He realized that the tunnel was no longer quiet. Instead, a sound had begun to form in the distance: an intensely familiar note.
Swarm.
This was not a single insect travelling down the hall. Not RoboBee. This was the oscillating wail of hundreds of bodies bouncing off the walls as they approached.
And even though it was dark in the tunnel, Gansey could feel the blackness that had bled out of that Cabeswater tree.
Gansey could see the entire story spread out in his head: how he had been saved from a death by stinging a little over seven years before, as Noah died. And now, as Noah’s spirit decayed, Gansey would die by stinging again. Perhaps there had never been a purpose to all this except to return to the status quo.
The hum came closer. Now the gaps in the buzzing were punctuated by nearly inaudible taps, insects ricocheting through the dark towards him.
He remembered what Henry had said when he put the bee in Gansey’s hand. He’d told him not to think of it as something that could kill him, but rather as something that might be beautiful.
He could do that. He thought he could do that.
Something beautiful, he told himself. Something noble.
The buzzing hummed-struck-hummed against the walls close to him. It was hideously loud.
They were here.
“Something that won’t hurt me,” he said out loud.
His vision went red and then black.
Red, then black.
Then just black.
“Leaves,” Ronan Lynch’s voice said, full of intention.
“Dust,” Adam Parrish said.
“Wind,” Blue Sargent said.
“Shit,” Henry Cheng added.
Light striped across Gansey and away, red and then black again. A torch.
In the first sweep of the light, Gansey thought the walls were trembling with hornets, but in the second, he saw that they were only leaves and dust and a breeze that sent them all scuttling down the tunnel. And in this new light, Gansey saw his friends shivering in the tunnel where the leaves had been.
“You dumb shit,” said Ronan. His shirt was very grubby, and the side of his face had dried blood on it, although it was impossible to tell if it was his own.
Gansey couldn’t immediately find his voice, and when he did, he said, “I thought you were staying behind.”
“Yeah, me too,” Henry said. “Then I thought, I can’t let Gansey Three wander around in the mysterious pit alone. We have such few old treasures left; it would be so careless to let them get destroyed. Plus, someone had to bring the rest of your court.”
“Why would you go alone?” Blue asked. She flung her arms around him, and he felt her trembling.
“I was trying to be heroic,” Gansey said, holding her tight. She was real. They were all real. They’d all come here for him, in the middle of the night. The completeness of his shock told him that no part of him had really thought they would do such a thing for him. “I didn’t want you guys to hurt any more.”
Adam said, “You dumb shit.”
They laughed restlessly, uneasily, because they needed to. Gansey pressed his cheek against the top of Blue’s head. “How did you find me?”
“Ronan nearly died making something to track you,” Adam said. He pointed, and Ronan opened his hand to show a firefly nestled in his palm. The moment his fingers stopped being a cage for it, it flew to Gansey and stuck upon his sweater.
Gansey plucked it carefully from the fabric and cradled it in his own hand. He glanced up at Ronan. He didn’t say I’m sorry, but he was, and Ronan knew. Instead, he said, “Now what?”
“Tell me to ask RoboBee to find your king,” Henry replied immediately.
But Gansey had only ever been in the business of ordering magic and never in the business of ordering people. It was not the Gansey way to command anyone to do anything. They asked, and hoped. Did unto others and silently hoped that they would do unto them.
They’d come here for him. They’d come here for him.
They’d come here for him.
“Please,” Gansey said. “Please help me.”
Henry tossed the bee into the air. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Gansey wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking when he finally found it.
In the end, this was how it looked: a raven-carved stone door and a dreamt bee crawling over the ivy. The tunnel behind them had led out of a house from Gansey’s unmagical youth, not a forest from Gansey’s extraordinary present. It was nothing as he had daydreamed it might look.
It felt exactly right.
He stood before the carving, feeling time slipping around him, him motionless in the rushing pool of it.
“Do you feel it?” he asked the others. Or is it only me?
Blue said, “Come closer with the torch.”
Henry had been hanging back, a newcomer to this search, waiting politely. Instead of crowding them, he handed her the torch. Blue held it close to the stone, illuminating the fine details. Unlike the previous tomb they’d found, which was carved with a likeness of a knight, this one was carved with ravens upon ravens. Ronan had kicked in the previous tomb they had discovered, but he touched this one carefully. Adam just looked at it in a distant way, his hands clasped together as if they were cold. Gansey reached for his phone to take the usual photo to document the search, remembered his phone was dead, and then wondered if there was any point to it if this was indeed Glendower’s tomb.
No. This moment was for him, not the general public.
He put his hand on the door, flat, fingers splayed, experimental. The easy rocking of it indicated that it would open easily.
“There’s no chance this guy is evil, is there?” Henry asked. “I’m really too young to die. Really, really too young.”