinks that, impossibly, it seems more surrounded by trees than it had the night before. The wooden sign, creaks eerily above the shadowed door and depicts a gold-laden wagon train tumbling into the Falchion. The King’s Downfall. 

Inside, it’s as dank and dirty as Gansey remembers. But it’s warm too, a fire crackling in the rusty grate, and the beds had been more comfortable than the ground that Gansey had planned to sleep on.

Ronan groans and slumps against the rotten wood of the bar. There’s a distressed creak from the floorboard as his weight shifts.

“Back again, adventurer?” The innkeeper, a hunchbacked old man, with more gaps in his mouth than teeth, and even fewer wispy white hairs, asks. Gansey is sure he’s being mocked, but he’s become accustomed to the way the people in this strange land react to him and his quest.

“Yes, my companion and I were attacked late last night by bandits. He’s been injured. I was hoping that we could impose upon your hospitality for another night?”

“Ya sure can. It looks like your friend’s gonna need that there bed sooner rather than later.”

It was true, Ronan had been looking paler and more drawn the further they’d travelled. Gansey hopes it was just the journey; he’d not had time to rest. There’s an edge to Gansey’s worry though. No, the mage hadn’t seemed interested in what Ronan is, at the time, but Gansey doesn’t know enough about healing to know if he’s been healed correctly. “Maybe you should go on up?” he asks Ronan.

But Ronan shakes his head. “Food,” he says.

Gansey grimaces. He’d been hoping to avoid a repeat meal at this particular inn. He turns back to the innkeeper. “Two bowls of broth, please. And two ales.”

The innkeeper nods, and staggers away from the bar, into the backroom, where Gansey imagines a large, rosy cheeked cook is boiling a great cauldron of offal, vegetable peelings, and whatever the cat caught last week. 

Gansey helps Ronan collapse to a rickety table in the corner of the room. 

“Get that look off your face. I’m fucking starving,” Ronan snaps at him. “It’s hot food. Close your eyes and pretend you’re in the palace.”

“Be quiet, Ronan.” They aren’t the only ones in the inn, and Gansey’s slowly learning not to piss off locals. There’s a bard sat across the bar, tuning his lute and Gansey would love to engage him in conversation; travelling bards love a good story, and they always have many of their own to tell.

The other patrons of the bar look far more like locals. A young woman with a crossbow strapped to her back; an old man, feeding scraps to his dog under the table; a group of day labourers fresh from the fields. Gansey would love to talk to all of them, and he would, if it weren’t for Ronan’s injury and his recalcitrant glare. 

The innkeeper’s daughter brings their food out to them. Gansey remembers her from the previous night, a pretty girl with a thick, dirty blonde plait twisting over her shoulder. Gansey tries to recall her name and is dismayed with himself when he finds that he can’t.

“Enjoy,” she says with a smile that’s so sincere, Gansey feels sickened with himself.

He pulls the bowl of broth closer to him, and stares down into its murky depths. A mouse’s tail floats to the surface. Next to him, Ronan has lifted the bowl to his mouth and is slurping it down greedily as though he hasn’t eaten in weeks. Gansey picks up his crust of bread instead, and tentatively dips it in the broth. 

Ronan burps, loudly. The woman with the crossbow looks up and glares at him, and he glares right back. The innkeeper’s daughter is back, and she giggles.

“Are you gonna eat that?” Ronan asks him, gesturing at his bowl.

“No, you have it,” Gansey says, and he slides the bowl to Ronan.

Ronan, rolling his eyes, accepts the bowl. He’s looking better already, although Gansey suspects that’s more to do with the warmth and the tankard of ale, than the questionable broth. Gansey watches him slurp the second bowl down, same as the first.

“Do you think anyone here will know more about that mage? Adam?” Gansey whispers, when Ronan has finished eating. He’s not too keen to attract attention right now, with Ronan’s injury, but the questions Gansey has are piling up in his head, eager to spill out.

Ronan’s heavy stare is enough to damn the flood. Gansey gives him a pleading look in return, and Ronan sighs wearily.

“I’d rather go to bed. Ask all the dumb questions you want.” He stands abruptly, knocking the table and sending the remainder of his ale sloshing across it. The innkeeper’s daughter rushes to them immediately and starts mopping at the spill with a dirty rag, as Ronan strides across the inn to the rickety stairs that lead to the guest rooms. He’s clearly still hurting, but trying not to show it and that makes Gansey ache more than the injury itself.

That’s Ronan, Gansey thinks. Always hurt, never letting anyone see. He takes another drink of his ale.

Henry doesn’t expect that anything interesting will happen at this particular tavern. It’s too rural, first of all, and second of all, the number of patrons in it is too few for a fun, raucous crowd, and too many for strange, meaningful interactions. He’s breaking his own rules just by being here.

Henry’s thought more than once about paying someone to write his rules up for him. He thinks they would look good on an illuminated scroll: Henry Cheng’s rules for safe and profitable cross-continental travel.

Henry’s unsure if he’s breaking another one of his rules: never eat at a tavern where the innkeeper is better looking than his wife. Judging by the innkeeper’s daughter, he doesn’t think he is, but maybe this is the exception that proves the rule.

His other rules: always keep a second knife in your boot and anyone who says they lost a limb fighting a dragon is lying, it was a dog bite that went bad, aren’t too important right now.

The final rule though. The dark, brooding stranger in the corner has the best story but he won’t give it up you easily.         

The dark stranger in the corner of this particular tavern is not actually doing a lot of brooding tonight. Or anything of much really, other than slurping down his broth in a manner so disgusting, it would be inappropriate, if it didn’t perfectly match the quality of food in this tavern. Henry would love to get his story, but he looks like a tough stone to crack. Literally and metaphorically. His abhorrent manners and his dark glare mean Henry can’t call himself disappointed when the man slouches off up the rickety stairs. He’s clearly injured, favouring his right side. Another story slides through Henry’s fingers.

But. The dark man had not been eating alone. In his absence, he’s left his golden companion alone. As much a king and his liege knight as Henry has ever seen. He watches the king carefully, gauging how receptive he’ll be to a stranger’s company.

Very, as it turns out.

“Excuse me, uh, miss,” the golden stranger says, and the innkeeper’s daughter’s misty grey eyes snap to him. “Do you know any stories about mages, in the area?”

“Oh, there aren’t many mages north of the Falchion, Mr Gansey,” she says, approaching his table. The golden man, Mr Gansey, stands and draws a chair for her. “Least not many that bother with the matters of common folk.”

“Is there one though, maybe one that didn’t go to the Academy?” The girl looks uncertain, and Henry admires how Gansey seems to realise this, but keep pushing anyway.

Henry tries to not look like he’s too obviously listening, but mages in this area are the very reason he’s even in the area at all and if this Gansey is talking about…

“You mean the mage of Cabeswater,” the woman with the crossbow says. She’s turned more into the firelight now, and Henry can see a twisted scar slicing across the deep brown skin of her cheek. Another interesting story, no doubt. Henry’s been hoping to write a ballad of a strong female warrior, and if he weren’t so set on chasing the golden stranger’s story, he'd be getting hers instead.

“Who’s the mage of Cabeswater?” Gansey asks, and that has to be Henry’s cue, if ever there is to be one.

“Did I hear mage of Cabeswater?” he asks, and he twists from his own seat and slides fluidly into the one vacated by the dark stranger. He holds his hand out to the golden king. “Henry Cheng, travelling bard, lovable rogue, legendary cross-continental heart-breaker.”

The innkeeper’s daughter laughs, and the woman with the crossbow rolls her eyes.

“…Gansey,” says Gansey, and he shakes Henry’s hand. The way he hesitated before giving his name makes Henry think he’s used to giving a longer name. A runaway nobleman maybe? Fleeing the kingdom to the untameable northlands with his handsome, brooding lover? Henry grins to himself. These stories practically write themselves.

“You know this mage?” Gansey asks, breaking Henry from his reverie.

“Ooh, do you have a song about him?” The innkeeper’s daughter says, beaming with excitement.

“Not exactly… I do hate to disappoint,” Henry says. “I’ve been trying to find him for a while now. Get his story, make him famous across the continent. No one knows who he is, really, and there’s got to be something in that alone. Most people don’t even really believe he exists.”

“I heard that he’s one of the trees, in a human form,” the innkeeper’s daughter says, and yes, this is what Henry wants. A tree, turned into a boy… looking for… love? Maybe that’s too obvious.

“That’s no good thing, girl,” the woman with the twisted scar and the crossbow says. She looks fierce, and there’s a heavy layer of warning in her voice.

“Isn’t it?” Gansey asks.

“You don’t know a lot about Cabeswater, do you?” she says.

“He’s from Angloria,” the girl tells her, tinged with pride and excitement.

The woman frowns. “Don’t go shouting that.” Henry needs to find out about missing Anglorian noblemen. The political situation there is good, a stable monarchy and good trade relations. No need for noblemen to flee, without an interesting cause.

He’s about to ask more about Angloria, when Gansey says, “People have been quite reluctant to talk to me about the forest. It’s the reason I came here, but when I ask people about it, they mostly tell me to stay away.”

“And that’s good advice,” the woman says. “The stories say that the forest is alive. It’s ancient, older than memory. The trees talk to each other, and they have power too. They could make you the most powerful man on the continent, they could give you treasures beyond your wildest dreams. Or they could drive you mad.”

“Or send you to sleep for hundreds of years?”

“Perhaps,” the woman says. “You must know this forest, bard?”

“Of course,” Henry says. He knows a lot of songs about the forest, and the morals all come down to the same thing. “Don’t go in, unless you’re prepared to get more than you bargained for. Or less, as the case may well be.”

“And where does this mage come in?” Gansey’s golden brown eyes flick between the woman and Henry.

“Well, people who’ve seen him, say that he found favour with the forest. He’s made more powerful by it,” Henry says.

“Nobody knows how,” the woman continues. “Many folk say that it means he’s not to be trusted, that he’s--”

“That’s not true!” It’s one of the young day labourers, crowded at the other end of the tavern. Henry hadn’t known they were even listening. “I’ve seen that mage, with my own eyes. There’s a village, a little ways north of here. I was working there two summers ago, and there was a huge fire. Monstrous. Whole fields of wheat caught in the heat and it spread faster than anyone could believe. It hit the village, before we could stop it. Most folk got away down to the river, but there was this group of little children, they’d been playing in a barn and they got trapped, you see. That mage he showed up and he walked right into that blaze and then right back out with those children. Left ‘em in the river with the rest of us and walked off as if he’d never been there. Didn’t ask for no payment, or nothing.”

Another of the labourers is nodding. “I’ve seen him too. Seen him raise the ground under a whole village when a river burst its banks last winter.”

Gansey’s pulled his journal out of his pocket and he’s turned to fresh page. Henry watches him eagerly scribble down everything people tell him about the mage. He’s written Adam, at the top of the page though, and Henry frowns.

“Adam?” he asks Gansey.

Gansey swallows. “That’s his name. You didn’t know?”

Henry shakes his head. Of course he knew the mage had a name, everyone has a name, even if it’s all they have. He’d just never considered he’d discover it in such an unremarkable way. Maybe Henry needs to re-evaluate his idea that busier inns mean that strange, meaningful interactions cannot happen.

“You’ve met him too then?” the woman with the crossbow asks. She’s looking a little sceptical, and Henry feels a sudden rush to defend Gansey. 

“Briefly.” Gansey doesn’t elaborate. And oh, there’s one hell of a story there. Henry’s sure he’ll get it from him eventually. “He healed my friend.”

"Well, there you go then, traveller," the innkeeper’s daughter says. "Now you've got a story to tell when you go back home."

Henry’s not sure that’s the end of the story. Henry’s familiar with the nuances of storytelling and this encounter, the way Gansey looks at his notes, his knight’s injury; to Henry, it feels far more like a beginning.

The innkeeper’s daughter is called away by her father, and the woman with the crossbow packs her bags to leave.

“You’d do well to stay away from the forest. I know you’ve heard that before, but I mean it. Go home,” she says, before walking in long, quick steps from the tavern and out into the stormy night.

“Well,” Henry says, raising his eyebrows. “Why do you want to know so much about this forest anyway?”

“I’m going in,” Gansey says, in a way that tells Henry that every warning against it has only made him more certain.

Henry nods. “Well, good luck, my friend. I hope your moody companion sharpens his sword and his wits.”

Gansey laughs. “Aren’t you going to tell me not to? Or ask me why?”

“I was hoping that if you survive, you’ll allow me the honour of writing a truly epic ode to your accomplishments.”

Gansey’s jaw tightens, a tiny little muscle jumps at the corner of his eye. He lifts his hand to his mouth and worries at his bottom lip with his thumb. Eventually, he says, “And if I don’t?”

“An epic ode to your endeavours shall be composed, nevertheless. Although perhaps you should tell me why? For the sake of historical accuracy.”

That gets a smile from Gansey. “What do you know about legendary kings of the continent?”

Ronan sleeps fitfully. The black reach of the wound across his body is tender, but he barely notices the ache. It isn’t the wound that keeps him awake; it’s the trees. The branches scratch at the window of the little tavern room. The wind through the leaves sounds like whispering, and the tapping branches are beckoning to him. There had been no tree there the night before.

When he does sleep, Ronan has the dream of the forest again. It starts the same way that all his dreams have, since they crossed the Falchion. He stands alone in a clearing, a great, twisting oak tree before him, secrets hidden in the branches. A breeze stirs through the trees, and the sun rises and sets in the blink of an eye. He hears his name on the wind. Ronan.

And then suddenly, he’s no longer alone. The mage is there. The mage is there, and he holds his hand out to Ronan, but when Ronan reaches for him, he turns to leaves, and the wind carries him away. He can feel something watching from the trees, or maybe it’s the trees themselves. Ronan tries to shift, but he can’t, he never can in these dreams.

The leaves that had been the mage swirl around his feet and as they swirl, they turn into tiny, striped snakes. They writhe on the ground, until the wind catches them again. Tiny ravens fly away into the sky, and when the sunlight hits them, they burst into flames. 

He calls to the ravens to come back, but he can hear Gansey calling him through the trees now. He shouts for Gansey—

“Ronan! Wake up!” Gansey shakes him awake. 

Ronan jerks awake. The room is cold, but his skin is slick with sweat. Gansey’s leaning over him, one hand gentle on his shoulder, the other hovering over the wound in Ronan’s side. 

“Those dreams again?” Gansey asks, pulling back a little, presumably to look at the wound.

Ronan nods, and tries to calm his breathing. “Different though.”

He’s told Gansey before, about the dreams of the forest. He’d had to, what with the way he’d been shouting in his sleep.

“Not the same forest?” Gansey sits down on the end of Ronan’s bed, eyebrows drawn together in concern. He hasn’t washed for bed yet, Ronan notices. He wonders how long that means Gansey had been sat down in the tavern.

“No, that was the same.” Ronan swallows. Gansey’s going to love this, he thinks. “I wasn’t alone though.”

“The mage?” He asks, and Ronan sees him trying to control the excitement in his voice.

Ronan nods again, and he screws his face up, wincing in anticipation of what will surely be a classic Gansey outburst of excitement.

“I knew it! I told him that much magic would form a covenant! This is amazing!”

Ronan gives Gansey a dark, incredulous look. What the fuck, it says. Amazing? Really? it says.

“I know,” Gansey says, in reply to his look, but he keeps talking, regardless. “Henry, the bard downstairs, was telling me that there’s a soothsayer in Forstall, and she has a gift for reading destiny! He mentioned her to me, because he thought that I could maybe use a little more certainty about what will happen in the forest. But I think you should speak to her, about the covenant.” Gansey sounds so excited. Ronan pulls the bedsheets up over his head. “Maybe she can tell you what it means?” 

 “I know what it means,” Ronan hisses, from under the sheet.

“You do?”

Ronan pulls the sheets back off himself so he can glare at Gansey. “Yeah, it means I now owe my life to a fucking mage. It means I now have a bond that will make finding me easy as pissing up a wall and when he does, he won’t even have to try before he starts siphoning magic off—”

“He didn’t seem like he wanted it either,” Gansey interrupts Ronan’s angry rant.

“Yeah, right. You better fucking well avenge me when he drains all the magic out of me.”

“That doesn’t sound like something he’d do…”

“What would you know? You speak to him for all of five minutes and suddenly you know exactly what he wants,” Ronan snarls.

“He’s not a mage from the Academy. I doubt he’d even know how to do that to you. In the morning, I’m going to see this soothsayer. You’ll come with me?”

Ronan groans. He knows when he’s being placated, he just hadn’t expected Gansey to try to placate him with more magic users. “What about Glendower? What about walking up that valley? You wanted to retrace his steps.”

“I just… I think this is important, Ronan. Meeting Adam, meeting Henry. It feels like it’s meant to happen.”

“I was meant to get stabbed,” Ronan deadpans. His anger has subsided, a little. He knows Gansey won’t sell him out. He’s better at keeping secrets than Ronan has ever been.

“Well, no. But… Maybe this soothsayer will have something to tell me? Or you! I want you to have some purpose, Ronan.”

“I have purpose. Saving your ass from trouble.”

“You won’t always have me to get out of trouble,” Gansey says, and his voice is soft.

“Why? Are you planning to stop doing dumb stuff? Can’t wait for that day.” Ronan’s kidding. Getting Gansey out of trouble has been the brightness in these dark days. He doesn’t dwell on what it might mean that Gansey is so insistent that he find something else to focus on.

Ronan already knows why. At the end of this quest, Gansey will have to go home, and Ronan…

He can’t.

Chapter Text

Adam wakes with the memories of the dream lingering in his mind, like the grass holds onto early morning mist. Images flicker through his head, white fire, branches rattling in the cold wind and always, always the formwalker. His eyes had been as cold as the hard frost that had shrouded the forest the first winter that Adam had been alone. The river had frozen; the waterfall had stopped, suspended in the air. The deep pool had frozen right to the bottom, and that’s the only other place Adam has seen that shade of blue before. And Ronan had always been turning away from him, leaving Adam colder than he’s ever been.

It’s the covenant. He wonders if the formwalker has dreamt of him. How long will it be before it’s deliberate? Adam can already feel the bond, tugging on the edge of his magic. It lingers in the peripheral, and a part of Adam aches to know how strong it is, how strong it could be. The rest of him wants to leave it alone. He doesn’t need any more magical connections in his life.

As he wakes a little more, leaves unfurl at the back of his mind. The forest doesn’t sleep, but at least it respects his need for peace. Sometimes. The sun mustn’t be long risen, and Adam doesn’t have any pressing matters to attend to today. He thinks of just curling up and sleeping a while longer on the soft ground of his home.

Home, or rather, Adam’s little corner of the forest, where the trees pack in tight around him, where the ground is soft and mossy, and never wet. Where a breeze blows through in the summer to keep him cool, and where the trees cling tighter to each other the winter, to keep the snow off and keep his little fire burning.

In all his life, it’s the only place Adam’s ever felt safe.

It’s the right place for him. His den. His hollow in the trees where he sleeps. Like an animal. Like the monster he is. Adam doesn’t bother anymore wondering when he’d lost his humanity. He doubts he’d ever had any. He’s always been cursed. Leaving for the forest had just traded one kind of curse for another.

He’d never borne the magical kind of curse, like Blue, the kind that can be broken. The kind that has its own unique magic. No, Adam’s curse was completely unremarkable, the kind of curse that passes from father to son. The kind of curse that ends in someone’s pain, someone’s loneliness, one way or another.

He had once, selfishly, thought that Blue could be the answer. That they’d build a cabin on the edge of the woods, that her family could be his family too, and they could live together with their curses. Not happy, but content.

But Adam knows that his curse is not meant to be shared. It’s a darkness that spreads through his body. He’d been a monster long before the forest had taken him in.

He rolls up to sitting, fumbling on the ground for the breeches he’d worn the previous day. He hadn’t taken the knife from the scabbard in his belt last night, but he removes it now, to have another look. To get rid of it.

But something has occurred to Adam, in the time it’s taken to get back to his corner of the forest.

“You didn’t even want this knife, did you?”

The wind through the leaves around him sounds like laughter.

Adam rolls his eyes. “I hope you’re happy.”

We will be. You were lonely. And you said you didn’t want to join us.

“And this was your solution? I’m happy how I am.”

The forest doesn’t reply. Adam’s grateful to it, for not pointing out what they both know is a lie.

He adds the knife to his meagre pile of possessions. It seems important to keep it safe, but keep it on hand, so he tucks it into the leather satchel where he keeps his hunting knife.

He’s just about to begin foraging for some breakfast, when a voice on the wind distracts him.

“Adam?” Someone is calling for him. The gentle breeze that blows through the densely packed bushes carries it to him. “Adam?”

“Noah?”

“There’s something you need to see.” Noah’s voice sounds a little closer, just beyond the hollow of trees. There’s a note to his voice that’s unfamiliar to Adam, concern, or fear. He’s never heard Noah sound this way before.

It’s that difference in his voice that has Adam pulling his boots on and, after a quick thought, shouldering his satchel that now contains both knives.

Noah lingers just beyond the trees that Adam pushes out from between. He’s half stood in the shade of a cluster of young trees, and the half that is out of the shade is rendered invisible by the sun streaming through him. The part of Noah covered by the shade is unremarkable, the face of a normal young man. But Adam can see, perhaps because he already knows, where the skin begins to give way to decay and eventually, pure white bone. Noah’s white-blond hair lifts slightly, blown by a wind that Adam can’t feel, as he gestures for Adam to follow him.

“What is it?” Adam asks. He wonders if maybe he should have brought another weapon.

“I can’t explain, you just have to see.” Noah walks just ahead of Adam, leading the way uphill, over a rocky crag and through a dense thicket to where the trees grow close together.

The light is scarce here and the shade illuminates Noah more and more, then deeper they get. The dark hollow of the trees reflects the dark hollow of the side of his face. He always looks more real in the dark, than in the light. More unreal too, Adam thinks, as Noah turns back to check that Adam is behind him still. A grin tugs at the corner of his mouth and Adam tries not to wince at the way the exposed muscle on that side of his decaying face pulls with it.

The forest is quieter here, all of the usual sounds of birds and tiny animals, of laughter in the leaves, are faded to almost nothing. This means something, Adam thinks, but he can’t work out what. He hasn’t explored the whole forest, not yet, but he’s begun working on a map, the last few years, mostly to help himself navigate.

The problem though, with Cabeswater, is that it’s reluctant to stay the same way every day. Adam can align himself with the forest, with the stars above and the pulse of the earth below, but he still finds himself lost on occasion, or unsure of how he ended up in one particular part, when he was sure he’d end up somewhere else.

This part of the forest is entirely unfamiliar.

“Do you know where you’re going, Noah?” Adam asks, as Noah disappears before a dense thorn bush, and then reappears on the other side of it.

“Yeah, it’s just up here,” Noah replies. Adam frowns at the thorns and tries to reach out to ask Cabeswater to let him through. The forest either doesn’t hear him, or doesn’t care. The thorns remain in place.

Adam buries his hands in the dirt and tries to reach the plant directly, but it still doesn’t move. It feels almost as if something is blocking his magic. The blade of his hunting knife badly needs sharpening, but it makes short work of cutting a path through the thorns. They still snag on Adam’s clothes in a couple of places, and he finds himself feeling more annoyed about that than about whatever is blocking his magic.

All thoughts about how he’s going to repair his clothes drop from his head when he sees the tree Noah is stood in front of. It’s a great beech tree, its trunk is thick and twisted with age, its branches reaching high into the sky. And it’s decaying.

Decay is the only thing Adam can think of. He’s seen dead trees before, but never like this. The trunk is split, right up the centre, and a thick, black sap oozes from it.

High above Adam, the branches of the tree sag towards the ground. A single leaf flutters towards him, and Adam catches it between his fingers. The top of the leaf looks normal, bright green, a tiny bite out of it from some kind of bug. He turns it over though, and on the underside, the same black rot that grows from inside of the tree clings to the underside of the leaf. It follows the veins in the leaf, and Adam is horribly reminded of the way the curse from the Scariat knife had spread through the formwalker’s body.

Adam cautiously approaches the tree trunk, his hand stretched out to it, watching where he puts his feet. As he gets closer, the pungent smell becomes more and more obvious to him. The tree isn’t just dying… it’s rotting from within, like a bad fruit, like wet wood. Like a corpse.

Inside the tree trunk, something pulses. It makes Adam feel nauseous to look at, but he keeps looking at, studying the strange way is almost seems to glow with darkness. In the heart of the trunk, the dark swallows the light so all detail is lost. Adam can’t see the core of it, can’t see what is killing this tree, not even his magic can reach into it.

“Have you seen this before?” he asks Noah. Noah has been in the forest far longer than Adam. Adam’s not sure how long, he’s never asked, but the style of his clothes suggest it’s years longer than Adam’s even been alive.

Noah’s half decayed face twists sickly. “No. Never. It’s almost like…”

“Like something’s growing inside it.”

The soothsayer’s house that Henry directed them to turns out to be little more than a pile of rocks set on a ledge, halfway up a cliff at the side of waterfall. Gansey would have missed it completely, had his attention not been caught by the sunlight reflecting off of a window made up of hundreds of broken fragments of coloured glass.

There’s a girl sat outside the rocks, resting her back on them, and her feet on a tree stump. Her dark hair hangs across her face. She doesn’t look up, as Gansey and Ronan approach up the rocky little path, but Gansey hears her say,  “That boy Persephone told you about is here,” to no one in particular.

Ronan raises an eyebrow, and his jaw tightens. His dark look says, this is a bad idea. Soothsayers are only one step away from mages on Ronan’s scale of mistrust.

“It’ll be fine,” Gansey tells him. He’s about to say, what’s the worst that can happen, but Gansey already knows the answer to that.

“Go in,” the girl says, the only acknowledgement she gives their arrival, and still without looking up. Where Gansey had previously thought a battered piece of wood rested against the rock, a door has formed. It creaks open, inwards towards to the cliff in a way that hurts Gansey’s head to look at. He moves to the door, and Ronan follows behind him.

“Not you,” the girl says to Ronan, holding a scarred hand out to halt him. “You can wait out here.”

“Like fuck I’ll wait out here.” Ronan’s not looking at the girl, he’s looking into the dark doorway, a darker look on his face. A candle flickers just inside, far deeper than seems logical.

“I’m going in alone, Ronan,” Gansey says, sure of himself. “You don’t want to go in there, really.”

Ronan keeps glaring at the dark doorway, and he doesn’t respond. Gansey nods and steels himself, taking Ronan’s silence as acquiescence. He turns and, with a steady breathe, walks into the darkness.

The sound of the waterfall rushes loud in his ears as he ducks into the doorway. For a moment, the rushing is all he can hear. It’s so loud, it’s all he can see too. Gansey keeps walking though, and the sound dims, before cutting off altogether when the door closes behind him. Gansey turns back, places his hand against where the door had been. He knows what he’ll feel before he makes contact, and sure enough, wet rock presses into his palm. He is, as far as he can tell, trapped.

Only one thing for it. Onwards. It’s strange, Gansey thinks, he feels like maybe he’s been in this cave before. Maybe in a dream, maybe in a nightmare.

A droplet of water drips from the ceiling and the soft plink of it echoes into the cave.

“Hello?” Gansey’s voice echoes too, bouncing off the walls of the cave. Hello? he asks himself.

“Welcome back,” comes a reply. This voice doesn’t echo.

“I… don’t think I’ve been here before,” Gansey replies. “But thank you for… having me?”

“Come closer,” the voice demands. Gansey struggles to determine if the speaker is a man or a woman. He walks further into the cave, but the flickering candle never seems to get any nearer. There’s a little more light being thrown now, and it comes from a flat disc of rock in the centre of the cave.

“A seeing stone?” Gansey asks. He’s never seen one before, only heard about them in stories. The stone is almost perfectly circular, and as thick as the palm of Gansey’s hand. If he leant across it, he could probably touch the other side with his fingertips, but it would be a stretch at the widest point. The sides are jagged, but the surface of rock is polished to a mirror sheen.

“Will you look into it?” the voice asks.

“What will I see? If I look?”

“If you don’t already know, then you never will.”

Helpful, the voice in Gansey’s head that sounds like Ronan snorts. He rests his hands on the edge of the rock. It’s warm to the touch, like someone else has been holding it recently. He thinks about Glendower, about his quest, he thinks of Ronan, of his past, of the future he’ll have…

“If you will not look, why are you here?” the voice asks. “This quest will kill you. You know that.”

“I do.”

“Does he?”

“I—No. Will that be important?” Gansey’s stomach lurches violently at the thought. Not of his own death, but of what will be left behind.

“Everything is important, little prince. What do you want from this then?”

“I want to know where to look. Where to go to find him.”

“You do not want to know if your death will come before completion of your quest.”

Gansey swallows. “No.”

“But you’re more worried about your death killing him.”

Gansey swallows around the lump in his throat. “I just want him to live through it.”

“Look, then.”

The surface of the stone ripples like water as Gansey looks into it. He breathes out, and the ripples freeze. All at once, they stop spreading out and retreat back into the centre. Then, the images begin to coalesce.

It’s not what Gansey had expected from the stone. He’d expected clear, precise visions of the future. That’s what the stories had said would happen, but instead he gets snatches of things. A thorny hollow; a leaf with a strange darkness spreading through it; a girl, her face a hazy blur, but a steady hand reaching towards him. He sees Ronan, but only in flashes, always moving, running from the darkness and then towards it. The feathers of a raven mixed with the feathers of another bird. Animal bones. Human bones. The Scariat knife. A broken sword hilt. A willow tree. Gansey’s face. Glendower’s tomb.

“What does this mean?”

“It means, little king, that there are many paths into Cabeswater. And they can only be trod by one. Cabeswater does not take kindly to those using another’s path.”

Gansey swallows. “I don’t want to leave him behind.”

“If you want to find Glendower, then you have to.” It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “He has his own way now.”

“The covenant.”

“It’s everything he fears it will be. And everything he doesn’t dare to hope for. And for you. Everything you dare to hope for, and you don’t know to fear.”

Gansey leaves Ronan stood outside the crumbling rocks, feeling nothing short of pissed off. He’s spent the whole walk here having to hear about how great Henry Cheng is, and how fucking wonderful this mage from the stories people told at the inn last night. Ronan doesn’t give a fuck about any of it. He dumps his pack on the ground and starts kicking rocks off the side of the cliff to the frothing waters below.

The girl sat at the table doesn’t acknowledge him. Curly, dark brown hair falls across half her face. Ronan supposed some men would think her pretty. He expects that she expects him to notice, to talk to her because of it. He won’t. He pays her no attention at all, keeps kicking rocks, satisfied by the noises they make as they hit trees or splash into the river below.

Ronan wonders if this girl would notice if he shifted, slithered in through the gap under the door. The door that had formed before Gansey had entered is nothing more than a fractured old bit of wood again. Ronan glares at it.

“If you could shift into a tic, you still wouldn’t get in,” the girl says. She hasn’t looked at Ronan, but he’s paying attention to her now. Commenting on his thoughts – the only way a pretty girl can get to him apparently.

She laughs. “I had never expected you to look, formwalker.” She’s turned more to Ronan now. Her head is still bowed, hiding half of her face.

“That’s fucking rude you know.”

“Yes, I’ve been told.” The girl tucks her hair behind her ear. “But I paid the price for my power, it would be a greater cost if I did not use it.”

Ronan doesn’t recoil when she tilts her face up towards him. It’s the reaction she expects, no doubt, because a flicker of a smile crosses her scarred face. Her left eye is missing, clawed out by the look of the marred skin around it. There’s nothing there at all, just an empty socket, darker and deeper than would seem possible.

“Some price,” Ronan says.

“Oh yes,” the girl says. “And your father certainly paid a price for his.”

Were Gansey here, Ronan would scoff and laugh it off. But Gansey isn’t here. “Don’t talk about my father,” he snarls.

The girl laughs. It’s not a pretty sound, it’s abrasive, like claws on rock.

“Arrogance and greed… There’s a long way down from there. Do you think anyone learnt from his mistakes?”

Ronan doesn’t know why he says it, the girl is in his head anyway, she knows what he’s thinking. “It wasn’t just him that paid

“I know,” she says, and for all that this girl is nothing but edges, her voice is soft. “I’m Aurelia. Do you have a question for me?”

“If you know what I’m thinking, then you should already know.”

“But you don’t trust magic you can’t see. Or any magic that isn’t your own.” Aurelia sweeps all her hair across her shoulder, exposing the damaged side of her face completely. “Wise, maybe. But you’ve already made a one-time exception. But will it only be the one time?”

“Don’t,” Ronan says. He knows where this is going. She ignores him, and takes a pouch of runestones from behind her.

Ronan could stop her. He’s armed, she isn’t, he doesn’t think. He’s obviously stronger than her. He could walk away. He could walk into this bizarre house, if it can be called that, grab Gansey and leave. Take Gansey all the way back to their homeland and never come to this strange place again, and never, ever see another mage so long as he lives.

He doesn’t.

Ronan stands as watches mutely as Aurelia casts the stones across the ground in front of her.

She has a sharp smile, like a wildcat, and it transforms her, from something damaged and delicate, to something feral and greedy.

Her one green eye flicks up to Ronan. “You’ve met the mage of Cabeswater. You’ve more than met him. The hands and eyes of a forest so ancient and dangerous few mortal men ever enter, and fewer still leave. And he saved your life.”

“Adam.” Ronan didn’t mean to say his name, but it spills out like it’s been waiting to escape past his lips. He expects the name to taste poisonous in his mouth, but it doesn’t. It’s just a name.

“That’s a powerful magical covenant you’ve got there, Ronan Lynch.”

“I don’t want it. And neither does he.”

“You will.” She smirks, twisted and wicked. “It’ll only get stronger too. It takes a lot of magic to stop the sun from setting. There’s a price you pay, there’s a power you get. Give something away, get something back. Remember, formwalker, an eye for an eye...” She puts a thin, delicate finger on the edge of her empty socket.

“A life for a life,” Ronan finishes. “I’ll save his?”

“Not in the way you think.”

It’s all nonsense to Ronan, the more Aurelia talks, the less Ronan understands what’s happened to him.

“Ronan!” Gansey’s voice echoes off the cliff around him. Ronan frowns at the wooden door, at the cliff. His voice hadn’t come from inside. “Ronan!”

“Gansey?” Ronan walks away from the house and looks down into the valley. Gansey is stood at the bottom. He’s wet, up to the waist like he’s been wading through a river, even though the stream he stands in churns just below his knees.

“How the fuck did you get down there?”

“Uhh, it’s kind of an… interesting story?”

Ronan rolls his eyes. He looks back at the girl. “You’re a little bit creepy. I hope we never meet again.”

The girl throws her head back in her shredding laugh that matches her wildcat face. “Oh, I hope we do,” she says.

The hill where Adam stands is not in a land that’s familiar to him. At first, he thinks he’s wandered into a dream, but the soft hazy quality, the way the edges blur out of focus, clues Adam into the fact that this is a memory. A good one, at that.

The sky above is blazing blue, too blue to be real. It’s close, and Adam feels like he’d just be able to reach his hand above his head and touch the smooth, uninterrupted softness of it. Everything is bright and bold colour, the leaves on the trees practically glow, there are more wildflowers blooming in the grass than could ever be possible. The grassy hill rolls away from a silver birch forest, and down to a farmhouse, cradled in the soft folds of the land. Adam can see the gleaming red front door reflecting the sunlight. Chickens peck around in the yard behind it, and sheep graze in the swaying green fields beyond. There is no darkness here, and even though the sun is well past the highest point in the sky, the shadows are short.

Behind him, three young boys are playing in the trees. Or rather, two boys play in the trees, while the third, clearly the eldest, watches on with the hint of a smile playing on his lips, like he’s trying not to be too amused by the antics of the two younger boys. He watches them fondly, but carefully, in the way Adam has seen elder siblings watch their younger brothers and sisters.

All of the boys have the same blue eyes, and the same thick, curly hair, but the youngest is sunny blonde where the other two are dark. Adam watches the younger boys rolling in the dirt at the edge of the forest, shifting from a golden puppy and a silver-grey wolf cub and back to human again.

The sight of them playing together invokes a strange feeling in Adam’s chest, like wings beating the air. He already had a strong hunch at whose memory this was, but the wolf shifting to a downy raven to escape his brother’s playfully snapping teeth clues him in. It’s not like he’s got many supernatural bonds that allow exchange of memories. Involuntarily or not.

The eldest brother’s attention has been caught by something down at the bottom of the hill by the house. His gaze has turned wary and intense, but Adam can’t see what he’s looking at. Either the formwalker never noticed whatever had clearly worried his brother, or he’s forgotten over time.

“Ronan, Matthew,” the eldest brother says. “It’s time to go back home. It’s getting dark.” It isn’t, not really, but there’s a tension to the boy’s voice that tells Adam it’s not the loss of light that’s got him worried.

Ronan has shifted back to a boy, but if Adam didn’t know who he was looking at, he would hardly recognise any of the adult formwalker in this child. He laughs easily as the golden puppy that is his younger brother tugs at the cuff of his shirt. He catches sight of the tense look on his older brother’s face and if anything, it makes him laugh more.

Adam watches the look the formwalker’s brother gives him, carefully. It’s a silent communication, and whatever it says makes the young Ronan huff in annoyance.

“Come on, Matthew,” he says, to the puppy, still playing in the dirt, snapping at bugs with his teeth. “Declan says we have to go home.”

The youngest boy shifts back, and he’s a golden haired child again, sat on the dusty ground. “Ohh,” he whines.

“Dinner will almost be ready,” Ronan says, like they’re magic words.

“I am hungry,” Matthew says, earnestly. “Race you!”

“No!” The oldest brother, Declan, says, before either of the younger to shift as they’re clearly about to. “Just. Go as boys.”

Ronan frowns, and in that suspicious, questioning look, Adam sees the adult formwalker he’d met. “Why?”

Declan glances off away, and this time it’s clear to Adam, what he’d been looking at before, as Ronan looks at it too.

A tall, dark haired man is standing halfway down the track that leads from the farmhouse. He stands with his hands on his hips, watching a carriage, pulled by four white horses, drive away down the dusty track. The carriage is iridescent in the sunlight, throwing every colour of the rainbow from its gilded sides, as it rumbles from the house.

The darkness has begun to gather now. In the once-clear sky, a cloud covers the sun. “Mages,” snarls the young Ronan. He looks older now, and fierce.

