The attic was a charged location, having been occupied first by Neeve and then by Gwenllian, two people difficult in different ways. Gansey would not have regarded either of them as possible paths forward, but Noah had led him there, and so Gansey hesitated there with his hand over the knob. He did not want to knock; he would wake the rest of the house.
Noah pushed on the door.
It fell open lightly – it had not been latched – and Noah proceeded up the stairs. Wan light came from the top of them, accompanied by a biting chill scented with oak. It felt like a window was open.
Gansey followed Noah.
A window was open.
Gwenllian had turned the room to witchy clutter, and it was currently full of every strange thing but herself. Her bed was empty. Cold night air came through a round porthole window.
By the time Gansey had climbed through it, Noah had vanished.
“Hello, little king,” Gwenllian greeted. She was far out on one of the house’s small, mismatched roof angles, boots braced against the shingles, a dark and strange silhouette in the ambient and flickering light of the haunted streetlights below. There was nonetheless something noble about her, a brave and arrogant tilt to her chin. She patted the roof beside her.
“Is it safe?”
She cocked her head. “Is this how you die?”
He joined her, picking his way carefully, dirt and tree litter crumbling beneath his shoes, and then sat beside her. From this vantage point, there were trees and more trees. The oaks that were merely featureless trunks at ground level were complicated worlds of ascending branches at roof level, the patterns of them made more complex by the shadows thrown by the orange glow below.
“Hi ho hi ho,” Gwenllian sang in a low, disdainful voice. “Are you coming to me for wisdom?”
Gansey shook his head. “Courage.”
She appraised him.
“You tried to stop your father’s war,” Gansey said. “By stabbing his poet at the dinner table. You had to be almost certain it wouldn’t end well for you. How did you do it?”
Her act of bravery had happened hundreds of years before. Glendower had not been fighting on Welsh soil for centuries now, and the man Gwenllian had tried to kill had been dead for generations. She’d been trying to save a family that now no longer existed; she’d lost everything to sit upon this roof of 300 Fox Way in a different world entirely.
“Haven’t you learned yet? A king acts so that others will act. Nothing comes from nothing comes from nothing. But something makes something.” She drew in the air with her long fingers, but Gansey did not think that she was drawing anything intended for a gaze other than her own. “I am Gwenllian Glen Dŵr, and I am the daughter of a king and the daughter of a tree-light, and I did something so that others would do something. That is kingly.”
“But how?” Gansey asked. “How did you manage it?”
She pretended to stab him in the ribs. Then, when he looked at her ruefully, she laughed wildly and freely. After she had been merry for a full minute, she said, “I stopped asking how. I just did it. The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.”
She did not say anything more, and he did not ask anything more. They sat there beside each other on the roof, she dancing her fingers through the air, he watching the lights of Henrietta dance similarly in time to some hidden and sputtering ley line.
Finally, he said, “Would you take my hand?”
Her fingers stopped moving, and she looked at him cannily, holding his gaze for a long minute, as if daring him to look away or change his mind. He did not.
Gwenllian leaned close, smelling of clove cigarettes and coffee, and much to his great surprise, kissed his cheek.
“Godspeed, King,” she said, and took his hand.
In the end, it was such a simple, small thing. He had felt flashes of it before in his life, the absolute certainty. But the truth was that he’d kept walking away from it. It was a far more terrifying idea to imagine how much control he really had over how his life turned out. Easier to believe that he was a gallant ship tossed by fate than to captain it himself.
He would steer it now, and if there were rocks near shore, so be it.
“Tell me where Owen Glendower is,” he said to the darkness. Crisp and sure, with the same power he had used to command Noah, to command the skeletons in the cave. “Show me where the Raven King is.”
The night began to wail.
The sound came from everywhere – a wild scream. A primal scream. A battle cry.
It got louder and louder, and Gansey clambered to his feet, his hands half-held over his ears. Gwenllian shouted something in delight and fervour, but the sound drowned out her voice. It drowned out the rattle of the remaining dry oak leaves in the trees, and it drowned out the sound of Gansey’s shoes scuffing on the roof as he minced towards the edge for a better vantage point. The sound drowned out the lights, and the street was plunged into blackness. The scream drowned out everything, and when the sound stopped and the lights returned, a dull white-horned beast stood askance in the middle of the street down below, hooves splayed on the asphalt.
Somewhere there was the ordinary world, a world of stoplights and shopping malls, of fluorescent lights at gas stations and light blue carpet in a suburban home. But here, now: There was only the moment before the scream and the moment after.
Gansey’s ears rang.
The creature lifted its head to look at him with brilliant eyes. It was the sort of animal that everyone thought they knew the name of until they saw it, and then the name ran away and left behind only the feeling of seeing it. It was older than anything, more lovely than anything, more terrible than anything.