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

by Maggie Stiefvater

Gansey said, “That was impressive, Jane.”

Although Ronan wasn’t smiling and Adam didn’t know some of the vocabulary, Adam was certain it was a dirty joke. For a moment, he watched Ronan and tried to imagine that he was a teacher instead of a Ronan. It was impossible. Adam couldn’t decide if it was how he’d shoved up his sleeves or the apocalyptic way he had tied his tie.

He crossed his arms, tilted his chin back, closed his eyes. Instant insolence. This was the version of himself he prepared for Aglionby, for his older brother, Declan, and sometimes, for Gansey. Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.

He stepped into the classroom, shoulders square, and for just a second, it was like he was a stranger again — once more that lofty, unknowable Virginia princeling.

Then Gansey sat down in the seat in front of Adam with a sigh. He turned around. “Jesus Christ, I haven’t slept a second.” He remembered his manners and extended his fist. As Adam bumped knuckles with him, he felt an extraordinary rush of relief, of fondness. “Ronan, feet down.” Ronan put his feet down.

He said it in the most offhanded way, like it was nothing to have thrown on a new belt, but once upon a not-very-long time ago, Richard Gansey III had only one automotive skill: calling a tow truck. Adam said, “You were smart to figure it out.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Gansey replied, but it was clear he was proud. Adam felt like he had helped a bird hatch from an egg. Thank God we’re not fighting thank God we’re not fighting thank God we’re not fighting how can I keep it from happening again—

The boys had entered without knocking, familiarly, and now Gansey eased his messenger bag to the old buckled floorboards and stood in the doorway to the living room.

Gansey didn’t so much visit as get absorbed. He loved it. He wanted to be a part of this world, even though he understood there were endless reasons why he could never be. Blue was the natural result of a home like this: confident, strange, credulous, curious. And here he was: neurotic, rarified, the product of something else entirely.

The spider dies, the web twitches, suddenly your accounts are wiped clean, your younger brother becomes an amputee, your older brother dies behind the wheel of a car in D.C., Mrs. Gansey’s campaign immolates over faked scandalous photos, Adam’s scholarship vanishes, Blue loses an eye —” “Stop,” Gansey said. He thought he might throw up. “Jesus, please stop.” “I just want Ronan to understand that he cannot do anything stupid,” the Gray Man said. “To kill Greenmantle is to end your lives as you know it. And what good will revenge do you?”

“Want this?” Blue asked Gansey. She tipped the yogurt container to him so he could see that all that was left was the fruit in the bottom. He didn’t nod, but she brought it to him anyway, giving him her spoon. It had a grounding effect — the shocking slime of the blueberries, the sugar hitting his stomach, empty from school, the knowledge that her mouth had been the last thing to touch the spoon.

“Everyone says, Just find Glendower,” Gansey said suddenly, “but all around me the cave walls are crumbling.” It was not the cave walls that crumbled. Now that Adam had heard Gansey’s anxiety in the cave, he was acutely attuned to its reappearance now.

Everything had begun ugly for Adam, but he knew what Gansey meant. His noble and oblivious and optimistic friend was slowly opening his eyes and seeing the world for what it was, and it was filthy, and violent, and profane, and unfair. Adam had always thought that was what he wanted — for Gansey to know. But now he wasn’t sure. Gansey wasn’t like anyone else, and suddenly Adam wasn’t sure that he really wanted him to be.

Soon this school year, too, would be behind him. Soon they would find Glendower, soon they would all be kings. Soon, soon.

She was thinking about Gansey and the Gray Man, Maura and the cave of ravens.

“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.”

But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another.

Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now tha...

Blue barreled right into Gansey, who had stepped inside the front hall. For a moment she smelled mint, felt the solidness of his chest, and then she wheeled back. Gansey untangled his watch from Blue’s crochet jacket.

Gansey was too gracious to inquire after the source of the argument. “Get me out of here,” Blue said.

After he got into the car, she realized he was wearing his Aglionby uniform, shoulders spattered with rain, just as his spirit had been when she saw it on the ley line. He could have died in that field and she would have been warned. But she hadn’t even thought about it until afterward. It was so impossible to live life backward.

Later, Adam walked out through the cool, damp night to his small, shitty car. As he sank into the driver’s seat, he found something already sitting on the seat.

He retrieved the object and held it up under the feeble interior cab light. It was a small white plastic container. Adam twisted off the lid. Inside was a colorless lotion that smelled of mist and moss. Replacing the lid with a frown, he turned the container over, looking for more identifying features. On the bottom, Ronan’s handwriting labeled it merely: manibus. For your hands.

He could not decide if he was tired, or tired of waiting. He wondered where Ronan had gone. He did not call Blue.

Noah grinned. He said, “Piss up a rope.” They both laughed uproariously at Ronan’s words coming out of Noah’s mouth.

