He said, “I can do it better with Cabeswater. With Orphan Girl, too. But —”
He stopped. He looked at the ground.
“Ask me,” he said. “Just do it. Just —”
“Ask you what?”
Ronan didn’t reply, just looked at the ground. The green air moved all around him, tinting his pale skin, and the trees curved black and real around him, everything in this place looking like his dreams, or everything in his dreams looking like this place.
Adam pressed his lips together, and then he asked, “Did you dream Cabeswater?”
Ronan’s blue eyes flicked up to Adam.
It was 6:21.
“When?” Adam asked. “When did you know that you dreamt Cabeswater? Right away?”
They faced each other at the top of the slanted rock face, that clear pool far down below. Adam’s heart was racing with either adrenaline or with sheer proximity to the ley line.
“Always,” said Ronan.
It should not have changed the way he saw Ronan. The dreaming had always been impressive, unusual, a god-glitch, a trick of the ley line that allowed a young man to make his thoughts into concrete objects. Magic, but a reasonable magic. But this – to not only dream an entire forest into being, but to create a dreamspace outside of one’s own head. Adam stood in Ronan’s dreams; that was what this realization meant.
Ronan corrected himself. “Sort of always. Just – the moment we got here, I recognized it. My handwriting on that rock. I guess I knew right away. It just took me longer to believe it.”
Every one of Adam’s memories of those early forays into the forest were slowly shifting inside him. Pieces falling into place. “That’s why it calls you the Greywaren. That’s why you’re different to it.”
Ronan shrugged, but it was a shrug from caring too much instead of too little.
“That’s why its Latin grammar is terrible. It’s your grammar.”
Ronan shrugged again. Questions cascaded through Adam, too difficult to say aloud. Was Ronan even human? Half a dreamer, half a dream, maker of ravens and hoofed girls and entire lands. No wonder his Aglionby uniform had choked him, no wonder his father had sworn him to secrecy, no wonder he could not make himself focus on classes. Adam had realized this before, but now he realized it again, more fully, larger, the ridiculousness of Ronan Lynch in a classroom for aspiring politicians.
Adam felt a little hysterical. “That’s why it speaks Latin at all, and not Portuguese, or Welsh. Oh, God. Did I —”
He had made a bargain with this forest. When he fell asleep and Cabeswater was in his thoughts, tangled through his dreams, was that Ronan —
“No,” Ronan said, fast, his tone unschooled. “No, I didn’t invent it. I asked the trees after I figured it out, why the hell – how the hell this happened. Cabeswater existed, somehow, before me. I just dreamt it. I mean, I made it look this way. I chose these trees and this language and all that shit for it, without knowing. Wherever it was on the ley line before, it got destroyed, and then it didn’t have a body, a shape – when I dreamt it, I brought it back into physical form, that’s all. What did they call it? Manifested it. I just manifested it from whatever other fucking plane it was on. It’s not me.”
Adam’s thoughts spun in the mud; he made no progress.
“Cabeswater isn’t me,” Ronan repeated. “You’re still just you.”
It was one thing to say it and another thing to see Ronan Lynch standing among the trees he had dreamt into being, looking of a piece with them because he was of a piece with them. Magician – no wonder Ronan was all right with Adam being uncanny. No wonder he needed him to be.
“I don’t know why the fuck I told you,” Ronan said. “I should’ve lied.”
“Just give me a second with it, will you?” Adam asked.
“Whatever.”
“You can’t be pissed off because I’m thinking this through.”
“I said whatever.”
“How long did it take you to believe it?” Adam demanded.
“I’m still trying,” Ronan replied.
“Then you can’t —” Adam broke off. He suddenly felt as if he had been dropped from a height. It was the same sensation as when he had known Ronan was dreaming something big. He just had time to wonder if it had truly been the ley line or merely the shock of Ronan’s revelation when it happened again. This time, the light around them sagged in time with it.
Ronan’s expression had sharpened.
“The ley line …” Adam began and then broke off, uncertain of how to finish this thought. “Something is happening to the ley line. It feels like when you’re dreaming something big.”
Ronan spread his arms out, meaning clear. It’s not me. “What do you wanna do?”
“I don’t know if we should stay here while it’s like this,” Adam said. “I definitely don’t think we should try to make it to the rose glen. Let’s call her just a few more times.”
Ronan eyed Adam, assessing his status. Correctly seeing that Adam was feeling like he needed to kneel in his apartment with his hands over his head and think about what he had just learned. He said, “How about just once more?”
Together they shouted: “Orphan Girl!”
Intention sliced through their shared words, sharper than the gloom.
The forest listened.
The Orphan Girl appeared, her skullcap pulled low over her enormous eyes, sweater even mankier than before. She could not help but be off-putting in this gray-green wood, not arriving like she did, skittering between dark trees. She looked like she belonged in the vintage photographs Adam had seen in the Barns, a lost immigrant child from a destroyed country.