Rex Corvus, parate Regis Corvi.
The Raven King, make way for the Raven King.
Feathers rained down as the birds careened toward the cave mouth. Blue’s heart burst with how big it was, this moment, and no other.
Then there was silence, or at least not enough sound to be heard over Blue’s thudding heart. Feathers quivered in the mud beside Adam.
“Hold on,” Gansey said. “I’m coming out.”
Adam Parrish was lonesome.
There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome. One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment, but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.
Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.
Adam was not always alone, but he was always lonesome. Even in a group, he was slowly perfecting the skill of holding himself separate. It was easier than one might expect; the others allowed him to do it. He knew he was different since aligning himself more tightly with the ley line this summer. He was himself, but more powerful. Himself, but less human.
If he were them, he would silently watch him draw away, too.
It was better this way. He had not fought with anyone for so long. He had not been angry for weeks.
Now, the day after their excursion into the cave of ravens, Adam drove his small, shitty car away from Henrietta, on his way to do Cabeswater’s work. Through the soles of his shoes, he felt the ley line’s slow pulse. If he didn’t actively focus on it, his heartbeat unconsciously synced up with it. There was something comforting and anxious about the way it twined through him now; he could no longer tell if it was merely a powerful friend or if the power was now actually him.
Adam eyed the gas gauge warily. The car would make it back, he thought, if he didn’t have to drive too far into the autumnal mountains. He wasn’t yet sure what he was meant to do for Cabeswater. Its needs came to him in restless nights and twinging days, slowly becoming visible like something floating to the surface of a lake. The current feeling, a nagging sense of incompletion, wasn’t really clear yet, but school was about to start, and he was hoping to get it taken care of before classes began. That morning, he’d lined his bathroom sink with tinfoil, filled it with water, and scryed for clarification. He’d only managed to glimpse a vague location.
The rest will come to me when I get closer. Probably.
Instead, though, as he drew nearer, his mind kept drifting back to Gansey’s voice in the cave the day before. The tremulous note in it. The fear — a fear so profound that Gansey could not bring himself to climb out of the pit, though there was nothing physically preventing him.
He had not known that Richard Gansey III had it in him to be a coward.
Adam remembered crouching on the kitchen floor of his parents’ double-wide, telling himself to take Gansey’s oft-repeated advice to leave. Just put what you need in the car, Adam.
But he had stayed. Hung in the pit of his father’s anger. A coward, too.
Adam felt like he needed to reconfigure every conversation he’d ever had with Gansey in light of this new knowledge.
As the entrance for Skyline Drive came into view, his thoughts switched abruptly to Cabeswater. Adam had not been to the park, but he knew from a lifetime in Henrietta that it was a national park that stretched along the Blue Ridge Mountains, following the ley line with an almost eerie precision. In front of him, three lanes fed into three squat brown booths. A short line of cars waited.
His gaze found the fee board. He hadn’t realized he needed to pay to enter. Fifteen dollars.
Although he hadn’t been able to pinpoint a precise location for Cabeswater’s task, he was sure it was on the other side of these toll booths. There was no other way in.
But he also knew the contents of his pockets, and it was not fifteen dollars.
I can come back another day.
He was so tired of doing things another day, another way, a cheaper way, a day when Gansey could tidy the edges. This was supposed to be something he could do by himself, his power as the magician, tapped into the ley line.
But the ley line couldn’t get him through a toll plaza.
If Gansey had been here, he would have breezily tossed the bills out of the Camaro. He wouldn’t have even thought about it.
One day, Adam thought. One day.
As he sat in line, he plucked his wallet free, and then, when it failed to produce enough, he began digging for change under the seats. It was a moment that would have been both easier and worse if he’d been with Gansey, Ronan, and Blue. Because then IOUs would have had to be created, the haves assuring them it wasn’t necessary to be paid back, the have-nots insisting that it was.
But since it was only Adam, lonesome Adam, he just silently looked at the meager sum he’d managed to scrape together.
$12.38.
He would not beg at the booth. He had very little of anything except for some damned dignity, and he couldn’t bring himself to hand that through the driver’s side window.
It would have to be another day.
He didn’t get angry. There was no one to get angry at. He just allowed himself a brief moment of leaning his temple against the driver’s side window, and then he pulled out of line and backed onto the shoulder to turn around.
As he did, his attention was drawn to the vehicles still in line. Two of the cars were exactly what Adam might imagine: a minivan with a young family in it, a sedan with a laughing college-aged couple in it. But the third car was not quite right. It was a rental car — he could see the bar code sticker stuck in the corner of the windshield. Perhaps that was not strange; a tourist might fly in and visit the park. But on the dashboard was a device Adam was very familiar with: an electromagnetic frequency reader. Another device sat next to it, although he wasn’t sure what that one was. A geophone, maybe.
The sort of tools Gansey and the others had used for hunting for the ley line. The sort they’d used to find Cabeswater.
Then he blinked, and the dashboard of the car was empty. Had always been empty. It was just a rental car with a bored family in it. A month ago, Adam wouldn’t have understood why he was seeing things that weren’t real. But now he knew Cabeswater better, and he understood that what he had just seen was real — just real in a different place, or a different time.
Someone else had come to Henrietta looking for the ley line.
Mapey neat downer,” Blue said, “to see how far it goes.”
“How far what goes?” Gansey demanded. He replayed her words, but they remained nonsense. “Lynch, turn that down.”
It had been several days since their trip into the cave of ravens and now they were on the way to the airport to pick up Dr. Roger Malory, international ley line expert and aged mentor of Gansey’s. Ronan lounged in the passenger seat. Adam keeled against a window in the back, his mouth parted in the unaware sleep of the exhausted. Blue sat behind Gansey, clutching his headrest in an effort to be heard.
“This car,” she despaired.
Gansey knew his reliable and enormous Suburban would have been a more logical choice for the trip, but he wanted the old Camaro to be the first thing the professor saw, not the expensive new SUV. The Camaro was shorthand for the person he had become, and he wanted, more than anything, for Malory to feel that person had been worth the trip. The professor did not fly, but he had flown three thousand miles for him. Gansey couldn’t fathom how to repay such a kindness, especially considering the circumstances under which he had left England.