The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(17)

“Oh God,” Gansey said, but he was laughing. “Do we have to endure that here, too? Ronan! ”

“It wasn’t me,” Ronan said. He looked to Blue, who shrugged. He caught Adam’s eye. When Adam’s mouth quirked, Ronan’s expression stilled for a moment before turning to the loose smile he ordinarily reserved for Matthew’s silliness. Adam felt a surge of both accomplishment and nerves. He skated an edge here. Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These weren’t forces to play with.

The Orphan Girl abruptly fell silent. Adam thought, at first, that she was somehow picking up on his mood. But no: They had reached the rose glen.

Aurora Lynch lived in a clearing bounded on three sides by lush and fruitful roses growing on bushes, vines and trees. Blossoms carpeted the ground and cascaded over the fourth side – a sheer rock ledge built into the mountain. The air was shot through with sun, like light seen through water, and suspended petals floated as if swimming. Everything was blushed pink or tender white or beaming yellow.

All of Cabeswater was a dream, but the rose glen was a dream even within it.

“Maybe the girl will give Aurora company,” Gansey said, watching the last of his fish swim from the clearing.

“I don’t think you can just give someone a child and expect them to be thrilled,” Blue retorted. “She’s not a cat.”

Gansey opened his mouth, and Adam could see that a borderline offensive comment was queuing up. He caught Gansey’s eye. Gansey closed his mouth. The moment passed.

Gansey wasn’t entirely wrong, though. Aurora had been created to love, and love she did, in a fashion specific to the object of her affection. So she hugged her youngest son, Matthew, and she asked Gansey about famous people in history, and she brought Blue strange flowers she found during her walks, and she let Ronan show her what he had dreamt or made in the week before. With Adam, though, she would ask things like, “How do you know that you see the colour yellow like I do?” And she would listen attentively as he reasoned it out. He would sometimes try to get her to reason it out herself, but she didn’t care so much for thinking, just hearing other people being happy to think.

So they already knew that she would love the Orphan Girl. Whether or not it was right to give Aurora someone else to love was another question entirely.

“Mom, are you here?” Ronan’s voice was different when he spoke to either his mother or Matthew. It was Ronan, unperformed.

No. Ronan, unprotected.

This tone reminded Adam of that unshielded smile from before. Don’t play, he told himself. This is not a game.

But it didn’t feel like a game, if he was being honest. Adrenaline whispered in his heart.

Aurora Lynch appeared.

She did not step out of the living area, nor from the path they had used. Instead, she emerged from the wall of roses cascading over the rock. It was impossible for a woman to step through rock and rose, but she did it anyway. Her golden hair hung in a sheet around her head, caught through with rosebuds and braided with pearls. For a brief moment, she was at once the roses and a woman, and then she was fully Aurora. Cabeswater behaved differently for Aurora Lynch than it did for the rest of them; they were human, after all, and she was a dream thing. They vacationed here. Aurora belonged.

“Ronan,” Aurora said, genuinely happy, as she was always genuinely happy. “Where’s my Matthew?”

“Lacrosse or some shit,” Ronan replied. “Something sweaty.”

“And how about Declan?” Aurora asked.

There was a pause, just a breath too long.

“Working,” Ronan lied.

Everyone in the rose glen looked at Ronan.

“Oh well. He’s always been so diligent,” Aurora said. She waved at Adam, Blue and Gansey. Adam, Blue, and Gansey waved back. “Have you found that king yet, Gansey?”

“No,” replied Gansey.

“Oh well,” Aurora said again. She hugged Ronan’s neck, pressing her pale cheek to his pale cheek, as if he was holding an armful of groceries instead of a strange little girl. “What have you brought me this time?”

Ronan put the girl down without ceremony. She folded up against his legs, all sweater, and wailed in faintly accented English, “I want to go!”

“And I want to feel my right arm again,” Ronan snapped.

“Amabo te, Greywaren!” she said. Please, Greywaren.

“Oh, stand up.” He took her hand and she stood, rail-rod straight beside him, her brown dainty hooves splayed.

Aurora knelt so that she was on eye level with the Orphan Girl. “How beautiful you are!”

The girl didn’t look at Aurora. She didn’t move at all.

“Here’s a lovely flower the colour of your eyes – would you like to hold it?” Aurora offered a rose in her palm. It was indeed the colour of the girl’s eyes – a dull, stormy blue. Roses did not occur in that colour, but they did now.

The girl did not so much as turn her head in the direction of the rose. Instead, her eyes were fixed upon some point just past Adam’s head, her expression blank or bored. Adam felt a prickle of recognition. There was no petulance or anger in the girl’s expression. She was not tantrumming.

Adam had been there, crouched beside the kitchen cabinets, looking at the light fixture across the room, his father spitting in his ear. He recognized this sort of fear when he saw it.