Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.

“My name is that of all women,” the woman replied. “Sorrow.”

strangely enough, Ronan knew a great deal about how Adam worked. It was possible Adam had always been aware of this but had preferred to consider himself — particularly the more unsightly parts of himself — impenetrable.

This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father’s world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn’t known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him.

When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.

I know you are not the same as him, Adam said. But in my head, everything is always so tangled. I am such a damaged thing.

Now that he stood directly beside Adam, not looking at him, Adam could see that he was a little out of breath. Ronan, behind him, was as well. They had run. For him.

Now he could see that it wasn’t charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth.

Blue exchanged a look with Adam. “I don’t believe in raw evil.” Noah said, “It doesn’t care if you believe in it.”

He had not known to be born afraid, but he’d learned. Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all

of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.

I was here. I exist. I’m alive, because I bleed.

“You’ll never be a king,” Gwenllian said. “Don’t you know how war works?”

Ronan and Adam may have seen this place as magical, but Gansey and Blue’s wonder made it holy. It became a cathedral of bones.