His older brother nods. “Come on. Matthew, if you beat me to the house, you can have my pudding.”

“You’re on!” Matthew shouts, delighted, and he takes off running down the hill. Declan follows him, only half trying to chase. The younger Ronan lingers for a moment longer, watching where the carriage had disappeared between the trees at the end of the track. The wind catches in his dark hair and he twitches, seems to look right at Adam for a second, before following his brothers down the hill.

Adam watches him go and tries to make sense of the tangle of emotions in his gut. He’s never experienced someone’s memory before and he’s not sure if how he feels is coming from him, or from Ronan, or both.

“What are you doing here?” a dark voice says from behind him. “How are you here?”

Adam spins around. It’s Ronan. Adult Ronan, and he looks angry.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.” Adam stands his ground. This isn’t real, he tells himself, and it’s not his fault he’s here.

“Like fuck you didn’t. Get out,” Ronan snarls.

“Do you think if it were that simple, I wouldn’t have done it as soon as I realised where I was?” Adam spits back.

“I don’t know anything about what you would do. For all I know you made that covenant on purpose and now you’re… using it for something. I don’t want this.”

“Oh, and you think I do,”

“Obviously!”

The memory is starting to fracture, and Adam can feel himself waking up, can feel the mossy ground beneath his back. He doesn’t have anything more to say to Ronan. He’s leaving, like Ronan wants, and when he wakes up properly, Adam is going to find a way to sever this bond. Sever it, and then find out what is wrong with his forest. Fix this, fix that.

Blue wakes up alone, an unusual occurrence for her, seeing as how she shares the room in the attic of the mill with her entire family. Sometimes the cat falls asleep on her bed too, but not even the cat is there this morning.

She doesn’t remember her dreams, if she dreamt at all. Not an unusual occurrence. Blue’s dreams are few, and they’re hazy and confusing. A side effect of the curse, Maura told her once, stroking her hair away from her face, you’ll dream when it’s lifted.

Dream of how I killed someone, can’t wait for that, Blue had replied, sullenly. Maura had tutted. There are other ways to lift curses. One day, you’ll see, she’d said.

There’s an unusual amount of noise coming from downstairs, for so early in the morning. There’s a kettle whistling, and the sound of someone chopping something up very rapidly.

“Bloooo!” her mother calls from downstairs.

Blue groans. Whatever has caused this commotion apparently needs her attention. Or rather, her presence as a damn magical energy conduit. Probably something to do with Adam.

“Blue!” Maura calls again, sharper this time, like she can sense Blue’s discontent.

“I’m coming,” Blue grumbles as she rolls out of her bed. She reaches for the breeches she’d been wearing yesterday, but finds they’ve been replaced with a clean pair of thicker ones, along with a new shirt and her favourite leather jerkin, the one that had mysteriously disappeared the week before. Her boots are set out there too, polished, strangely, despite Blue preferring how they look when they’re a little scuffed.

There’s a tiny bubble of hope in Blue’s chest, but she pays it little attention, lest it burst. Is it one day today? Has soon become now? She dresses hurriedly, pulling on her clothes as quickly as she can, fingers fumbling over the laces of her boots. She runs out of the room, yanking on her jerkin as hammers down the rickety mill stairs.

Blue almost slams into the door frame of the busy kitchen. She watches the scene for a moment, taking it in, suddenly calm. Persephone is wrapping some cured meats in a cheesecloth, while Calla packs arrows into a handsome leather quiver that Blue hasn’t seen before. Her mother is standing by the kitchen door, Blue’s travelling cloak over one arm, smiling knowingly at her daughter.

“Is it--?” Blue asks, cautious in case she’s wrong. She doesn’t think she’s wrong, not this time, not about this.

“It is, Blue. It’s time for you to go,” Maura says. “The decisions are made.”

“About bloody time!” Calla says. “That boy better—”

“Shh!” Persephone says, sharply, cutting Calla off. “Remember to stick to the path,” she tells Blue, lifting the satchel she’s packed off of the table and passing it to Blue. There’s a bedroll strapped to the bottom of it, thick green fabric bundled in a tight roll. “Find the oldest tree in the forest.”

“Don’t follow anything if you can’t see its face,” Calla tells her, handing her the quiver of arrows, and an elegantly carved hunting bow. Blue tucks them across her back along with the satchel. “In fact. Don’t trust anything if you can’t see its face. Or its hands.”

“Adam can help you,” Maura tells her. “You’ll have to help him too. You’re ready for this, Blue.”

“Thanks, Mom. Thanks Calla, Persephone. I’ll be back, I promise.”

“Of course you will,” Maura says, smiling sadly at Blue. She tucks the cloak across Blue’s shoulders. “This is the way you’re meant to go.”

Blue takes a final look at the little room. She feels like she spent her whole life here, like she was always going to be here, stagnant in these four walls. The promise of soon never coming. Now it’s here, Blue’s not sure that she is ready for it. So much time to prepare, and yet…

“You’ll be more prepared than you are,” Calla says.

Ronan wakes abruptly from the dream that wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a dream, it was a crystal clear memory, and it wasn’t a dream because the mage was in it. Ronan can’t escape him, can’t move without tripping over this man. Can’t even sleep without having him wander around Ronan’s head. Wander around Ronan’s head, looking at his memories like they’re the pages of a book. It’s the worst kind of violation, and Ronan’s damn well had enough of mages and soothsayers reading the inside of his head.

Ronan can feel the covenant at the edge of his magic. He’s been able to feel it every time he’s shifted, not like a barrier, exactly, but a strange presence that he hadn’t been there before. There’s something else too, a tingling in his fingers when he walks through the trees with Gansey. A whisper, just out of range of his hearing. Ronan wonders if this is what it feels like to have your magic drained from you.

There’s a bigger problem this morning though. Far bigger than whatever that mage is up to.

Gansey’s gone.

Chapter Text

Six turns of the moon ago, Gansey had been sat with Ronan on a quiet beach, in a night-cloaked cove along the far south coast of the continent. They’d spent the day talking with local fisherman, hearing their own local folklore, their version of the tale of the disappearance of Glendower.

He's under the sea, they’d said. He went to find the lost city of Galansor, but he was ensnared by a great sea monster, and now he slumbers beneath the ocean, with the other great beasts of legend. He can be woken, but be careful of what else you might awaken.

“What if Glendower is under the ocean?” Gansey had asked Ronan. Ronan didn’t look away from the flames of their crackling campfire. They curved strangely around the driftwood, flickering blue and green in places.

The edges of Ronan’s grief were sharp; the wounds still raw. In those first few days, Gansey had felt as if he were the caretaker of a particularly volatile weapon. If he did not take care to watch it, it would wreak unimaginable damage. Mostly to itself.

Gansey had long been looking for a reason to begin his quest for Glendower, and getting Ronan away from their homeland had been almost too perfect. Gansey’s parents had waved him off, agreeing happily when he suggested taking Ronan. Yes, get Niall Lynch’s last son out of here.

It seemed to Gansey, that his parents’ main method of solving problems with power hungry mages was to brush the cause of the problems under the rug. If there are no formwalkers left in the kingdom, then the mages can’t use them for their power; banning formwalkers rather than banning the practice outright. That’s what happened, he supposed, when magic users gained too much influence. When mages found that their powers increased infinitely when they took magic from another. They could shake the earth, light an unquenchable fire, raise the dead; things that had been considered impossible, became possible. All it cost was the power of a creature few considered to be truly human.

“It’s bullshit,” Ronan said, after what felt like an age had passed since Gansey’s question. “You know he’s not under the damn ocean. Why are we wasting our time here?”

Gansey swallowed. It felt like the truth was right there, just out of his reach. He’d stared at the flames, as if the answer would show itself to him. “I don’t know. I don’t think I know how to find him.”

“Yes you do,” Ronan had asserted. “You do, and when you’re ready, I’ll be there. Just tell me what to do, and we’ll find him.”

“Together?” Gansey had asked, around the lump in his throat.

“Yeah. Obviously,” Ronan had replied, certain, in this new world where they both knew certainty was a luxury.

‘Glendower is in Cabeswater. I had to go in alone. You have to find your own way in. I’m sorry. – Gansey.’

That was the note he’d left, on a page torn from his journal, folded neatly in the spot where his bedroll had been the night before.

Now, guilt gnaws a hole in Gansey’s gut as he ascends the slope towards the edge of Cabeswater forest. A thousand voices echo in his head, the voices of all the people who had told him to stay away from this forest. Their warnings, that forest will drive you mad; never go in unless you’re sure of what you want; don’t go in, unless you’re prepared to get more than you bargained for; stay away from that forest.

The trees are close, but as Gansey approaches, they seem to open up for him. A gap in the forest emerges, small at first but then the trees seem to bend together to form a grand archway.

Gansey stands before the archway and peers down the long tunnel of trees. Could it really be this simple? If he holds Glendower in his mind, will the forest take him straight to him? I want to find Glendower, Gansey thinks. The vision from the seeing stone flashes in his head. His face; Glendower’s tomb.

“I want to find Glendower,” Gansey says out loud. “I am going to find Glendower.”

A harsh wind rushes down the tunnel of trees, scattering leaves around Gansey’s feet. “Make way for the Raven King.” The words are carried on the wind.

The Raven King. Glendower had been known as that, for the emblem on his shield, and for the chief of his guard, his best friend, a formwalker who would shift to a raven and ride on his shoulder, only shifting back to a man to protect his king. It was the strange sort of parallel between him and Glendower that Gansey would dismiss as coincidence, if he believed in them.

Would Glendower have ever left his loyal best friend behind?

Make way for the Raven King.

It cannot be this easy.

Make way for the Raven King.

This has happened before. A thousand lifetimes ago.

Make way for the Raven King.

Gansey takes a breath. And he steps into the trees.

It’s just a fucking forest. It’s just a bunch of stupid trees. All that stuff about talking trees and walking trees and being driven mad by them is just made up to scare children out of wandering too far from their homes.

Probably.

The only things in this world that Ronan has to fear are mages. He’s got no reason to be afraid of some overgrown flowers.

“You’re just a bunch of overgrown flowers,” he tells the trees. He feels stupid talking to trees, but then, if they can hear him, he wants them to know he’s not afraid of them. He’s a fucking wolf.

The edge of the forest is strange. The trees along the boundary of it are thick, and they grow close together. Dense thorns twist between them, and there’s no visible way in between them. Ronan spends a good couple of hours that day stalking along the line of the forest, looking for any gap that Gansey could have possibly squeezed in through. He can’t find one.

He shouts Gansey’s name a few times, but they only reply he gets is his own voice, bouncing back off the dense fortress.

Eventually, Ronan unsheathes his sword. One way or another, he’s getting into this forest.

The thorns put up a fight. Ronan hacks at them, twists his way in between them, but they regrow almost immediately, until he’s completely surrounded by them, swallowed by the tangle of bushes. Ronan weighs up his options. No way of flying out of here, and the wolf would be just as stuck as he is. He probably should’ve tried the snake first.

Ronan shifts, and the snake slides between the branches. He has to twist over and over and around and around his own red, white and black body on his way out of the thorns, but eventually he drops to the hard compacted earth beneath.

Ronan shifts back to his human form and stands. It’s night. It had been early afternoon, grey and cloudy, but still light, and now he stands in a clearing, under the blackest, moonless night. The trees spill upwards, spreading across the starless sky like ink. Their branches reach infinitely into the void hanging over him.

The forest is still, no wind, no rustling of leaves. A crow caws from far away; the sound rings through the silence. Goosebumps prickle across Ronan’s skin, the hackles raise on the wolf inside him. He feels as if he is being watched, a fear that Ronan thinks is not entirely unfounded.  

“Gansey!” Ronan shouts, although he has little hope of a reply. His voice reverberates on the trees around him. The darkness recedes a little, as Ronan’s eyes adjust. His breath fogs in the frigid air. He can make out individual tree trunks. Something dark moves between them.

“Ronan!” Ronan’s thundering heart stutters and then doubles its pace at the answering shout. It hadn’t been Gansey’s voice. It had been his father’s.

“Dad?” Ronan says. Doesn’t shout, not again. He’s shocked that his voice works at all. In the silence that follows a voice Ronan never thought he’s hear again, Ronan doubts that he’d heard it at all.

And then, from behind him, there’s a great boom from between the trees, and the rushing, rushing, rushing of an oncoming spell. Hot, naked fear surges through Ronan.

“Ronan, run!” Declan screams. “Don’t just fucking stand there! Run!”

It’s just like before. Ronan’s back in the worst night of his life. The darkness around him is close and heavy and he trips as he staggers away from the sound of running feet. In the dark, Declan shouts again.

“Get Matthew and run, Ronan!”

Ronan can’t find Matthew. He shouts for him, but he can’t see, can’t hear him.

“This is all your fault!” Declan shouts, not at Ronan, but he’s close enough to hear anyway. “You knew they’d come for us. You never made it a secret!”

Another boom echoes through the trees, and then silence, like the world is holding its breath.

He’s found Matthew now. Ronan can’t see, but he knows he’s there, his face pale and afraid in the pause before the fall.

“What are you doing? Run! Both of you!”

Ronan runs.

It’s that night, all over again, and it can’t be real. He trips and stumbles over roots, Matthew’s heavy breathing in his ear. Ronan dares to glance behind him, and the fire is chasing him, sucking in light rather than giving it out, the darkness swelling around him, pressing closer and closer. His mother’s scream rings out from it and it’s all Ronan can hear.

Up ahead there’s a light, and it’s small and far away, but Ronan can make it, before the fire catches up to him. He’s about to shift to the raven, but before he can, a hand grabs his wrist.

Matthew’s face is white, hollow and only half visible. “Ronan, I’m scared,” he says. Ronan shushes him, guides him to where there’s a gap in the roots of a tree. Matthew crouches between them, and he doesn’t look real, like the colour has been drained from his body. A ghost of himself.

Everything is the same. The tree, the distant screams, the way Matthew’s fingers slip from between Ronan’s. He should never have let go.

Ronan says the same words as before, even though he knows they’re a lie. “Stay here. I’ll come back for you, I just have to see—It’ll be okay.”

He leaves Matthew in the hollow of the tree and looks back at the burning house. The fire is searing orange now, illuminating the trees, silhouetting the house inside it. Bare timber collapses into unquenchable flames that consume everything with a ceaseless hunger. When Ronan can’t look anymore, he turns back to the tree. It’s empty, the same empty it had been. It was always empty.

There are voices in the trees, closer and closer. Heavy footsteps. There was another one, they say. The tiny circle of light ahead of Ronan flickers and gets a little smaller. The boom of magic echoes through the trees. A searching spell. If he shifts, they’ll use the traces of magic to find him. If he doesn’t, they’ll find him anyway.

Ronan shifts and flies for the light, flapping his wings desperately despite the grief and fear coursing through him.

He bursts through the trees back into the cold, afternoon light, shifting between different forms as he tumbles to the ground. Finally, Ronan collapses, human, drenched in sweat, heart racing, and stomach tight with grief, guilt, and pain. Hot tears run freely down his cheeks and he wipes at them furiously with the back of his hand.

He crumples to the ground, huddles in the dirt, and tries to stop the shaking of his hands.  He’s never going back in that forest. He has to go back. There’s no way he can go back. There’s no way he can’t go back.

The tunnel of trees doesn’t lead him to Glendower. Gansey was mostly sure it wouldn’t, he’d have been disappointed, he thinks, if it had been that easy.

Instead, it leads him to great, broad oak tree. Its branches are thick and gnarled and they form a vast canopy that nothing else grows beneath. The tree itself has to be hundreds, if not thousands of years old.

Gansey hesitates at the edge of the clearing. Brilliant sunlight streams through the branches above, blue sky visible in the gaps between the leaves. Behind him, the tunnel of trees that had brought him shrinks closed.

The next step is obvious. Gansey cautiously crosses the clearing towards the tree. It feels familiar to him, and when he puts his hand to the bark, he knows before he makes contact that he’ll feel the pulse of the forest, beating within. Gansey knows this tree, and this tree knows him.

“Which way do I go?” Gansey asks, unsure if he’ll get an answer. The wind blows through the clearing again, and leaves swirl around and around in the middle.

There are many paths that lead out the clearing. The swirling leaves are unhelpful in telling him which route to pick, so Gansey starts off down the closest one to him. The leaf-strewn mud of the clearing becomes soft green grass, and Gansey has to duck down to get beneath the branches of the trees as they bow lower and lower over him.

Outside of this forest, the world was just turning into the first shades of winter. Golden trees had been stripped of their leaves by the wind, and they’d shook, bare branches rattling in the harsh winds that had blown from the northwest. Here though, down this path, the trees are welcoming a new spring. Tiny green shoots bud on every branch, and early spring flowers bloom along the sides of the path. Unseen birds dart between the bushes, and there’s rustling in the undergrowth that makes Gansey think of animals waking from a long hibernation.

The further he walks down this path, the more it blooms with life. Up ahead, a tree, heavy with white blossoms, hangs over the path. Gansey approaches it and up close, he can see that the white flowers are shaped like tiny birds. He touches a finger to one, and its petals flutter like wings. A sharp gust of wind comes from nowhere and catches the branches of the tree. More of the blossoms flap their petals, dancing in the current. They take off, hundreds of tiny, white birds whirling through the air around Gansey. Gansey laughs in delight, watching them spiral into the sky, disappearing through the high branches of the trees into the brilliant blue beyond.

More blossom flutters past, and Gansey follows the path down to another clearing he can see ahead of him. He emerges into the clearing, hoping to see another path out of it, some sign that he’s going the right way.

Gansey’s stomach drops when he realises that it’s the same clearing as the one he left. He emerges from behind the great oak tree, entering from the same path he’d used to walk away from it. Spring is heavy in the air here too. Trees that had been bare before are now dressed in pale pink and white flowers. The oak tree is vibrant with new growth. The deep breath that Gansey takes tastes of pollen.

With a sigh, Gansey reminds himself that it was just one path. There are more paths that lead from this clearing, more routes he can take. There has to be a way that will lead him out of here, keep him on the path to Glendower. Gansey takes the next trail, to the left of the first one he took.

Heat presses around him, down this path, so sudden and intense that Gansey has to remove his cloak and stuff it into his pack. More and more flowers bloom down here; the path ahead of him is awash with colour, thousands of flowers, like nothing he’s ever seen before.

Gansey pauses, to take it all in. Something moves, flashing in the trees to his right, and when he looks, a herd of deer gallop through, golden coats gleaming in the sunlight.

I could stay here forever, he thinks. He can’t even remember why he came anymore. Summer stretches around him, infinite and beautiful. He can hear a stream running off in the distance, just a little way off the path and Gansey thinks how nice the cold water would be, on his hot skin.

Glendower, a voice whispers, borne to him on the warm wind that ruffles his hair.

Glendower. That name. It’s important to him. Something at the end of this path is important to him. Gansey puts the thoughts of the cool stream out of his head, and continues along the path.

“Impossible,” Gansey murmurs, as he emerges back into the same clearing. The oak tree sighs. Summer is heavy in the air here too, the ground is soft with moss and there’s a patch of sun Gansey thinks would be perfect to settle in, just to gather his thoughts for a moment.

Gansey sits, leaning back against the thick trunk of the oak. He takes his journal and a pot of ink from his pack and turns to a blank sheet. His gut twists when his fingers brush the damage where he’d ripped out a page for the note he’d left Ronan.

Gansey draws out a rough sketch on his blank journal page. The vast oak tree in the centre, and then carefully, each path that spreads from it. He makes notes on the two paths he’s already tried: spring and summer.

Thirteen paths lead from the oak tree, and so Gansey works around the clearing in a circle. The next path takes him to spring again, an earlier spring than before. The air is crisp and cold, despite the sunshine, and most of the trees are bare, save for a few green shoots. It’s still beautiful in its barrenness, in its promise of new life.

The next path is icy, deep winter. Every branch, every leaf, every twig is decorated in a delicate frost. The frozen grass crunches beneath Gansey’s feet, and everything sparkles. The clearing, when he returns to it, is a glorious palace of ice. The canopy of delicate branches above Gansey glistens in the weak winter sunlight, like a gossamer web laid over the world.

“Now that,” Gansey says, staring up at the oak tree. “Is just showing off.”

It’s freezing cold here, but Gansey is, as always, reluctant to leave. He does though, with a final look at the static beauty of the winter.

Gansey keeps going and going, following paths that lead to nowhere but another season. He doesn’t know how long he’s spent, walking these paths. It could be minutes, or hours, or years could have passed. Each time he returns to the clearing, nothing has changed, and it’s like the first time he arrived all over again. The memories of the other paths hang in his head, but it’s like they happened to someone else. He can’t remember if he’s seen the autumn path yet, or late summer, or the thaw of winter, or if he just thinks he should have. The notes in his journal are illegible, things written in the margins Gansey doesn’t remember writing, words overlapping other words.

He's been down every path. Each roughly sketched route has a hastily scribbled word, a season usually, or a feeling, or both. Gansey runs his fingers across the page, trying to read his own writing.

One path, he has no memory of taking, but the note written on it doesn’t give detail of a season, it simply says, NOT HERE. The path in question is the furthest from the oak tree, and it curves strangely downhill. Gansey cannot remember following it. There’s a tree, just visible, a short way down the path, and Gansey looks at it curiously. It’s dead. Its white, skeletal branches stretch across the path, like hands stripped of flesh reaching for him.

Gansey swallows. For now, he’ll heed his own warning. He looks back at his journal. The notes in the margins, in the blank spaces between the routes, all say the same word, over and over again. Glendower.

“I know he’s here,” Gansey whispers to himself, and then louder, he says, “I know you’re here, Glendower. I’m coming to find you!”

Gansey chooses a path at random, no thought this time as to whether he’s been down it before.

This path is burning, vibrant autumn. Gold and red and orange, the ground thick with fallen leaves. Gansey ignores it all. This time, this path will lead him somewhere new. He’s determined it will. He holds the thought in his head. I am going somewhere. I am finding something, this time. This time will be different. This time. This time. This time.

The same clearing looms ahead of him. Gansey allows himself to breath a single swear, one he learnt from Ronan, as the oak tree comes into view.

Gansey is about to resign himself to choosing another path, to repeat the same determined charge down it, again and again, until something changes, when he notices. Something has changed.

He’s not the only person in the clearing this time.

It’s late summer, not that Ronan can feel the heat, but he recognises the dry grass, the insects flittering in the air. There are people working in the field, cutting the grass down to make hay. Everything is leached of colour slightly. Even the sky above that should be bright, soaring blue, looks faded and almost grey.

Ronan always knows when he’s dreaming, but this isn’t a dream. He’s asleep, but, like before, when he’d seen the memory of him playing with his brothers, he isn’t dreaming. He’s remembering.

But this memory isn’t his.

A little way ahead of him, the mage, Adam, is standing. Ronan thinks of announcing his presence, but Adam must know he’s here, even if he isn’t paying him any attention. He’s stood off to the side of the field, looking at something low to the ground, head tilted and a strange look on his face.

He almost expects the same reaction from Adam as Ronan had given him when the situation was reversed. Ronan approaches him slowly, so he can see what Adam’s looking at too, curiosity outweighing his aversion to hypocrisy.

There’s a little boy crouched in the long grass, just by the edge of a ditch, almost completely hidden from view. He’s small, and skinny, smaller and skinnier than Ronan ever remembers Matthew being. His hair and his skin are the same dusty colour as the parched earth, like he was made from it. He’s got a tiny frog cupped in his hand and a matching tiny smile on his dirt-smudged face. A tiny, inquisitive finger strokes across the frog’s back and it croaks in response.

There are more frogs hopping around his feet, and the child lets out a small giggle when one hops onto his knee. Another joins the one in his cupped in his hand, and they tussle together, making the child laugh again. He laughs like he knows to keep it quiet.

Ronan looks up at the mage again. A hint of a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes are sad.

“Adam!” A woman’s voice rings across the field. Adam flinches at the same second as the tiny boy. “Adam!” The frogs leap from his hands and flee into the thick grass of the ditch.

The woman doesn’t sound like she’s looking for her playfully hiding child. She doesn’t sound the way Ronan’s mother had sounded when she’d called Ronan and his brothers back in from playing in the fields. This woman sounds angry.

The little boy doesn’t move though. He’s looking intently at the spot where the last frog disappeared into the grass. The tiny smile has vanished completely from his face, but he doesn’t look sad or scared either; he crouches in the grass, expressionless. Ronan remembers the hiding games he’d play with his brothers in the woods by their home. And he remembers hiding with Matthew. The last time. Bile rises in his throat. He wonders if you can throw up in someone else’s memory.

“There you are,” the woman snarls, as she bursts through the long grass. She grabs the child by the arm and hauls him upright, spinning him around to face her. “What have I told you? Show me your hands.”

The little boy, the young Adam, looks away at the ground, but he holds his hands out anyway. They’re clean, Ronan doesn’t know what this woman is looking for. Her stony, weathered face examines the grass behind Adam. Whatever it is she’s looking for, she sees it.

“I’ve told you, Adam. Your father catches you doing that you won’t sit for a week. Someone else catches you, they’ll take you away. You don’t want that. They’ll take you far away and you’ll never come home again.”

The little boy sniffs. “Was just playing with the frogs.”

“No. Normal children don’t do that with frogs. Normal children do the jobs they’re asked to do, they help their families. They don’t do any of the disgusting, unnatural things I’ve caught you doing. There’s no food for you tonight.”

The woman takes the child by the arm and drags him away from the ditch through the grass. His bare feet scuff in the dirt as he stumbles to keep up with his mother and Ronan wants to—Ronan doesn’t know. There’s nothing that can be done; this is a memory, it’s too late. He can’t look at the mage, at Adam, even though he can feel Adam’s eyes on him.

“I told you, you’re not the only one who doesn’t want this,” Adam says. The memory is fading, shattering at the edges as the bridge between them is broken. Ronan feels himself pulling back from Adam’s mind, and on the way back to himself, his own memories flash past him.

Playing in the trees with Matthew, running down the hill with Declan, his mother singing in the kitchen. Hiding in the trees. Running. His mother screaming.

The bed in the inn is as uncomfortable as it was when Ronan fell asleep, but this time his mind is screaming not because of the excess of ale, but because of the excess of memories. There’s no escape from the inside of his own head. Or the inside of Adam's.

This bond is nothing but a fucking inconvenience. It’s just another problem to solve. Get back into Cabeswater. Find Gansey. Get Gansey out of that fucking forest. Get as far from it as possible. Oh, and then also, find a way of severing a magical bond with the goddamn mage of Cabeswater.

Mage of—Oh. Ronan can’t believe his own fucking stupidity sometimes.

Gansey is in Cabeswater. Ronan can’t get in, but he’s got a covenant with the mage who gets his power from Cabeswater. Shit.

Maybe the bond isn’t fucking inconvenient. He just has to work out how to use it…

Chapter Text

Adam spends days walking deeper and deeper into Cabeswater. When he set off from that decaying birch tree, he was looking for a cause, or a solution, or anything at all that looked out of place. Days into the search though, Adam hasn’t found anything even remotely strange and he’s beginning to think that travelling this deep into the woods was a mistake.

He’s not sure if he’s even in Cabeswater anymore, really. This part of the forest feels decidedly less magical. It doesn’t keep sending him in circles for its own entertainment for a start. The trees don’t whisper to him here either, and he thinks if he gets lost, it will be his own fault rather than the forest’s deliberate decision.

After examining every part of the strange, decaying tree, Adam had cast his rune stones right there on the ground before it. They’d made no sense though, complete gibberish. It felt like whatever grew from that tree had blocked his connection to the forest.

He and Noah had searched the immediate area for other trees with the same affliction. They’d found nothing out of sorts in the immediate area. Adam had suggested digging down to the roots of the tree, but Noah had shaken his head at the idea, and not offered an explanation.  

Noah, who was stronger and more present, the closer he was to the old oak at the heart of Cabeswater, returned to it, to seek out other trees closer to it. Adam, meanwhile, walked north, to the more unknown parts of the forest, reaching with his magic to find places where it didn’t feel as strong.

The lack of any new discoveries has irritated Adam, but not as much as the new discovery that someone else has made. The last couple of days, something has been tugging insistently at the edges of Adam’s magic, pulling at it, trying to get his attention. Adam knows what it is, without having to reach for it. The covenant.

Adam still doesn’t know how to break it. And now, for some reason, the formwalker is trying to get his attention with it. It’s an indignity, Adam thinks, that this man thinks he can just summon Adam to him like—

The tug is stronger this time, almost pulling all of Adam’s magic away from the spell he’d been trying to cast. This will continue, he thinks, ruefully. Maybe the formwalker knows how to break it, maybe he needs to tell Adam that. Maybe he needs to employ a mage. Maybe he’s just doing it to be annoying.

He stands again, and gathers his things together for the new spell. He reaches for the covenant, feels it slide against his magic like snakeskin. It’s easy, to step through space and to land almost exactly where the formwalker is calling out to him from. The covenant stretches like an invisible string, like a faint line on a map, and Adam only has to touch it, feel it flutter against his fingertips like wings, before he’s drawn to the place where Ronan is.

Blue stands before the few wobbly planks of wood that lead over the river, separating the edges of the woods where she has been before, from the proper forest, where she has never been. As soon as Blue crosses this rickety, makeshift bridge, she is past the familiar and finally into her own adventure.

Blue doesn’t know why she’s hesitating. She shouldn’t be, she’s dreamt of this moment, of striding confidently past the point where she was always told, no Blue, just wait there. But now she stands, watching the water swirl and eddy beneath the bridge and the trees sway beyond it in the late autumn wind. And she hesitates.

I’m not afraid, Blue tells herself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Only the rest of your life.

Steeling herself, Blue places a foot on the nearest plank. Despite its fragile appearance, the bridge doesn’t shift as she begins to cross. She watches her footing anyway, careful to test the wood before she puts her weight fully on it. She doesn’t trust the forest not to send her plummeting into the water.

Blue’s around halfway across when sunlight glints off the water, despite the overcast day, and it catches her attention. When she looks down to the river, she sees the petals of a blue lily caught in the current, drifting serenely downstream to the bridge. Blue’s breath catches in her throat.

She watches as a petal sticks on a protruding rock, and another glances off it, before moving away downstream. A kiss, and a parting. The petal caught on the rock stays, as the others pass beneath the bridge. They do not emerge on the other side. Blue watches the one remaining petal for a long time. She watches how the flow of the water tears at the edges of it, leaving it ragged, but never freeing it. She wants to climb down the bank towards it, longs to free it for herself. But Calla’s warning to stay on the path rings through her head. She leaves the petal alone.

As Blue steps off the bridge, a cold wind blows suddenly, swelling from nowhere and fading to nothing just as fast. When her foot makes contact with the bank, she doesn’t step into the soft mulch of autumn, but the deep snow of midwinter. The cold air around her feels as if a blanket has suddenly been torn from her. The wind blows again and Blue yelps as a flurry of snow falls on her head from a nearby tree.

She remembers watching Maura and Calla crossing this bridge, how they would cross and then firmly say, ‘Stop that,’ or, ‘I’d prefer a warmer day.’

Blue looks up to the trees. She feels foolish, addressing the trees, but she’ll have to if she wants the snow to go away. And if they listen to her, then they’ll know that she isn’t scared to be here.

Blue swallows and stands up straighter. “Stop that,” she says, in her best imitation of Calla. “I’m here to break my curse, not freeze to death.”

The sound of clattering branches fills the air, like a great storm passing through. Blue doesn’t feel the wind, but she does feel another cold drip of water on her head. She glares at the nearest tree to her, but even as she does, the snow begins to melt. The season changes before her eyes, snow melting under an increasingly intense sun, green grass and wildflowers pushing through it, buds of blossom bursting to life on the trees around her.

“Thank you,” Blue says. But there is no clear path away from the bridge. The warning to stick to the path is still at the front of her mind, but without a way to go, how will she do this? “Will you show me where I need to go to find out how to break my curse?”

The branches chatter above her head again, and the flowers dance in a wind that Blue can’t feel.

“The oldest tree in the forest then,” Blue says, remembering what Persephone told her. “The great oak. Will you take me to that?”

Again, the branches chatter and the flowers sway, but this time, the path becomes clear. It feels as if it has been there the whole time, as if the way was always obvious. The curves away from the bridge up a steep incline, that Blue definitely knows wasn’t there before.

Blue takes a deep breath, focuses on what she wants, and pushes on into the forest. It’s only the rest of your life.

Ronan’s drunk. Ronan’s lost track of how much he’s had to drink, but he’s sure it doesn’t matter anymore. Get drunk, pick a fight, get drunk again, pick another fight.

Gansey’s gone. He’s gone and Ronan can’t follow him. He’s not ready to live through that nightmare for a third time.

Whatever he’d done to contact the mage hadn’t worked, and so Ronan’s spent the last few days roaming between the towns closest to that cursed fucking forest, drinking whatever he can find and picking fights with anyone who looks at him funny. Soon though he’s going to find his own way in again. Maybe the trees like drunk formwalkers. Maybe if he loses this fight the forest will think he’s desperate enough or pitiful enough and let him in.

It’s easy to pick a fight when you’re as big and scary-looking as Ronan. All he has to do is find another guy who’s as big and scary-looking as he is and give him a challenging look. And then they’re flying out the door of the tavern into the dusty street, swinging punches. There’s plenty of guys like that in these accursed towns. 

Like this guy. Straggly dark hair, a beard that Ronan’s pretty sure has dried blood in it, and a ragged scar on his jaw. He’s bigger than Ronan, but it only makes him slower. Although the ale churning in Ronan’s gut isn’t helping his speed much either.

The man punches him so hard in the head his teeth rattle, but Ronan’s drunk enough that he doesn’t really feel the pain, only the vague notion that it must’ve hurt. He can taste blood in his mouth, sharp and metallic, but that could be the rush of fighting.

The guy then delivers what Ronan considers to be both a literal and metaphorical low blow, and knees him in the gut. As he falls to the gutter, Ronan considers himself lucky that he didn’t get stabbed this time. That guy looked like he wouldn’t’ve thought it bad manners to bring a knife to a fistfight.

Ronan lies in the dusty side street, staring up at the bruise-purple sky. It threatens a storm, which fits in perfectly with Ronan’s mood. He’s considering whether getting stabbed would actually help his chances of getting in the forest, when a pair of worn brown boots enter his eyeline. The boots tut.

“The problem with being the last of your kind,” the boots say, and it becomes apparent to Ronan that these boots are filled with a person who speaks with a very condescending tone. “Is that if you’re not careful, you’ll be responsible for wiping out an entire race.”

Ronan rolls in the gutter until he can see that, yes, his suspicions are correct and it’s that mage. The one that saved his life. Adam. Ronan should be happy, he thinks. This is what he wanted.

There’s dried vomit on his shirt, and the tender ache of a new bruise blooming on his face. This isn’t what he wants.

“Three things,” Ronan says, holding up four fingers. He slumps to sitting, so he can give Adam the full force of his glare. “One, how is it my fucking fault that my entire family was murdered. Two, I’m certainly not going to be responsible for continuing the line. Three, everyone’s gotta fucking die.”

Adam raises an eyebrow. It’s an unfairly attractive expression and Ronan thinks he should be banned from making it. 

“Oh, and four. Fuck off.” 

Adam sits on the curb next to him. “You’re drunk.”

“Wow, did you get your stunning powers of observation along with the others?”

Adam snorts, and stares across the road at where a stray dog is sniffing at a pile of discarded rags. “Where’s your friend? The prince.” 

Ronan sighs and scrubs a hand across his face. When he pulls it away, there’s blood smeared on it. He doesn’t remember when he started bleeding. “I lost him.”

“That was careless,” the mage says, dryly.

“Again. Fuck off. Why are you even fucking here?”

“Oh I was in the area…” Adam says, absently. His casual tone makes Ronan’s rage boil up again, from where it lay dormant in the wake of the fight.

“Save a child from a well?” He sneers at Adam.

Adam doesn’t answer that, so Ronan keeps pushing, just for the satisfaction of winding him up. “Cat stuck up a tree? Tavern bar brawl to break up? Or did you just feel like dragging my sorry ass out of the gutter.”

Adam clenches his jaw, and huffs. “Apparently, I was summoned.”

Ronan tries not to let his surprise show. Whatever he did had worked, but he wishes it had worked sooner. Anything could have happened to Gansey. Anger still boils inside him and  winding the mage up is clearly working. “Huh. Took your fucking time.”

“Don’t you think I have better things to do than answer your every whim. I’m not a djinn. What is it you want?”

“Thought you weren’t a djinn?”

“Did you just bring me here to insult me and make stupid jokes?” He turns his intense gaze right on Ronan then, the full evidence of his annoyance at the situation writ large across his gaunt face.

Ronan grits his teeth and momentarily wishes he weren’t fucking this up so badly. And then he continues to fuck it up. “Are you handing out favours now? Save my life, offer me whatever I want. Sounds like you’re building up to demanding something from me.”

“I’m not offering you anything. Believe me, formwalker, there’s nothing I have that you want.”

Ronan looks him up and down, slowly. He only means to tease the mage, when he says, “Are you sure about that?” but he can feel his cheeks getting pink anyway.

Adam’s only reply is to roll his eyes. He looks away from Ronan, at where the stray dog has begun to bark at nothing.

“I want a way into Cabeswater,” Ronan says, serious now. He’ll salvage this. He’ll find Gansey.

Adam’s deep blue eyes snap back to him.  “That is something I can give you. But will I? No.”

 “Why not? Gansey’s gone in there and I don’t know what the fuck you said to him, but it’s all your fault,” Ronan replies, his voice raising unintentionally.

Adam shirks away from him, but he nods like the news isn’t a surprise. “It’s hardly my fault. I told him to stay away from it. Is that why you summoned me here? Can’t get in yourself and you think I can just let you in?”

“Fuck you. Why would you come if you thought that? You said you’ve got better things to do so why don’t you go do them? Or did you just feel like taunting me?” Maybe there is no salvaging this.

Adam scoffs. “I came because of the covenant. You wouldn’t leave it alone. Prodding at it like a—” Adam looks disdainfully at where Ronan has picked at a scab on his forearm. “Just like that, like an old wound.”

“So you thought you’d come here, mock me, and then fuck off again? Is it not enough that you do it in my head?” Ronan says, even though Adam’s never mocked his memories.