“I think … Cabeswater wanted to be awake,” Noah said. “It knew I wouldn’t do what needed to be done, and you would.” “It couldn’t know that.” Noah shook his head again. “It’s easy to know a lot of things when time goes around instead of straight.”

“When we find Glendower, I’m asking him to fix you. As the favor.”

Because it was Noah and no one else, Gansey could admit, “I don’t know what I’ll do if I find him, Noah. I don’t know what I’ll be if I’m not looking for him. I don’t know the first thing about how to be that person again.” Noah put the clay in Gansey’s hands. “That’s exactly how I feel about the idea of being alive again.”

“Well, I think your job is to wake up one of them, and I think it’s Maura’s job to not wake up another one.” “That’s only two jobs and three sleepers.”

“Every May, we hold a vigil and we see the spirits of people who are going to die within a year. We ask their names, and if they’re clients, we let the living people know we saw their spirits so they can get their things in order. This is the list of names.” “Are you all right?” “Oh, yeah, I just have, this, eyelid in my eye or something,” Blue said, wiping her right eye. “What’s that face for?” “The ethical and spiritual ramifications dazzle.”

“She was born in West Virginia. The church watch only seems to show us people who were born in the area.” Or, in the case of Richard Gansey III: reborn.

Mr. Gray had gone still. Voice careful, he said, “Gansey?” The very last name on the last of the pages. She just chewed on her lower lip. “Does he know?” She shook her head, just a little. “Do you know how long?” She shook her head again. His eyes were heavy on her, and then he just sighed and nodded, the solidarity of being the one left behind, the one not on the list. Finally, he said, “A lot of promises get broken, Blue.”

Gansey was not sleeping. Because Blue had no cell phone, there was no way for him to break the rules and call her. Instead, he had begun to instead lie in his bed each night, eyes closed, hand resting on his phone, waiting to see if she was going to call him from the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room at her house.

Stop it, he told himself. Stop wanting it —

“You’re still not Congress, I see.” He was wide-awake.

“What do you know about the blue-winged teal?”

“Jane. Did you know that the blue-winged teal has to eat one hundred grams of protein to replace the sixty grams of body and tail feathers shed at this time?” “I didn’t.” “That’s about thirty-one thousand invertebrates they have to eat.” “Are you reading off notes?” “No.” Gansey closed his journal.

There was another pause, and Gansey realized she’d hung up. He leaned back against the fridge, eyes closed, guilty, comforted, wild, contained. In twenty-four hours, he’d be waiting for this again. You know better you know better you know better

“Hey, I heard this great song,” he said. Gansey tried to tune out the sound of a raven horking down a hot dog. “Want a listen?” Gansey and Ronan rarely agreed on music, but Gansey shrugged an agreement. Removing his headphones from his neck, Ronan placed them on Gansey’s ears — they smelled a little dusty and birdy from proximity to Chainsaw. Sound came through the headphones: “Squash one, squash tw —” Gansey tore them off as Ronan dissolved into manic laughter, which Chainsaw echoed, flapping her wings, both of them terrible and amused. “You bastard,” Gansey said savagely. “You bastard. You betrayed my trust.”

collecting his phone and his journal, and then he went back to bed. The guilt and the worry had already worn off by the time his head hit the pillow, and all that was left was the happiness.

“I’ve dreamt him a box of EpiPens. I dream cures for stings all the time. I carry one. I put them in the Pig. I have them all over Monmouth.” Adam felt a ferocious and cruel hope. “Do they work?” “I don’t know. And there’s no way to find out before it actually happens. There won’t be a rematch.”

Ronan said, “Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.” Adam didn’t understand. “I dreamt him, Adam!” Ronan was angry — every one of his emotions that wasn’t happiness was anger. “That means that when — if something happens to me, he becomes just like them. Just like Mom.”

Declan’s eternal position as an outsider, neither a dreamer nor a dream. Only half of Ronan’s surviving family was real.

Declan had left for college in D.C., but he still made the four-hour drive each Sunday to attend church with his brothers, a gesture so extravagant that even Ronan seemed forced to admit that it was kindness.

Ronan laughed suddenly. That sound, as crooked and joyful and terrible as the dream in his hand, should have woken these cattle if nothing else did. “I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”

It was quite late when Blue called that night,

“Gansey?” Blue asked. Something anxious in him stilled. “Tell me a story,” she said. “About the ley line.”

“What was Poland like?” “Prettier than you’re thinking. So pretty.” She paused. “I’d like to go, one day.” He didn’t give himself time to doubt the wisdom of saying it out loud before he replied,

“I know how to get there, if you want company.” After a long pause, Blue said, in a different voice, “I’m going to go sing myself to sleep. See you tomorrow. If you want company.”

The phone went quiet. It was never enough, but it was something. Ga...

There was nothing inherently guilty about the moment except that Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known.