And he began to cry.
Beside Blue and Henry, Adam was dry-cheeked and dead-eyed, but the Orphan Girl hugged his arm as if comforting a weeper as he stared off into nothingness. His watch twitched the same minute over and over.
Blue had stopped crying. She’d used up all her tears beforehand.
The sounds of Henrietta made their way to them; an ambulance or a fire truck was wailing somewhere. Engines were revving. A loudspeaker was going. In a tree close by, little birds were singing. The cows were starting to move down the field towards them, curious about how long they’d been parked there.
“I don’t really know what to do,” Henry confessed. “This isn’t how I thought it would end. I thought we were all going to Venezuela.”
He was wry and pragmatic, and Blue saw that this was the only way he could cope with the fact of Richard Gansey’s dead body lying in the grass.
“I can’t think about that,” Blue said truthfully. She couldn’t really think about anything. Everything had come to an end at once. Every bit of her future was now unwritten for the first time in her life. Were they supposed to call 911? Practical concerns of dead true loves stretched out in front of her and she found she couldn’t focus on any of them clearly. “I can’t really … think at all. It’s like I have a lampshade over my head. I keep waiting for – I don’t know.”
Adam suddenly sat down. He said nothing at all, but he covered his face with his hands.
Henry sucked in a very uneven breath. “We should get the cars out of the road,” he said. “Now that things are not bleeding, traffic will …” He stopped himself. “This isn’t right.”
Blue shook her head.
“I just don’t understand,” Henry said. “I was so sure that this was going to … change everything. I didn’t think it would end like this.”
“I always knew it was going to end like this,” she said, “but it still doesn’t feel right. Would this ever feel right?”
Henry shifted from foot to foot, looking for other cars, making no move towards their cars despite his earlier care about traffic. He looked at his watch – like Adam’s, it was still restlessly trying out the same few minutes, though not as violently as before – and repeated, “I just don’t understand. What is the point of magic, if not for this?”
“For what?”
Henry stretched a hand over Gansey’s body. “For him to be dead. You said you were Gansey’s magicians. Do something.”
“I’m not a magician.”
“You just killed him with your mouth.” Henry pointed at Ronan. “That one just dreamed that pile of shit beside the car! That one saved his own life at the school when things fell from a roof!”
Adam’s attention focused sharply at this. Grief sharpened his tone to a knife’s edge. “That’s different.”
“Different how! It breaks the rules, too!”
“Because it is one thing to break the rules of physics with magic,” Adam snapped. “It’s a different thing to bring someone back from the dead.”
But Henry was relentless. “Why? He’s already come back once.”
It was impossible to argue with that. Blue said, “That required a sacrifice, though. Noah’s death.”
Henry said, “So find another sacrifice.”
Adam growled, “Are you offering?”
Blue understood his anger, though. Any degree of hope was impossible to bear in this situation.
There was silence. Henry looked down the road again. Finally, he said, “Be magicians.”
“Shut up,” Ronan suddenly snapped. “Shut up! I can’t take it. Just leave it.”
Henry actually stepped back a step, so fierce was Ronan’s grief. They all fell silent. Blue couldn’t stop looking at the time twitching away on Henry’s watch. It was becoming ever less frantic the further they got from the kiss, and Blue couldn’t help but dread when time returned entirely to normal. It felt like Gansey would really, truly be dead when it did.
The minute hand quivered. It quivered again.
Blue was already tired of a timeline without Gansey in it.
Adam looked up from where he was folded in the grass. His voice was small. “What about Cabeswater?”
“What about it?” Ronan asked. “It’s not powerful enough to do anything any more.”
“I know,” Adam replied. “But if you asked – it might die for him.”
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Cabeswater.
Cabeswater was not a forest. Cabeswater was a thing that happened to look like a forest right now. This was a peculiar magic that meant that it was always very old and very young at once. It had always been and yet it was always learning itself. It was always alive and waiting to be alive again.
It had never died on purpose before.
But it had never been asked.
Please, the Greywaren said. Amabo te.
It was not possible. Not like he thought. A life for a life was a good sacrifice, a brilliant base for a fantastic and peculiar magic, but Cabeswater was not quite mortal, and the boy the humans wanted to save was. It was not as simple as Cabeswater dying and him rising. If it was going to be anything at all, it would have to be about Cabeswater making some essential part of itself human-shaped, and even Cabeswater wasn’t certain if that was possible.
The magician-boy’s mind moved through Cabeswater’s tattered thoughts, trying to understand what was possible, projecting images of his own to help Cabeswater understand the goal of resurrection. He did not realize that it was a much harder concept for him to grasp than Cabeswater; Cabeswater was always dying and rising again; when all times were the same, resurrection was merely a matter of moving consciousness from one minute to another. Living for ever was not difficult for Cabeswater to imagine; reanimating a human body with a finite timeline was.