“I’m trying to break the damn covenant. I thought that’s why you were trying to get my attention,” Adam says, and there’s no emotion in his voice.

“I told you what I wanted. I want a way into Cabeswater.”

“Well, I’m not giving you that.” Adam gets to his feet and dismissively dusts off his breeches. He doesn’t say anything more. He turns sharply on his heel and begins to walk away.

Ronan’s last chance of finding Gansey, walking away, and all he can do is watch.

“Please.” The word bursts out of Ronan, and he sounds pathetic even to his own ears. “Gansey is the only thing I’ve got left to lose.”

Adam stops in the street, a few paces away. “And yet you managed,” he says, his back still turned. It’s a blunt knife, but Ronan feels it slice just the same.

“You’re such a bastard. You’re the last person I want to ask for help. Don’t you think I wouldn’t ask if I had any other choice?” Ronan gets to his feet too, anger and hurt driving him up. He ignores the prickle of tears behind his eyes.

Adam turns back to him, and a strange expression has settled across his face. He looks almost longing. He rolls his shoulders, like he’s come to a decision. “Okay. I’ll help you find him. Maybe we can find a way to break the covenant too.”

Ronan takes the couple of paces towards Adam, and holds out his hand. “Ronan Lynch,” he says.

Adam nods. “Adam Parrish.” He looks warily at Ronan’s hand for a second. When he takes it, the covenant surges between them burning hot like grasping a red-hot poker. Ronan gasps, but he can’t move his hand away. Magic screams through him, and it feels like when he shifts, squeezing tight and releasing just as suddenly. The rush of magic coalesces at the point where his hand meets Adam’s, and he can feel everything. The heartbeat of the forest, the thunder of the Falchion river hundreds of miles away, the screaming sun tracking across the sky. A thousand lifetimes passing in the blink of an eye. And then just as suddenly as it had come, it’s gone. They’re just two guys, shaking hands in a dusty street. Ronan swallows his nausea.

Adam breathes out shakily, he’s close enough that Ronan can hear the tremble.

“Come on then, Parrish,” he says, trying to shake off the awkwardness he feels. He doesn’t want to ask Adam if he feels that all the time. Afraid in case he does; even more afraid if he doesn’t. “Where do we begin?”

Adam is still looking at his hand. He blinks, and then rubs it against his trousers. Ronan would be offended, if he weren’t thinking of doing the same thing.

“Runestones,” Adam mutters, and he nods towards the front door of the tavern Ronan was thrown out of earlier.

The path that Blue takes is for the most part, soft and mossy. The path winds through the forest, turning and turning so tightly that Blue is almost sure she’s going to double back on herself. The path climbs steep banks, and then tumbles back down even steeper ones. Some slopes are so steep that the forest grows roots for her to grab hold of to pull herself up.

“If you made the ground less steep,” she tells the trees, the third time this happens, “then you wouldn’t have to grow roots for me to hold onto.”

This bank is so steep that it’s almost vertical, and Blue is sweating by the time she hauls herself onto the top. She huffs with annoyance, when she sees that the path leads her almost straight down the other side.

“Is this funny to you?” she asks the trees. The branches clatter above her, in a way that Blue is beginning to recognise as laughter.

Sometimes, the trees grow so close and low to the ground that to stay on the path, Blue has to crawl on her hands and knees. It would be a problem, Blue thinks, if she were any taller.

Other times the path winds around and around clusters of trees, and it would be too easy to hop across to a different section of path and skip out the weaving around. But Blue follows the path diligently, not afraid, but cautious, of straying from it.

Finally, after Blue feels as if she was walked for hours, but barely covered a few miles, she emerges into a clearing. It’s familiar to her in the way that places you’ve only heard about in stories are. She knows to expect the oak tree, with its broad trunk, its branches spreading wide like arms waiting to hug. She knows about the soft mossy ground that rolls up to it, and the spider’s web of paths that lead from it. This is it.

Blue looks up at the twisting old, oak tree, and waits. Something has to happen now. Anything. Well, here I am, she thinks. If Blue could read runestones, then now, she thinks, would be the perfect time to cast them. Speak to the forest in the language of fate and magic, the language that it understands the best.

But it’s not a language that Blue speaks. Not one that she speaks well, anyway. Maybe she should’ve tried to find Adam first. She wanders around the clearing, looking down each path. Thirteen paths lead away from the tree, and Blue doesn’t know if it’s relieving, or unnerving, to see that every path is identical. Packed dirt track, daisies lining the grassing slopes, the same yellow-leafed tree bowing down across the path. Even the path that led her here has changed. Blue understands the message. Stay here.

She walks back to the centre of the clearing, and puts her hand against the trunk of the tree. Blue laughs in delight, as beneath her hand, she can feel the steading thumping of the heart of the forest. It’s just like in the stories she’d been told as a child. Blue would put her hand to the trunk of the lonely birch tree that grew near the mill house and imagine she could feel the magic that surged within it. This is nothing like she could’ve ever imagined. Blue feels as if she can climb inside the tree, and if she did, she’d be able to feel the whole forest, connected through the roots, like one living body. Is this what it’s like to be a mage?

Blue has her attention so firmly on the tree, that at first, she doesn’t hear the rustling. But then it comes again, louder and closer. Something is coming towards her, down one of the paths. Blue whirls around, just in time for a young man to tumble out of one of the paths, the one directly behind her. He has golden leaves caught in his shiny brown hair, like a crown, and his skin is glowing tan. He’s much more smartly dressed too, than anyone Blue has ever met, and certainly much more smartly dressed than anyone she expected to run into in the forest. He looks, Blue thinks, like a lost prince from a story.

She thinks for a second that this is what she was waiting for. That the forest has found her true love for her and spat him out to meet her. But then he opens his mouth, and it becomes apparent that it was only wishful thinking.

“Are you a wood nymph?”

Blue gapes at the boy. “What? You just assume that every girl you meet in the forest is a wood nymph?”

“No, not at all! I mean, you’re the first girl I’ve ever met in a forest!”

“Oh so then I must be a wood nymph!”

“I just thought that, since you’re here, and this forest certainly isn’t normal, that you might be some kind of magical being, sent to guide me out.” The boy looks expectantly hopeful. His accent is not local, something from further south and much clearer and more elegant than the way anyone she grew up with speaks.

“Guide you out? You think I’m just going to guide you out?” Blue replies, sounding more annoyed than she means to. The boy’s face falls. “I’m not here to help you!”

The boy stumbles forward a bit more, into the clearing. Blue frowns at the way the leaves seem to part to illuminate him in golden sunshine. “Well, do you think you could tell me how to get out of…” He gestures vaguely around at the clearing, a slightly tense expression on what Blue thinks is a distractingly handsome face. “Here.”

Blue frowns at him. The clearing, she supposes he means. “Out of here? You’ve only just got here.”

“No, no,” and now he sounds worried. He pulls a battered leather journal out and flips though pages of scratchily inked notes and strange drawings until he comes to a page that is more ink than blank paper. Blue doesn’t know how he could possibly read anything on it. She leans closer, curiosity getting the better of her.

“You see,” the boy points to random lines on the page. “Thirteen paths, and I’ve been down them all, and they all lead me back here.”

“Did you ask the forest to not do that?” Blue asks, examining the scribbles on the page and trying to discern some actual words from them.

The boy tilts the book to her, but then he suddenly says, “Oh, I’m sorry. Can you read?”

“Of course I can read!” Blue snarls. “What you think that they just don’t teach us to read here?”

“Oh well, it’s just the way you were looking at—”

“I was looking at it like that because it’s a mess! Can you write?”

The man opens and closes his mouth again and again, but no sound comes out. He shuts the journal, and tucks into an inside pocket on his fancy, embroidered doublet.

“I am sorry if you were offended. I can offer you compensation, in exchange for your help in escaping this particular part of the forest?”

“What part of ‘I’m not here to help you,’ did you not understand? If you’ll excuse me, I’m waiting for the forest to show me how to lift my curse,” Blue says, haughtily, turning away.

“Right. Curse, of courses. Curses,” the boy mutters, but he doesn’t leave the clearing, despite Blue’s hostility. He shuffles about in the leaves, absently kicking them from one pile to another. He’s pulled his journal back out and he’s ruffling through pages of it.

Blue takes a deep breath. “And why are you here?” Please don’t say you were randomly transported from a faraway land.

“I’m looking for the legendary lost king, Glendower,” he says, and Blue exhales her relief. “Have you heard the stories of him? He was mapping the northlands and disappeared into Cabeswater.”

The man keeps speaking, keeps telling Blue all about this Glendower, and all Blue can think about is how different he suddenly seems, how much more real and vulnerable he is, without his pretentious guard, without his impudent blustering.

At a pause in his rambling, Blue asks, “Why do you think you’ll be the one to find him?”

He looked startled by the question, as if he doesn’t get asked very often, or maybe it’s just her tone. “Well, I have this dream.”

“A dream? You dream you find him, and that means that you’ll find him?” Blue raises an eyebrow. It sounds like the kind of thing people like to believe about themselves. That they're destined for greatness, that they’ll be a legend in their own right.

“I suppose so. It’s more complicated than that. I’m Gansey, by the way. Richard Campbell Gansey III, Prince of Angloria. But I just go by Gansey.”

“You’re a prince?” Blue gapes at him. Destined for greatness indeed. “I mean, of course you are, just look at you.”

Gansey startles at that, and self consciously touches his embroidered doublet. “And your name is?”

“Blue Sargent,” she says, trying to put as much pride into the syllables of her name as had dripped so effortlessly from Gansey’s.

“Blue? Are you sure you aren’t a magical—”

“Don’t,” Blue interrupts. “Don’t even think it.”

Gansey looks cowed. He gazes around the clearing. “This is place is… miraculous, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. I grew up around mages, but this place is so much more than that.”

“But you don’t have magic?”

“No. You already heard that I’m cursed.”

Gansey ruffles the pages of his journal again. “What type of curse? A blood curse? Or a shadow curse? Or is it one of those ones that only takes effect at night?” He studies Blue curiously, and she imagines he’s picturing the kind of beast she turns into at night.

“It’s incredibly rude,” she says. “To ask people about their curses.”

“I know, I apologise. I’ve met a lot of people with curses, you see, and I thought I might be able to give you some information. Or I could help lift it?”

“You can’t help lift it.” Blue takes a breath. “It’s a true love’s kiss curse.”

“Oh!” Gansey says, and delight is not usually the reaction Blue gets from that revelation. “There’s so much magical potential stored in those! No wonder the mages like to have you around.”

“The mages are my mothers,” Blue snaps.

“Of course!” Gansey says, but he doesn’t look like he heard. He keeps examining the scrawled notes in his journal. “The magical explosion released from breaking that kind of curse! I certainly hope I’m not nearby when you find a way to lift it!”

Something twists in Blue’s gut. “I hope you’re not either,” she tells Gansey, and she’s surprised that she means it. “I’m going to ask the forest to show me the way out of here.”

Gansey nods, and he doesn’t ask Blue to ask for him as well. Blue walks to the oak tree and places her palms against the trunk again.

“Will you show me which way I need to go now?” Blue asks the forest. She glances at Gansey, at his expectant face. “And which way Gansey needs to go to find Glendower?”

The wind swells from nowhere again, in a great gust that carries leaves, alive and dead, and petals, white ones like birds, and blue lily petals. The debris swirls around Gansey and Blue and catches them in the centre of the clearing. It rushes up through the trees, straight into the sky above, and then back down upon them, almost knocking Blue to the ground with the force of it. Gansey grabs her arm to keep her on her feet and Blue is so startled by the gesture, she can’t even be offended. The wind swirls, stinging her eyes and pulling at her hair, and then it rushes away, cutting a path through the trees ahead of where they stand.

Like that, the wind is gone, dying to nothing more than a tiny breeze. Two petals, a blue one and a white one, flutter at the edge of the only available path. All the other paths are closed, blocked by thick lines of trees. Only the one remains, and it stands wide and welcoming ahead of Blue and Gansey.

“I suppose that means…” Gansey trails off.

“We’re going the same way,” Blue finishes. She doesn’t know if it’s disappointment, or relief that bubbles in her gut.

“Well then, Miss Sargent,” Gansey says, with a tiny smile. “Onwards.”

The bartender in the tavern looks up at Ronan when he enters. He glares at Ronan, like he’s about to say something, throw Ronan out again probably, but Adam catches his eye. The bartender jerks a little, then nods once, sharply. The rest of the tavern has gone quiet, as the door swings shut behind them, and at first Ronan thinks it’s because they recognise him, for starting fights across town, or for what he is. But every pair of eyes in the room is flicking towards Adam and away again. Like they want to look, but they’re afraid to be caught doing so.

There’s an empty table close to the door, and Adam sits at it, sideways in his chair, like he’s ready to leave. He ignores everyone in the room and doesn’t offer Ronan any further instructions.

“Do you want me to get us some rooms?” Ronan asks. He wants to wash; he wants to rest his drunk and battered body. He doesn’t sit.

“No. We’re not staying.”

A young girl brings over a tray with two ales on. Her hands shake as she slides the tray onto the table, trembling the surface of the ale. “On the house,” she mumbles, her eyes flicking up to Adam and away just as quickly. She doesn’t even acknowledge Ronan, and the tray has barely settled, before she almost runs from the table.

“Thank you,” Adam says, sincere, but the girl has gone. Ronan sits in the chair opposite Adam and looks at him expectantly. Adam doesn’t say anything more though, just pulls his pack round onto his lap and rummages inside it.

Ronan quickly grows bored of waiting for Adam to do something. He looks around at the bleak, dark interior of the tavern. This tavern is like the town it resides in, all manure brown and corpse grey. A small fire crackles merrily in the grate, but it’s the only source of any kind of warmth in the room. The hard wooden chairs and the morbid demeaner of the bartender do not suggest this is a place in which many people chose to linger.

The other patrons of the tavern have gone back to their conversations, but quieter than before. Occasionally people glance up at Adam, and Ronan glowers back at them until they look away guilty.

“Stop that,” Adam says mildly. He takes a sip of his ale and scrunches up his face at the taste.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

Adam shrugs. “Could be worse.”

All the stories Gansey told him that he’d heard about Adam in the inn that night, the little boy he’d seen in Adam’s memory, and the man he’s just argued with in the street combine with this new information. Ronan’s never felt so confused.

Adam seems unperturbed by the staring. He finally takes his runestones from his bag and Ronan watches as he cups them in his hands. Ronan can’t look away from his hands all of a sudden: his boyishly long fingers, the protruding knuckles, the way they’re chapped from exposure, but still elegant as they shake the stones and scatter them across the table. Ronan remembers holding Adam’s hand in his, the surge of magic and the way his skin was warm and rough to the touch. He wonders how it would feel for Adam to touch him again, just for a second. If that magic will surge again, or if a touch somewhere else would feel—

“Can you focus?” Adam snaps. He gestures at the stones on the table. “You’re throwing me off.”

Ronan looks at the table. The runes are meaningless to him, but Adam studies them the way Gansey studies notes in his journal. “How is me focussing going to help?”

The look Adam gives him is only mildly threatening. “It just will. Think about what you want.”

“I tried that,” Ronan says. “I already tried to get in once, thinking of what I wanted.”

“That was you, was it? I wondered who’d been hacking at those bushes.” Adam looks back at his stones. He gathers them back into his hands and shakes them again.

“Felt it, did you? Someone hurt your precious forest.”

The look Adam gives him is withering. “You got in though?”

Ronan shrugs. “The snake.”

“And it didn’t go well?” Amusement colours his voice, like he already knows. Ronan hates him for it.

“No. It didn’t.” He won’t explain, and he knows that Adam won’t ask.

“It’s like this. If the forest doesn’t want you in, it won’t let you in. If you get in anyway, it does whatever it can to get you out again.” Adam casts the stones across the table again.

“What do they say?” Ronan says, leaning across the table more, casting shadow across the stones. All the stones are face down this time, apart from one.

“They say get the fuck out of my light,” Adam says.

Ronan leans back. “What does that one mean?”

Adam sighs. He doesn’t answer Ronan for a long time, he just stares at the one face up stone like it’s telling him an entire story. “Destiny,” he finally says. “It’s all I get where you’re concerned.”

Ronan’s stomach twists, and he doesn’t know if it’s the alcohol in his system, the snake settling, or Adam’s words. He swallows. “Because of the covenant?”

Adam nods.

“Fuck that,” Ronan says. He grabs his tankard of ale and almost drains it in one long gulp.

“You try,” Adam says. He gathers the stones back together and holds them out to Ronan.

“Fuck off. I’m not touching that shit.”

“Alright.” Adam stands. “Good luck getting back into Cabeswater alone.”

Ronan grits his teeth. “Fuck, Parrish. Give ‘em here.”

Adam still has the stones in his hand, and he tips them into Ronan’s outstretched one, as he sits back down. Ronan’s never touched runestones before, and he’s not got one drop of mage blood in him. There’s no reason that he should get anything from them other than nonsense. Nevertheless, he copies the movement he’d seen Adam use before; he shakes the stones in his cupped hands and drops them onto the table with a rattle.

There’s only one stone that lands face up again. It’s the same one as Adam got. The strange symbol, that looks almost like an E, missing the middle bar.

Adam groans his frustration. “Again,” he says.

Ronan gathers the stones back up, and he casts them again, watching a tiny muscle jumping in Adam’s cheek. The same stone lands face up.

“Stop thinking about me,” Adam says, suddenly. “Think about Gansey. Think about what he’s looking for, about Glendower.”

“Wasn’t thinking about you,” Ronan says, too defensively.

Adam just rolls his eyes. “Come on, try again. You’ve got more of a connection to Gansey, you have a better chance than me.”

Ronan shuts his eyes. In his memory, he’s in the palace library with Gansey, before they left, but after the attack. Gansey is dumping dusty tome after dusty tome onto the desk in front of Ronan, babbling endlessly about his leads for Glendower. ‘Head south first, to collect some more stories. It will be interesting to document all the legends, don’t you think? And then retrace his journey, across the Falchion…’ Gansey says, while Ronan wishes they were looking for a way to change the past, rather than lead to a future he has no interest in.

The stones scatter across the table. Adam makes a small, pleased noise and Ronan opens his eyes to watch Adam’s long fingers begin to sort the stones that landed face up.

“What do they mean?” Ronan asks, suddenly unsure if he wants to know.

“A journey, obvious really.” Adam moves a stone away to the top of the table. “This one here, means a gift, partnership it looks like.”

“Me and you?” Ronan asks, but Adam shakes his head.

“No. This is Gansey’s journey. The ice is broken, the delay is over. There’s a torch, enlightenment, and this one, the lake, relates to mysteries and dreams.”

“How does that help me find him?”

“Doesn’t really.” Adam hasn’t looked up from the stones. Ronan wonders if there is something else there, something he won’t tell Ronan. “I’ll give you a way in.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Chapter Text

“Do you think that this path will lead us right to where Glendower is?” Gansey asks. The path he follows with Blue is wide and grassy. Tiny, almost invisible insects vibrate the air around him. The sun is setting, and Gansey can’t work out if it feels like it’s the right time for that, or if it’s too early. Time moves like a river in this forest; never at the same speed in two places.

“I doubt it,” Gansey’s strange new companion replies. He feels quite enraptured by her, by the strange way she talks, her certainty when she asks the forest for things, but her caution, like she’s been told not to trust the forest, but hasn’t been told exactly what about it is untrustworthy. There’s something magical about her too, that reminds him of Ronan, and that puts Gansey at ease. He was supposed to meet this girl, feels, in fact, as if he already knows her.

“What makes you say that?” he asks. A spray of tiny brown birds erupts from a bush as they approach, the sudden noise of them loud in the still woods. Gansey’s face splits in a delighted grin.

“These things are never that easy,” Blue says. She doesn’t seem as delighted by the whimsy of the forest path. “The forest didn’t just let you in to give you the thing you want and then send you on your way.”

“It didn’t?”

“You don’t know much about Cabeswater, do you?”

“I know that I’ve been told not to come in here,” Gansey replies, smirking a little.

Blue rolls her eyes in reply. “Did you not consider why that would be? Or have you experienced enough of the things this forest can do to understand?”

Gansey pauses on the path and considers her question. “I think it’s rather wonderful.”

“Really? Being trapped forever in the forest, unable to escape endless summer, slowly forgetting everything you knew on the outside, or why you came in the first place, is wonderful?”

“I suppose not,” Gansey concedes.

“People go mad in here,” Blue says, and it sounds to Gansey like she knows more about it than she’s letting on.

“You came in here to find something too, you said,” Gansey presses. He tries to be polite, but the idea of coming into a forest to find a way to lift a true love’s kiss curse is a subject he desperately wants to know more about. Most people he’s met with that kind of curse go to crowded cities, to meet as many people as possible, in the hope of finding true love. It seems that wandering an ancient, cursed forest is not the best way to find your true love.

“To find how to lift my curse,” Blue says, simply.

“Will you tell me more about it? I would’ve thought that lifting a true love’s kiss curse would be easy? Easier than one of those ancestral blood curses.”

“P’shaw. No curse is easy to lift. That’s why they’re curses,” Blue says. She stops on the path, as if no longer interested in the conversation. Gansey watches her touch the petals of a strange blue blossom that grows from a bush of which he has never seen the like. He tries to memorise the shape of the blooms; perhaps he will have time to sketch them later.

Blue sighs, more forcefully than the moment calls for. “If I kiss my true love, they’ll die. That’s the curse.” She doesn’t look to Gansey, keeps her eyes on the blue flowers. “Anyone I kiss will die, until I kiss my true love. And I could find them, easily. I know mages and soothsayers who could find them for me, and I could kiss them. Kiss them and kill them and then be free. But what a price to pay.”

A thousand things that Gansey could say in the face of this revelation bubble up in his mind, but he doesn’t say any of them. She will have heard them before, or thought of them herself, or she’ll hear them in the future. Gansey’s put his foot in his mouth enough already.

“Perhaps I can find a way to help you lift it,” he says, offering her the only thing he can. “That may be why the forest brought us together. Somewhere along my quest for Glendower, or perhaps at the end of it, there will be some way that your curse can be lifted.”

Blue turns away from the flowers at last. A sun beams casts through the trees above and illuminates her in golden sunshine. It catches off the strands of her dark hair, and there’s blue there too, glistening in the light. “I’d like that,” she says, a tiny smile catching on her lips like the sunlight on her warm brown skin.

“Shall we continue?” Gansey asks. He considers offering Blue his arm, it would be the polite thing to do, but he doubts she would see it that way. Perhaps he’ll do it anyway.

Blue nods though, before Gansey can finish his deliberation and she moves off, making his decision for him.

“So you’re a prince?” Blue says, after walking a little way. “They really let you go wandering off in the strange and wild northlands alone?” Her tone is light and teasing, but the words land heavy with the guilt in his stomach.

“No, I wasn’t alone,” Gansey says. “I was with a friend and I— I left him behind.”

Blue’s eyebrows furrow, the teasing smirk dropping softly from her face. “Left him where? Outside the forest?”

“Yes,” Gansey admits. “I knew he couldn’t come in with me. I’d been told he had to find his own way in. That he would find his own way in. I hope he’ll find me in here.”

“But you’re not looking for him?” Blue says, and her scepticism makes Gansey feel worse.

“You think I should be? I don’t even know if he’s even here yet, if he’ll even try to…”

Doubts cloud Gansey’s mind. He hasn’t let himself worry about Ronan, stupidly, selfishly, but now he does. What if Ronan tries to get in and the forest hurts him? What if Ronan does something stupid and gets hurt without Gansey? What if he doesn’t use the covenant? Doesn’t reach out to the mage? Gansey’s foolish, really, for believing Ronan would do that, ask a stranger for help. But it’s too late. Too late to leave. There’s no going back, only forwards.

Gansey will never leave this forest, and if Ronan doesn’t find him, he’ll never know if he made the right choice.

He doesn’t even know Adam. Not really. All he knows is that Adam felt right. But what if he’s untrustworthy? Gansey all but gave him Ronan. Blue knows mages, she’d said. Does she know Adam? Gansey is about to ask, when Blue stops abruptly.

“Look,” she says. “There!”

Her startled voice puts a sharp end to Gansey’s spiral of panic. Up ahead, the path widens even more, but it’s not quite into a clearing. Trees and bushes sprout across the path, but Blue isn’t pointing to any of them.

Amongst the young trees and hawthorn bushes, there are the ruined walls of a building. It has to be, although what it’s doing here, in the middle of Cabeswater, Gansey can’t say. He rushes forward in excitement. This isn’t it, it can’t be, but there’s something here. He can feel it calling him, like a memory.

The walls are little more than rubble, strewn in long grass but they’re laid out in a rough rectangle, and towards the back wall there’s a large, flat stone like an altar. Gansey steps over the low wall and walks carefully across to the altar. What he sees there, carved into weathered rock isn’t a surprise, and that, is more of a surprise.

The crest of Glendower is carved into the centre of the altar. Its edges are worn, but the ravens on it are in sharp definition. Gansey runs his fingers across it and beneath them it feels freshly carved. When he shuts his eyes, he can see it. This rudimentary church built hastily by Glendower’s men. Stones that appeared before they even searched for them, the rough thatched roof that was by no means well made, and yet never leaked.

The forest had encouraged them to build this, and they had. For what, Gansey doesn’t know, but something they found here shook their faith. Made them desperate to reach out to a higher power. But Gansey knows, with a certainty like the chill that runs down his spine, no prayers ever reached their God from here.

The edge of the forest is different this time. It’s more gradual, like the edge of a forest should be. Small, young trees sprout at the fringe of it, and clusters of nettles strive towards the sunlight. Ronan watches Adam skirts the edge of a bush heavy with winterberries and knows he should follow. But he doesn’t. He hesitates.

It’s a feeling he cannot shake. The trees know that he’s here. Ronan almost expects them to close up again when he gets too close.

Adam’s standing just inside the boundary of the forest, leaning against a tree, watching expectantly. Ronan slowly approaches until the bush separates them. As he gets closer to the tree, he can almost feel how it feels. Happy, content, the way Ronan had felt eating with his family, walking with Gansey. It almost sighs, as Adam runs his hand over its moss-covered bark.

“How do I know it won’t happen again?” There’s nothing sinister about the forest today, not a snarled thorn bush in sight, but once unease sets in, it’s difficult to let it go.

“I suppose you don’t. But if you want to find Gansey, you’ll have to find out.”

Just because Adam has a point, doesn’t mean that Ronan likes it. “Do you have a plan?” He asks Adam.

“No. I just thought I’d see what happened,” he replies, dripping sarcasm. “Of course I have a plan. We don’t all go around stumbling blindly into the unknown because we think we know better than those that warn us not to do something.”

Ronan doesn’t know if the dig is aimed at him, or at Gansey, or both. He glares at Adam’s back, as he walks away into the forest. “I didn’t do it because I think I know better. I did it because it was the only choice I had.”

Ronan cautiously starts to follow him. Too trusting. Stupid. “Is this the end of the deal I get then? You’ll help me find Gansey, but I have to listen to you bitch about my poor decision making the whole time?”

Adam turns back on the path to face him. Ronan’s almost shocked at the wide grin spreading across his face. “Gotta find a way to entertain myself, haven’t I?”

The path they follow is narrow and muddy. It’s littered with brown pine needles and it unexpectedly slopes downhill. Nothing happens. No sudden darkness, no visions of the worst night of his life, but Ronan’s heartbeat doesn’t get the message.

The worst thing that happens is a crow, that flaps down and lands on a branch that hangs low over the path. It opens its beak and, “Ronan!” His father’s voice rings out in the forest.

Ronan flinches. He stops dead in the middle of the path, frozen with the fear of what comes next.

“Don’t do that,” Adam says, bored, as he traipses past. It’s unclear if he’s talking to Ronan, the crow, or something else entirely.

The wind blows across the path and Ronan can hear words carried on it. The words are almost exactly what Adam had said earlier; Got to find a way to entertain ourselves.

Adam laughs properly, and the bright wheeze of it surprises Ronan even more than his wide grin had.

“Glad to be a source of entertain for you all,” Ronan says, rolling his eyes and walking on.

“You heard that?” Adam asks. He asks in such a way that makes Ronan suspicious of the answer he’s expected to give.

“Obviously,” he replies. “They said it loud.”

“You can hear them talking? The trees?” It’s Adam’s turn to stop still in the middle of the path.

“Am I not supposed to?”

“How long…?” Adam’s eyes are wide, and his jaw is tense. Ronan wonders what the fuck he could be thinking.

“I don’t know, since I met you, I guess. Why does it matter? I gotta piss.”

“You’ve got to… Right, of course.”

Ronan leaves Adam standing on the path, looking blindsided, and walks a few steps into the forest. He hesitates for a second, wondering if the trees are going to take offence to this and start their horrible visions again. But he has to pee somewhere. The memory of Gansey, and the fuss he’d made the first time that Ronan told him that if he needed to pee, he’d have to do it outside, distracts him from worrying about sentient trees.

When he comes back to the path, Adam is stood with his hands pressed to the trunk of a thick pine.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

Adam cocks his head strangely in reply. He has his eyes closed, and he doesn’t open them when he says, “Finding out how much further we’ll have to go. It’s never taken me this long to get there before.”

“This long to get where?” To Gansey, Ronan hopes the answer is going to be, even though it wouldn’t make sense.

“The oak, the heart of the forest,” Adam replies. Ronan sighs at the ambiguousness of it all and steps back from Adam, to lean against another one of the pines that lines the edge of the path. His hand thoughtlessly makes contact with the bark.

Hello, Ronan Lynch. We have seen your heart. The words echo in his mind, coming from the tree, coming from inside himself. Ronan startles back away from the tree. He trips on a root and lands on his ass in the dirt, heart thundering out of his chest. He stays sat on the ground, trying to control his panic, until Adam turns from his tree.

“What are you doing down there?” he says, as if Ronan had fallen on purpose. “Come on, they’ve given me a better idea.”

“No one lives in Cabeswater,” Blue says, quietly. “Why would someone build a church here? Was it a church? For what God?”

“An old one. The God they’d have worshipped at the time of Glendower, possibly. I don’t know if you’d have been taught about old Gods of the southern kingdoms up here,” Gansey says, but Blue understands that he doesn’t mean it condescendingly. He’s right, anyway, although she won’t admit it.

“This was Glendower? You’re sure?”

“Yes, this is his crest.” Gansey runs his fingers over the weathered carving in the flat stone. It doesn’t look like much to Blue; she can’t make out any familiar shapes in it. Gansey takes his journal out, and he shows Blue a sketch of the crest, but it doesn’t help. There’s a raven, maybe, if she squints.

Gansey starts scribbling in his journal. He draws out a rough sketch of the church, as it stands now, rubble and strange carvings. Blue watches him curiously, as beneath it, he starts to draw what Blue supposes he imagines it would have looked like when it was first built.

This Gansey is so different from the pompous prince she’d first seen him to be. He’s almost shaking with nerves and his excitement about their discovery is infectious. Blue finds herself eagerly searching through the rocks for more signs of Glendower, while Gansey tells her more about the men he travelled with, and the strange land they had come from.

“Strange to you, you mean,” Gansey points out, when Blue says this. “Do you think perhaps, we could move that altar? There might be something beneath it.”

Blue raises an eyebrow, and looks pointedly down at herself. “Maybe, if we were both built like you,” she laughs.

“Oh, apologies. Perhaps the forest could bring us back here, after we find Ronan?”

Ronan. The thought of him sours Blue’s mood, although she’s not sure why. Gansey cared little enough about him to leave him outside the forest, and he’s sharing the quest with Blue now. Why should this Ronan get to come back in? Blue contents herself with the fact that the forest might not ever even let Ronan enter.

“We should carry on,” Blue says. “I think we’ll find more things about Glendower, the further in we go.”

“Yes, like a trail of crumbs!” Gansey’s grin is bright enthusiasm, and it makes Blue grin too, her sour mood forgotten.

Beyond the ruin of the church, ahead of them, the path splits. Another tiny trail peels away from the main path, curving downhill. A skeletal, white tree sits at the mouth of it. The main path continues on, wide with lush green grass, but this path sits like a diseased limb. The trees around it tremor, like they want to cover the route, but don’t have quite have the strength to close it.

“What do you think is down there?” Gansey asks, his voice quiet and gentle all of a sudden, the excitement unexpectedly vanishing from it.

“I don’t know, but I don’t think the forest wants us to go. I think it wants to cover that path up, but it can’t.”

Gansey steps over the wall of the ruined building and strides towards the dead path. “I think I’ve seen this before,” he says, and Blue realises why his voice sounds so different. He’d long dropped his pretentious princeling façade, in favour of boundless energy, but he’s different again now. He’s raw. He’s afraid.

He fumbles through the pages of his journal, careful not to smudge the still-wet ink. “I’d written a note, there was a path and I’d told myself not to go down it. This tree. I think saw it there.”

Gansey’s found his page in the book, but he doesn’t offer it to Blue. He stares at it, and a small “Oh,” puffs from between his lips.

Blue walks a little closer to him, so she can see the pages too.

It’s open on the map he’d drawn of the oak tree’s clearing, that he’d shown Blue before. But gone are Gansey’s scribbles, his notes on the seasons, on his feelings and the warning he’d written to himself. Every word has been replaced with the same one, written again and again.

Glendower.

The path Adam and Ronan follow eventually emerges into less dense woodland. It skirts around the edge of a crisp, clear pond. The water faultlessly reflects the amber sunset, and the warm breeze stirs a cluster of reeds growing at the edges of it. On the opposite bank, a weeping willow bends its branches to drink from the surface. Adam pauses and watches a leaf drop to the surface, ripples spreading from it across the otherwise flawless mirror. He’s never seen the pond before, its appearance now is unexpected to say the least.

“I’m gonna wash, Parrish,” Ronan says. It’s the first thing he’s said for a while, but he seems to have relaxed, or at least he’s desperate enough to clean the dried blood and vomit off of his shirt. He pauses in his movement. “If you think that’s a good idea.”

 Adam considers the pond. He has a sudden vision of something lurking beneath the still water, but the day is heavy with rain in the vision, nothing like this bright, calm evening. The forest feels still, and content. Things are going the way it wants.

Adam looks disdainfully at Ronan’s soiled shirt. “The smell has got rather bad.”

He doesn’t mean it, and Ronan doesn’t rise to it. He just dumps his pack on the ground and starts pulling his clothes off. Adam stumbles away from him, didn’t realise he was standing so close until Ronan started stripping.

“I’ll just… light a fire.”

“Sure,” Ronan replies, already walking into the water. Adam should watch him, to make sure that there really is nothing in the water, but just the thought of looking at Ronan in this state makes his face heat up. His hands shake as he tries to conjure a fire.

There’s a splash and shout from the pond.

Adam looks up in panic. “Lynch?”

“There was a loose rock,” Ronan says, and he laughs a little as he says it. Adam’s gut clenches and he hates the way that laugh makes him feel, and he hates the way his eyes catch on the muscles in Ronan’s back even more.

He’s waist-deep in the water now, his back to Adam, and it’s not just the muscles in his back that have caught Adam’s attention. Adam’s read some texts on formwalkers, when he’d had the opportunity to read up on magical theory. All formwalkers have marks on their human form, that show the animals they can shift to, or something like them. Adam’s read that for most of them, the marks are like birthmarks, just a few shades darker than their skin.

But Ronan’s is dark black. It spreads across his skin like ink spilt across a fresh sheet of parchment. It’s impossible to make out any clear shapes, the mark is a tangle of teeth and claws, of great dark wings, and the sliding scales of the snake. Adam’s fingers long to traces the lines of it, to see if it moves under his hands, to feel the magic it holds. He looks away, guilty.

There are things that Adam can want. More time to read up on magical theory. An answer about that strange, decaying tree. A new pair of boots. Bacon for breakfast.

But these things. Wanting to get to know Ronan, wanting to see how strong the covenant is, wanting not to be alone. These are all things that Adam cannot allow himself to want. He has to help Ronan find Gansey, and it has to be soon. And then he can return to his quiet life, find an answer about the tree, and return everything to the way it was.

He turns more firmly away from the pond and works on building up the fire with dry sticks that are scattered around the small forest clearing.

As the fire builds, Adam thinks on what the forest suggested to him. It’s not a spell he’s done often, and he’s not sure if he can bring Ronan with him, but it’s better than stumbling about in the forest waiting for Gansey to appear to them. The forest had suggested he try it, and Adam knows better than to ignore its advice.

He checks in his bag, and sure enough, he has all the things he needs for the spell. The two knives are in there, nestled at the bottom. The strange needle point of the Scariat knife reflects the reddening sky like a drop of blood. Adam shudders minutely.

Behind him, he can hear Ronan splashing about, washing his clothes in the water. The fact that the trees speak to him gives Adam a little more confidence that bringing Ronan with him in this spell will work. Hopefully.

The water was warmer than Ronan had expected it to be, almost like a bath. He washed his clothes and now he sits, reclining against a mossy rock, enjoying the fact that the forest has seemingly got over its vendetta against him.

The sun has sunk below the trees now, and the parts of Ronan that aren’t beneath the warm water are starting to feel the chill of the evening. He reluctantly pulls himself out and dries himself on the linen sheet in his pack. There are spare dry clothes in here too, and Adam doesn’t even look at him as he dresses. Not that Ronan wants him to be looking.

In fact, Adam has barely moved at all in the time Ronan has taken to get dressed again. He’s crouched in front of the fire, and Ronan can hear him murmuring to himself as he throws things into the flames.

“What are you doing now?”

Adam doesn’t answer, and the flames explode blue and green around him. His lips aren’t moving, but Ronan can hear him speaking.

“Casting a spell?” He means for it to sound snide, mocking, but in the end it comes out sincere, inquisitive even.

Adam nods imperceptibly, just a twitch of his head. He hasn’t blinked.

“To do what?”

Adam’s eyes flick to him, and Ronan almost recoils when he sees that his pupils are blown so wide, the dark blue of his eyes is completely swallowed. The look on his face though is more what shuts Ronan up though. He doesn’t look like someone who will tolerate annoying questions.

Ronan sits opposite him, the fire between them. There’s not much else to do but stare into the flames, at the embers glowing at the bottom, and the sparks that dance into the night sky. Ronan doesn’t look for patterns, but they appear to him anyway. Horses running free across the endless green hills of home, a sparkling river twisting past mossy cottages, the silver birch trees, resplendent in autumn colour. There are visions of places he doesn’t recognise too, a log cabin caught between a wildflower field and a lush green forest, two pairs of boots drying by a warm hearth, footprints in the snow that always arc back to the cabin— Ronan tears his eyes from the fire. The smoke stings.

