Cabeswater did its best to show him the reality of this, though nuance was difficult with the ley line as worn down as it was. What little communication they could muster was only possible because the psychic’s daughter was there with him, as she had always been there in some form, amplifying both Cabeswater and the magician.
What Cabeswater was trying to make them understand was that Cabeswater was about creation. Making. Building. It could not unmake itself for this sacrifice, because it was against its nature. It could not quite die to bring a human back just as before. It would have been easier to make a copy of the human who had just died, but they did not want a copy. They wanted the one they had just lost. It was impossible to bring him back unchanged; this body of his was irreversibly dead.
But it might be able to refashion him into something new.
It just had to remember what humans were like.
Images flashed from Cabeswater to the magician, and he whispered them to the psychic’s daughter. She began to direct her mirror-magic at the trees that remained in Cabeswater, and she whispered please as she did, and the tir e e’lintes recognized her as one of theirs.
Then Cabeswater began to work.
Humans were such tricky and complicated things.
As it began to spin life and being out of its dreamstuff, the remaining trees began to hum and sing together. Once upon a time, their songs had sounded different, but in this time, they sang the songs the Greywaren had given to them. It was a wailing, ascending tune, full of both misery and joy at once. And as Cabeswater distilled its magic, these trees began to fall, one by one.
The psychic’s daughter’s sadness burst through the forest, and Cabeswater accepted that, too, and put it into the life it was building.
Another tree fell, and another, and Cabeswater kept returning again and again to the humans who had made the request. It had to remember what they felt like. It had to remember to make itself small enough.
As the forest diminished, the Greywaren’s despair and wonder surged through Cabeswater. The trees sang soothingly back to him, a song of possibility and power and dreams, and then Cabeswater collected his wonder and put it into the life it was building.
And finally, the magician’s wistful regret twisted through what remained of the trees. Without this, what was he? Simply human, human, human. Cabeswater pressed leaves against his cheek one last time, and then they took that humanity for the life it was building.
It was nearly human-shaped. It would fit well enough. Nothing was ever perfect.
Make way for the Raven King.
The last tree fell, and the forest was gone, and everything was absolutely silent.
Blue touched Gansey’s face. She whispered, “Wake up.”
June evenings in Singer’s Falls were beautiful things. Lush and dark, the world painted in complicated greens. Trees: everywhere trees. Adam drove the winding road back to Henrietta in a slick little BMW that smelled of Ronan. The radio was playing Ronan’s terrible techno, but Adam didn’t turn it off. The world felt enormous.
He was going back to the trailer park.
It was time.
It was a thirty-minute drive from the Barns to the trailer park, so he had plenty of time to change his mind, to go back to St. Agnes or Monmouth Manufacturing instead.
But he drove past Henrietta to the trailer park, and then he drove down the long, bumpy drive to the trailers, his tyres kicking up a disintegrating thunderhead of dust behind him. Dogs leapt out to chase the car, vanishing by the time he arrived in front of his old home.
He didn’t have to ask if he was really doing this.
He was here, wasn’t he?
Adam climbed the rickety stairs. These stairs, once painted, now peeled and cracked, drilled with the perfectly round tracks of carpenter bees, weren’t very different from the stairs up to his apartment above St. Agnes. Just fewer of them here.
At the top of the stairs, he studied the door, trying to decide if he should knock or not. It had not been that many months since he had lived here, coming and going without announcement, but it felt like it had been years. He felt taller than he had been when he had been here last, too, although he surely couldn’t have grown that much since the summer before.
This was not his real home any more, so he knocked.
He waited, hands in the pockets of his pressed khaki slacks, looking at the clean toes of his shoes and then up again at the dusty door.
The door opened, and his father stood there, eye to eye with him. Adam felt a little more kindly to the past version of himself, the one who had been afraid of turning out like this man. Because although Robert Parrish and Adam Parrish didn’t look alike at first glance, there was something introverted and turned-inward about Robert Parrish’s gaze that reminded Adam of himself. Something about the knit of the eyebrows was similar, too; the shape of the furrow between them was precisely the shape of the continued difference between what life was supposed to be and what life was actually like.
Adam was not Robert, but he could have been, and he forgave that past Adam for being afraid of the possibility.
Robert Parrish stared at his son. Just behind him, in the dim room, Adam saw his mother, who was looking past Adam to the BMW.
“Invite me in,” Adam said.
His father lingered, one nostril flaring, but he retreated back into the house. He turned a hand in a sort of mocking invitation, a gesture of pretend fealty to a false king.
Adam stepped in. He had forgotten how compressed their lives were here. He had forgotten how the kitchen was the same as the living room was the same as the master bedroom, and on the other side of the main room, Adam’s tiny bedroom. He could not blame them for resentfully carving out that space; there was no other place to be in this house that was not looking at each other. He had forgotten how claustrophobia had driven him outside as much as fear.