“It’s a connection spell,” Adam says, long after Ronan had stopped hoping for an answer. He blinks up at Adam; he’s standing now, and Ronan doesn’t remember him moving. He looks normal again now, the trance he’d been in is broken. The fire burns bright white between them. “If you want to find Gansey in here, this is a quicker way of doing it. The forest connects to people on a level that’s more than physical. I’m sure you’ve noticed that by now. This spell takes us into that level.”

“You mean the fucking about in people’s heads level? The relieving your worst memories level? Fun.” Ronan rises to standing too, but Adam’s expression says he’s not fucking around. “You know, this is exactly the kind of murky sorcery that ends up with people like you putting people like me in tiny magical cages and fucking around with them.”

The firelight casts strange shadows across Adam’s face. “You’ve trusted me this far, in this reality. Why don’t you think you can trust me in another?”

“Because you say shit like that.”

Adam shuts his eyes, and a little line appears between his brows. Ronan wants to poke it.

“Give me your hands, Ronan,” Adam says, opening his eyes.

A part of Ronan’s mind screams to him that this is a terrible mistake. But the rest of him knows that this is truly his only chance of finding Gansey. He holds his hands out to Adam, and Adam links their fingers together above the fire. Ronan braces himself for the same rush of magic as before, but it’s less like a lightning strike and more like sliding into the warm water of the pond had been. Unexpected, but not unwanted.

Adam shudders at the feeling of it, nevertheless. “Besides,” he says. “How many people like me have entered into covenants with your kind?”

Ronan doesn’t have an answer for that.

“Ronan,” Adam says. “This will be hard.”

Ronan nods. The memory of the things the forest showed him before are as fresh as an open wound, as painful as a new injury on scarred skin. “I know.”

The white light from the fire is growing. It casts the clearing into brilliant light, everything blazing like the midday sun. Ronan squints against it, as it grows hotter and brighter still. It becomes so bright, he has to close his eyes against it, but even through his eyelids, the light burns.

And then suddenly, black.

*

*

When Ronan opens his eyes again, he’s standing in a different clearing. He can feel that it’s still Cabeswater from the heavy weight of magic in the air. It’s a fair summer’s day, but Ronan can’t feel the warmth of the sun on his skin, just like when the covenant pulls him into a memory. There’s a haze to the edges of his vision too, as if he is peering through a thick, imperfect pane of glass. Another reality, Adam had said. Adam isn’t anywhere in sight. Ronan’s cautious, as he begins to move through the forest clearing. This is like a dream, and reality is twisted in dreams, following its own logic, rather than anything real.

As if to prove this, a dragonfly flutters past, larger and more colourful than anything Ronan has ever seen in real life. In the trees, birds chirp, and a squirrel chatters and rustles branches as it leaps through the trees. In the distance, the sound of trickling water.

He has the uneasy feeling that something is watching him. The ground beneath his feet is soft and mossy, and clearing he’s in is empty, save for a great, twisted oak tree. Its branches reach out across the clearing, a great canopy of a brighter green than should be possible. Ronan recognises it from his dreams.

“Adam?” Ronan says, carefully. Something moves in the branches of the tree. There’s something hidden in its arms. Someone. There’s no sign of Adam, so Ronan slowly approaches.

A little boy peers around one of the branches. There are smears of mud and blood on his face, and tear tracks carve clear lines through the horrible mess, exposing bruises and cuts underneath. It’s hard to say how old he is, he seems to change between being barely old enough to walk, to almost fully grown as Ronan watches him.

He watches Ronan right back, familiar dark blue eyes narrowing at him. It’s so clearly Adam, and Ronan has the horrible thought that something went wrong with the spell, and this is the Adam he’s got to guide him through Cabeswater now.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Ronan says, but he’s not sure the boy believes him. He shakes his head and stumbles away from Ronan as much as he can. Ronan backs away as the boy starts to climb deeper into the tree. His hands shake as he pulls himself onto a higher branch, and where the sleeves of his torn tunic ride up, Ronan can see more bruises.

The boy sits on a high branch and he doesn’t say anything at all as Ronan paces around the clearing, looking for a sign of where the adult Adam might be. His thoughts keep turning back to the little boy though. Ronan wants to reach out to him, to take him away somewhere else, away from this strange, unsafe forest. Ronan looks at the boy’s skinny wrists, his ribs almost visible through his shirt and he wonders when the last time he had a hot meal would have been.

“You can’t help him.” Adam. The adult version is stood behind him. Ronan whirls around to face him, putting himself between him and the little boy. He feels almost like he has to defend the child from Adam, even more so when he sees the hard look in Adam’s eyes. “This isn’t what I meant to show you.”

“What is this? Where have you been?”

“Do you not listen when I talk?” Adam doesn’t offer a further explanation, he begins striding off through the forest, away from the child. Ronan moves to follow, but he doesn’t want to leave the boy there alone. “Come on. Leave him. He’ll be fine.”

Ronan sneers at Adam’s back, but he reluctantly follows him through the forest. “How can you be sure? He’s just a child, anything could happen to him.”

“He’s part of this,” Adam says, dismissively. “He’s not real.”

Ronan tries to puzzle out what that could possibly mean about Adam, and about where they are, but he quickly gets distracted.

They’ve arrived at a tiny stream; the source of the water Ronan could hear earlier. Upstream from them, the water flows over a sheer cliff face. The water runs down at the same speed as the stream flows, this part runs from the sky to the earth just as a stream would flow east to west, like the rock has been folded up. Ronan has the strangest feeling that if he set a foot to this cliff face, then the earth would tilt beneath him to allow him to stand upright upon it.

Stranger than this, is a door set into the cliff. It’s wooden, painted bright red, a wrought iron knocker sat proud in the centre. Everything about it is flawless, the paint, the polish of the metal, the grain of the wood beneath it all. It’s exactly how Ronan remembers it.

Adam swallows, and nods his head towards the door. “Go on.”

Ronan’s not sure he wants to open it. Should he knock? He grasps the door handle, squeezes tight so Adam can’t see the way his hand trembles. The metal is warm, like it always was on sunny days. Even in the night, if the day had been particularly hot, the metal of the door handle stayed warm for hours.

It had been cold when he came home that night. Like the house already knew it was dead.

Ronan strokes his other hand reverently across the flawless red paint. The door creaks open at his touch. It swings outwards, not like it did in real life. The warmth that hits from within sends Ronan stumbling back, but Adam is right behind him.

“Go on,” he says, again, firmer.

Ronan rolls his shoulders and steps through the doorway. He almost chokes on the memories that wash over him as he steps, not into the entryway as he’d expected to, but into the bright sunlit kitchen. He walks further in, taking in the sharp and perfect detail of a place he never thought he could go again. The mismatched tiles on the floor are familiar, some splattered with mud, and that one that shattered when he’d knocked a cast iron pan to the ground when he was play-fighting with Declan.

Adam has followed him in, and he’s looking around thoughtfully, careful fingers skimming across the surface of the rough-hewn kitchen table.

“Is this…?” Ronan says. There’s a lump in his throat and he can’t get words around it. He doesn’t really know what he’s asking anyway. “This isn’t…”

Adam nods, like he understands. “I told you this would be hard.”

Ronan reaches out to touch the petals of a vase of flowers, placed delicately on the window ledge, in a chipped milk jug. He can’t really feel the petals, more like the memory of them brushing his skin, but the smell of jasmine and lavender waft around him. He can hear children laughing in the distance. A dog barks excitedly.

“We cannot linger here, Ronan,” Adam says, and his words are harsh but the tone is almost understanding, like Adam would stay longer too.

“No.” Ronan knows it. This is the kind of magic that drives people mad. He wants to stay though, could stay here forever. Open the back door and run out into the memory of his home before he lost everything.

Adam opens a cupboard door. The cupboard door in question is not one that Ronan remembers ever seeing in his own home. It’s clearly been painted over and over many times, in many different colours, but not for years. The paint has chipped off, completely in some places, raw wood exposed. Adam crouches in front of the door and Ronan watches in amusement as Adam climbs inside.

“Come on!” Adam calls, once he’s disappeared all the way inside. Before he goes, Ronan allows himself one last look around, allows this memory to superimpose itself over the true last time he saw his family’s home.

He joins Adam on the other side of the cupboard door. This time, they stand in a busy, crowded street. The town is unfamiliar, a river runs parallel to the cobbled street, and stone bridges arc across it. There are petals floating through the air, pinks, and reds, and purple. Flags hangs from buildings and there’s music in the air, coming from an invisible source. A festival, he supposes, but which one, Ronan doesn’t know.

All the people that pass by them are in couples. Holding hands, arms around each other and, more often than not, kissing. Some far more passionately than others. One couple is kissing with such ferocity that it makes Ronan blush, to see such a display out in public.

Adam is cutting through the crowd with speed, but he suddenly stops dead. Ronan almost collides with him and is about to berate Adam for his abrupt stop, when he sees the reason.

Up ahead, in the middle of a crossroads, stands a great glass bell jar. It’s as tall as the tightly packed houses on either side of it, and it casts a strange translucent shadow down the cobblestoned street.

There’s a girl inside of it.

She has her hands pressed against the glass, and the look of longing on her face as she watches the happy couples pass her by ties Ronan’s insides in knots. No one else seems to notice her, or the jar, except for him and Adam.

“Blue,” Adam breathes. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be seeing this.”

“Why is she trapped in there?” She isn’t all that’s trapped in the jar. A haze swirls above her, blue and grey and silver, pressing against the edges of the jar like it’s looking for weak points. Magical potential.

“It’s a curse. Just leave it be, Ronan. You can’t save everyone.” Adam’s moving off down the street away from the bell jar. Ronan can’t put it out of his mind so easily. He tries to think of Gansey instead.

“There!” Adam says.

Set into one of the houses, is the door of a tomb. Ice fills Ronan.

A great stone slab blocks the door, and Adam and Ronan have to push with all their strength to budge it enough to slide through.

It’s black as night inside, especially after Ronan slides the stone slab back into place at Adam’s instruction. Adam clicks his fingers, and his hand is full of bright green fire.

There’s a plinth ahead of them, a body lying in repose atop it. A man stands over it, looking down into the face of the dead man. From high above, sunlight streams in; a tiny rectangle on the faces of the two men, that does not reach any further into the otherwise consuming darkness.

It's Gansey. It’s Gansey standing there, looking at the body in the tomb. It’s Gansey, laying there cold and dead; the body in the tomb. Ronan clenches his hand into a fist. Gansey isn’t dead, Gansey isn’t dead.

“You need to speak to him, Ronan,” Adam says.

“Which one?”

“The one that’s alive, dumbass.”

“Right. What does this mean, Parrish?”

“I don’t know, it’s not my mind. Speak to him. He’ll see you when he dreams, and he’ll remember what you said like he’d remember a dream.”

“What do I say?”

“Tell him something he doesn’t know but you would, so he knows it’s you. Something he’d never make up. Then tell him to follow the course of the river, in the direction the water flows, downstream. When we get out, I’ll show you where the river is, and you can walk upstream and find him on it.”

Ronan nods, and he approaches Gansey. Gansey hasn’t looked away from the body on the plinth, but he must feel that Ronan is there. The Gansey on the stone slab is dressed in fine, plated armour, a sword and shield resting on his chest. A king, resplendent in death.

“What does it mean, Ronan?” Gansey says.

“It means you’re an idiot,” he snaps. “This is a dream, but it’s really me.”

Gansey looks up at him and recognition crosses his face. “How?”

“It’s complicated. It’s not important. You told me once I should learn to shift into something more useful, like a pack horse, because you think I’ve still got enough magic for one more creature.”

Gansey frowns at him, lifts his thumb to his bottom lip. “But you don’t, I take it?”

“Nope. Wolf, raven, man, snake, and this fucking awesome sea monster with like, a million teeth.” He hears Adam muffle a snort behind him.

“Why tell me this? Here?”

“So that you know it’s me. I’m trying to find you. I need to find you, Dick. What the fuck were you thinking? When you wake up, ask the forest to take you to the river. Follow the river, in the direction the water flows. I’ll find you on the river, okay?”

Gansey frowns again and looks back at the body on the plinth. There’s something off about him, something dreamy, like he doesn’t know that this is real. “There’s something…” He shakes his head, like clearing a fog. “Okay. I’ll find you Ronan. On the river.”

Ronan nods. He turns away from Gansey, and moves back to Adam. He can see little more than the green flames flickering in the dark.

“Parrish? Where the fuck are you going?” Ronan calls into the dark.

“I thought I saw something,” Adam calls back, closer than the flames make it seem.

“I gave my message to Gansey,” Ronan says. He follows the sound of Adam’s voice, and he finds him, deep in the darkness.

Adam has a hand cupped over his flames, and Ronan can barely see his face, only the sharp edges of his jaw and his cheekbones.

“I heard,” Adam says, but he’s still moving away from Ronan.

“So now we wake up?” Ronan’s keen to get back to the real world. He’s had enough walking in people’s heads.

“Soon. I just want to see—” The flames go out.

There’s a rumble, like a boulder being rolled, like thunder. And then the creak of a rusty iron hinge. A surge of panic makes Ronan try to shift, but he can’t. Whatever reality this is, he’s stuck as a man. Vulnerable.

Something grabs hold of his arm. A hand. Adam’s hand he realises. He can hear Adam breathing quickly in the dark, and if he listens, he can hear his heartbeat racing.

Adam pulls Ronan forward with him, further into the dark. It seems impossible for it to be getting darker, but even the memory of light is beginning to fade. Ronan doesn’t feel anything, not cold, not heat, not even the ground he’s walking on.

“Adam,” he whispers. The only thing Ronan can really feel his Adam’s hand on his arm.

Adam shushes him, but that’s not the only sound that breaks through this hungry darkness.  A scuttling. A rattle. Another deep rumble. “There’s something there.”

“Yeah, no shit. Get me the fuck out of here.” A thud, and then another, closer this time.

Adam’s hand on his arm slides down to lock their fingers together once again. Ronan screws his eyes shut. There’s no difference between having his eyes open or closed, but he’s glad of it, because in the second before his vision is consumed by the white light of Adam’s magic, he feels a scrape against the back of his neck, like a long, hooked claw, a wicked blade dragging across his skin.

Glendower. Again, and again. It’s not Gansey’s writing. He doesn’t recognise the writing at all. He snaps the journal shut and opens it again, like he can convince himself it was a trick of the light.

But no, the page with his map, and every other page too, every word he’d ever written in his journal has been replaced with Glendower. Even the stupid commentary Ronan had made: Glendower Glendower Glendower. Gansey sits down hard on the low stone wall.

“What.” His hands shake. “What does this mean?”

Blue shakes her head. “I don’t know. Do you think we should go down the path?” Her voice is small, but she sounds braver than Gansey feels. That path can lead nowhere good. He looks away, longing for the lush green of the wide path that Cabeswater has opened for them.

Gansey no longer cares if that path will lead them in circles. He no longer cares about becoming trapped in an endless summer. When he closes his eyes, the visual from his repeating dream appears. His own still face stares back at him from within Glendower’s tomb, the cold cloak of death draped across it.

“I don’t know.” He swallows. “I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I thought this was…” he trails off, pathetically waving a hand at his journal.

“We can just walk down this path a little bit. Adam will want to know about this. We can see what’s down there, then turn around and come back up here. I’ll find a way to get the forest to get Adam for us. He’ll know what we should do.”

The fact that Blue does know Adam fails to raise Gansey from his uncertainty. But they can always come back here. She’s right, just a small way down that path. It isn’t going to lead to Gansey’s death. Not now. Not yet. It’s too soon, he hasn’t found Ronan, he hasn’t found the tomb. He can’t die, not when he has so much left to do.

Gansey nods and gets to his feet. He wants so badly to be unafraid. “Okay, Miss Sargent. If you’re sure that’s what you want to do.” He tries an unsteady smile. Blue’s answering smile is just as unsteady and it’s a relief, almost, to know on some level, she is as afraid as him.

The white tree at the mouth of the path looks carved from bone. Its thin branches tremble when Gansey passes by, and Blue brushes a sympathetic hand down its withered trunk.

The air is noticeably colder down this path, but absent of any of the beauty that the forest has shown Gansey before. Blue draws her cloak around her more, but she shivers nonetheless. Gansey pauses and takes his second wool cloak from his pack to offer to her. Blue doesn’t say anything, and for a second Gansey thinks she’s going to turn it down, but then she reaches for it. A tiny, grateful smile plays on her pretty face, and the sense that finally he’s done something right for her wells up inside him.

Neither of them speaks though. It feels wrong to speak down this path, like laughter at a funeral. The light is weak and grey, the hour after a deep winter’s sunset, and the hairs prickle on the back of Gansey’s neck.

The trees that line the path are absent of leaves, and eerily absent of the feeling of magic. Gansey hadn’t realised how much he’d got used to the presence of it until it was gone. He turns to check the path behind them, and with a horrible jolt, sees that the way back is blocked.

“Oh,” he breathes. Thorns have grown across the path behind them. White, dead, and knotted together impenetrably. Fear claws at Gansey’s insides.

“We keep going,” Blue says, and Gansey will never stop being grateful for her steadying presence.

The further they go, the more that Gansey can’t shake the sensation that a third person walks the path with them. The ground crunches beneath their feet, as if frozen, but no frost is visible. Gansey can hear three sets of footsteps, but when he pauses, only Blue’s remain. He keeps going, and when he moves again, a second set of footsteps follow him.

“Blue, stop,” he whispers. They pause together, and in the second after they stop, there’s the sound of another foot hitting the crisp ground.

“You heard that too?” Blue whispers back. Her face is drawn and paler. She tucks Gansey’s cloak tighter around her.

Gansey nods. “I don’t think we’re alone,” he says, whispering so low the words barely escape his lips.

Blue shakes her head.

“Keep going,” comes a voice. A puff of warm breath in the cold air accompanies it, drifting between Gansey and Blue.

Gansey spins on the spot. “Who’s there?” he says, only a little louder, not daring to raise his voice.

“You’ll see. Please.” There’s the weight of a hand on Gansey’s shoulder. He reaches up to touch, but his fingers only meet with the soft fabric of his own cloak. But the weight of another hand remains.

Blue nods. Gansey watches her straighten up and let go of the edges of the cloak. She fists her hands at her sides, steeling herself. “Come on, Gansey. We need to keep going.”

Nothing good lies ahead. The images the soothsayer had shown Gansey in the cave flash through his mind. Animal bones. Human bones. The way back is shut, and ahead, the grass is long and dead. Not the parched yellow of summer, but the bone white of true death.

And amongst it, bones so white that the world turns grey, lies a skeleton.

Chapter Text

Ronan wakes with a jolt that feels like he’s falling. He has fallen, in fact. He’s collapsed back on the packed earth, on the opposite side of the fire to Adam. Adam is already on his feet, crouched over the flames again, working on casting another spell.

Ronan is still half in the dream, still feeling the drag of the sharp claw across the nape of his neck.

“Adam,” he says. Ronan’s voice is thicker than he’d like. “What the fuck was that?”

“I’m… not sure,” Adam says. There’s an edge to his voice that tells Ronan he’s surer than he’s saying.

“That was someone’s dream? The inside of someone’s head?” Ronan pushes. Gansey’s alone in this forest, and if whatever dreams about that is out there too…

Adam is frowning into the flames. Ronan watches as he reaches into his pack without looking and takes out his pouch of runestones.

“Not someone. Something.” He scatters the stones on the dirt in front of him. Whatever he sees there, written in runes, carved into tiny stones, makes his frown deepen.

“A thing? And you kept walking into its mind?” Ronan watches, disbelieving, as Adam continues to throw herbs into the fire, building white flames again. “And you’re going back in?”

“Yes. I have to go back in.”

“Uhh, no you’re fucking not. You’re helping me find Gansey. Finish the first job, magic boy.”

That gets Adam to finally look at him. His stare is hard, unimpressed, carefully controlled, but Ronan recognises rage frothing beneath the surface.

“What part of telling your prince to follow the river didn’t you understand?” he hisses. “He follows it downstream; you follow it upstream, and then hey, magical fucking reunion. The river’s that way.” Adam points east, and Ronan marvels at how he can make even that gesture look cold and uncaring. “Get fucking going.”

“What? No, I’ll go back in with you.” The argument rises, unbidden, and contrary to what Ronan’s been after since Adam found him. From the moment he lost Gansey, all he’s thought about is how he’ll find him again, what he’ll do to make it happen. Adam’s given him the way to do that, and now he’s faced with it… He can’t.

“Leave, Ronan,” Adam snarls. “I don’t need your help.”

The idea of it, to leave Adam alone to go back into that creature’s dream, sits uneasily with Ronan. He can feel a fight coming, and something in him feels sick at the idea of leaving Adam to fight it alone. Like leaving that little boy alone in the woods had felt.

But Ronan doesn’t know how to insist on something delicately. “You just don’t want it. This is why you’re alone really. Everyone who could help you, you push them away.”

“You cannot help me. You could never have helped that child you saw, and you cannot help me now.” Adam’s voice is as cold as his demeanour. “Leave.”

Hot anger surges through Ronan, like gnashing teeth and boiling blood. He grits his teeth and clenches his fists so hard it hurts. “Fine.”

He snatches his pack of the floor and hauls it over his shoulder. He doesn’t even wait for the forest to open a path for him. Ronan crashes through the brush in the direction Adam had pointed, sticks and branches snapping beneath his feet. The anger inside him is as familiar as the wolf, but he’s never felt it quite like this before.

As he storms through the forest, the anger breaks inside him, like water crashing against rocks. The first waves surge at Adam, for not accepting his help, for sending him away like Ronan was nothing to him. The next waves are bigger, and when they hit the rocks, the force of the water shatters them, so great is Ronan’s anger at the world, at every person who made Adam feel like he doesn’t deserve help. That he has to be alone. And then the greatest waves are Ronan’s anger at himself: for not seeing why Adam was so isolated, for just seeing him as a means to an end, for not trusting him, even though he proved again and again that Ronan could. For leaving him now.

Ronan doesn’t know how far away from Adam he walks. He walks in a line as straight as an arrow, and for long enough that his anger has dissipated slightly by the time he reaches the river. He emerges from the trees, almost at the exact same place he’d been at in Adam’s dream, where the door to his home had been. He follows the river upstream, until he reaches the mossy rock that the door had been set in. The rock is damp, cold to the touch, but it seems to know him, to reach out for him, as he reaches for it. The cold is in his bones in an instant.

“Fucking magic forest,” he mutters to himself.

Ronan lingers at the foot of the cliff face. He knows what he has to do. Climb the rocks. The waterfall looks normal, outside of the dream world he’d last seen it in, and next to it, small rocks jut out – perfect hand holds. He should climb the waterfall, follow the river, find Gansey. Forget about Adam, forget about the little boy in the woods. Forget about that fucking covenant.

Adam is nothing to him. And he’s nothing to Adam. Anything Ronan feels about him is fake, just a product of a magical bond that’s proven to be nothing but useless and inconvenient.

But still, he lingers at the foot of the cliff, unsure.

A cold breeze blows through the trees. The wolf lifts his head, and Ronan smells the air. He can smell a thousand different scents of the forest: the moss, the river, animals sleeping in the undergrowth, birds nested in the trees, pine, and old leaves. But underneath, there’s something new. The smell of rot, of decay, of lingering death. The smell says fear. The smell says danger. The smell says run.

Ronan doesn’t think. He shifts.

As the wolf, his sense of smell is heightened. He baulks at the intensity of it, the putrid smell of rot. He can locate the source better though, and it’s heading away from him. Heading away from the river, and towards –

Adam.

The skeleton is strewn in the dead grass like the person it had once been had fallen with their limbs askance and nobody had bothered to move them to a more dignified position. Half of the skull is caved in on the left, but Blue doesn’t think it’s as a result of decay. The rest of the bones are intact and perfectly clean. The air around Blue is icy cold still, but she thinks the cold that penetrates down to her core has more to do with the empty sockets of the collapsed skull staring back at her. She shivers and pulls the borrowed wool cloak tighter.

“There must be hundreds of bodies in this forest,” she says, tearing her eyes from the skull and to Gansey’s face. For a brief second, she sees a skull in place of his face too, empty sockets and a cold grimace. Blue’s heart stutters in her chest. She blinks, and Gansey’s pale face is back, tension in every muscle.

He frowns at her words, a strange, pinched expression that makes him look far older than he did before. “What makes you say that?”

“Like your Glendower. People go into this forest and never come out again. People have come to the mill house before, and then we’ve never seen them again.”

Gansey takes a sharp quick breath, like something had jolted him, but then his inquisitive, composed face is back in place, as if the fear had never been there. “I wonder why the forest lead us here?”

“It didn’t. It didn’t want us to go this way. Something else lead us here.” The shivering of the trees at the mouth to the path, the way the true path from Cabeswater had been wide and bright. The thorns that had closed the way back, the third set of footsteps. The bone chilling voice.

“Who do you think this was?” Gansey says, quietly. His voice is rough and low, but he sounds certain that this is not his missing king. Blue half expects him to reach for his journal again and pull out a list of the names of Glendower’s men in the hope of matching this skeleton to one of them.

But before he can, someone else speaks. It’s the same voice they heard on the path, louder and more tangibly real.

“Me,” it says.

Ronan runs. All his instincts are screaming to run away from the smell, to get as far from it as he can. But it’s heading for Adam. So he runs towards the smell of decomposition, and when he scents it, towards the smell of woodsmoke and burning herbs.

He can see the tiny flicker through the trees. The campfire burns white, meaning Adam is still in the dream realm, unaware of the danger approaching him. Ronan runs soundlessly, and as he approaches the tiny clearing, he slows. He can hear the soft sound of the water of the pond lapping at the shore and, worryingly close now, the slavering breath of death given form.

The thing, the creature, is somewhere across the clearing from him. Ronan can’t see it, but he can smell it. Death. Ceaseless hunger. A scent that cries for destruction. Ronan moves through the undergrowth, low to the ground, until he has a clear view of Adam.

He’s sat still in front of the fire, his eyes closed as if asleep, and his chest barely moving, tiny imperceptible breaths. He’s vulnerable to attack, and Ronan still cannot see the creature, only the absence of light where it must be, across the clearing where the shadows are deeper.

The hackles rise on Ronan’s back. He bares his teeth, silent, ready.

The monster lunges for Adam, and Ronan lunges for the monster.

They collide above the fire, a vicious tangle of teeth and claws.

He locks his teeth around an outstretched limb, claws like butcher’s knives at the end. Ronan can’t get a hold, can’t get his feet back underneath him and the monster pulls him off by the scruff of his neck, claws puncturing deep into his skin. Ronan kicks and bites and claws back at it, but it’s like trying to fight the night. He tries to claw for the creature’s eyes but it doesn’t seem to have them, only a vicious jaw and more clawed limbs than is natural.

He could shift again. The monster could not hold the snake, couldn’t catch the raven. But shifting would leave Adam undefended in his trance.

Ronan twists and bites at the monster’s limbs. Thick, black blood gushes forth, filling his mouth and choking him but the creature howls in outrage. It has Ronan pinned to the dirt now and he can see nothing. Nothing, but darkness, claws, and rows upon rows of serrated teeth. There is nothing, nothing but that smell. The smell that promises nothing good can survive this, abandon all hope for it has abandoned you.

Ronan has no more strength to fight. He tries to bite at the monster again, but its blood is like tar and it fills his mouth. Ronan uses the last of his fading energy to shift. He’ll die a man, like his father, like his brothers. The smell is no less intense, he discovers, and his injuries feel worse, like the wolf’s fur had matted most of the blood in. Shifting feels like being turned inside out.

He should’ve have brought his sword, shouldn’t have left it at the river. He would at least have a chance at stabbing this creature as it devours him, injuring it enough that it wouldn’t attack Adam after it was done with him.

The creature roars, a terrible, rumbling sound from deep within, that shakes through Ronan and into the earth below.

And then it roars again, a pained edge to it this time. The creature loosens its hold on Ronan, and turns, snapping its toothsome jaw at its middle.

Ronan uses the creature’s distraction to roll out from beneath it, and as he desperately scrambles away, he sees it.

The knife, the one that Ronan had been stabbed with when he’d first met Adam, is slicing through the monster. It roars again, angry, and in pain. It roars at Adam, who has leapt at it, slashing deep into the monster’s side with the needle pointed knife.

Ronan watches from the ground as Adam staggers away from the monster, splattered in black blood. The monster stands, upright on its hind legs, four more monstrous limbs raised into the sky. Great droplets of black blood rain down on the ground, but the creature lurches forward at Adam.

Adam raises the knife again. He doesn’t look afraid. He looks determined. And it’s with that determination that Ronan watches him charge at the creature and plunge the knife into its stomach. The knife drags through the creature’s flesh as easy as it would through butter, and the monster folds to the ground. It gives one final, gurgling roar as Adam drives the point of the knife through its throat, and then it collapses, silent and still.

Ronan fights to stay awake as the rush of the fight fades from him. Beneath him, his own blood seeps into the packed dirt. There are three great gashes that wrap around his left side, and Ronan deliriously thinks how lucky he is that he can’t see his own guts.

Adam drops to his knees next to him. He’s covered in the black blood of the creature, plastering his hair to his head and covering the torn remains of his shirt. His own blood mixes with it too, brilliant red and oozing slowly from deep cuts on his chest, his arms and his face. He’s breathing hard and his hands shake as he plants them in the dirt.

He’s smirking at Ronan though. “We really have to stop meeting like this.”

Ronan tries to laugh around his sticky mouthful of blood. The movement jerks his body, and makes his wounds scream at him. He rolls to one side, to his less injured side and spits onto the ground.

“Don’t. Don’t move,” Adam says. “I’m getting my pack. Your wounds, they need cleaning.” Tiny roots crawl across the ground from his fingertips.

“Nah,” Ronan manages to say. “I’m fine. Gotta get going.” His words are slow, and his breathing is heavy, laboured. “Like you said. You don’t need me. And I don’t need you. River. Gansey.” Ronan vaguely lifts a hand in the direction of the river.

“Ronan,” Adam says, condescending. His roots have grown to vines, and they drag his pack across the ground to him. “I’m not going to let you go. Not in that state.”

“It’s fine. I’m sure there’s a nice—” He groans as he sits up. “—Cave I can die in.”

“Don’t be like that.” Adam takes his pack and rummages through it, passing Ronan a skin of water. “Thanks for saving my life.”

Ronan huffs. It hurts. “Thanks for saving mine. Again.” He uses the water to rinse his mouth out, and when Adam starts poking at the deep claw marks in his side, Ronan doesn’t complain.

Blue and Gansey spin in unison towards the source of the voice. A young man stands in the path behind them, half in shadow. The dead vines that block the path twist behind him like snakes.

The shadow that casts across half his face, should hide most of his face, but the darkness makes him clearer. Blue can see that the far left side of his face is completely stripped of flesh, as bare as the skeleton that lies on the ground behind her. The half of his face that is exposed to the sunlight is translucent, but his face is that of a young man, and the far right side of his face is flushed and alive. His white blonde hair lifts in a wind that doesn’t exist, and Blue knows who he is.

“You’re Noah, aren’t you?”

“You know me?” he replies, and his voice is like the cold wind. “I thought everyone had forgotten me.”

Blue swallows. The air around her is a little warmer already, but warmer than ice is still very cold. It’s hard to shake the fear that had gripped her heart just moments before.

“Adam. He’s mentioned you before.”

“Adam,” Noah repeats. “You know him?”

At the same time, Gansey looks at her in delight and says, “You know Adam too!”

“Great, we all know Adam,” Blue says, dismissively. “He mentioned you to Persephone once, he was asking if she knew a way to help you move on. Is that why you brought us to your body? Do you us to bury you?”

“There is no on,” Noah says, so harshly that next to her, Gansey flinches. “I’m stronger at my bones. But I’m a part of the forest. Cabeswater gave me enough magic to live like this, so when the time came, I could warn you.”

“Warn us?”

“Come with me.” Noah turns from them and walks through the trees that bank the edge of the path. The warnings from Persephone and Calla echo in Blue’s head. Remember to stick to the path. But Gansey is already picking his way through the brush after Noah.

“Wait,” Blue whispers. Gansey pauses and turns back to her. He doesn’t say anything, and she cannot see a single shred of the pompous prince she’d first thought him to be on his face. “Do you trust him?”

Gansey looks away after where the ghost is drifting in the trees, in and out of shadows. He’s more visible in the darker parts than in the sunlight.

“I… I feel like I can,” Gansey replies. “I feel like I know him. Like he’s a part of something so familiar to me. Does that make sense?”

“Not really,” Blue says.

“Do you trust me?” Gansey asks, earnestly.

Blue hesitates before she answers. It’s difficult to imagine any bad things happening to Gansey, or around him. His face is fit for a golden crown, for a thousand splendid portraits and bronzed statues. He seems destined to be a hero in a story that spreads across the continent. “Yes,” she finally says.

“Then we’ll be safe.”

“Safe?” Blue replies. Nothing about this forest feels truly safe.

“Yeah.” Gansey smiles easily. “Safe as life.”

“Take it away,” Adam says, waving a vague hand at the mutilated body of an already mutant creature. The roots of the nearby trees rise up and drag the creature away. It’s with familiar horror that Ronan watches the ground tear open beneath it like a wound, and swallow the monster whole. The only evidence it had been there at all is the black bile that still covers him and Adam, and the wounds that cause them both to move slowly as Adam directs them to move away from the edge of the pond and into the cover of the trees.

Ronan struggles to his feet and Adam supports him, an arm around his waist and Ronan’s arm across his shoulders. Adam is tense at the contact and Ronan doesn’t think it’s only because of the copious amounts of blood that he’s leeching onto Adam.

The trees grow closer together deeper into the forest, away from the path. The ground starts to slope upwards and a vast craggy boulder is almost suspended in the air, jutting from the ground but seeming to be held in place by a strange spindly tree. Ronan can’t wrap his head around it, how the tree seems to be lifting the rock into place. He’s lost too much blood for this shit.

Still, he slides gratefully under the overhang and finds that it leads to a deeper cave, cut into the cliff. The bleeding has stopped, mostly, but the deepest of the wounds will need to be stitched up. His pack rests against the far cave wall and Ronan is so grateful to see it, he doesn’t even have the energy to gripe about ‘damn magic forest touching my things.’

Adam lowers him to the ground next to it and Ronan hears a relieved sigh from him. There’s a small pool of water at the back of the cave, filled by a tiny spring that well up between rocks. Adam drops to his knees by it and begins to wash the blood of his face and out of his hair. When he strips off his ruined shirt, Ronan looks away quickly.

He has a rudimentary medical kit in his pack, mostly made acquired through necessity, and concern for the kind of scrapes Gansey could get himself into. He takes a cruelly sharp needle from it, already loaded with enchanted thread that Gansey had bought from a witch in a village at the foot of the Forgotten Mountain.

“You’re really going to do that yourself?” Adam has finished cleaning himself, and Ronan has no idea where he got a clean shirt from, but he’s relieved that he has. He doesn’t have the wherewithal right now to cope with having to avoid looking.

“Yep,” Ronan replies through gritted teeth. He winces as he tries to twist to get a better view of the deepest wound. It curves right around to his back, tearing into his formwalker mark. There’s no way he’ll be able to stitch it up himself.

“What was it you said to me earlier? About pushing away people who can help you?”

Ronan glares at him, and then harder when he smirks. “Fine,” he says. “You do it. Tend my wounds, light me a fire and while you’re at it bring me some dinner.”

Adam smirks at him as he takes the needle. He’s not careful when he pushes it in to Ronan’s skin at the top of the gash. Ronan doesn’t cry out though, even as Adam stitches up the middle of his wound, where it’s wide and deep. Adam’s fingers are cool against his hot skin and it’s a relief, to not have to do this himself.

“I’ll find us some food when I’ve finished,” Adam says. He should protest this, tell Adam he’ll do it himself, but Adam keeps going once he’s stitched up the largest wound. He breaks the thread and stitches the other deep claw marks too. Ronan watches him carefully as he reaches for his pack again and takes an ointment from it. He pours some onto a rag and dabs at the stitched wounds. His hands are so gentle against Ronan’s skin, and Ronan can’t look away from them as they strip away the remainder of his ruined shirt away and clean the smaller wounds on his chest.

He’s so close to Adam, and there’s no tension in either of them anymore. When Adam exhales, Ronan feels the warmth of it over his skin. He’s so close to Adam that he can see the tiny, pale freckles that splatter across his nose, the memories of summer. He’s so close to Adam, that when Adam looks up at him, he can see the dilation of his pupils, and the tiny frown that creases between his fair eyebrows. Ronan doesn’t move. Adam’s lips part and Ronan sees a flicker of his tongue dart out to wet them. Adam’s hand is unmoving on his bare chest and Ronan wonders if he can feel his thundering heart beneath it. The moment stretches like the enchanted thread that now holds Ronan’s wounds together.

“You’re healing fast,” Adam observes. The moment snaps. “Is it a formwalker thing?”

“What? No?” But he’s right. The smallest cuts on Ronan’s arms look a few days old already, and his deepest wounds look less angry. Adam is in much the same state; there’s a deep gash on his chest, the edge of it poking out of the open neck of his shirt, that Ronan would offer to stitch, only it no longer looks as if it needs it. The scratches on Adam’s exposed forearms are scabbing over. He doesn’t look surprised by the state of his own wounds.

“Cabeswater helps me heal faster,” he says. “I wonder if—”

“The covenant?” Ronan finishes the thought. “Maybe it’s not so useless after all.”

“I’ve yet to see the benefit.”

“I literally just saved your life.”

“True.” Adam stands fully and moves away from Ronan. He crouches in the middle of the small cave and rubs his hands together. A spark jumps from them and catches on the small amount of kindling there. Ronan hadn’t noticed Adam gather it.

Ronan finds a fresh shirt in his pack. There’s a wool blanket in there too and he pulls it out and throws it over himself. The fire has built up now and Ronan doesn’t want to stare into it, afraid he might see something again, but he can’t help himself.

There’s nothing at first, just the flames, licking at the logs Adam has added. Ronan blinks, and two birds spiral in the air. He blinks again and they’re gone.

“Do you—” he clears his throat, unsure of why he needs to. “Do you ever see stuff in the fire?”

“Other than the logs?” Adam asks. He smirks at his own joke, but then frowns. “Sometimes. The past, other presents.”

“The future?”

Adam looks up at him, the fire reflected in his eyes. “Sometimes.”

“Did you see me in it? Before we met?”

Adam does laugh properly at that. “If I had, I’d have known to avoid you.”

“Asshole. Anytime you wanna thank me for not letting you get your head torn off by a six-limbed creature from the deepest circle of Hell is good with me by the way.”

“I’m sure I already did that,” Adam replies, still grinning.

“Well, maybe I wanna hear it again.”

“Well maybe you should—” Adam abruptly cuts himself off. Ronan can fill in the end of the sentence.

“Do you think that was the thing, that dreamt that darkness?” Ronan asks. He thinks of the claw on the back of his neck.

Adam’s face is carefully expressionless. “No. It’s connected. That monster was a manifestation. I think there’s something out there. Something attacking the forest.”

There’s a powerful surge along the covenant. Not of magic, not like when they’d touched hands outside the forest, but of emotion. Ronan doesn’t have to ask to know what Adam is thinking, and he can read how he’s feeling underneath his carefully blank face.

Something is out there. And Adam’s afraid of it.

“I’ll stay with you. We can fix the forest, and find Gansey at the same time.”

“Ronan—”

“Don’t fucking tell me you don’t need my help. Fuck destiny alright, but there’s a reason the damn covenant is strong. Look at this—” Ronan gestures at his side where his wounds look days old already. “I nearly got my guts torn out and now there’s nothing there.”

Adam cocks his head. “I wouldn’t say that’s nothing.”

Ronan rolls his eyes. “You can insist that you can do it alone all you like, but you can’t get rid of me that easy.”

“Clearly not,” Adam replies, but he smirks as he says it.

Ronan settles further against the cave wall. He stares into the fire again, but something bothers him. “A soothsayer told me I’d save your life.”

“That’s why you came back?” Adam is still looking at him, dark eyes on him through the flames.

“No,” Ronan says, before he can think better of it. “She said I would, but not in the way I thought. Do you know what that means?”

“I don’t. Maybe breaking the covenant isn’t as easy as balancing it.”

“It’s still there, isn’t it?” Ronan doesn’t know why he asks, he just wants to know that Adam feels it still too. It’s more tangible than it’s ever been. When Ronan reaches for it, it’s like plunging his hand into cool water, like the sunshine hitting his skin on a spring day.

“You know it is. You should sleep. Your wounds might be healing fast but it’ll still take a lot of energy. I’ll go find something to eat.”

It’s raining hard now, and the air is scented with pine. Adam would rather not go out in it, but he’s hungry and from the sounds coming from Ronan’s stomach, he is too. Hunger won’t help heal their wounds, and they can’t fix the forest wounded.

As Adam gathers his things together, Ronan shuffles back, further into the cave, as if he’s trying to get comfortable against the cave wall. But while Adam is checking he still has both knives, a waxed leather cloak smacks against him.

“So you don’t drown,” Ronan says, and he shuffles back away from his pack.

“Thanks.” The word sticks in Adam’s throat. He pulls the cloak on and tucks the hood over his head. When he steps out of the cave, the rain drums loudly on it, but he stays dry beneath it.

Deep in the trees, Adam aligns himself with the forest. He can feel the paths that run through it like veins, the old oak pulsing at the heart of it. His magic connects him back to Ronan too. He was right, the covenant is strong, stronger now that they’ve saved each other’s lives again. It’s warm, like a living thing and Adam is grateful for it as he sets out into the forest.

She said I’d save your life, but not in the way I thought. Adam had told Ronan he hadn’t known what that meant, but as he walks through the forest, feeling the covenant in his mind like a warm blanket around him, he knows what it means. He’s not alone. Whether he wants it or not, since he saved Ronan’s life, he hasn’t been alone. The thought doesn’t make Adam as afraid as it once might have. His hand still tingles from touching Ronan’s bare chest, the memory of his heart pulsing against it. Before Ronan, Adam would have thought he could never be that close to someone and not be afraid. His only fear now is Ronan seeing too many of his memories.

Seeing what he did.

Adam shakes the fear from his mind. There are more important fears. Something is wrong in the forest. When Adam asks it to take him to one of the snares he has set, it doesn’t. It takes him to a leaping waterfall, to the top of a rocky crag where the wind howls, high above the treetops, to an empty swath of meadow at the edge of which a cluster of young hawthorns are gathered around one single, tall pine. Adam feels watched.

A branch cracks amongst the hawthorns.

“Noah?”

Nothing. The rain has turned to a fine mist. The tall pine sways in a wind that Adam can’t feel.

“Is there someone there?” he asks again. “Gansey?” Adam thinks of the creature that he killed, the other living creature in the dreamscape.

“Take me home,” he whispers, and steps through the air, hoping for his forest den.

But he ends up back at the mouth of the cave where he’d left Ronan. The fire he’d lit with magic still burns without Adam maintaining it.

He orientates himself with the forest again, tries to feel where they are in relationship to the other parts of it. It’s never been this hard before to find where he needs to be. Something is very wrong in the forest.

“You’re looking for Glendower,” Noah says.

“Yes! Have you seen any signs of him, in your time in the forest?” Something about Noah had felt right, and Gansey hadn’t been bluffing when he told Blue he trusted him. And now, here was proof. Finally, some more, solid information about Glendower, from someone who had had centuries maybe to search the forest.

“I died because of Glendower.”

“Oh,” is all Gansey manages to say in reply. He doesn’t like to think of Glendower being responsible for anyone’s death. Blue kicks him in the back of the knee and he almost stumbles over a raised root. “I mean, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Who killed you, Noah?” Blue asks, her voice soft. “Glendower?”

Gansey doesn’t say what he’s thinking, which is that Glendower didn’t just kill people for no reason and the leave their bodies in the forest. He’s about to tell Blue that Glendower would have only killed for honour, when Noah speaks again. His voice doesn’t come from where he walks, like Gansey expects it to. He almost sounds like he’s whispering directly in Gansey’s ear, and the tone he speaks with implores silence.

“No. My friend did. We were searching for Glendower’s final resting place, as you do now. But we found something else. The darkest thing I’ve ever seen. He said it told him that it would take us to Glendower. But that it needed a sacrifice to free it.”

The ground freezes solid beneath Gansey and Blue, winter falling upon the forest in the blink of an eye.

“He sacrificed you?” Blue breathes, her breath puffing a cold mist from her mouth.

Noah doesn’t reply. He turns away and drifts on through the frozen forest, moving not around the bushes and trees, but through them as if they aren’t there at all.

“Did it work?” Gansey asks, calling loudly after him.

Blue shushes him. “Don’t be so insensitive,” she hisses.

“I didn’t think so,” Noah replies and for as far away as his ghostly form has gotten, his voice still whispers straight into Gansey’s ear.

“What happened to him? The man who killed you?”

“The forest. It took him. The trees see everything, Blue. Before you’ve even set foot in the forest, if you ever will, they know your heart.”

The thought, that the trees have always known he was coming, chills Gansey. But then, he had always known that he too was coming. The dream he has, the same dream again and again. It was always going to bring him here. He walks on with certainty.

Up ahead, the ground begins to slope steeply uphill. The frost has gone, but the trees around them are bare still. The air is cold, but not as cold as it had been. It’s as if whatever magic that controls the seasons within the forest cannot reach this part.

Noah passes through a dense thorn bush. It doesn’t look as if there is any opening suitable for him and Blue to pass through, and the forest doesn’t part to provide them one. Gansey unsheathes his sword, ignoring the way that Blue rolls her eyes.

He hacks away at the thorns until there is a gap large enough for them to pass through. He stands aside for Blue, and she smiles begrudgingly at him.

“That was hardly necessary. We could’ve just asked the forest to let us through,” she says.

“No,” Noah tells her from beyond the thorns. “You couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Blue asks, as she easily walks through the gap. Noah doesn’t reply, but Blue has gone quiet on the other side of the thorns, like the answer has been given to her anyway.

Gansey follows her through.

A birch tree stands in the clearing beyond the thorns. It stands bare of all leaves, and its trunk is split from the ground upwards, the gap large enough for a man to stand within. It’s entirely black, as if it has been burnt, but there is no evidence of a fire beyond it. The ground at the base of the tree is falling away, black roots exposed to the forest. It’s a pit. It’s the darkest thing Gansey has ever seen.

“Gansey, look,” Blue says. Gansey cannot fathom how Blue can be looking at anything other than he yawning dark beneath the birch tree.

“What is it?” he asks, not looking away. Gansey has the horrible feeling that if he takes his eyes off of the pit, then something will come crawling out of it.

“There are more trees like that,” Blue says. “It’s like something has… infected them. A disease.”

Gansey finally looks from the pit. He keeps it in his peripheral though, as he turns to where Blue is. She stands by another tree, and yes, the trunk has split and within it, something strange and black oozes. Gansey plucks a leaf from a low hanging branch. The darkness follows the veins in the leaf perfectly. There are at least ten other trees that Gansey can see that show at least some sign of this mysterious darkness.

“Is this what you meant, Noah? About warning us? Is this the thing that your friend sacrificed you for?” Blue asks.

Noah stands at the edge of the pit, his back to them. “I think so. He woke it. It’s been biding its time. Waiting for something. It might be too late now. Every day it gets stronger. The darkness grows faster than the forest.”

Gansey cannot find the words. He has no words for this. For the black that grows in the trees. For the dark pit that has opened. Something attacks this forest, and he feels too small, too afraid, too helpless to be able to do anything to help it, prewarned or not.

“What do we do?” Blue asks.

“We should find Adam, we should—”

“Sleep on it,” Noah interrupts.

“What?” Gansey asks. That sounds like a terrible idea, the worst possible idea, in the face of this growing darkness, but drowsiness has overcome him. He slumps against one of the blackened trees.

“Sleep, and then you’ll have an answer,” Noah says again.

Next to him, Blue has settled onto a soft pile of leaves. Gansey’s eyelids droop heavily. He doesn’t remember the last time he slept. He doesn’t remember anything, other than that it’s been a very long time since he slept, and that right now, there’s nothing he’d like more.

Gansey sleeps. When he opens his eyes in the dream, he sees the same sight that has always greeted him when he dreams. His own face, Glendower’s tomb. But this time, it’s different in one minor detail. This time, he isn’t alone in the tomb.

This time, Ronan is there.

That night, Ronan’s dream isn’t a dream, it’s another memory. It’s that strange unfamiliar familiarity of Adam’s memory again. Ronan can tell from the faded colours and from the sick twist in his stomach.

The roof of the barn he stands in is low and water leaks in at the corner, dripping into a puddle at the corner. Outside, it isn’t raining.

Another corner of the barn is fenced off with rotting timbers. The inside of the enclosed area is thick with straw and the smell of pig is strong, even through memory. Young Adam is crouched at the edge of the pigsty and a great sow lies before him in the straw. There are half a dozen tiny piglets suckling, but Adam’s got a seventh in his hands.

He’s holding it close to his body, but it doesn’t twitch and wriggle like the other piglets would if he held them that tight. Adam watches the live piglets suckling and absently strokes a finger over the head of the dead one he holds. Ronan watches him bite his bottom lip distractedly.

Adam’s mother is sweeping the stone floor of the barn and the look she gives her son is full of contempt. She looks tired, and even older than she had the last time Ronan had seen her. Heavy lines are carved into her stony face. Good, Ronan thinks.

“Adam,” she snaps. “You’ve got work to do. Throw it out. It’s only the runt.” She snorts, a cruel noise. “Just like you.”

She props her broom up in the corner of the barn and walks away, back to the tumbledown cottage. Adam watches her go, and Ronan knows that look on his face. Defiance. He’s clutching the dead piglet to his chest and there are tiny tears threatening to spill at the corners of his eyes. But still, he looks determined.

Ronan watches him carefully set the piglet down on the straw. He rests his hands carefully on its tiny body, and screws his face up in concentration. The moment stretches on, an effect of the memory. It must have felt like an age to Adam, but it can only have been seconds in reality.

The piglet twitches. It grunts a little and its back leg jerks out. And then it’s up with a squeal. It runs from Adam, to its mother, where it nuzzles in amongst the others and starts suckling too. Adam smiles, delighted. It’s an expression that should never look as wrong on the face of a child as it does on Adam, but it’s one that Ronan has caught a glimpse of, in his present. Ronan smiles too, and he’s still smiling when he turns from the pigsty to his Adam standing behind him.

The look on Adam’s face isn’t the bemused pride at his past self that Ronan was expecting. It’s cold, and hollow, like he’d rather have forgotten that this had ever happened.

“That’s enough,” Adam says. He strides away from the barn, away from the cottage and out towards the edge of the memory.

“But that was amazing! That piglet!” Ronan says, following after him.

“I don’t want you to mention this ever again,” Adam says, crossing the boundary back to the waking world. His voice is cold.

“Why not?” Ronan shouts after him, even though he knows he won’t hear. He shuts his eyes as he crosses back over, tight, so he doesn’t see the flashes of his own memory as he crosses the bond.

When he opens his eyes, Ronan is lying on his bedroll. Adam is sat up, facing out into the forest. Ronan can read the tension in his shoulders.

“They killed it.”

Adam nods. “That’s the day I left. You heard what she said. I was just another mouth to feed. Useless.”

“But…” Ronan doesn’t have the words. He’s never seen anyone do something like that before. That’s the kind of magic that mages kill formwalkers to be able to perform. He tries to sit up, but his injuries scream at him. “That was…”

“Stupid,” Adam says. “A waste.”

“Incredible. Amazing. Fuck, I—have you done it again?”

“No. It was a mistake to do it at all. It takes a lot of magic, even for that piglet. You know that. Can we stop talking about it?”

Ronan agrees. Maybe Adam doesn’t know what a big deal it was. Maybe he doesn’t even know how much magic that would take another mage, even just for a piglet. He won’t mention it again, but he won’t forget it.

It’s still raining, and Ronan wonders whether Gansey is walking the river yet, looking for him.  He should get up and look for him. Ronan doesn’t want Gansey to think he’s forgotten him or abandoned him. He doesn’t want him to think he lied.

“You should go back to sleep,” Adam says. He’s pulling Ronan’s waxed cloak on again. The sun has begun to rise, and the sky is lightening above them, the cold blue of the dawn. But it’s still raining hard and the air smells strongly of wet pine. “Your wounds need more time to heal.”

“Where are you going?” Ronan asks.

“I’m going to find Gansey. Something’s wrong with the forest, and I don’t think anyone should be wandering around alone out there.”

“So you’re going to wander around alone, and leave me here alone?” Ronan says, mostly to be an asshole.

“I appreciate the concern,” Adam says, dryly. “You’re not going anywhere. Stay here, I know where to find you.”

Ronan wants to protest, but his body aches from the fight yesterday. He trusts that Adam will find Gansey, and he trusts that he’ll come back.

He lets Adam go. “Bring me breakfast!” he calls after him. Adam is disappearing into the trees, but he flips Ronan off as he goes. Ronan smiles to himself and settles back down to sleep.

Gansey wakes from the dream with a start like he’s falling.

“The river!” he says, bursting with excitement. “We need to get to the river!”

Blue looks up at him, blearily. They’re still in the clearing by the monstrous, gaping pit, but suddenly things are looking brighter. Ronan found a way into the forest. Ronan is looking for him.

“I dreamt of Ronan,” Gansey says, excitedly.

“So?” Blue mumbles. She doesn’t look happy about being woken up so dramatically, but Gansey finds it endearing, the way she blinks sleepily at him, the way her hair is escaping its tiny ponytail at all manner of strange angles. He reaches out and plucks a tiny leaf from her hair.

“I always have the same dream. But this time it was different, Ronan was in it. Is there magic, Blue? Magic that could allow someone to leave a message in someone else’s dream?” He’s almost buzzing with the excitement of it, the strange message Ronan left him, and the idea that they’re going to do it. Find Ronan and Adam, fix the forest, find Glendower.

“I guess? Maybe.” She doesn’t sound certain, but if she’d outright said no, then Gansey would let it go but—

“This means he must be with Adam. We have to find the river and follow it downstream. We can tell Adam about this—he gestures around. “About the pit and the trees. This darkness, and he’ll know how to fix it.”

Blue looks uncertain. “Why would your Ronan be with Adam?”

“They have a covenant,” Gansey says, dismissively. “Noah! Which way to the river?” he calls out, even though he can no longer see Noah in the clearing. Gansey leaps to his feet and gathers his things together. His journal has returned to its previous state and he finds the notes he’d made on Adam and the covenant.

Behind him, Blue is frowning at the ground. She doesn’t seem to share in his excitement, but Gansey desperately wants her to.

“Is something the matter?” he asks her.

“It’s nothing. I just. I suppose you won’t need me any longer, once you’ve found Ronan and Adam.” She sounds bitter.

“Nonsense!” Gansey says, startled that Blue would even think that. “You’re part of this quest too! Besides, I thought we were finding a way to lift your curse as well.” He adds the last part a little softer, and the answering smile he gets from Blue makes his heart skip in his chest.

“Okay,” Blue says, getting to her feet. She gathers her things together. “When I was a child, my mother told me that finding the river would always take me where I wanted to go. That I should always follow it if I got lost. She said that walking downhill would always take me to water.”

“Downhill it is then,” Gansey says, grinning broadly. He should feel afraid, he thinks. This strange pit, this darkness that grows in the forest, his own oncoming death. But he’s with Blue, on his way to find Ronan. It’s like he said to Blue before. Safe as life.

Every night now, Ronan edges closer and closer to the darkest of Adam’s memories. How long would it before he knew the truth? Before he could no longer look at Adam without seeing a monster, no better than the one they had killed in the night. Worse, even.

Adam brushes the palms of his hands off on his breeches as he picks his way through the trees. There’s a tiny black mark on the palm of his right hand, and at first, Adam thinks it’s a spot of blood from the monster that he’d missed when he washed. Adam tries to scratch it off with his left thumbnail. It doesn’t budge.

It’s with cold dread that Adam realises it’s beneath his skin.

Chapter Text

Henry Cheng takes his role as a travelling bard incredibly seriously. It’s his job, after all, to collect the stories of the continent, to embellish them, to make them shine and to turn them into songs that people will be singing for decades — no — centuries to come! He sets people off on quests, gives them the nudge out the door, tells them where to find the right soothsayer, hell, he’ll even help you pack! Henry prides himself on knowing exactly when a story is about to get good. And, even better, when a story is about to get legendary. He’s got a knack for knowing precisely when the hero needs a kick up the backside, too.

It’s not often that he goes chasing other people’s stories. They tend to have a way of coming to him, of revealing themselves slowly, showing him the holes, the missed opportunities, the places where a little embellishment can be added. Henry fixes these stories, and sends them on their way, always with the reminder that they should return to him, to regale their tale (nice rhyme there Cheng), so he can spin into something worthy of remembrance.

But. It’s been six weeks since Henry sent the golden prince and his dark and mysterious companion off into the mysterious – no wait, he’s already used that – enigmatic Cabeswater forest. Henry hasn’t heard or seen them since.

Call it what you want, gut instinct, a nose for a good story, the particular subtle art of reading the magical atmosphere, but there is something strange out there, something hindering Gansey’s quest, something, Henry thinks, that needs an outside perspective. He’s a big picture kind of guy.

And that’s how he finds himself, on the edge of the strange forest of legend, about to, maybe, begin a quest of his own. There’s something, in the wind perhaps, or maybe it was in the porridge he had for breakfast, but Henry feels certain that today is the day he needs to be in the woods.

He feels an odd sense of trepidation as he lingers at the edge of the woods. There aren’t many songs about Cabeswater. Just a lot of very ominous warnings. Henry likes to think that the main reason is that most bards who’ve come before him aren’t creative enough to find a good rhyme for ‘Cabeswater.’ The ominous warnings won’t dissuade Henry though. If the forest doesn’t want you there, it doesn’t let you in, and it can be incredibly hostile in doing so. But today, the young trees bend gently in the breeze and the day is bright, the sun above is unseasonably strong and not a cloud to hide it.

There’s a wide, grassy path leading into the forest and it’s almost too perfect, almost too easy. It’s this ease that gives Henry pause. His mother would tell him not to take the easiest route, that’s the route they expect you to take, find something more challenging, do something unexpected.

Henry walks a few paces away from the wide, grassy path. There’s another path into the forest, and this one is a little more overgrown, a little more hidden, but still a path. He takes it. The path is narrow and dusty, tufts of grass springing up through dry, cracked mud, but it’s short. It spits him out on the wide grassy path that he’d been trying to avoid, not far at all from the edge of the forest.

Henry turns around and walks out the forest, taking the grassy path back to the edge.

He walks further this time, several paces in the opposite direction, until he comes to another dirt path, a little more hidden this time. This path is a little rockier than the last, strewn with loose pebbles. He takes it, but again, he’s barely walked anywhere before the path takes him to the wide, grassy route into the forest.

“Okay, I get the idea,” Henry says, although he hopes that nothing is listening. Do what the trees tell you, he’d been told once by a soothsayer. At the time, he’d thought of it as particular thick metaphor, for listening to the rhythms of nature, something you might tell a farmer with a struggling crop, not a travelling bard. It’s starting to make a lot of sense to Henry now.

He takes the grassy path.

“So is there some kind of magic that would allow someone to leave a message in a dream?” Gansey asks, as he and Blue pick their way downhill through the forest, listening for the sound of running water.

“I suppose. I heard Persephone mention the dreamscape before. It’s only accessible in the forest, as far as I know. But it’s really skilled magic, not a lot of mages can do it, and I’ve never heard of them bringing someone into the dreamscape with them.”

“But like I said, Ronan has a covenant with Adam. That would allow that to happen right? If they’re sharing—”

Gansey cuts himself off as he reaches to catch Blue’s arm when almost trips on a raised root. “He’s the formwalker?” she says.

“What?” Gansey starts babbling, backtracking as best he can. “No, no, Ronan’s not a formwalker. All the formwalkers are dead. Ronan’s definitely not one, he just—”

“Gansey,” Blue says, patiently. “I already know that Adam formed a covenant with a formwalker.”

“Right. I’m sorry. It’s just not my secret to tell, and I know Ronan hardly ever makes it a secret, but I feel I should at least attempt to keep it for him. It isn’t that I don’t trust you.” Gansey trusts this girl more and more.

“I know,” she says, and she grins wickedly at him. The grin itself is not wicked, but it’s full of so much potential. Gansey’s stomach churns. “I think it’s a really fascinating piece of magic.”

He’s relieved at the subject change. “Oh absolutely! It’s incredible the way their different forms come to them. Ronan doesn’t often talk about it anymore, but he once told me it’s as natural as knowing where your legs are without looking for them. Jumping and knowing exactly where you’ll land.”

What animals does he turn into?” Blue asks.

“A wolf, a snake and a raven. And also apparently some kind of sea creature, although I can’t imagine that it’ll be very useful for him, not this far from any large bodies of water.” Gansey chuckles to himself. “How much further do you think the river is?”

“It can’t be much further.” Blue continues taking long strides down the steep hill. “I’d ask the forest if it knows, but don’t you think it feels less…”

“Alive?” Gansey finishes, although the thought makes a fist inside him around his guts.

Ahead of him, Blue has stopped in the path. She freezes completely, like a startled deer. “Did you hear that?” she breathes.

Gansey stops too, although he’d rather keep going.  “Another ghost?” he says, half-jokingly. Blue’s dark eyebrows furrow, and she opens her mouth like she’s going to argue about his joke, but she’s cut off by the loud crack of a branch.

“Someone’s coming,” she says, instead.

There’s more rustling. Whoever is approaching is not making a secret of it. Gansey tenses, mostly because he knows he should. There’s danger in this forest, and it’s more real to him after what Noah showed them than it had been before, but this is an adventure. What’s adventure without a little danger?

“Adam?” Blue says, cautiously.

“Blue? What are you doing here?” A holly bush parts in the middle, and Adam emerges from it. Gansey feels like a lifetime has passed since he last saw him, but he looks almost the same as he had in the bandit camp. He’s wearing a cloak of waxed leather, and there’s water beaded on it, despite the bright, cloudless evening. The cloak seems familiar to Gansey, but he’s sure Adam hadn’t been wearing it the last time they met.

Blue relaxes, tension visibly rolling off of her. “I’m so glad to see you!” she says, but she doesn’t rush to hug Adam like Gansey thought she would.

“I’m glad to see you too, especially because you’re with—” he looks over Blue’s head to where Gansey is stood watching. “Gansey.” He doesn’t look glad to see either of them, he looks mad.

“You’ve met?” Blue asks,

“Ah, yes. I may have forgotten to mention. We met not too long before—”

“I told you not to come here,” Adam says, cutting him off, and yes, Gansey knew this was coming.

“Yes, I’m aware of that, but I think it was the right decision and—”

“How can you say that? You left Ronan.”

Gansey swallows hard. He’d been expecting Adam to be angry at finding him in the forest, when he’d expressly told him not to come in. He had not, however, expected Adam to be angry at him for leaving Ronan. This means Ronan found him though, and Gansey thinks he’s relieved. Maybe.

“Where is he?” Gansey asks, looking behind Adam to see if Ronan is following, but all he sees is prickly holly closing up behind him.

“Injured.”

The bottom drops out of Gansey’s stomach and it fills with ice. “How? When?”

“What did you think was going to happen when he tried to get in, alone and unwelcome? He’s lucky it didn’t kill him, no thanks to you.”

“Adam!” Blue snaps.

Adam rounds on her. “And you. You shouldn’t be here either. I’ll take you back to Ronan and then all three of you are leaving.”

“I haven’t found Glendower yet!”

“Forget Glendower! Adam, we met Noah. He showed us these trees, there’s this strange black rot, growing from within them. One of them has already been consumed completely. There’s a pit, opening up beneath it.”

Blood drains from Adam’s face. His irritation remains firmly in place, but it’s deeper now, sharper, in the face of Blue’s news. “A pit? Where?”

“Oh wouldn’t you like to know,” she says, haughtily. “Suddenly it’s not so bad that I’m here, is it?”

“Blue, please,” Adam sighs. His face softens and he looks at her imploringly.

“Say sorry for yelling. Say sorry to Gansey,” she demands.

Adam glances at Gansey. His face is hard again. “No. Not until he says sorry to Ronan.”

Gansey has no idea when the most loyal person to Ronan became this strange boy. Probably around the time he left Ronan alone with nothing more than a note and a questionable magic bond. He absolutely deserves this, he thinks.

“It’s fine, Blue,” Gansey says, quietly.

Blue sighs. “Boys,” she mutters. “The pit is just north of here, through a thicket of thorns. Noah said that magic won’t work there, so it won’t move. I can take you there.”

Adam nods. “Now?”

Blue shakes her head. “After you’ve taken Gansey back to Ronan.”

Adam’s mouth twists wryly. “Fine. I told him I would.”

Gansey adjusts his pack, ignoring the dirty look Adam gives him. He wants to get to Ronan quickly, see how severely injured he is. The guilt that had been gnawing at Gansey since he left him behind consumes him now, with this new knowledge. He walks slowly, behind Blue and Adam, and only half listens as Blue recounts to Adam the story of how she’d come into the forest, and how she’d found Gansey.

“…And then we found this church—”

“Church? In the forest?” Adam sounds bewildered.

“Yeah, Gansey says it was built by Glendower’s men. Have you seen it before?”

“No. But I haven’t seen the whole forest. Maybe…” Adam hesitates. “Maybe I’ll show you both the map I’ve been working on, and you can show me where it was.”

Gansey perks up at the mention of a map. “A map? That would be fantastic. This forest, it’s constantly shifting. A map would be incredibly useful, I imagine so much of it is unexplored.”

“The forest doesn’t change,” Adam says. “It’s an illusion. It transports you to different parts of it, whatever parts it wants you to be in.”

“So if it wanted to, it could keep sending you in circle on the same path, back to the same place?”

Adam glances over his shoulder and raises a knowing eyebrow. “If it was feeling so inclined to, yes.”

This forest, Gansey muses, is certainly losing its charm. “How do we know that we can get back to where you’ve left Ronan?”

Gansey can read the tension in Adam’s shoulders. He braces himself for another attack about leaving Ronan. But instead, Adam says, “Something’s wrong with the forest. Something is draining its magic. And I can find Ronan anyway.”

“The covenant?” Gansey says, although he thinks maybe he shouldn’t have.

“Yes,” Adam replies. He doesn’t continue the conversation.

The forest changes the further they walk. The shaking deciduous trees give way to solid pines, tall and densely packed. It begins to rain. Gansey watches Adam pull the hood of his cloak over his head and he realises why he recognises it.

“That cloak. It’s Ronan’s,” Gansey says. Adam doesn’t answer and for the first time, Gansey considers the harsh truth of the situation. He’d left his formwalker best friend to a mage who could easily drain his magic and leave him nothing more than a shell. This could be an elaborate lie. Adam could be taking them anywhere, there’s no guarantee that Ronan’s even—

Gansey stops his spiralling thoughts. Ahead, a great boulder juts from a cliff, forming a small, shallow cave beneath it. A tree seems to be the only thing stopping the boulder from collapsing to the ground. Beneath it, a fire glows.

“About time! I’m fucking starving,” Ronan shouts from the fire. Relief surges in Gansey like a river in a storm. He shoves past Adam and Blue on the path and practically runs to Ronan. He collapses into him, and despite Ronan’s huff of annoyance, his arms come around Gansey and hold him as tight as Gansey holds him.

“I’m still mad at you,” Ronan says, muffled in Gansey’s shoulder.

“I know. I’m just so happy you’re alive.”

“Why would I not be?”

“Adam said you were injured.”

“Not badly.”

“I thought—”

“That asshole made you think I was on my deathbed?” Ronan laughs. Adam sits on the other side of Ronan at the fire, and he’s biting down on a smile.

Ronan lets go of Gansey and turns to whisper something to Adam. He is, Gansey notes, moving gingerly, so he must be a little injured still. He desperately wants to ask what happened, but he doesn’t know how to yet.

Blue loudly clears her throat. “As touching as the reunion was—”

“You didn’t tell me elves lived in your forest, Parrish,” Ronan interrupts.

Blue glares at him.

“Blue, this is Ronan Lynch. Ronan, Blue Sargent. She lives just on the edge of the forest.”

“You’re the formwalker,” Blue says, without breaking her glower.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

Adam smirks. “Does it ever not?”

Ronan looks pleased by Adam’s assessment of him. Gansey desperately wants to ask what has happened between the two of them to allow such easy familiarity to spawn. He’s never seen Ronan behave like this around anyone, especially not since the murder of his family.

As he much as he regrets his decision of leaving Ronan alone, and as much as Ronan, and apparently Adam, may hold it against him, it looks like just maybe, it was the right one.

“So are we going to find a way to heal the forest?” Blue asks.

Adam looks up at her, where she still stands on the other side of the small fire. He seems to contemplate her question for a moment, and then, strangely looks down at the palm of his hand. “No. You’re not. You three are all leaving.”

“What?” Ronan snarls. “Fuck off!”

“Ronan,” Gansey says, automatically falling back into his old rhythm of admonishing Ronan’s outbursts. “He’s right thought, we can help find a way to—”

“How? What could you possibly do that I can’t do on my own?”

“You told me I could stay, I already told you you’re not getting rid of me!”

“That was before – No, it’s not safe. There could be more of those monsters out there, there could be worse things.”

“The forest brought me here. It let me in, it’s never let me in before and it let me in now for a reason.”

Ronan points at her. “Yeah, the fairy is right, there’s a reason all this shit is happening.”

Gansey feels uneasy. He’d always felt the reason was connected to Glendower. He keeps trying to draw links in his mind though. Noah was killed looking for Glendower. The forest is sick, but it keeps taking him to things connected to his lost king. Around him, Blue and Ronan are still arguing with Adam, and he can’t tell who’s winning. They’re all on their feet around Gansey and he’s lost track of their arguing. It sounds like more than three voices.

“We should turn back.”

“Whatever is out there has no fear of God.”

“If one of you gets hurt—”

“I’m already hurt!”

“You are just proving my point.”

“Six men are already dead, Owain. A curse stalks this forest.”

“There will be a way to trap it. We are the finest warriors, the most skilled mages. There is no evil that cannot be defeated.”

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“Why do you always have to do everything by yourself?”

Behind Gansey, the trees rustle, and Gansey turns in time to watch a wide, grassy path open up in them.

“Ah! Adam Parrish! At last!”

Adam’s shoulders slump and all the ire drains from his face. He sighs deeply. “Henry Cheng.”

“You know him too?” Gansey says, excitedly. Everything, everything, everything is falling into place.

“I know of him,” Adam says.

“You’ve been avoiding me! Every time I hear rumour of you, I try to get there and then suddenly you’re gone! The ballad I could compose about you, it would be epic!”

“Did you consider that maybe I don’t want a ballad about me?”

“Nonsense! Why else perform all those amazing feats?”

“Because—” Adam starts to say, before cutting himself off. “How did you get in here?”

“Yeah, how come the forest just let you in?” Ronan snaps.

“Oh I just came through over there.” Henry gestures behind himself to where a path in the trees is just closing up. Through it, Gansey can see right out to the edge of the forest. “I’d been expecting a little more of a challenge, if I’m honest.”

Ronan growls and for a second, Gansey thinks he’s going to have to intervene before an altercation breaks out. But instead Ronan just stalks away, back into the tiny cave. Gansey looks to Adam, wondering if he should go after him, but Adam is already following.

Gansey can hear them whispering in the cave, while he introduces Henry to Blue.

“Henry, this is Miss Blue Sargent. Blue, this is Henry Cheng,” he says, but his mind is still more on Ronan.

“Excellent,” Henry says. “I’m glad to see you’ve diversified your company. It makes for a more appealing story, you know. To have more characters people can relate to.”

Blue regards Henry suspiciously. “I’m not a character,” she says.

“Certainly not, Miss Sargent, but when I compose the epic Quest for Glendower, the tough and fearless adventurer Blue Sargent will be popular amongst the young ladies who hear my song.”

Blue purses her lips. “Not if Adam Parrish has anything to do with it.”

“Of course! I could hear the argument from outside the trees,” Henry says, with a shiny smile. Gansey wants to ask if he heard other voices too, but he keeps going. “It wouldn’t make for a very good story if you all just said it was too dangerous, and gave up now, would it?”

Gansey agrees with his point. Adam and Ronan have re-emerged from the cave, but they still look like they’ve been fighting.

“Well then, I think there’s a quest we need to be getting on with,” Henry says, happily, ignorant, perhaps wilfully, of the tension.

Adam sighs, defeated. “If you say so.”

“Wait, are you coming as well?” Ronan says, glaring a little at Henry. Gansey had been hopeful that he would be merely accepting of Henry’s presence, but alas that was too much to hope for.

“Merely as an observer, Ronan Lynch,” Henry says, and he gestures to Gansey, as if imploring him to take the lead. Gansey looks to Ronan who rolls his eyes and then make a similar gesture to Henry, albeit a little more mocking. Adam laughs.

“Cabeswater,” Gansey says. The wind ripples through the trees. “Show us the way.”

The day is hot, and the sun rises high above them and then seems to stop in it’s climb, hanging at its highest point above them, beating down on the narrow forest path. Sweat slides down Gansey’s back, and his hair sticks to his brow. It seems to affect everyone the same, and Adam tries more than once to ask Cabeswater for a change in the weather. It’s to no avail though, and the more he tries, the more agitated he becomes by it. Gansey tries to distract him.

“So if you didn’t go to the Academy, Adam,” he says. “How did you learn magic?”

Ronan looks over his shoulder at Gansey, and then past him to where Adam walks at the back of the group. It makes Gansey wonder if he’d asked a question that Adam wouldn’t want to answer.

“I used magic when I was a child,” Adam says, eventually. “And then when I came into the forest, it showed me how to hone it.”

“And Persephone,” Blue adds. “She didn’t go to the Academy either, and she taught my mother and Calla to use magic better. No one from up here goes to the Academy.”

“Well the mages at the Academy don’t care so much about magic users north of the Falchion,” Henry says. “In the wildlands, magic isn’t as potent.”

Adam snorts, and this time when Ronan looks back at him, Gansey sees he’s grinning.

“I have heard that the mage of Cabeswater is more powerful than the average northern mage, however,” Henry continues. “Although I have yet to see any evidence of this for myself. It would be nice is something could be done about this terrible weather. Perhaps it’s just a rumour.”

It starts to snow. Gansey laughs, merrily, as great flakes of the stuff flutter down from the bright blue sky. The flakes are cold when they land on his bare skin, and they catch in his hair.

“Are you doing this?” Blue says, laughing, holding her hands out to catch more snowflakes. They pepper all over her dark hair, not quite melting, sparkling in the sunlight.

“It’s not quite what I was going for,” Adam says, frowning up at the blazing blue above them. The bright sun battles with the snow, and the flakes melt as soon as they hit the ground. But they keep coming, and a warm breeze sends them spiralling around in the path.

Henry laughs. “I stand corrected.”

The path they follow slopes steadily downhill, and it continues to snow as they walk. Tiny white flowers bloom at the edges of the path, as if the forest is trying to give the impression that they are walking through winter.

The path skirts around the edge of a wide pond, the water as still as a mirror. Gansey watches the branches of a weeping willow twist in the air on the opposite bank.

“We’ve been here before,” Ronan says. “Do you remember?” Gansey’s about to agree, that yes, he recognises the deep, wide pond. He can almost feel the cool water lapping against his skin.

But then Adam answers and it becomes clear that Ronan was only ever talking to him. The corner of his mouth twitches. “Yeah, I remember.”

Blue and Henry wander away, chatting animatedly. Henry makes a grand, sweeping gesture at the water with his arm, and Blue’s laugh echoes back to Gansey. The late afternoon sun reflects off of the water, and casts them in gold. He feels warm, watching them together.

“I’ve got a very bad feeling about this,” Adam murmurs, from behind him, standing on the flat rock at the edge of the pond. Ronan nods, like he feels it too, but he doesn’t say anything. Gansey can’t even begin to fathom the ways he’s changed since he came here. He’s almost growing out of his grief.

“Will you see if there’s something down there?” Gansey implores. He doesn’t think Glendower is at the bottom of this pond, but something tugs in him, as he looks at the water. A memory just out of his reach. He’s been here before. He threw something in. Gansey just wishes he could remember what.

Adam nods once, quickly. He kneels on the rock, and lays his hands flat upon it. Henry laughs at something Blue says and Ronan, standing close to Adam, glares at them. He’s tense, like he’s ready for a fight.

There’s a great gust wind and the whoosh that accompanies it fills Gansey’s ears and ripples the surface of the pond. As quickly as it had come, the wind dies.

“There’s something down there, somewhere in the middle,” Adam says.

“What? What is it?”

The look Adam gives him is withering.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Ronan says, and Gansey is more and more confused by this new Ronan.

“How deep is the water?” Blue asks, apparently a more sensible question.

“Several feet. You won’t be able to stand in it.”

“Yeah, you won’t,” Ronan snorts.

Gansey expects Adam’s withering gaze to turn on him, and it does. “You won’t either, Lynch. In fact—”

But he’s cut off by a splash. Gansey whirls to the source of the sound. Henry stands alone by the edge of the water, watching the ripples spread across the surface.

“That honestly was not my idea,” Henry says, looking startled. Blue’s boots and leather jerkin lie abandoned on the shore.

“Ronan!” Adam says, accusatory, although Gansey doesn’t understand how he could’ve stopped her.

“I didn’t want to mess up my hair.”

“Mess up your— Fuck! She shouldn’t be in there! There could be—” But again, Blue cuts Adam off.

“I got something!” Her dark, wet head bursts through the surface of the water, followed by her arm, raised aloft, clutching the hilt of a rusty sword. “Good of you, gentlemanly even, to assist me,” she gripes, as she wades ashore.

Blue walks to the shore and Gansey tries to avert his gaze. He tries but he’s incredibly interested in what Blue is bringing ashore, and he tries despite his incredibly dishonourable desire to not try.

Blue stands ankle deep at the edge of the pond, and she hands Gansey the sword. Henry fusses, bringing her a linen to dry herself on, and Adam walks away to light a fire. Only Ronan remains looking at the water.

When it happens, Gansey is distracted by the sword. This is it. In his memory, he sees it arc high into the sky and then plunge straight down into the water. He’s testing the familiar weight of it, the comfortable grip, almost shaped to his hand, so when it happens, the first thing he’s aware of is Blue’s scream.

When Blue was a child, she would spend wild summers swimming in the river that ran past the mill house. The river cascaded over a series of waterfalls, each one wider than the last, and each one accompanied by a deep pool. Blue would spend the hot days diving to the bottom of the pools, finding strangely shaped stones on the bottom and seeing how long she could hold her breath for.

She played games too, imagined that she was a formwalker who transformed into an otter, and she could swim and play with the other otters on the river, and they would think she was just like them. Or she would pretend there were merpeople living at the bottom of the pool, and they would bring her down to live with them. After all, you can’t kiss underwater.

The water in the Cabeswater pond is far murkier than the water of the river pools had ever been, but Blue dives deep into the middle, until she catches a glimpse of something shining at the bottom, reflecting the golden sunlight above.

As she dives, something dark dances in her peripheral, but she ignores it. Pondweed, she thinks.

As Blue shows the sword to the others gathered on the bank, she feels something slimy caught on her ankle. Pondweed. She kicks her leg, absently, trying to brush it off. She grins at the mirth on Gansey’s face as she hands the sword to him.

“You marvellous creature!” he exclaims.

Blue smiles and she keeps watching Gansey as Henry hands her a linen to dry herself. She moves to walk out of the pond. The thing wrapped around her ankle tugs sharply. Blue kicks at it. It tugs again.

There’s nothing Blue can do but scream as it drags her back into the water.

The creature drags her under, fast. Blue shuts her mouth tight, but she didn’t have the chance to take a breath before it dragged her under, and her lungs are burning in seconds. She kicks and struggles against the black tentacles wrapping around her, but they hold her tightly, cutting into the exposed flesh of her ankles, tearing into her clothes. She squeezes her mouth shut tight, opens her eyes wide, and tries to make out the shape of what has hold of her. She can see nothing but the murky bottom of the pond, and the dark, black form of a many legged creature. It drags her towards its centre, somewhere where the black is darkest. She struggles against it, kicking weightlessly under the water.

Blue fights her wrist free and snatches desperately for the small blade she keeps hidden in the seam of her trousers. Her lungs scream. Black spots dance in her vision. She slashes hopelessly at the tentacles around her legs. Black blood spreads slowly, and Blue gets one leg free. She tries to kick to the surface, but she has no idea which way is up.

Something silver flashes through the murky water, cutting through the darkness of the monster like a knife. The tentacle around her left leg slackens and Blue kicks free as the water around her turns black with the blood of the monster. Again, there’s a flash of silver and this time, Blue can hazily see a mouth, filled with rows upon rows of razor sharp teeth.

Another tentacle wraps around her middle, and Blue screams. The tentacle drags her away from the inky spread of the fight though, and as her head bursts through the water into the cold air, Blue sees not a tentacle, but a pale brown root, dragging her to the surface.

On the shore of the pond, Blue coughs and splutters as she chokes up a lungful of water. Blood runs rapidly from cuts on her legs and her forearms where it mixes with the water, but none of them seem that deep. Henry fusses again, more so than before and he dries the water from around her wounds, then holds linen against them to stem the bleeding. Gansey fusses too, his hands shake as he hovers above Blue like he’s not sure if he should touch her, but he wants to. Like he’s still worried as well. Nobody says anything.

At the edge of the water, Adam is crouched still, his hands buried in the silt, water washing over them. The pond boils, and the black blood of the monster is spreading further and further across it. Occasionally, a thick black tentacle breeches the surface in a torrent of water. The silver creature that had saved her breaks the surface too, more often than the tentacles. It’s not an animal Blue recognises, razor sharp fins and mouthful of teeth are unlike anything she’s seen before, but she knows who it is.

“Is that--?”

“Ronan, yeah,” Gansey says, and his continuing fear makes his voice shake.

“He went right in after you,” Henry says. Blue waits for his comments about it being the stuff of epic poetry, but his face is serious now. She’s still incredibly unsure of what Ronan thinks of her, but she won’t let herself forget that he saved her.

The surface of the water is still now, but Adam hasn’t moved. The seconds stretch like minutes, the minutes like hours. A single leaf from the willow tree on the opposite shore falls and settles on the water, without a ripple, but still Adam doesn’t move.

A silver fin breaks the calm. It cuts through the water, back to the shore, just for a few seconds, before it dips back below the surface. Ronan walks out of the water moments later. He’s breathing hard and his clothes are plastered to his skin, but he doesn’t seem injured. He collapses to the ground next to Adam, who still doesn’t move until Ronan puts a hand on his knee. Adam draws a long, heavy breath in, then out, and his arms come up over his head.

“It’s dead,” Ronan says. He looks over at Blue, and she’s shocked to see a huge grin splitting his face. “You and I better not have a fucking covenant now.”

Blue laughs. It hurts to laugh, her lungs ache and her muscles scream. “Cursed,” she croaks, grinning too.

“Good,” Ronan replies. At Gansey’s admonishing gasp, Ronan backtracks. “Fuck, not good, but one damn magical bond is enough for me.”

He rubs a hand gently down Adam’s back and gets to his feet. Henry stokes up the fire, and Blue stumbles shakily into the trees to change out of her wet clothes.

When she gets back, Henry and Gansey are talking in low voices about the sword, and Blue is keen to examine it closer, to see if it’s connected to Glendower, to hear Gansey’s thoughts, but Adam is still sat at the edge of the water, alone.

Blue sits carefully next to him. She’s not keen to let any part of herself touch the water again.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says, soft and serious. “I didn’t see it. I don’t know why. It was hidden from me, or it was like… it was just a part of the pond. I should’ve known, I saw a vision of it. I should’ve warned you.”

“It’s not like you didn’t tell me this was going to be dangerous. And I’m okay. You and Ronan, you got me out.”

“Ronan did. Not me. I was too slow, I couldn’t reach the forest. It couldn’t hear me.” Adam’s voice is rough.

Trying to convince Adam that it isn’t his fault won’t work, so Blue looks for another source of blame. “Do you think it has something to do with that pit Gansey and I saw? To do with whatever is killing those trees?”

Adam’s jaw tenses. “I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

“Have you cast runes?”

“Yeah. I just get shit,” Adam says, and there’s anger in his voice, frustration too, and Blue wishes she knew what to do, what to say to fix it.

“Maybe we should go home. Back to Fox Mill. Persephone might have seen something like this before. Calla can get some information from that sword that will help Gansey find Glendower.”

“Do you think it’s connected?” Adam asks. The question makes Blue smile, despite the situation. Adam asking her opinion; it’s never happened before.

She considers her answer. “It has to be. These things have only started happening recently, right? Finding Glendower, that could be the way to stop it. That’s why Gansey is here now. Because he’ll find Glendower.”

Adam nods. “We’ll find a way back to the mill in the morning.”

They make a small camp, a little further from the water, far enough away that they can’t see it, but not so far that Blue has to walk far with her injuries. She insists that she doesn’t need assistance, and even makes a big show of stomping away to collect firewood. Adam trails after her, ostensibly to collect wood, but also because he’s not sure he can face everyone else just yet.

He can feel the forest, can feel it asking him for something, but the connection is weak, and Adam can’t work out what it wants. The dark mark on his hand is larger, as black as the blood of the creature in the water, and it spreads across his palm like the blood had spread through the water. Whatever this means, he’s adamant that no one else get hurt. They’ll go back to Fox Mill tomorrow, and Adam will leave them all there. He’ll go back into the forest and he’ll find a way to make sure no one follows him.

Adam circles back around to the camp. One more night, and tomorrow he’ll be alone again. The thought doesn’t make him as happy as he thought it would.

Ahead of him, Ronan is standing against a broad tree, like he’s hiding from something.

“What are you doing?” Adam asks. The smirk on Ronan’s face suggests he’s up to something.

And yeah, Ronan laughs silently. “Look,” he says, nodding around the tree. Adam steps closer to him, careful not to touch Ronan, but closer than he’d let himself be to anyone else.

Adam peers around the tree. On the other side, in the little rudimentary camp, Gansey is sat on a log. There’s a raven perched next to him and Gansey is chatting amicably away to it. Clearly, he thinks he’s talking to Ronan.

Adam laughs, in spite of himself. Ronan laughs too, out loud this time but still quiet. Adam grins at him, in spite of himself. He’s leaning in a little more, almost touching Ronan again, not deliberately, and again, in spite of himself and his best intentions. The air between them crackles with potential. The covenant pulls him closer, imploring him to touch. It’s only because of the lack of connectivity with the forest, Adam tells himself, that his draw to Ronan is so strong.

“He thinks it’s you?” he whispers.

Ronan’s grinning at Adam, and it feels like it’s always been this way, him and Ronan. He wants it to keep being this way, and if it weren’t for the growing darkness, Adam thinks that maybe, it could be. Selfish, he tells himself, but Ronan relaxes against him, and maybe, maybe, it isn’t.

Blue stomps past, an armful of firewood. She pauses and looks to where Gansey is still talking to the raven, as it pecks at the wooden log.

“I can’t believe you both think that’s funny,” she says, and continues on towards the campsite. “That raven isn’t Ronan!” she calls to Gansey as she walks towards him.

As she gets close to Gansey, the raven startles and flies away, but Gansey doesn’t notice. He’s only looking at Blue now. Adam wonders if he knows about her curse.

Against the tree, Ronan raises a teasing eyebrow, and then he shifts. Adam watches the raven flap down on the log next to Gansey. Blue eyes it disdainfully.

“What do you mean, it isn’t Ronan?” Gansey asks.

“He was over there, by the tree, with Adam,” Blue says, but as she does, Ronan shifts back. He’s laughing, and she rolls her eyes. “I feel like that’s a misuse of magic powers, Ronan Lynch.”

Ronan shrugs. He looks up, right at where Adam is leaning against the tree, trying not to laugh. “I had my reasons,” he says.

The weather turns that night. The wind rattles cold between the bare trees, and the dark sky threatens snow. As long as Adam’s awake, the fire will stay blazing and warm, but he can feel sleep tugging at his limbs, behind his eyes. Adam crouches close to the fire, watching the flames dance, and through them, watching Ronan silhouetted against the blue forest behind him. Gansey, Henry and Blue are sleeping close to the fire, and close together, under a pile of cloaks, Blue in the middle.

Guilt gnaws a hole inside Adam. ‘When the time comes, I trust you’ll keep my daughter safe,’ Maura had said to him, not long ago. Adam had promised that he would. But he hadn’t. She could’ve died. He couldn’t do anything, and he hadn’t stopped it from happening either, even though he’d known. If it hadn’t been for Ronan…

Adam shivers with the cold as the fire splutters. It’s taking all of his focus to keep it burning.

“You can just sleep, Parrish,” Ronan murmurs. Adam thought he was sleeping too.

“Don’t want the fire to go out,” he mumbles in reply.

Ronan huffs a sigh, and rolls to his feet. Adam watches him stomp around the clearing, gathering wood.

“There are normal fucking ways to start and maintain a fire,” he says, dumping several logs into the flames.

Adam doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing he can say, really. He knows how to light a fire. Knows how to do it without magic. He normally would do it without magic. The fire catches on Ronan’s logs and Adam lets go of trying to keep it burning. It doesn’t waver.

Ronan doesn’t go back to his own bedroll. He drops to the ground next to Adam’s. “I’m not gonna get cold,” he says. Adam frowns, but Ronan either doesn’t see, or he ignores him. He shifts, and Adam is unexpectedly overwhelmed the heat being given off by the great, grey wolf.

The little fire crackles away, without Adam paying attention to it, with the addition of Ronan’s logs. Adam turns so his back is to it, and the wolf lifts a paw so Adam can move closer.

It’s easy, Adam thinks, to be close to the wolf. To Ronan, really, when he’s like this. Adam’s never thought of the wolf as anything other than weapon, in all truth, and he doesn’t think Ronan thinks of it as much more than the sword he carries inside himself. But here, so close to him, his fingers tangled in the wolf’s fur, the slow, rhythmic breathing of the sleeping animal, Adam feels safe.

That night, Ronan dreams of it again. It’s the memory, properly this time, not like in the forest. The full memory in all its horrific glory, ever colour a thousand times sharper, the flames brighter, the pain, worse.

He’d fallen asleep as the wolf, so in the dream, he’s still in that form. He can’t shift, and he doesn’t want to anyway. It won’t hurt him again, but nothing hurts him in this form.

Adam is there this time, and instead of watching the nightmare unfold, Ronan watches him. He’s still, his face expressionless, even when they’re running after the young Ronan through the forest, he doesn’t betray his feelings. Ronan focuses on him, Adam as his only proof that this isn’t happening again.

Adam doesn’t say anything, not until the younger Ronan returns to the tree where he’d left Matthew. “No,” Adam breathes, sharp and wet. Ronan presses along his side, like he’s trying to comfort Adam, even though it’s his grief that Adam is feeling.

When Ronan wakes, he’s shifted back. It’s still dark, but he can see by the light of the campfire, still burning warmly. Adam’s hand is fisted in the front of his shirt, white knuckled. He’s looking at Ronan, his face pale as the moon, serious and pained. Ronan doesn’t bother trying to hide his anguish. He swallows wetly, and Adam looks down at where his fingers are twisting the fabric of his shirt. Ronan’s hand comes up and loosens Adam’s grip. He tangles their fingers together instead.

“What happened to—?”

“They’re dead.” The words fall out of his mouth like stones. “All of them. I don’t—”

“You don’t have to.” Adam’s other hand comes up strokes away a tear that clings to Ronan’s eyelashes.

Ronan leans in and rests his forehead against Adam’s collarbone. His breath shakes when it rushes out of him, and Adam’s arm comes up around his shoulders. Grief is a raw wound and sharing it with Adam doesn’t make it any less painful. Adam’s breath is calm and steady, and Ronan tries to match it. It’s easier than he thinks. The covenant is like another limb and it ripples when they breath in time. Whatever terrible decisions Ronan made to end up here, whatever happens in the future, beyond this forest, he’s glad he found this.

Chapter Text

The darkness is a present, visceral, thing. It ripples when Blue reaches her hand out into it. It feels like breath on the back of her neck, like something brushing against her skin, like a shudder: frozen in the moment, or endless, a constantly repeating tremor.

She’s on a path, that much, at least, she is certain of. In Cabeswater, almost certainly, but she can’t make out any trees, and there are no sounds, not even that of her own breathing.

The only thing she sees is the figure of a man, shrouded in white. It’s impossible to say how far away he is, even as Blue tries to discern it from his size, he seems to shift, get further and then closer, closer again still. She can’t see her own hand in front of her face, but she can see him, white and light and glowing against the edge of the dark forest.

“Noah? Is that you?” Blue barely raises her voice to ask the question. She doesn’t want anything else to hear her.

The white figure at the end of the path doesn’t respond. The light thrown off by them flickers a little, like a shadow passing across it.

“Noah?”

Something moves behind her.

“Murdered.”

Blue bites hard on her lip to keep her fear in check. She feels the ghost of breath against the shell of her ear. She feels the presence of Noah behind her, but the white figure at the end of the path hasn’t moved.

“Noah, it’s me. It’s Blue. We met before, do you remember?”

“Murdered,” the voice says again.

“Noah, why were you murdered? Do you know?”

“A sacrifice to sleep. A sacrifice to wake. But he woke the wrong sleeper.”

“What do you mean?” Blue asks, raising her voice so she sounds more stern, and less afraid.

“It’s awake.”

“Not Glendower?”

“Bound in eternal slumber to trap that which seeks to destroy.”

“But someone woke it up?”

Noah’s half-rotting face looms out of the darkness, bare bone exposed, as white and as cold as the moon.

“Can’t wake Glendower without waking the destroyer. And now it has everything to finish what it started.”

“What it started?” Blue desperately thinks of the church, built by Glendower’s men, of the decaying trees, the pit. “To destroy the forest?”

The white figure at the end of the path beckons to her. Blue stumbles forward, uncertain in the dark. She’s afraid of tripping, but she’s more afraid of the fact that she can barely feel the ground beneath her feet at all. It’s as if she’s walking on water, or clouds. The ground is insubstantial beneath her, as if it rises up to meet her feet.

The white figure lifts a hand to halt her. Blue has to squint against the bright light, shocking after the heavy darkness. She cannot see the man’s face, only the white light that radiates from it. His clothing is fine; chainmail armour and cloak that moves like water, held in place by a shining broach. The fashion is hundreds of years out of date. Blue recognises the crest pressed into the broach from Gansey’s journal.

Glendower.

He reaches a white, translucent hand out to Blue. She takes it, his fingers like ice, delicately meeting hers. Blinding white light consumes Blue but in that split second before she sees nothing at all, she sees his face. Gansey’s face.

Adam’s awake long before the others. He packs his bedroll away quietly, ignoring the way his hands shake. His mind still burns with the remains of Ronan’s memory, and the fear that had coursed through it.

Adam sits on a dry log by the side of the fire and watches the flames until the others wake. He watches the dancing flames eat at Ronan’s logs; logs that never seem to be consumed. The fire crackles with magic, not all of it Adam’s, but still familiar to him. He doesn’t try to look for shapes in the flames, but they come to him anyway. Two birds, wheeling and spiralling through the sky. As Adam watches, he hears the caw of a raven, and the answering cry of different bird, echo in his deaf ear. The fire throws sparks into the cold morning air and Adam stares at it for a moment longer, for a moment too long.

He cups his hands above the fire, and silently performs a spell to douse it. His right hand burns with the effort. When the fire is out, Adam sits back on the log and unwraps the bandage he’d covered it with. The dark mark on his hand wraps around his fingers and follows the path of his veins up his wrist now, further each day. Further still each time he uses magic. He pulls back his sleeve, tracing the darkest line of it up to the crease of his elbow. He stares at it, again for a moment too long, before tugging his sleeve down over it and replacing the bandage on his hand. The last thing he needs is someone noticing.

“Gansey!” Blue shouts, flying to sitting, throwing her blankets from her. Adam jumps with abruptness of her cry, but she doesn’t look at him, too busy scrambling towards where Gansey is slowly waking up. Blue shakes his shoulders. “I had a dream!”

Ronan has woken too, and he stalks across to sit next to Adam on the log. “So?” he snorts.

Blue glares at him. “It was real. It was like it really happened. Noah was there and Glendower.”

That wakes Gansey up. “Glendower?” he says, excitedly. “Did he say anything to you?”

“No, but I spoke with Noah. He said that when he was murdered, that he was sacrificed. The wrong sleeper was woken. Do you think that means whatever is causing this darkness? It could be the same thing that Glendower’s men built the church to protect against?”

“An explanation!” Gansey says. “For the darkness, and for why Glendower was lost in the first place! This is perfect, Blue. It’s all coming together so well.”

“We really should get back to the mill. Persephone interprets dreams, she’ll be able to help decipher more meaning,” Blue says, stuffing her things away in her pack.

Adam’s concerns about leaving the forest swirl in his head. He can’t see the right path anymore, can’t make sense of his choices. Darkness sticks all over the edge of his magic, seeping in like the darkness under his skin, but the covenant pulls at it too. It’s stronger, stronger still when Ronan knocks his shoulder into Adam’s as he gets to his feet. Adam’s heart beats like frantic wings.

As they leave the camp, Blue drops back to walk next to him.

“I saw Gansey’s face. On Glendower’s body, in my dream. Or he was Glendower,” she says. She hesitates, breathing softly. “I haven't told Gansey. Adam, I don’t want it to mean what I think it means.”

Adam considers the facts. Blue’s dream. Henry’s assertions that Gansey is on a quest for the ages. And then Gansey’s recurring dream. The runestones that Ronan had cast in a run-down inn, an age ago.

“It does though,” he says, trying to be soft with his tone, if not with his words. “It’s not far from here to the Mill.”

Ronan doesn’t want to go to the mill. He doesn’t want to stay in this forest a moment longer, but this mill? A house of mages? That’s not somewhere he wants to be at all. He doesn’t know if he’s relieved or not when the path that leads from the camp,doesn’t lead them to the mill. It doesn’t lead them anywhere at all. The track stops dead, an abrupt, clean line of wavering pine trees rises up ahead like a wall. Nowhere to go, but Ronan doesn’t think the forest is up to tricks right now.

“Where do we go now?” Blue says, looking around the trees, at the others. “Cabeswater, can you show us how to get to my home?”

There’s nothing. Not even the sound of the wind in the trees. Ronan didn’t think he’d miss the presence of the forest, but its absence is tangible. At least it can’t torment him.

“Cabeswater?” Adam asks. He puts his right hand to the bark of the nearest tree, but quickly swaps it for his left. Ronan watches his right hand swing away. There’s a bandage wrapped around it, but Ronan doesn’t remember Adam injuring his hand.

Adam groans in frustration. He dumps his pack on the ground and digs through it until he finds his runestones. Ronan stands over him and watches Adam cast them on the dirt. Ronan doesn’t know what he expects to see, but when they all land face down, he doesn’t know why he expected anything else.

“What does that mean?” Gansey asks.

Adam scrapes the stones back into his pouch and doesn’t answer. He looks at Ronan instead, and lifts a fair eyebrow. He gets to his feet and without offering so much as an explanation, he dives into the thick trees.

“But there’s no path!” Blue shouts after him.

“I’m not so sure it matters anymore,” Henry replies, as Ronan goes after Adam.

Ronan pushes through the trees, following him through the densest part of the forest that he’s been in so far. Everything is closed off, fallen trees cloaked in ivy, endless tangled thorn bushes, rocks that are so covered in leaves that their stone looks like bark. Adam pushes through all of it though, and Ronan follows, keeping close, forcing cracked branches to crack further.

Eventually, Adam stops. The trees ahead of him are even more densely packed, tight in a cluster as if they’re guarding something. Ronan watches Adam’s shoulders slump with something that looks like relief. He looks back at Ronan and a tiny smile crosses his face, gone as fast as it came.

Adam walks towards the trees and a gap opens in them. Or perhaps the gap had always been there, and Ronan had only noticed when Adam began to disappear into it.

Inside the cluster of trees, the branches overlap, twisting together to form a circular wall. They’re woven tightly up to the sky, only a small opening in the top, allowing a perfectly round beam of sunlight to fall on the centre of the tiny clearing. The sunlight falls on a burnt out fire pit, layers upon layers of old ash and burnt out logs that suggest the pit has been in near-constant use for many years. To the side of the pit, the soft, mossy ground raises slightly to something that reminds Ronan of an animal’s nest, but instead of feathers and dandelion fuzz to soften it, this nest is softened with threadbare woollen blankets, and several large, waxy-looking leaves.

Adam isn’t paying attention to Ronan and his staring. He’s rummaging through a chest on the opposite side of the clearing to his bed. The chest is small, and it looks grown, rather than carved. Several books are stacked on the ground next to it, removed by Adam. Ronan watches him take a rough spun cotton shirt from the chest and tuck into it into his satchel. He puts aside a large roll of parchment and begins replacing the books back into the chest. Ronan’s heart aches.

Adam gets to his feet, throwing his satchel over his shoulder again and tucking the roll of parchment beneath his arm.

“Shall we?” he says, smirking a little, and gesturing at the gap in the trees.

“Yeah, I just—” Ronan pauses. He looks around the tiny clearing again and sees all the things that aren’t there. There are so many things he wants to say, but he knows that anything he could say wouldn’t be enough. “Let’s go.”

Gansey never thought he’d leave this forest. They’ve been scrambling their way through dense, wild woodland for what feels like hours, and it had started to feel more and more like an impossible dream, like there never would be an edge to this forest. That Gansey’s death would come for him, not in the form of fulfilment of his quest but simply plain exhaustion. The tiny bridge across a bumbling creek comes like a figment of his dying mind.

But the others see it too. Henry woops in delight, and Blue smiles as she all but runs to it. It seems to be an impossible thing to cross. Too simple. Too easy to leave. The edge of the forest is visible just beyond it; a sweeping green field, rippling in the wind. But Gansey stops. His fate lies within these trees and to leave? It feels as if he’s running.

Blue is already standing on the bridge. He can hear her voice echoing back up the hill to him, laughing to Henry about the magic she’d seen when she crossed the bridge before. Petals dancing in the water, the deep snow she’d stepped in on the other side.

Gansey watches the way Ronan approaches the bridge. The way he looks to Adam, and then back at Gansey.

“Dick?” he says, and the name makes Gansey smile in spite of himself. “Are you coming?”

“Yeah, I am. I’m just—” he looks around himself.

“We’ll be back,” Adam says, as for all it sounds to Gansey like he’s trying to be reassuring, the tone is anything but.

Gansey crosses the bridge.

Beyond the edge of the forest, the green field sweeps away downhill. At the bottom of the hill, the mill house clings to the edge of a wide, curving river. The water sparkles in the winter sunshine. Gansey watches a wide smile spread across Blue’s face as the front door of the house swings open. A woman steps out, and Gansey only sees an older, taller Blue.

Two other women linger the doorway behind Blue’s mother. The sharp features and folded arms of one of them remind Gansey strangely of Ronan, and the other has hair like a cloud, and looks as if a strong breeze would blow her away like one.

Blue rushes in, hugging her mother and the other women, dragging Henry in too to introduce him. Adam crosses the dusty track outside the house behind her, but he stops at the door. He looks back, for the same reason that Gansey is hesitating.

Ronan is shaking his head. It’s slow, and subtle, but Gansey sees the movement and knows the reason.

“Ronan,” Gansey says. “It’s Blue’s family.” He doesn’t say, I won’t let anything happen, he doesn’t say, just trust me. Ronan knows that already.

“I know.”

Adam nods his head towards the house, and he’s looking at Ronan with the same expression that Gansey thinks he is also wearing. He walks past Ronan, past Adam, and enters the house. There’s nothing to be gained from this relentless apprehension.

Inside, a narrow wooden corridor twists back to a sunlit kitchen. To the right, a rickety staircase climbs and climbs up to the upper floors and loft of the house. This house doesn’t look like it should be standing, none of the visible supports look as if they could hold any weight. The lowest parts of the exposed wood are covered in scratched child’s drawings, that increase in skill and clarity the higher up the beams they get. Gansey touches his fingers against a scratched in drawing of a fox in a field of flowers. Blue’s laughter rings to him from the kitchen.

Behind him, Ronan and Adam have entered. He feels as if the three of them take up far too much space in the cramped corridor, even more so when Ronan almost hits his head on a low beam. The magic of this house is soft and welcoming, so different from the indifference of the forest.

Ahead of him, there are voices in the kitchen. Henry chatters away, talking with Blue’s mother, while the cloud-haired woman places a pie on the table.

In the kitchen, Adam sits at the table, a chair in the corner against the wall. He takes a slice of pie, but he hesitates before he eats. Gansey registers his hesitation as strange, especially when the pie smells so good. Adam tucks in though, and he nudges Ronan to do the same when he’s offered a piece. Adam seems so comfortable here, almost as comfortable as Blue, who has clambered up onto the top of the warm oven, and is swinging her legs like a child. She’s watching Adam carefully, like something about his behaviour has made her suspicious.

“So. This is Gansey,” Blue’s mother says. Gansey jolts in the doorway, banging his elbow against the doorframe.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you ma’am.” He steps forward, straightening up, and then bowing to her slightly.

Blue’s mother assesses him shrewdly, narrows her eyes a little. “Maura is fine. This is Calla, and Persephone,” she says, gesturing to the other two women.

Calla stands in the arch of the backdoor, lit from behind by the fading winter sun. “I thought he’d be taller,” she says. “You have something you want me to look at.”

“The sword!” Blue says, from her perch on the oven. “Give her the sword.”

Gansey nods, and goes to unsheath the sword from his belt, but Maura raises a hand to stop him.

“Why don’t you all go upstairs and freshen up. Find where you’re going to sleep tonight, change your clothes. You can play with swords and magic when you all smell a little better.”

Blue rolls her eyes and slides from the oven. She crosses the kitchen to Gansey and sniffs when she’s close enough. “Oh, yeah. Mom’s got a point…”

Upstairs, Gansey follows Henry into a small bedroom. Blue had kept climbing to the loft, after pointing Ronan and Adam to the next bedroom along from Henry and Gansey’s.

“They were definitely expecting us,” Henry says. “But I suppose that’s the point isn’t it? Of soothsayers and mages.”

“This is meant to happen, right? This is how it’s meant to go.”

“I can’t tell you that Ganseyman. No one knows how the story ends,” Henry says, settling onto the bed.

I do, Gansey thinks. He says nothing, just leaves his pack on the bed, and digs out a change of shirt.

“The covenant isn’t only accessible when you sleep. But you know this. You’ve used it once already, when awake. And there are lots of ways it can be used.” Persephone says. She places a heavy stone bowl on the table between Ronan and Adam. The water she pours into it is as clear as a mountain spring but when it swirls in the bowl it turns dark, then darker still.

Ronan’s hands are white-knuckled where they dig into the edge of the table. Adam has visions of him splitting the wood. He slides his good hand across the table and presses his knuckles to Ronan’s.

“Okay,” Ronan says. “If you’re sure this will help.”

“Just think about Glendower. Think about a time Gansey talked about him to you,” Adam says. Persephone had assured him that this would be safe, but he won’t mention the darkness in his magic to her. Adam regrets that now, but he won’t bring it up in front of Ronan.

“Memories conjured in this way are clearer than recalling them alone. Your mind warps things, drops details, makes things larger than life, reassigns to culpability to make you the hero. Or the villain.”

Adam swallows. He rolls his shoulders and looks into the still, black water. His own reflection stares back at him, joined by Ronan’s when he leans over the bowl. Adam stares and stares. He blinks. The reflections swap and Ronan is looking back at him where his own reflection had once been held. He blinks again.

The rain lashes hard at the library window. Beyond the shimmering panes of glass, Adam can make out grey turrets, topped with iron spikes. Gargoyles looming from the edges of the overhang peer out over a dismal stone courtyard.

In the grate behind him, a fire crackles, but even that seems leached of colour, of any kind of warmth. The shelves are stacked high all around him, and Adam tries to read the embossed titles on the spines, but the letters shift and dance, never settling long enough for a word to make sense.

A younger version of Ronan sits at a polished mahogany table. He’s slumped against it, and he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. Adam can feel the longing in the memory. The grief. This is not long after the death of his family.

Gansey paces the room, a little younger than Adam knows him to be, and with considerably more energy than Ronan. He’s holding a book in his hand, and speaking rapidly, but no sound comes from his mouth despite his frantic gesticulation, only a rhythmic humming.

And then suddenly, “Lynch are you even listening to me?”

Ronan’s head snaps to him from where he had been staring out the window at the slate rooves of the city, spread out beyond the palace keep, dark against the mist of the rain.

“No,” is all he says.

“But this is important!” Gansey slides a book across the table to Ronan, and Adam peers over his shoulder so he can look too. The pages are blank.  So much for these memories being more detailed. “This is from the account of one of the men that left the forest two hundred years after Glendower vanished.”

“Fascinating,” Ronan says, sarcasm pouring from his voice.

Gansey is ignorant of the sarcasm, and Adam can’t tell if it’s wilful or not. “It is! The soldier said that when they were lost in the forest, they heard voices, whispers on the wind. Strange creatures spoke to them, and shadows moved in darkness. He gives an account here of a deer wandering into the path, bold as brass, and turning to face Glendower. He says here, look.” Gansey slides a book to Ronan, and as he speaks, the words fill in on the page. ‘At first they believed it to be a formwalker, for no other animal would approach men in such a way, but then it spoke with the voice of the forest.’”

“A deer? A deer spoke to them?” Ronan doesn’t look like he’s invested in the answer, Ronan looks like he’s hoping that Gansey will stop reading from the book.

“Yes! The deer said to them, and obviously this is a recollection, so this can’t be precisely what the deer said. It said that ‘a great evil is attacking the forest and only sacrifice of the highest magnitude will ensnare the destroyer.’”

Gansey grins excitedly. Ronan puts his forehead down on the desk. It makes the memory stutter, and Adam wishes he could make Ronan focus.

“The stories Ronan! The stories of Glendower! Won’t it be so amazing to collect them all, the myths from across the continent. I’m thinking of collecting them into a proper book. I’d love to retrace his steps.”

“And find him?” Ronan says. It’s the first time Adam’s heard him sound anything other than incredibly miserable.

“Of course!”

Thunder rumbles outside the window.

Both Ronan and Gansey look to it, but the memory is fracturing. It’s wrong. Night has fallen outside, the darkness rapidly dropping like a blanket thrown over the world.

“Ronan wake up,” Adam says. His own thundering heart echoes in the rumbling outside the window.

The Ronan in the memory looks right at him. He cocks his head, a strange, unnatural tilt. His eyes are all black.

“Ronan,” Adam says again, trying to wake himself, trying to find his way back to the real world.

“Adam Parrish,” Gansey says, in a voice like scarping bone. His eyes are black too, and he reaches his right hand out towards Adam’s.

Something cold presses against Adam’s left arm, followed by the hot trickle of blood. “Oh,” he says softly, and presses into the pain, uses it to guide himself back to the waking world.

When Adam wakes, he’s sat straight up in the chair. Ronan is awake too, looking at him across the table, blue eyes wide, the muscles of his face tensed.

“Parrish what the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know,” Adam lies.

Persephone looks between them, and her dark eyes remind Adam of Ronan’s in the dream. He shudders.

“Did you find what you were looking for? Or did you find more?” she says.

Ronan huffs. “I’d forgotten that ever happened,” he says, moving on quickly from the end of the vision. Adam gets the feeling that the subject isn’t dropped completely.

Adam nods. “Let’s go tell Gansey.”

Ronan gets up from his chair, and Adam follows him up the trembling stairs. Gansey is standing in the little room her shares with Henry, chatting about the dye used on his doublet.

“Beetles! I know, you’d never believe such a wonderful aquamarine—"

“Gansey! Dick!” Ronan barges into the room.

“What?” Gansey drops his doublet on the floor.

“The deer! You told me something about a goddamn talking deer in the forest, when Glendower was here.”

“What? How do you remember--?”

“I didn’t. Well, I kind of saw it again. Just now, with Adam, you know.” He awkwardly scratches at the back of his head. Explaining the kind of magic he’s been doing with Adam clearly sits uneasily with Ronan.

“Sharing a room, sharing dreams, anything else you two are sharing?” Henry teases. Ronan glares at him.

Gansey has his journal back in his hands, and he’s searching through it, riffling through it until— “Ah ha!” he cries.

Adam moves next to him so he can see Gansey’s scrawled notes.

Mysterious visions (talking deer? – just a story), A growing darkness – only trapped by a sacrifice. Could be why Glendower went missing? Sacrificed by sleeping forever?

“A sacrifice,” Adam reads. “Like Blue said, from her dream.”

Gansey nods. “We need to get Calla to look at that sword.”

Adam feels infected by Gansey’s excitement and optimism. “I’ll find Calla.”

“I’ll get the sword.”

“I need a word with you first, Parrish,” Ronan says, stopping Adam from leaving the room.

“Yes!” Henry agrees. “You two go have a word. I need to change properly. Gansey, why don’t you take your sword and go and inform Miss Sargent of the developments.”

“Oh, I can wait for you.”

“Go.” Henry insistently presses the sword to Gansey, as Adam follows Ronan out to their own room.

Downstairs, Blue is setting the table with jugs of ale, plates of bread and cheese, and more of Persephone’s pie. She glances up at Gansey when he comes in and smiles wide, then wider still.

“You scrub alright, don’t you?” she says, teasing. She’s holding a large, clay jug in her hands, brimming with ale.

Gansey looks down at himself, at his nice shirt, the one he had saved for such an occasion, beneath his second best doublet. Blue’s hair is as wild as ever, although she’s removed a lot of the twigs and leaves from the forest. She’s changed into a soft linen shirt, embroidered with wildflowers, and Gansey stands in the kitchen with her, the table of food and the jug of ale between them. A knowing smirk dances on Blue’s lips, and Gansey wishes they were somewhere else, a dance maybe, where things were different, and getting to know Blue wasn’t the impossibility that it is here and now.

Blue pours a flagon of ale, and she holds it out to Gansey. Gansey takes it from her, in desperate need of a drink to quench his dry mouth. Their fingertips meeting against the wood of the cup. Neither of them lets go. Blue’s smirk grows more and more teasing, more and more alluring.

“I’m just saying, but if you had a damn map this whole time, it probably would’ve been fucking good to bring it out sooner.” Ronan’s voice rings into the kitchen from the hallway and Blue jolts backwards at the same time as Gansey jerks his hand away. The flagon of ale crashes to the floor.

Ronan, Adam and Henry fill the doorway.

“Well,” Henry says, grinning wildly. “What’s going on in here then?”

“Nothing,” Blue says.

“A drink,” Gansey says, at the same time.

Henry looks at the floor and raises an eyebrow. “I see.”

Gansey ducks down to the ground to pick up the dropped flagon.

“Forget about that,” Ronan says, pushing past. “Parrish has a map.”

Gansey jerks upright. “A map?”

Adam still stands in the doorway. He lifts a long, thin roll of parchment. This is perfect, this is amazing, this is just what Gansey has been hoping for since he met Adam. Blue rushes away and returns with Gansey’s journal as Adam unrolls the large parchment onto a clear section of the heavy oak table.

The map is rough, and Gansey is disappointed to see large swathes of it are unmarked. The mill house is marked on it though, as is the large, twisting old oak tree, at the heart of the forest. Gansey runs his fingers across Adam’s scribbled drawings, his slanted handwriting. The oak tree is far deeper into the forest than Gansey thought.

“How did you know which parts were connected?” Gansey asks, examining the way that the paths Adam draws cross over each other, twisting like veins, packed tightly in some places, and then nothing at all.

“When your eyes are closed, how do you know where your legs are?” Adam says.

“Oh. I see,” Gansey says, although he’s not sure that he does. He can’t imagine feeling that way about a forest, not even Cabeswater. But there are parts of the map that are familiar, and parts that make sense to be connected. Even some of the blank parts, Gansey almost feels like he knows what should fill them.

“That church you saw, what were the trees around it like? Where had you been before it?”

“Hawthorns, I think. We hadn’t walked far from the oak,” Blue says. “Noah was there, I thought you said he only went to certain parts of the forest.”

Adam’s mouth twists. “I thought he did, but lately he’s been changing his patterns. Something is bothering him.”

“The church was near his body, if I remember rightly,” Gansey says. He’s sure the forest didn’t take them somewhere else.

Adam points to a small, blank spot on the map. A tiny white circle, surrounded by rough drawings of dark pine. “He was killed here.”

Blue traces her finger down south from the spot to another, larger blank piece of map. “Here’s where the church is then.”

Adam nods. Gansey passes Adam a pot of ink, and Adam moves to add the church onto it. Gansey can’t read his scrawled handwriting.

“You should put that pond on there,” Ronan says. “So we know to avoid it.”

Adam snorts, and traces his fingers down to the very edge of the map. A path loops around into nothing, two dark lines cutting across it, indicating where Adam must have left it before.

“It’s further north than that,” Ronan says. Gansey looks at him with wide, confused eyes, unsure how Ronan can say that with such certainty. but Adam just shrugs.

“I suppose so.”

“Where’s that sword then?” Calla is stood in the doorway. Gansey has no idea how long she’s been stood there, but he unsheathes the sword for her and carefully hands it over.

She takes it by the hilt, and holds it with the tip pointing to the ceiling. The very tip sways dangerously close to an exposed beam. Calla closes her eyes. “Blue, come here please.”

Blue sighs, and crosses to Calla. She puts a hand on her shoulder, and Calla rolls her head on her shoulders in response.

“This sword. It was left for Glendower.”

“By Glendower?” Gansey asks.

Calla opens one eye. “For.”

“Anything else?” Blue asks.

“This sword gives passage.” She opens both eyes fully. “Keep hold of it. That’s a very useful sword.”

Gansey accepts it back from Calla. He carefully sheathes it, and lays it on the table with the journal and the map.

“Right!” Henry says, loudly. “That’s enough, put the map away, put the journal away. Definitely put the sword away!”

“But I—” Gansey starts to say. He wants to copy the map out, make his own notes on it in his journal, but Henry presses a drink into his hands instead.

“The quest can wait, your highness,” he says, with a strange, regal flutter of his hand.

“I’d really rather—”

“Gansey,” Ronan says. “Shut up and drink.”

Gansey shuts up and drinks.

“Come on, Henry, please!” Blue pleads. Her cheeks are flushed with the alcohol she’s been drinking, and her smile is like daybreak. Like the stars on a clear night. Like – like – Like Gansey has maybe had one too many drinks.

Henry strums his lute. “As my fair lady requests,” he says. The song he starts to play isn’t one that Gansey has heard before, the melody is lilting and soft, where the words are rough and rhythmic, with contrast that makes him yearn, makes his heart clench and his feet long to wander.

“Fuck man,” Ronan complains. “Play something less damn depressing.”

“I thought it was beautiful,” Blue says.

“Yeah, you would,” says Adam.

Blue rounds on him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Henry starts strumming, quickly playing something fast and, judging by the lewdness of the lyrics, no doubt a northern drinking song.

“Oh I know this!” Blue laughs. She starts singing along, loudly. She jumps to her feet and pulls Gansey up too. “Come on, you know it! You know it!”

Gansey doesn’t know it, but he tries anyway, picking up the words to the song based on the repeating structure and letting Blue lead the song. She sings something about scarecrows, when Henry sings a question, Blue shouts back an answer.

“That was better,” Ronan says, appraisingly. “Not quite the murder squash song though.”

“What’s the–?”  Blue asks.

“No!” Gansey interrupts. “I beg you not to finish that question.”

“Shall I play my ballad of the Mage of Cabeswater?” Henry says, raising his eyebrows cheekily.

Adam doesn’t look impressed. “I’d really rather that you didn’t,” he says. “In fact, I think I’m going to go to bed.”

“Boring!” Blue shouts at him, as he gets up from the wooden kitchen bench and goes to leave. “Henry, do you the one about the mermaid and the milkmaid?”

“Of course, Miss Sargent,” Henry says and he starts playing again.

Ronan says nothing when he slips away after Adam, and Gansey’s the only one who notices him go.

Adam can’t fall asleep. He’s not sure he can blame the drink. He’d only had one. He gets out of the tiny straw bed, grabs a blanket and tries to see if sleeping on the floor is any better. It’s not.

Ronan snores in the bed across the room. Adam had evaded his earlier questioning about the end of the vision, distracting him with his Cabeswater map instead, but he knows the truth will come out soon.

The thin curtains over the window are hanging open slightly and Adam watches clouds drift past the moon. He thinks he’s maybe about to fall asleep when something dark moves outside the window.

He sits up. The bedroom is far darker than it had been. The moon outside is covered in a thick bank of cloud.

“Adam.” The voice comes from nowhere. From nothing. Somewhere in the darkness, someone is speaking but Adam cannot tell if it’s inside his own head. It rings win both his ears. “Adam Parrish.”

Adam twists around where he sits to see if he can see the speaker. It’s not Ronan, he knows that for certain. Just because he can’t tell where it’s coming from, doesn’t mean it isn’t coming from somewhere. The darkness flickers at the window again; impossible dark, then darker still.

“Who’s there?” he whispers, trying not to wake Ronan.

Loud footsteps thud outside the door. A light flicks, cold candlelight that lights the shadow of a pair of legs. “It’s me, Adam. I’ve come back for you.” The voice has changed. It’s his father.

Adam shuts his eyes. “No. You’re dead. You can’t do that.”

The light under the door goes out and Adam is back in the darkness. He strains to hear Ronan’s breathing, and when he catches the sound he clings to it, a lifeline in the horror that this night has become.

“You and I are the same Adam. You know the rules of magic.” It’s a voice like whispering wind again, speaking like no human has ever spoken. The voice of scraping bone. He’s heard it before. “And you’ve known the darkness too.”

“Who are you? Are you the thing that’s attacking Cabeswater?” he asks, too loud. Ronan sighs in his sleep.

“Destroyer. You’re nothing like them. Did you think he could ever love you? With his pure heart and his sense of what is good. His tragic past but his hope that there is still good in the world. You’re going to show him there’s not. You’re going to take all the light that’s left in him.”

“No.”

“You’ll watch. And he’ll never trust again.”

“I’m not going to let this happen.”

“It’s too late.”

“Adam?” Ronan is sat up on his bunk. Adam doesn’t remember standing, but he’s far across the other side of the room, at the window. The windows are thrown wide open, and the cold night wind tugs at Adam’s thin shirt. He shivers.

“Adam,” Ronan says again. Adam hears him move out of the bed. He reaches past Adam to shut the window and in the few seconds before he reaches for Adam, Adam tugs his sleeve down over his blackened hand.

Ronan’s warm arms come around him and lead him to the tiny bed.

“I’m alright,” Adam tells him. He’s not sure if it’s a lie or not.

Ronan pulls the covers over both of them. Adam waits for him to ask what happened.

But instead, Ronan says, “When we were children, my father would tell us all these stories, all the time. There was one he told us, about the bog witch, do you know it?”

Adam snorts. “Is it about a witch that lives in a bog?”

Ronan laughs. “It was a bedtime story, it didn’t have to be complicated. But there was a bog, up on the moors beyond the farm we lived on. The bog stretches for miles and there’s only one way across it, following the flagstones sunk into the mud. My father told us that if you step off the stones, the bog witch would pull you under the mud and you’d drown in it.”

“Cheerful bedtime story. Did you believe him?”

“Yes, and then no.”

Adam presses a smile into the pillow. “You tried it. What happened?”

“I got stuck in the mud. Obviously. Declan had to pull me out, he was so annoyed.”

“No bog witch?”

“No, but I wished there had been. Our mother was worse than any witch would have been when we tracked bog mud through the house.”

Adam laughs, but the mirth drops from his face as quickly as it had appeared. “I think that’s what I am. Or what I’ll become. Bedtime story with a moral about not running away into the woods.”

“What? Stay out of the forest or the mage of Cabeswater will get you?”

Ronan’s joking, but Adam shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Fuck ‘em. Who cares what people think of you? Don’t tell me that’s why you did all that shit that Henry says about you.”

Henry’s stories about Adam are the most embellished things he’s ever heard. If Henry knew the truth, he’d stop thinking a ballad about Adam was such a good idea. “It’s more complicated than that.”

Ronan sighs and rolls away to face the wall. Adam wants to reach out for him. All the places they’re already touching in this little bed aren’t enough. A long buried part of him aches for it, to feel Ronan’s arms around him as he falls asleep.

But he doesn’t reach for Ronan. Can’t reach for him. Can’t have that comfort.

Adam stares into the darkness instead. He doesn’t want to tell Ronan anything. But it won’t be long before Ronan sees. He’s already seen the piglet, seen the evidence that something happened, and he knows that Adam left. He’s on the cusp of Ronan knowing.

How bad will it be if he knows?

Adam thinks of the voice that spoke to him earlier in the night.

Ronan can never know.

After the others have gone to bed, Gansey follows Blue up onto the roof of the mill house. The wood is rough beneath his hands, but he can smell the recent rain clinging to the timber. Blue carefully picks her way across the slanted roof and settles at the edge. Gansey sits next to her, and his legs hang down over the edge of the roof, feet suspended above the gracefully flowing river below.

The water is dark. The moon’s reflection in it is perfect, like a beautiful white stone has been dropped in the water. Gansey feels like he could stand on the roof and pluck the moon from the sky.

The only sound is the trickling of the water over the water wheel, and the quiet breeze through the reeds. Blue leans back against the slanted wood and looks up at the stars.

“Is there a constellation of Glendower?” she asks.

“No, there isn’t.” Gansey doesn’t know all the constellations, but he knows that there are many kings of old immortalised in the stars. Not Glendower though.

“We should make one,” Blue says.

“I don’t know that it’s that easy.”

She laughs, and the sound is like the flowing water. “Of course it is. We find an empty piece of sky, we pick some stars and there he is. Glendower.”

“I’d like that. Maybe someone will put it into a map of the stars one day.”

“Or maybe they won’t,” Blue says. “Maybe it will be just for us. Just me and you.”

“I’d like that too,” Gansey says. The moonlight makes everything glow, and this could be a dream, except for how furiously Gansey wishes it were, for there are no consequences in dreams.

“Have you heard the story about the man who married the lady in the moon?” Blue says.

“No? There’s a lady in the moon?”

“Yeah, can’t you see her?” Blue points up at the sky, pointing out what Gansey imagines is a set of marks on the moon that sort of look like a woman, if you squint. He has to imagine, because he isn’t looking. He won’t look away from Blue, the way the moonlight catches the blue sheen of her dark hair, the way her dark skin shines under the stars, the midnight blue sky stretching infinitely above her. Everything is blue, blue, Blue.

“Shall I tell you the story?” she asks.

“Please,” Gansey replies, rolling onto his side to face her properly.

“Okay. So, it starts like all good stories. Once upon a time, there was a spoilt prince. He was the heir to the throne of a gloriously rich kingdom, and the most handsome man in all the continent. He could’ve had any bride he wanted. In fact, there were thousands of women desperate to marry him. But he wanted the lady that would make the most men jealous. He wanted people to envy him, for his wealth, his youth, and his beautiful bride. He went to a witch, and he demanded that she marry him to the most coveted and beautiful woman in all the world.

“Now, what the prince didn’t know, was that the mages in his kingdom had long been looking for a way to ensure that his bloodline didn’t continue, and this witch in particular had been wronged by his father, so she was filled with far more rage.”

“Did he not know that?” Gansey asks.

“No! Come on Gansey, he’s a narcissist! A selfish fool!”

“I apologise, please continue.”

“The witch agreed to marry him to the most beautiful woman. She told him that he would wed her to the most beautiful woman in the world, the woman that thousands stared at whenever she passed by. The loneliest, but most beautiful woman. But she told him that if he married this woman, he could never touch, speak to, or even look at another person again. That was the price, to become as lonely as her. He could never leave her and must remain faithful to her always. The man agreed, for why would he want to leave this beautiful woman? And who would ever interest him again, now that he had his mysterious wife. And so the witch married him to the lady in the moon, and in doing so, cursed him.

“The prince found that after he’d married this beautiful woman, he could no longer see the witch. The streets were empty of people. His mother and father, gone. His sisters, his brothers, his friends. He wandered the kingdom, afraid that something terrible had happened to them. And that night, when he looked up to the moon and saw the lady there, he realised the truth of it.”

“What’s the moral of this story? Don’t make deals with witches?”

“There are few. Be kind to strangers. Appreciate what you’ve got. Don’t want what you can’t have.”

“Oh.”

“I think I want it anyway,” Blue whispers.

Her hand slides towards Gansey over the roof, her fingers twist into the gaps between his. “Gansey,” she says, her voice barely more than the softest whisper. She’s looking back at him, so close that when she speaks her breath puffs across his lips. As close to a kiss as they’ll ever get.

Gansey doesn’t allow himself the pleasure of imagining what it would be like to kiss Blue. It’s a terrible fate, he thinks, that he is doomed to die before this quest is over, and he’ll never kiss her.

He doesn’t want it to be her. He won’t put that burden on her. Killing him.

Her skin is petal soft. Gansey strokes his thumb across the back of her hand.

“What happened? To the man in the story?”

“He went mad. Threw himself off the highest turret of his fancy castle.” Blue snorts. “They all do, get mad, or drown, or get lost in the forest forever.”

“I forget stories in the Northlands are far more wild than southern stories.”

“Because you’re all soft.”

Gansey laughs, the movement shaking the timbers a little beneath him. “Surely because the land is far more dangerous here?”

“Yes, and because of that, you’re all soft. How would you end it then?”

“I don’t know, I was hardly rooting for this selfish prince.”

Blue laughs. “I think I told it wrong. I think you’re supposed to like him at the start, but all I could remember was that his father made the witch hate him. And I was raised by witches, so witches are always right.”

“Of course,” Gansey agrees. “We should go to bed.”

Blue nods, the smile dropping from her face. “Can we stay here? Just a bit longer? Can we just pretend that this is how it goes?”

Gansey nods. He squeezes Blue’s hand. She turns to face him, and her breath puffs against Gansey’s lips. Gansey doesn’t think it’s the danger that makes goosebumps raise on his arms. He doesn’t think it’s the danger at all.

There’s something off about this memory. Something dark about its edges. Ronan’s sure he shouldn’t be seeing it. The way it twists, the way nothing is what it really is.

There’s a dead piglet on the dusty ground out the back of the tumbledown cottage. Ronan recognises it as the one that Adam brought back to life. Its body is broken and twisted. Blood trickles from it. Blood trickles from it and Ronan watches as it runs across the ground, spelling out a word.

ADAM

“Disgusting. Unnatural. Sick.” Adam’s father’s voice echoes all around the memory. Ronan doesn’t know where it comes from but just as he’s thinking it, the man himself is there. He’s larger than any man truly could be, and he’s made all the larger by the rage on his face. By the rock in his hand.

“Should’ve done this a long time ago. Should’ve done it the moment I knew what an unnatural little freak you were, boy.” His long, dark shadow advances towards Ronan. He doesn’t know where Adam is.

DEAD, spells out the pig blood on the ground. Ronan blinks and the pig is Adam. Twisted, broken. Dead. He blinks again and then piglet is back, and Adam is there. Not Ronan’s Adam. Adam as a child. Ronan still doesn’t know how old, but he looks younger, and smaller, than he had when he brought the piglet back to life, even though Ronan knows this is the same day.

There’s a rushing sound in Ronan’s ears. Adam’s father wraps a meaty hand around the child’s upper arm. Adam’s feet scuffle on the ground. He’s screaming, but Ronan can’t hear the sound. Adam’s father is talking, but the only sound is of rushing water.

Adam’s father leads them to a river. It’s wide and deep, and nothing like Ronan has ever seen in any of Adam’s memories before.

“I should’ve done this years ago,” Adam’s father’s voice booms. He throws Adam to the river and his head smacks off one rock, then two, then three. Blood pours from the side of his head. The river runs red, churning over the rocks around Adam.

Ronan wants to fight. Wants to take up a rock and smash it over Adam’s father’s head himself. But this a memory, and as twisted as it is, it’s already happened. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing that Ronan can do now to stop this from happening. His hands shake, his heart races and he feels sick, feels fear like nothing he’s ever felt before. The helpless fear of a wounded animal.

Adam’s father splashes down into the stream. His intentions are clear. He picks up a rock. The clouds overhead are dark, and thunder booms. Adam gets to his feet, his legs trembling. The water churns red around his ankles.

“Don’t touch me again,” he says. His voice is small, and shaky, but beneath it, there’s serious threat.

Adam’s father sneers. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. You’ve been nothing but I problem I should’ve gotten rid of.”

He raises the rock. Ronan yells. Adam yells.

The rock splits in two. One half splashes to the ground. The other half hits Adam’s father on the head. He snarls and lunges for Adam, but the river cracks wider. Adam stumbles backwards and trips on a rock. Brilliant red blood pours from his head still, and he lies in a gap between two boulders, out of his father’s reach, as the riverbed splits deeper and deeper.

Ronan watches as the river surges, as the ground splits wider and wider. Roots from the nearby forest spring from the ground and drag Adam’s father under the water. They reach into the gap between the boulders and lift Adam out of the way of the water. They spring up further away, at the tumbledown cottage. The crack of the riverbed runs towards it and the roots drag the house, the barn, the adjoining shed, all of it, down, down, down into the ground. Every rock, every brick, every beam is dragged into the chasm.

Adam is curled on the riverbank, held gently by the roots, and when the ground closes up, sealing Adam’s father and the house beneath the ground, he still doesn’t move.

Ronan crouches by him, and he’s not shocked to have to wipe tears from his own face. He has the same urge he always has when he sees the child that Adam was. The one to wrap him up and take him somewhere safer. Ronan realises now that this was Adam’s alternative. He had no one to make him safe, no one, and nothing but a savage, magical forest.

He didn’t see the real Adam in the memory, but when he wakes, Adam is gone.

He can’t have got far. His pack is gone, but that doesn’t mean anything. Ronan tugs his boots on without lacing them, pulls his jerkin on as he stumbles down the stairs.

The door is unlocked and Ronan trips out into the darkness. He shifts to the wolf as the door bangs shut behind him. He can smell Adam on the wind and ahead, a dark figure moves into the trees of Cabeswater.

Th wolf bounds over the grass. Ronan can only remember running this fast once before. The forest offers no resistance, and once he’s beyond the trees, Ronan shifts back.

Adam stands on the bridge.

“Don’t follow me,” he says, but Ronan has. And he will. Of course he will.

Adam runs. He vanishes through a thick bush in the dark treeline. Ronan crosses the bridge and ducks in after him, running to catch Adam.

Adam stumbles on a tree root and Ronan catches him. He reaches for his hand, but Adam pulls away sharply. “I said don’t!” he snarls.

“Adam, please. I don’t understand,” Ronan pleads.

“Don’t understand what? You’ve seen it now.”

Ronan reaches for his hand again, but Adam snatches it away. His right hand is slower though, and when Ronan catches it, the feel of his skin is strange.

Ronan’s hands are gentle as they cup Adam’s hand in his. He softly rolls his sleeve back, and the more of Adam’s arm that he sees, the sicker he feels. Adam’s whole hand is shrivelled and black, and the blacks carries on up his arm, tracing through the veins right up to his shoulder. Adam is quiet, and he doesn’t fight Ronan again.

“Adam.” Ronan doesn’t recognise his own voice. He reaches up and unbuttons Adam’s shirt, pushing it away to one side so he can see the way the poison has crept through his veins, up his shoulder, up the side of his neck. The dark lines disappear beneath his hairline.

“Why didn’t you say?” Ronan asks.

Adam doesn’t look at him, he stares away to the side. “There was nothing to say.”

“But we can do something. There’ll be a way to fix this. Like the forest, we’re so close to finding a way to fix it.”

“No. You shouldn’t. You should leave while you can. There’s nothing. This is what happens to monsters.”

“You are not a monster.” Ronan’s so sure. He’s never been more sure of anything in his life.

Adam turns to look at him. His eyes flash. “Am I not?”

Darkness creeps through the forest.

“You’ve seen inside my memories, Ronan Lynch. You’ve seen my family. My father. You saw what I did to them. How I could do it again.” Adam’s voice is heavy.

“You were a child, you acted out of fear.”

“Are you afraid now?”

The forest is dark all around them. In the distance, a scream.

“Adam. Stop it.”

Adam cocks his head to the side, a strange, unnatural movement. He’s smiling, but it doesn’t move past his mouth. It’s not his usual grin, the one that bursts across his face like he isn’t expecting it. He looks feral.

“Adam, tell me what’s wrong.”

Adam’s eyes are black. Not the blown pupils of scrying, but completely black. Ronan is reminded horribly of the soothsayer girl, and the empty socket of her clawed out eye.

“Adam, tell me what’s wrong.” Ronan’s own voice echoes back at him, coming from Adam, his mouth barely moving from its feral grimace. “Adam can’t hear you.”

The voice has changed. It’s not Ronan’s anymore, but it’s not Adam’s either. The voice is an empty grave. The voice is cold breath on the back of Ronan’s neck. The voice of a lonely death.

“Adam Parrish’s heart is mine,” it says.

“You’re wrong.”

Adam laughs. The demon possessing him, laughs. “You think he loves you? I know everything he knows. I know everything this forest knows. If he was capable of love, then it would not have been so easy for me to corrupt.”

Roots and vines are creeping from the ground and they snatch Ronan’s ankles, tethering him to the ground, and wrap around his legs, trapping him. Ronan claws at them, trying to pull them away from his body, but they trap his arms too. Adam advances towards him, and it’s with cold horror that Ronan sees him pull out the Scariat knife.

“Adam, stop it. Make it stop,” he pleads. “I don’t want to leave you like this. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me. You’re weak. You couldn’t even save your brothers. How will you save me?”

He has to. Adam’s in there somewhere still, somewhere watching all this happen beyond his control. 

The vines snap and pull when Ronan shifts but the wolf is strong. He twists and pulls himself free enough to knock Adam away from him.

There’s a flash of blue in his eyes as he hits the ground, the wolf on top of him. “Ronan.” The word is forced out through gritted teeth and it’s the only thing he manages to say. The roots tug at Ronan, pulling him off Adam and his eyes flash black and then blue again. Adam flings the knife across the dark clearing.

The instruction is clear. Ronan leaps away from Adam, towards where the knife gleams in the dark. He wants to tell Adam that he doesn’t want to leave, but Adam won’t hear. He lies on the ground, fighting amongst the roots, his body twisting unnaturally, his hands clawing at his face. Ronan shifts to the raven and picks the knife up in his talons.

He doesn’t look back when he flies away.

Chapter Text

The darkness wraps around Adam like a thick cloak. It’s almost welcoming, almost too easy to give into it. There’s no reason to fight it now anyway. No point. Ever since he murdered his family, this is what Adam has deserved. Since before that.

Ronan knows now. It’s better this way, Adam can’t hurt him. He won’t grieve, he’ll be glad for his lucky escape. Maybe he’ll come back. Come back to finish the job.

He gave Ronan the Scariat knife but—

Once they kill you, your mortal body will be mine.

Dying is not what Adam’s afraid of.

A sacrifice trapped me. A sacrifice freed me, but I cannot leave the forest.

He’s afraid of what comes after.

Once I use you to rid the forest of Glendower, I will be free to bring my destruction to the continent.

He never told Ronan anything.

Ronan almost smashes the window of the room Henry and Gansey are sharing when he flies through it. He shifts as he enters, knocking his head against the window frame, and he ends up sprawled on his back on the uneven wood floor. He rolls onto his front and gets to his feet.

Gansey jolts upright from the bed at the noise. “Ronan!” he shouts.

Henry sits up too and lights a lamp, casting the room in a warm glow. Ronan feels full of frenetic energy. He can’t stop moving, desperation and fear coursing through him, making him unable to resist pacing the room. He snatches clothes for Gansey from his pack, throwing them at Gansey to get dressed.

“That demon. That dark creature. It’s got Adam,” he says in a rush. “Whatever had Cabeswater, it’s got him. I couldn’t— I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t do anything. It’s inside his mind.”

Gansey blinks in the light. He looks wide awake, suddenly caught in Ronan’s frantic storm. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t get out of his bed. He looks at the pile of clothes on his bed as if unsure about how they got there.

“Gansey, come on.” He swallows. “I don’t want to be alone again.”

“Ronan,” Gansey starts to stay, softly. “We’ll help him. I just—”

Gansey looks away from Ronan, towards Henry. Ronan spins around to face Henry, catching him shaking his head.

Ronan snarls at him. Henry fixes him with a steady gaze. The silence fills the small room.

Above Ronan’s head, the floorboards creak. Gansey looks up at the ceiling and follows the sound with his eyes, as footsteps pad across the floor above, and then down the stairs.

Henry swings his legs off the bed. “He gave you the knife though?”

“Yes,” Ronan spits, and he pulls it from where it had got tucked into his boot when he shifted back. “Is there a way to kill the demon without hurting Adam?”

A dark look crosses Henry’s face. “The darkness has possessed him. Taken hold of his mind and his magic.”

The door creaks open, and Blue slips in. She’s pulled a thick cloak over her cotton nightshirt, but Ronan watches Gansey’s eyes dart to her and away, and then back to her again. He frowns.

“What’s going on?” Blue whispers. “Where’s Adam?”

“The darkness that’s consuming the forest. It has hold of him too,” Gansey tells her.

“The demon. I think it’s going to use Adam to find Glendower,” Blue says, softly. “Like that dream I had about Noah. If Glendower trapped the demon, then it needs to sacrifice something to get free again.” Ronan knows what comes next and he has his hand around the hilt of his sword before she’s even finished speaking.

“What do we do?” Gansey says. “We have to find a way to stop him.”

“Stop him,” Ronan snarls. “It’s not him. It’s that demon, controlling him.”

“Ronan, you’re the only one of us who can get close enough. He can’t hurt you.” Blue speaks slowly and carefully, and Ronan hears what she doesn’t say.

Gansey’s staring at his hands. “I hope you aren’t about to suggest what I think you are.”

Henry puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s the only way. That must be why Adam gave him the Scariat knife.”

“NO.” Ronan slams his fist against the wall. The room shakes. “If that’s the only way then there is. No. Way.”

“Ronan, it’s not something any of us relish the idea of, but without a mortal vessel, the demon can’t wake Glendower,” Henry says. “If Adam —”

“Shut. The fuck. Up. This is not a debate. He would never agree to this if it was any of you—”

“But it’s him. What would Adam want us to do?” Henry presses. “If he knew that this was the only way, then he would agree to it.”

Rage surges up inside Ronan. The wolf tears at his insides, snarling, almost roaring with pain and anger. “I don’t fucking care. It’s not going to happen that way, I’m not doing it, and if any of you want to try, you’ll have to kill me first and none of you fuckers could take me in a fight.”

He grips his hand tight around the hilt of the Scariat knife and storms down the stairs, back out the door of the house. He’s going to find Adam. He’d gone back, hoping that Gansey had answers, hoping that there would be a solution. But no. He’s going to find Adam alone, and he’s going to – do something. Ronan doesn’t know what, but there’s no way that this ends with Adam dead.

“I don’t know what to do. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. None of this was supposed to happen.” Gansey paces back and forth in the kitchen. Every so often, he glances out into the dark night. It’s not that he expects Ronan to be back so soon. He just doesn’t want to miss the moment when he does return. He should follow Ronan, but Henry had said to wait, and to think.

So Gansey waits. And he thinks. And while he waits and thinks, he paces.

“Ganseyman,” Henry says, from where he’s lazily reclining on the kitchen bench. “You already know what to do. You know how to find Glendower. You’ve always known.”

Gansey shakes his head. He doesn’t.

“You do,” Henry insists. “You’ve always known.”

Gansey finds the sword that Blue had pulled from the lake, propped up in the corner of the kitchen. “A sword that gives passage.” He lays it carefully across Adam’s map. He thinks of his dream, of the underground tomb of Glendower.

“You only have to ask,” Henry says. “The forest knows you already.”

“But without Adam… We have to save Adam before we find Glendower.” Gansey’s sure of this. Glendower quested into the forest with all his men. He needs Ronan and Adam back with him, for it to be right. The demon, the creature, if it wants to find Glendower before them, it can use Adam’s magic to stop them.

“Adam has to save himself, Gansey,” Henry says, carefully.

“Ronan shouldn’t have gone after him?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Why did you tell him he had to kill Adam?” Gansey’s certain that there could be another way.

Henry smirks a little. “Don’t you know how these things work, Gansey? In order to inspire the hero to action, there has to be a threat. If I tell you I’m going to eat the last slice of pie that you’ve been eying for the last ten minutes, what do you do?”

“Oh I don’t really want—”

“Bad example. I’m going to ask your girl to dance.”

“She’s not really—”

“You’re going to fight me for her honour though, aren’t you?”

Gansey crosses his arms. “I think she’s perfectly capable of defending her own honour.”

“But you’re going to back her up, right? You’re not going to let her face the scoundrel of a bard who insulted her alone are you?”

“I—Oh. I see. So you don’t think that killing Adam is the way to resolve this? You just told Ronan that so he’d find another way?”

Henry nods, smirking deviously.

“You think there is another way?”

“If there is another way, then I can guarantee that Lynch will find it.” He says it like a fact. Gansey takes a deep, much-needed breath. “This is how it’s supposed to go,” he whispers.

Blue slips through the door. She’s dressed back in her traveling clothes. “I told my Mom about Adam. She says that Ronan going alone was the best course. They’ve gone back to sleep.”

Gansey nods. “We go after them,” he says. “I don’t think we’ll be able to help, but we have to try. The demon will be after Glendower. We should get to him before it does.”

Blue nods. She straps her crossbow over her shoulder. “You know where to find him?” she asks, but she doesn’t sound like she needs an answer.

Gansey nods. “I know the way. I feel like maybe… I’ve known the way the whole time.” He wishes hopelessly for Ronan, wishes he hadn’t left him, or that Gansey had followed when he’d gone. Wishes that things were different.

Blue nods. “We’ll be with you Gansey. The whole way.” She sounds so serious, and Gansey wonders for a second if she knows something more, if she knows about his destiny. He doesn’t ask though, just slots his fingers between hers when she holds out her hand and squeezes.

Henry rolls up Adam’s Cabeswater map, and Gansey sheathes the rusted sword of Glendower.

On the way out of the door, Gansey looks around the mill house one last time. This is a place for magic, and he would love to come back to it, to feel at home in a place like this. But he won’t.

As Gansey steps over the threshold, he knows, deep in his frantic heart, that it is the last door he will ever walk through.

The forest is cold, colder than before, colder than it’s ever been. High above him, the sparse trees creak ominously, despite the absence of wind. Ronan storms through them, ignoring how he feels watched, ignoring any instinctual fear he still feels alone in the forest. He moves as silently and as swiftly as he can until he reaches the great, twisting oak. He puts his hands to it, rests his forehead against it. He feels stupid, talking to a tree, but this is his only idea.

“Please,” he whispers to the oak. “I know you can hear me. I know you love him; I know you don’t want him dead.” He takes a breath. ”I love him too. Show me where to find him, how to help him.”

Nothing. Only the creaking of the branches above him, a crow cawing in the distance. A howling wind, like someone screaming far, far away.

And then.

He has to find it in himself. You love him, formwalker. That only matters if he believes he is worth that. We are too weak to help him now. But we will try.

The wind blows again, but in the opposite direction this time, and it’s warmer. Brown leaves skitter across the mud beside Ronan. He shifts to the raven, catches the warm wind and allows it to lift him up, high above the trees.

Below him, he can see how the trees fight to keep him aloft. And then he sees it, as the land rises up towards him. The hollow patch. Green to grey to barren wasteland. The black pit in the middle.

Ronan doesn’t think, he dives straight for it. The wind whistles through his feathers. He can feel the dark magic rise up off the ground, the spell to keep people away, to protect the demon. The spell was cast by Adam so Ronan breezes straight through it, feels the familiarity of his magic brush against him. Adam is still in there, not entirely consumed by the demon, not yet.

Ronan flies right down into the gaping hole in the ground. He lands softly on the soil at the bottom of the pit. The roots of the dead trees above still reach down deep and create a barrier before the entrance to a narrow tunnel.

Ronan shifts again. The snake slips smoothy between the roots, and once on the other side, he stays that way, sticking close to the wall, low to the ground. He tastes the air. Adam is here, but he smells wrong. He smells like a nightmare, like every one of Ronan’s worst fears come true. Ronan pushes down his instincts to flee, and pushes on, deeper into the cave.

He finds Adam, stood in the centre of a great cavern. The ceiling is high and vast, and thousands of stalactites hang down above. Ronan can almost feel them threatening to drop and crush him. There’s a circle around Adam, red, shining, floating just above the ground. Ronan stays as the snake, and slithers beneath it. Only when he is positioned right in front of Adam, does he shift.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Adam says, and he sounds almost like himself. Like himself, but afraid. His eyes are scrunched tightly shut, and he has his arms crossed, hands tucked under his arms, like he’s trying to restrain himself. “You shouldn’t have come. Unless you’ve come to kill me.”

“I could never do that. You have to know.” Ronan wants to hold him, to take him out of this awful place, before the demon realises, but something about the circle, about the dark magic radiating from it, is warning Ronan that it won’t be possible.

“Ronan, leave. I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t let me.” He twists his head from side to side, something unsettling about the movement. There are four great, parallel scratches down Adam’s face, and more on his neck and forearms. There’s blood beneath his fingernails.

“Where is it?” He can’t see any creatures in the cave with Adam. He’s half expecting the great beast that they slayed, or the many-tentacled thing that attacked Blue in the lake.

“Here.”

Adam’s eyes snap open. They’re black, completely black, no white, no iris, no shine. Nothing but great black pits in his face. He screams, a terrible, anguished sound, straight from the deepest pits of Hell, and his whole body convulses. Ronan reaches to grab him, but Adam throws himself away onto the ground, away from Ronan.

“You were stupid to come,” Adam says, but it isn’t his voice. It’s the voice from Ronan’s nightmares. The demon. “I’m going to make him watch as he kills you. He’s like I am. Destroys everything he touches. I don’t even have to try to make him destroy you.”

“No. No, Adam, listen to me. Adam I know you can hear me, and you aren’t, you aren’t like it. You won’t kill me. Not because of the covenant, but because I love you. And I know you love me.”

Adam screams. The demon screams. The screams tangle in the air and Adam twists on the ground, in horrible, bone breaking tremors. It has hold of him, completely, just like Henry said. Ronan’s hand is sweaty around the hilt of the Scariat knife.

But he can’t do it.

There’s only one thing Ronan can do. The only option he has left. He doesn’t like it; the idea of leaving himself vulnerable. He doesn’t even know if it will work. He can feel the forest inside himself though, a dying light, but there all the same. It’s inside him because of Adam, and he knows that somewhere inside Adam, there’s a piece of him.

Adam’s satchel lies abandoned on the ground of the cave, the contents scattered around. Ronan gather them together and searches the dark cave until he finds a hidden corner. He sits with his back to the wall, facing out, although he knows that if this works, he’ll be vulnerable from any direction.

There’s no guarantee this will work. Ronan still doesn’t have a full understanding of the covenant, if the magic will flow between him and Adam now that the demon has control of him.

There are a few dead sticks around, enough to light a real fire, but when he reaches for the covenant, he finds the knowledge that this spell will only work with a fire started with magic.

He holds the covenant in his mind, and tries to do what he’s seen Adam do, to make the sparks jump. The first time it doesn’t work, or the second. Ronan snarls in frustration. Desperation builds inside him. He thinks of the first time he saw Adam, his wildfire eyes, the way he’d brought the forest to him, breaking through the restrictions caused by the Scariat knife. He’s a powerful mage, and the covenant, even now with the demon wrapped around Adam’s magic, is strong.

Adam is a powerful mage, and now, that means Ronan is too.

Sparks jump from Ronan’s fingers to the tinder, just like he’s seen Adam do. He doesn’t know the words to say, or the herbs to add to the flames, but he’s moving without thinking, speaking without knowing he is.

Before he goes in, Ronan has one last thought. He takes the knife, the Scariat knife, the one responsible for the bond in the first place. It’s a desperate, foolish hope that he’ll have the knife on the other side, and even more foolish to hope that it will do what he intends. The flames grow around him, and Ronan grips the knife. The fire burns white and bright. He stares into it, blinking furiously at first but then not at all.

When Ronan opens his eyes on the other side, the twisted, needle-point knife is in his white-knuckled hand.

The meadow lies in heavy darkness, and dark clouds blanket the moon. The night feels alive, a slight wind rustles the leaves like whispers and Gansey feels as though he’s walking with far more than two people. Over the forest, a flock of dark birds wheel and arc in the sky, and Gansey feels as though he is leading an army to battle, as if he is a hero in one of the great stories, reaching the climax of his quest.

The dark trees of the edge of the forest offer them no opposition, and the tiny bridge barely creeks beneath their determined feet. On the other side of the creek, the forest is darker again, and cold.

Blue’s breath fogs in the air, as she says, “That demon truly has taken hold of this forest.”

The ground is hard beneath Gansey’s feet, the kind of hardness that comes with weeks of freezing temperatures and not a second of snowfall. “We have to keep going,” he says. “We have to find the oak tree, the great twisting one in the heart of the forest.”

“Adam’s map says it’s deep into the forest. I think that if we keep on this path, it should take us there,” Blue says. She doesn’t sound certain, but Gansey cannot afford to act with anything but certainty, lest he waver from his goal. It would be too easy to leave. To let the demon have the forest.

It's not what Glendower would do. Gansey holds this thought in his mind as he ventures forth into the trees. He’s walking the path of Glendower tonight, and wherever it leads him, it will be as Glendower did, as his destiny deems it to be.

Ronan’s in the forest still, but he isn’t.

It’s Adam’s dream. But it isn’t.

The trees are black and gnarled, Ronan watches them twist and writhe, as if in pain. Only the great oak tree stands unaffected. Its curving, moss covered branches reach towards a darkened sky, as ash falls like snow onto the ground. The little boy is stood in the arms of tree, and tear tracks stain his face. Ronan’s relieved to see him there, it’s a hope he hadn’t dared to have. It means Adam isn’t lost. Not yet.

Ronan rushes towards the oak, as a darkened, dead tree crashes to the ground. The boy cries out in fear, and one of the branches of the oak tree begins to blacken. It looks like it’s burning, but there are no flames.

Ronan slows as he gets closer to the tree. The boy is looking in fear at the blackening branch of the oak, and as Ronan gets closer still, his wide, fearful eyes turn on Ronan.

“Come on, we have to get out of here. We have to find Adam,” he says to him, softly.

The little boy bites his lip, but he holds his hands out to Ronan, and lets Ronan pick him up from the tree. He clings to Ronan’s shirt, buries his face in Ronan’s neck, and Ronan knows what this is. What this means. If this tiny piece of Adam, this piece of him that never let go of being a hurt and scared child, trusts him, then there’s nothing that can stop Ronan from proving that he deserves it.

He heads for the place that the demon had the real Adam. If he could shift, like he did when he went before, then he would, but this is a dream. This is a dream, but Adam has let him in in more ways than this. As Ronan thinks it, the roots glide apart, and he ducks inside with the child.

Inside the cave, Adam is slumped on the ground, in the centre of the ring. He looks almost dead here, his skin almost grey in the cold light filtering in from high above.

The demon is there too, real and fearsome, inside Adam’s head. It hovers high in the cave, wicked pincers biting at the air, vicious talons slicing at the air.

The child in Ronan’s arms yelps at the sight.

“Don’t look at it,” Ronan says, and sets him on the ground. The little boy clings to his trouser leg, and his tiny face is pale with fear. Ronan knows what he has to do, but he hates himself for it anyway.

He untangles the boy’s hands from him and crouches down in front of him. He puts a gentle hand on his shoulder and uses the thumb of his other hand to wipe away the tears streaking down his face.

“You have to do this. It has to be you,” he tells the boy. “You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. You don’t need me to save you.” He hands him the knife.

Adam takes it. He nods and his tiny face sets, hard and determined. It’s the same expression he wore when he brought the piglet back to life. The same expression the real, adult Adam wore when he escaped from the bandit camp, when he slayed the monster in the forest.

Ronan lets him go.

The demon doesn’t notice the child crossing the cave. It’s too busy focussing on Ronan, throwing rocks at it. It swoops and Ronan slashes at it with his sword. It’s larger than Ronan expected, and he can hear it whispering to him, spewing darkness into his ear, speaking in his father’s voice, reminding him of Matthew and Declan’s deaths. But the reminder of them spurs Ronan on. He lost everything once. He won’t let it happen again.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the boy approach the ring of red light surrounding Adam. The knife cuts right through it, severing the walls that contain him.

Adam lies still on the ground, like he hasn’t noticed. Like he can’t wake up anymore.

But Ronan can’t do anything, the true battle is Adam’s alone. The demon is on him again. He throws his sword, and it catches the demon’s flank, but skitters off into the darkness, barely slowing the demon’s onslaught. It crashes into him again, and it has him pinned to the ground, pincers gnashing at his face. Ronan’s sword appears back in his hand, and he thrusts it through the demon’s head. Inky, black bile spills from it, where the sword bursts in. An anguished scream fills the cave, almost too human in its hurt. The demon spins off of him, away across the cave.

In his moment’s reprieve, Ronan runs to Adam. He rolls him onto his back, but his eyes are still closed. Ronan grips his shoulders, tight. “Adam. Adam, I know you can hear me,” he says, frantic. “You need to come back. I need you to. I only just found you, I’m not ready to lose you. I can’t—I love you.”

Adam’s eyes flicker open. Blue. Black. Blue. Black again, then blue again. He looks angry, he looks afraid, he looks confused, and he looks anguished, but beyond anything, he looks hopeful.

“We can do this,” the little boy says to Adam; Adam says to himself. He presses the knife into Adam’s hand. Adam looks at it and his eyes settle to blue. His face sets, determined, just like the child.

The light that flares out when Adam touches his hand to the face of his childhood self is blinding. The force of Adam’s magic throws Ronan across the cave and when he opens his eyes again, the light is all he can see. He blinks furiously against it until he can make out shapes.

The child is gone. Adam floats in the middle of the cave, several feet off the ground, and his eyes are glowing brilliant white light. The demon is suspended in the air too, convulsing in the blinding light.

“You have no power over me,” Adam says, his voice echoing through the cave. The demon screeches and, with a slash of his arm, Adam sends the Scariat knife flashing through the air, slicing the demon in half. Black bile explodes across the cave, but it evaporates into smoke when it reaches the light that Adam is casting.

“Wake up, Ronan,” Adam says, and his mouth doesn’t move. He stays there, floating in the air, surrounded by light, making the light. “Ronan!” Adam calls again, the sound of his voice echoes around him.

Ronan clings to it, and follows the sound until he wakes.

They got here too soon. Blue thought they would have more time. Hours. Days maybe. Or at least until morning. She doesn’t feel ready. Not ready to find Glendower, and, more importantly, not ready to lose Gansey.

Blue has never been able to foresee the future, but this seems too obvious. Gansey’s life is tied to this quest, and it’s tied to the demon, to the forest, to Glendower.

They got here too soon.

The canopy of the tree is darker than the night above them. Blue can barely see her own hand in front of her face, but when she looks up, she can see the stark darkness of the branches against the deep sky.

She can see Gansey too. Her golden prince. He almost glows, as if every beam of light that could penetrate this darkness is turned onto him.

He takes Glendower’s sword in his hand and approaches the tree. He holds the hilt in both of his hands, and rests the tip at the roots of the tree. A kingly motion.

“Cabeswater,” he says, loud and clear, ringing like a golden bell. “I am Richard Gansey III of Angloria. I am seeking the lost king Glendower. I ask that you give me passage to his final resting place.”

The wind dies. The rustle of the leaves vanishes. Even the sound of Henry and Gansey’s breathing has gone. Blue cannot even hear her own breath, her own heartbeat. She sucks in a sharp breath, feels it whistle through her teeth, but it makes no sound.

And then, the sound of wood cracking. The great oak tree, the ancient tree at the heart of this mystical forest, begins to crack open. Golden light bursts from the cracks. Blue has to shield her eyes against the brightness as it pours over her like molten gold.

The crack in the tree grows wider, until it is large enough for a man to step inside. In the darkness, Henry’s hand finds hers. Blue squeezes tightly.

“Well,” says Gansey. “As Glendower would have said: Excelsior.”

He steps forward, and the golden light takes him.

Adam wakes alone. The cave is dark, and he’s sure, so sure that he’s still trapped in the darkness caused by the demon. But white fire flickers in the darkness, and the light grows and grows. A mage stumbles across the cave towards him. It has to be a mage, he’s holding mage-fire in the palm of his hand.

But it’s not. It’s Ronan.

“Ronan,” Adam says, almost disbelieving. He remembers the dream, remembers his childhood-self handing him the Scariat knife. Remembers that Ronan came for him. Ronan came for him, Ronan loves him. Ronan gave him the strength to drive the demon out.

Adam rushes to him.

“Adam,” Ronan says, and the flames go out as Ronan throws his arms around him. His body trembles in Adam’s arms, but he’s here and he’s real. Above them, the roof of the cave shakes and Ronan jerks him to the side as a rock falls almost on top of them.

“We need to get out of here. The demon carved this cave, but it’s gone from here, its magic won’t sustain the opening,” Adam says. The demon is still out there. It has no hold on him anymore, but he can feel it in the forest still, feel the way it’s drained the magic from it.

Through the grey light, he can see Ronan nod. He takes Ronan’s offered hand, and Ronan leads him across the cave. But there’s no route out.

“Fuck!” Ronan shouts. He releases Adam and starts tugging at the boulders that block the exit from the cave. “It did this,” he snarls. He keeps pulling at the rocks, but the more he tugs at them, the more fall from above. A mighty boom echoes through the cave as a great slab of the roof crumbles in. And another. And another.

“Ronan, stop,” Adam says, and he takes hold of Ronan’s arm. “We’re trapped.”

Ronan shakes his head. “No.” He yanks his arm free from Adam’s grip.

Adam tries to reach for Cabeswater, but wherever the demon has gone now, it’s weakening the forest even more. Adam is drained, it took everything he had to fight the demon from his own mind, and he knows that even if Ronan tries to use the covenant, he’s mostly using Adam’s depleted magic.

“Ronan stop it,” Adam takes his other arm and wraps himself around Ronan. “Stop.”

The cave collapses around them, heavy rocks and boulders trapping them in, against the wall. Adam clings to Ronan, and Ronan clings to him. If it ends like this, Adam thinks, at least he has this. The rocks stop falling, but Adam knows that it’s not the end. He tries again to reach for Cabeswater, but he can’t, not down here where nothing good could penetrate.

There’s a tiny chink of light, high up above Adam’s head. It won’t be big enough for him, too high to climb to, too small to squeeze through, but Ronan can shift and make it out.

“Ronan—” Adam starts.

“No. I’m not leaving you. I can’t lose you. I was meant to die months ago, with my family.” Ronan’s voice shakes. “And all this. Knowing you. I never thought I’d get this. I’m so grateful. Everything you’ve given me.”

“I’d have given you more. Everything.” Adam’s hands shake as he fumbles to press them beneath Ronan’s shirt, to touch his skin. “I thought I’d die alone. I thought—I thought that being alone was all I’d ever know. And you showed me it didn’t have to be that way. You came for me.”

“I—”

“Shh. Don’t say it. I already know.” Adam’s breath is shaky. “I do too.”

Ronan tightens his grip. Another rock falls, a rumble as it skitters above them, followed by a few smaller ones. Adam screws his eyes shut, against the tears that threaten to overflow, and waits for the end to come. He hopes it’s quick.

Adam can hear Ronan’s heartbeat, louder than anything else, beating like wings. He can feel his own heartbeat too fluttering desperately in his chest. Perfectly in time, the same sound, like wings.

Like wings.

He thinks of the bird call that echoes in his deaf ear. The raven in the flames. How strong the covenant has become, how strong it’s always been. How Ronan found him, when he was lost to himself. How he thought Ronan was a mage, how he scried into the dreamscape.

He lifts his head, to look Ronan in the eye, to see the faded sliver of his face that’s visible in the light from above.

“We’re not dying. Not like this.”

Ronan frowns, confused, but Adam doesn’t explain. The wings beat frantically inside him, longing to be set free. He knows what to do, it’s as easy as magic always has been. Adam reaches for the wings, becomes them.

He shifts.

It’s jumping from a height, it’s landing in icy water, it’s… soaring into the sky. The tiny crack of light grows and grows and behind him, Adam hears Ronan call his name.

When he bursts out into the grey sky, the raven is behind him.

Chapter Text

High above the trees, two birds soar in the blazing light from the rising sun. The raven caws, a free, joyous sound that echoes across the treetops. The kestrel dives for a clearing in the trees, and the raven follows after, cold wind rushing around him, carrying the scent of pine and wet, rotting wood.

Ronan shifts as he lands, thumping hard onto his feet. Adam tries it too, but he misjudges, and ends up rolling through the dense ferns growing in the clearing.

Ronan runs to him, covering the feet between them in three great strides. He stops abruptly at Adam, not quite touching him, his hands hovering. Adam rolls back to his feet, brushing grass and ferns off himself as he stands. He looks at Ronan, blue eyes clear and steady, a strange look on his face.

Ronan lifts his hand slowly. His rough fingers trace down the side of Adam’s face and Adam’s eyelids flutter.

And suddenly it’s all that matters. Adam in his arms, whole and himself and here. Ronan holds him tight, buries his face in Adam’s neck and breathes him in. His mouth slides along Adam’s jaw and Adam turns his head. The kiss is frantic, desperate, and Ronan pours everything into it. Adam pushes into just as hard and there’s no finesse, nothing but their messy meeting and the matching pulse of magic between them. Adam’s hands tangle in Ronan’s shirt and it’s everything, everything, everything.

It’s not gentle, the kiss. Adam pushes into like he too, is starving. He kisses like a fire, like Ronan is dry wood. Ronan would give anything to keep that fire burning. Adam’s hands cup his jaw tenderly though, a stark contrast to the way he kisses, a teeth and hard lips. Ronan grips Adam’s waist, the back of his neck, holding him close, urging him forward, urging him to give more.

He kisses Adam like he’s drowning, and Adam is air. Like he’s starving and Adam is food. Like he’s lived a life in darkness and Adam is the light. His heart beats in his chest, frantic and desperate, and every thud reminds him that they’re alive, alive, alive.

The fight isn’t over though. Ronan can feel the wavering pulse of the forest beneath his feet, feel the way darkness pulls at its magic. The wind carries the smell of rotting wood, of death and decay too him again. The fight isn’t over.

“The demon’s still out there,” he says, acknowledging what they both already know.

Adam nods, and steps away from Ronan a little. Ronan is reluctant to let him go. “I couldn’t kill it, I could only stop it from using me. Drive it out of my mind, but it was never really in the pit.” Adam’s exhale is shaky. “I did all that, the pit, the darkness—”

“Adam, no. I’m not going to let you bear the blame. You drove it from you’re mind, and now we are going to drive it from the forest. Destroy it.”

“I don’t know that we can. It’s going to require a huge amount of magical energy. Something like—” Adam stops abruptly, as a great booming sound echoes through the forest. It sounds like the thick trunk of tree cracking open, from the roots, right up the trunk.

“Gansey,” Adam says, and he takes off running into the trees.

“What?” Ronan shouts after him. He rushes to catch up to Adam. “You don’t have to go on foot anymore, you know!” he calls to Adam, as he shifts.

Adam shifts too, and the two birds take off into the lightening sky again.

The golden light wraps all around Gansey like a shroud. He cannot see beyond it, and for a second, he wonders if his death has come already, without him even noticing. But the light begins to fade, the further into the tunnel he walks. When he looks back, it’s gone completely, only darkness behind him.

Blue and Henry are no longer visible, only a featureless stone wall, where once the forest had been. Gansey puts his hand to it, and feels wet rock beneath it. Just as expected. The rightness of it settles in his stomach, filling him up. Joy and terror war furiously inside him, and the battle threatens to spill over. He steels himself, and takes another step forward.

The tunnel slopes gradually downwards; soft packed dirt gives way to hard stone. It’s not as dark as Gansey thinks it should be, the tunnel seems to be lit by a flickering light, as if someone behind him carries a torch. He walks alone, despite shadows moving on the walls.

And then, there are voices. Voices, echoing down the tunnel, thick with accents that Gansey does not recognise but they’re at least speaking a language that he understands. Gansey feels the memory as if it’s his own. Lives it, as if it’s happening to him.

The clearing, the one Gansey just left, where the great twisting oak grows. Only there is no oak tree here, only a yawning pit in the ground, darkness spreading from its edge. Soldiers sit around it, some injured, all wearing and battle-worn.

“The runes do not lie, Owain. This forest is cursed. A darkness that cannot be allowed to escape, lest it consume the continent,” a man is saying. He is dressed in the fine, intricately embroidered robes of a mage, the gold thread still gleaming despite the frayed hem, the rips, and the dirt splattered on them. Premature wrinkles carve deep lines across the man’s golden brown skin, and Gansey realises he’s looking straight at him. “It must be contained. An old magic.”

“Sacrifice.” Gansey speaks without thinking. The words well up inside him and spill forward. “I rule a great and powerful kingdom. My heirs will be strong, my life will be long, and my legacy will be great. I sacrifice it all to trap the growing darkness within this hollow.”

Glendower’s voice, Glendower’s words, Gansey’s mouth, Gansey’s body.

The mage nods. “We will remain with you, my liege.”

The soldiers around them get to their feet, slow and weary. Gansey watches them march in line down into the pit, deep under the earth. Some hold torches high in the air, some have their swords drawn. As he follows, the memory fades to darkness.

More voices. Coming from a different direction, closer, perhaps. Gansey almost trips in his rush towards them.

This memory, he watches from high above, as if he has climbed a tree to observe, as if he hides amongst the leaves. Two young men stand in the rubble of a crumbling church. One has his back turned to Gansey, his face hidden from view. The other Gansey recognises as Noah, although he looks so much more real, so much more alive than Gansey knows him to be.

“Whelk, I’m not sure this is right,” Noah says, looking around at the ruins of the church. “You want to free Glendower from his bargain, not free whatever he trapped instead.”

“It is right! Look! The stone altar!” the other man says. “The demon is trapped beneath. It’s an exchange! And I’ll get everything I want.”

“Everything you want?” Noah asks. His voice trembles.

A voice whispers on the wind, a voice like the drag of old bones. “Free me and you will be rewarded.”

“See!” Whelk shouts.

“That’s not Glendower,” Noah says, shaking his head. He backs away from Whelk, towards the stone altar. “I don’t know what that is, but I think we should go.”

“Go?” Whelk has a rock in his hand. Gansey shuts his eyes to the screams. Knowing what happened, and seeing it are two entirely separate things.

“You’ve awoken a darkness, Barrington Whelk,” Gansey says. A great split opens in the ground and roots crawl from it. They wrap around Whelk’s legs, and twist up his arms. He lunges and struggles against them. “A great darkness that will bide its time, but if not checked, will consume the continent. You cannot be allowed to leave here.”

Back in the present, Gansey keeps walking. The tunnel turns sharply to the right, and a cold patch of light illuminates the cave wall. A man is trapped within it, his horrified face coated in stone. Gansey can see the paths of the roots that dragged him underground and hold him still in his prison.

Knowledge pours into his head. The memories of a primordial forest, magic for centuries, yes, but its sentient heart not nearly as old as Gansey had thought.

Even more startling; these memories feel like Gansey’s own. Like he’d always known. Like he’d turned the pages of his journal and seen a note that he had forgotten making, but upon reading, the recollection of it comes flooding back.

Gansey walks decisively away from the imprisoned man. Glendower is down here, and when he finds Glendower, Gansey will find answers.

The tunnel twists and turns now, and Gansey feels horribly lost, as if he walks the depths of hidden labyrinth beneath the forest. The light flickers in and out, sometimes it seems as though someone will walk around the corner to him, and other times he feels as if he will be alone forever in the darkness.

It’s in this darkness that something brushes past Gansey.

“Gansey!” Blue shouts.

At first, Gansey thinks it’s just another voice. A memory again. His own, possibly. But then Blue’s finger tangle with his, solid and real.

“Blue?” Gansey says, and it’s so dark here, but he blinks again and she holds a palmful of mage-fire, little green flames that lick at her fingers like leaves.

“I’m with you Gansey,” Blue says. “We’ve been searching for you for hours.”

Hours? Is that how long he’s been down here? Blue throws an arm around him and squeezes him tight.

“You just disappeared! You stepped into the tree, there was this golden light, and you were gone! Henry and I were about to follow you in, when Ronan and Adam came back. They’re down here somewhere too! Adam gave me these—” Blue holds up her handful of flames.

The others are down here too. But Blue found him. Blue, with her wit and her charm and her curse. Of course she was the one to find him. Gansey understands so much.

“The demon, Gansey. It’s still out there. Ronan and Adam fought it off but it’s still out there somewhere. If it destroys the oak, it’ll break free of the forest—”

“And consume the continent, shroud it in darkness. Yes.”

“We have to find a way to stop it, to destroy it,” Blue says, and the flames blaze ferociously in her hand.

“No,” Gansey says. “We have to find Glendower.”

Blue sighs deeply. “Gansey, why?”

He can feel the darkness. So close now. “Because wherever Glendower is, that’s where the demon is.”

The door to the tomb is intricately carved. Ravens chase each other through thick trees, every leaf perfectly rendered in stone. Beneath the canopy of trees, an army of soldiers ride in a troop, and each face, of every soldier, is so clear. Gansey recognises them all. He rests his hand against the door of the tomb, and, at his touch, it rumbles open.

Inside, it’s just like Gansey’s dream.

A beam of sunlight falls perfectly onto the dais. Everything is plain, grey stone, neat and expectant. A place for timely, expected death. The room is not as large as it appeared in Gansey’s dream, though, and something else is wrong.

It’s empty.

The roots of the tree twist around the stone plinth where Glendower should be, but there’s no sign of him. No sign that he was ever there at all. Gansey doesn’t understand. Gansey understands perfectly.

The plinth is cracked in two, a jagged line slicing the stone. The runes carved around the edge are all perfectly intact, save for one. The strength rune is neatly split, arms of the rune reaching for each other across the sinister crack. From the edge of it, darkness leaks. The same darkness that infected the trees, the same darkness that was inside Adam. Gansey crouches down, and there, beneath the stone, between the carved ravens holding up the plinth, the demon lurks.

It oozes strange darkness, and it seems to shift its form. Smoke; something with many legs and ferocious pincers; a hundred thousand furious insects; gnashing teeth and fearsome claws.

At the door of the tomb, Blue is quiet. The flames in her hand have gone out, unnecessary in the sunlight streaming into the chamber. Gansey watches the understanding pass across her face as she takes in the empty tomb.

“A sacrifice,” Gansey says. His voice doesn’t shake. “They trapped the demon here. In this tomb. And with it, Glendower. And the tree, the great oak in the middle of the forest. He grew into it. He is it. The whole forest is Glendower.”

“How do you know this?” Blue whispers. She takes Gansey’s hand, rubs her thumb over his.

Gansey squeezes her hand in return, tries to be reassuring. He’s not afraid. If he tells himself that enough times, then he won’t be. “I heard voices, echoing through time, in the tunnel. Glendower sacrificed his future. He stayed here, and the power of the sacrifice trapped the demon here too.”

“But how did it get free?” Blue asks. “A different sacrifice? Noah?”

Gansey nods. He never said goodbye to Ronan, never thanked Adam, never told Henry how glad he was to know him. He swallows, and remembers to be brave. “And now, a third sacrifice is needed. To restore the original spell.”

The demon is inside the chamber. The cracked plinth leaks black. It has to be now. There’s no Glendower. There’s only Gansey. There’s only ever been Gansey.

Gansey stands by the plinth in the tomb. The sunlight streaming from above him lights his hair with a crown of gold. Blue’s hands long to reach out for him, her fingers tingle with the need to touch him, the need to be reassured by him, to reassure him.

There’s no Glendower. Blue knew there never would be. Her dream of Gansey as Glendower comes back to her, and it makes a lump rise in her throat.  

“It’s okay, Blue. This is how it’s supposed to happen,” Gansey says. “To die for something meaningful. To sacrifice my future, to stop the darkness spreading beyond the forest. It’s why I’m here. All my dreams, all my life, it’s brought me here.”

Blue shakes her head. The truth of it all makes her blood run hot. She wants to yell and scream, to shout about how unfair it all is. Instead, she crosses the tomb to Gansey, and her hands hover above the neaten, woven fabric of his tunic. She can feel her pulse pounding within her fingertips.

Gansey cups her face and wipes her tears away with the pad of his thumb. “It has to be now, Blue. The demon is getting stronger. Once the oak at the mouth of the tunnel is destroyed, there will be nothing holding it back. It’s working on it now, can’t you feel it?”

“Why’d you have to be so damn noble?” Blue says. She doesn’t mean it.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you find a way to break your curse,” he says.

“You already have,” Blue says. She’s never wanted her curse, always wanted to be free of it. But now. Now, with the way to break it staring back at her, so full of life and love, Blue wants nothing more than to live with it forever. Live with him forever.

“It’s time, Blue,” he says, definitively, and then, softer, “I love you.” The words barely make it past his lips.

“And I love you,” Blue replies, barely audible through her tears.

Blue kisses Gansey. Gansey kisses her back, and he kisses her with so much life, with all his life. His mouth is warm against hers, his lips are soft, and this is nothing at all like she’d imagined. It’s better, so much better, and it’s so much worse, all at the same time.

She feels the curse inside her, larger than ever, pushing at the seams of her, like it’s going to burst forward. Gansey holds her tighter, kissing her harder, kissing with all the fire of his quest. The curse fights against it, but something’s got to break. Blue gasps. Everything’s going to break.

She loves Gansey.

She’s going to lose Gansey.

Blue pours everything she can back into the kiss, everything she ever wanted to tell him, all the things she’ll never get the chance to now. All the hurt, and the loss, and the pain; all she’s felt, all she’s feeling now, and everything she’s going to feel.

The curse battles the kiss inside of her. It’s going to break. They’re both going to break. It’s all going to break. Gansey’s grip tightens and he makes a surprised noise, softly into her mouth as the curse shatters.

Magic surges through her, through Gansey, and out into the space around them, pouring off in waves. The bright light of it burns the inside of her eyelids orange, and she feels bigger than her body. She can feel the force of her magic, the way it burns through everything in its path, and in the distance, she can hear the pained screeching of the dying demon.

All too soon, Gansey’s hands slacken on her sides. With a final gasp, his mouth drops away from hers and he falls back, onto the plinth. A king, resplendent in death.

Blue stands, eyes squeezed shut, and hands empty, unable to look. If she doesn’t see his body, she’ll always remember him how he was, full of life.

Footsteps echo down the tunnel. Tears track down her face, a steady flow like rain down a windowpane. Adam’s arms come around her, and Blue turns into his chest. Henry’s there too, and his warm hands rub her back.

“You bastard,” Ronan says, voice shaking, close to breaking. “Why would he do this—why would he—”

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” Henry says. “It doesn’t end like this.”

Blue lifts her head and looks at him. His eyes are wet with unshed tears, and he looks strangely confused.

“Henry, I’m sorry,” Blue says. It does end like this. They leave Gansey here, where he was always going to end up. Blue goes home. Henry leaves, Ronan leaves. She supposes Adam will leave too. Adventure over.

Blue doesn’t care. She doesn’t want an adventure. Not without Gansey.

“Tell me you didn’t know about this,” Ronan says, and Blue can hear the tears in his muffled voice. “Tell me you didn’t know this was going to happen.”

Adam moves away from Blue, and she watches him crouch next to where Ronan has collapsed next to Gansey’s body. She still doesn’t look at Gansey. Beneath the plinth, only scorch marks remain. The whole ground is scorched, a perfect, black sun radiating from the point at which Blue’s curse broke.

“If I’d have told you, would it have spared you any pain now?” Adam asks.

“Not your decision,” Ronan spits. “I could’ve stopped him. Saved him, died instead, done something.”

“No, Ronan. He knew how it was going to go,” Adam says. “He wanted you to live. Have a life past the end of his.”

“But it isn’t! It’s not the end of his!” Henry insists. “You’re all magic! There’s so much magic in this place. What’s the point of it all if not to bring him back? Can’t you ask Cabeswater to bring him back?”

Adam glares at him, as he rubs a comforting hand across Ronan’s back.

“He is Glendower. We are Glendower, and so is he. He belongs here, with us now.”

“But the demon is destroyed. He doesn’t need to stay with you,” Henry cries shouts into the tomb. His voice echoes off the stone walls. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to go!”

“His mortal life cannot be reclaimed.”

“Yes. It can,” Ronan says, his voice thick with grief. He turns to Adam. “You’ve done it before.”

Adam looks startled. He shakes his head. “It was a piglet. It was insignificant. The kind of power it would take to bring back a whole person... I don’t have that.”

“I do,” Ronan replies, his gaze unwavering.

“No. Ronan, no.” Adam shakes his head. “I’m not doing that.”

“Do it. Bring him back,” Ronan says, voice like iron. “Use my magic. Use the covenant, it’ll make it easy.”

“There has to be another way,” Henry says.

“A life for a life,” Ronan insists.

“But not like this!” Blue cries.

“I can’t. I won’t,” Adam says.

“You’d sacrifice yourself for your friend?” the forest speaks again.

Ronan gets to his feet. He furiously wipes a falling tear from his chin, and sets his jaw. “I would.”

The forest sighs. The roots of the oak tree, trailing through the tomb, shift. “Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps you are right, bard. The darkness is vanquished, destroyed by the breaking of the curse on the soothsayer’s daughter. Perhaps the bard is right.”

“He is,” Adam says,

“You understand what it would take from you?”

Adam nods. “I’ll give it. For Ronan. For Gansey.”

“Adam what are you going do?” Blue asks. A life for a life. “You’re not going to—”

“It’ll be okay, Blue,” Adam says, and Blue hates how calm he sounds suddenly, like she’s asked him about the upcoming weather.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Henry whispers. “Are they bringing him back? The forest?”

“Glendower and Gansey are part of the forest now. The same part. Adam’s going to…” Blue trails off. This is a strange kind of magic, the like of which is rarely seen. She doesn’t know what Adam’s going to do.

Ronan seems to know though. He walks to Adam, takes Adam’s face in his hands, so gently. Adam’s hands wrap around Ronan’s wrists, and he presses their foreheads together. Ronan whispers something to Adam, and Adam nods.

“You should stand back,” Adam says. Henry takes Blue’s hands and drags her to the edge of the doorway of the tomb. Ronan steps back from Adam, but he stays until Adam nods again, and then he too, joins Blue and Henry in the doorway to the tomb.

The beam of sunlight fades to almost nothing as the sky above grows dark, and then darker still as Adam stands over Gansey. His face is set and determined.

“He’s not sacrificing himself, is he?” Blue says. A flash of lightning casts the tomb into stark brightness, there and gone again in a second. Blue blinks away the image of Adam staring up at the sky through the hole high in the ceiling.

Ronan looks down at her. “If he is, I’ve fucking misunderstood the situation and I’m going to kill him myself when he’s done.”

It’s a joke, but it misses the mark. There’s too much tension.

“It’s a conduit spell. Right?” Henry asks.

Ronan nods. “Energy transfer. The forest to Gansey.”

Energy transfer. “Wait!” Blue shouts. She runs across the room and takes Adam’s hand. “You feel that?” she asks. The magic of the remains of the curse pulse inside her.

“That’ll help,” Adam says, nodding. “You’re right. The more energy we have, the better.”

“Two mages, better than one,” Ronan says as he takes Adam’s other hand.

Henry’s fingers slide between Blue’s. “This’ll work,” Henry says.

Ronan reaches for the roots of the oak tree, and they twist around his arm. Henry puts his hand to Gansey’s chest. The magic flows through the four of them, from the forest, through its magicians, to Gansey. Blue squeezes her eyes shut tight, and she thinks of Gansey, his stories about Glendower, his hope, his joy, his furious belief.

An ancient forest, magic woven through every leaf and twig and branch.

A sleeping king, the sentient heart beating within, lying in wait for centuries.

And a boy, always destined to be something more.

Gansey opens his eyes.

Chapter Text

The rolling hills of Angloria are nothing like Blue has ever seen before. Everywhere she looks, the world is carpeted in smooth green, unbroken by jagged rocks, or dark forests. Even the Falchion river here is wide and meandering, cutting a perfect ribbon across the land, nothing like the raging torrent they crossed days ago.

Ahead, cradled in the arms of two vast hills, with the river cutting neatly through it, is the Golden City. Five great spires twist from it, up into the heavens, like the fingers of a giant’s hand. Close to the river the houses are packed tightly, but as the city spreads up the hills, the houses become larger, and grander.

“It’s not very… gold,” Blue says, cocking her head.

“Oh, it is when the sun shines upon it,” Gansey says. “The golden spires in the centre there, they blaze like torches in the setting sun. And the rooves of the large houses, up the hillside there, they have panels on the houses that reflect the sun all day long! When the sun is out, it really is quite a sight to behold.”

“But this is a land that is rarely sunny,” Henry says, wryly. “The most those rooftops ever reflect is the occasional lost sunbeam, led astray on its way down to the sunnier climes of the south.”

Gansey smiles, and Blue wonders if those rooftops are reflecting that. “It’s as a good a starting point for our journey as any,” he says. “Ready for a new adventure, Miss Sargent?”

Blue grins back at him. “Excelsior,” she says, laughing into the wind.

The wind carries that laugh high into the sky, across mountains and valleys, until it finally ripples across a wildflower meadow, causing the grass to sway like waves in the ocean. The laugh dances in the breezes and coils into the woodsmoke rising from a wooden cabin at the edge of the meadow. Two pairs of boots usually sit by the back door, matching pairs of scuff marks on the stone.

Behind the cabin, the dark pines of Cabeswater sing in silence, wavering a little, but not unnaturally, moving only how trees should. Ronan Lynch pauses in scraping the mud from his boots on a rock by the back door, listening, straining to hear voices on the wind.

He hears nothing and returns to his scraping.

Last night’s storm had felled a tree in the forest and Ronan had spent the morning clearing the debris away and chopping the trunk into manageable pieces. The branches and the higher part of the trunk would make good firewood, and the wood from the thickest part of it seemed sturdy enough for making into strong furniture.

The back door flew open, and it would have startled Ronan, had he not already known Adam was on the other side of it. The strange look on his face is concerning though. Ronan hasn’t seen that look on his face in almost a year, not since the demon, not since Gansey died, and came back.

“Someone’s coming,” he says, and he looks around Ronan, over the wildflower meadow, as if the visitor will crest the hill on cue.

“You want me to go have a look?” Ronan offers.

Adam shakes his head. “No, they’re coming for you.” He shifts before Ronan can mock his tone, the kestrel launching into the air without a moment’s hesitation.

“Ominous,” Ronan snorts, as the bird flies away. He’s not worried. Adam wouldn’t leave if it was anything to worry about. He takes the axe from where it rests against the stone wall and starts splitting logs, waiting for Adam to come back.

Adam’s magic isn’t as strong as it once was, just the magic from inside himself now, rather than the magic of the forest. He uses it to light candles, redirect the rain onto their garden, rather than start blazes in bandit camps, and redirect surging rivers from villages. It still crackles along the covenant, pulling as Adam gets further away.

The sound of hooves on the dirt track makes the wolf prick its ears. Adam isn’t back yet, but a young man on a brown horse is approaching. Ronan doesn’t put down the axe, but he moves towards the track.

The kestrel returns, flapping gracefully to the chimney pot, dodging the smoke, and settling at the edge of the roof. Ronan wonders why he doesn’t shift back.

“Ronan Lynch?” the man on the horse calls.

“Who’s asking?” No stranger who knows his name could possibly come bearing good news.

The man dismounts his horse but keeps a hold of the reins. He’s dressed in simple travelling clothes, but Ronan recognises Anglorian fashion.

“I have a message, that I’ve been instructed to deliver to Ronan Lynch, and Ronan Lynch alone.”

“Well I’m Ronan Lynch and we’re alone.”

The man glances up at the kestrel on the roof, but he reaches into his pack and withdraws a tightly coiled roll of parchment.

He holds the message out to Ronan, but Ronan doesn’t take it. The wax seal. Black, like letters his father had sent. He doesn’t recognise the crest pressed into it, but the black wax still sends a tremor through him.

Ronan’s hands are steady, only by shear force of will, as he sets the axe on the ground, and takes the scroll.

There’s a scuffle from behind him as the kestrel takes flight. It lands on Ronan’s shoulder and Ronan is grateful for the comfort. He understands now why Adam doesn’t shift. As he takes the message, he feels the magic coiled around it. The seal, set by a mage, that cannot be broken by anyone but the intended recipient. Gansey would not send him a message like this, and there is no one else alive who would want to contact him here, who would know to find him here.

Isn’t there?

A dark cloud blocks the sun. The trees creak and the man’s horse whinnies. It feels like the storm is coming back. The messenger breathes out heavily, and his jaw is tense as he tries not to advertise his fear. Ronan doesn’t think he’s doing it on purpose. Maybe Adam’s doing it. Maybe they’re both doing it.

“I have been instructed to take my leave once the message is delivered, but before it is opened,” the man says. It sounds like an excuse, a panicked lie, but he mounts his horse and gallops away.

When he’s over the hill, Adam shifts back. He keeps his hand on Ronan’s shoulder, where the bird had been.

“What do you think?” Ronan asks him, turning the scroll in his hand. “Cast runes first? Or just go for it?”

“Why are you hesitating?” Adam says. “You already know what’s inside.”

“No I don’t,” Ronan replies, but he does. He’s afraid to be wrong. He’s more afraid to be right.

Adam’s hand slides from his shoulder, and Ronan looks at his face, not at the parchment, as his fingers slide under the seal. He knows he’s living in the before.

The seal cracks with a louder sound than would be expected from such a thin layer of wax. Inside, the letter is solid lines upon lines of neat, black calligraphy and Ronan barely skims it until he reaches the bottom.

And when he gets to the bottom, Ronan sits hard on the ground. The paper falls with him. Adam picks it up and crouches next to him, as he reads the letter. Ronan doesn’t care what the rest of it says. It’s all unimportant. The end is the most important thing.

Like a ghost. Like a dream. Like a memory, relived in perfect clarity.

Your brother,

Declan Lynch