Chapter Text
"It was there," Gansey said, for possibly the twentieth time. He fiddled with his electromagnetic-frequency meter, but even he could tell there was no point. An hour ago it had sparked out beyond any hope of repair, all but combusting in his hand.
"We all saw it," Adam agreed. He was still eating, sandwich in one hand, pen in the other, Gansey's notebook - the new Scotland one - open in his lap.
They had glimpsed the ruin by helicopter some five or six hours ago. A glimpse was all they got, the dark and vine-claimed skeleton of an ancient castle. It was a cloudless mid-afternoon, visibility unmatched. They had meant to fly right up to it and land outside.
That had not happened. Gansey couldn't figure out, in retrospect, exactly what had gone wrong: something about air currents, or fuel reserves, or a simple miscommunication with the pilot. They had dipped out of sight of the castle and completely failed to find it again.
After half an hour of circling, when the pilot's annoyance had threatened to boil over, Gansey had given up on air travel. He felt he had a sense of where he'd seen the castle, and sometimes these things didn't like showing more than a glimpse of themselves if you didn't approach the right way.
So they set down and set off on foot, laden with sandwiches and water bottles, instructing the helicopter to return for them when Gansey called. And then, feeling confident and adventurous and self-sufficient, they had marched off, following the whims of the electromagnetic frequency reader.
Some five hours after that, sweaty and sore-footed and utterly confused as to the location of any castles hereabouts, Gansey was beginning to feel like less of a genius.
"I don't think it wants to be found," Blue said. She'd taken her sandals off and was flexing her toes in the grass as she munched.
"Then should we leave it?" Gansey asked, surveying his splayed group of fellow adventurers, all looking tired and quiet and mildly sunburned. They could research the castle, figure out what might be out here, come back informed and prepared and with more than sandwiches for dinner.
Blue shrugged. "It doesn't seem upset about us being here. Just tricksy. Like it's trying to play hide and seek with us."
Adam polished off the last bite of his sandwich and considered the horizon. "It should be easy to walk in a straight line across a field. But between setting out and getting to the other side, I'm never exactly where I expected to be. It's redirecting us."
"But we have a compass, don't we? Ronan?"
Ronan was lying on his back, the dappled shade of the oak tree making him into a mosaic of light and shadows. He tilted the compass this way and that above his head. "It's not working," he said.
Blue shot Gansey a look, one which happened to include the very delicate, very sensitive, very useless hunk of metal and wiring on Gansey's lap.
"What about it isn't working?" Gansey asked.
Ronan tossed the compass at him. "North keeps bending."
"So what do we do?" Gansey asked, eyeing the compass. It wasn't fluctuating so much as it was vaguely floating, the directions settling down in a slightly different orientation each time he twisted it.
"The castle isn't where we think it is," Adam suggested. "Or rather, it's making us feel like the wrong direction is the right direction."
"Then what - close our eyes and do the opposite of what our intuition tells us to?"
"Sure, and walk straight off a cliff," Ronan said.
"Then what do you suggest?"
Ronan tilted his head at Gansey with a sharp smile. "We walk back to town."
"To Glenfinnan? Two hours away by helicopter?" Gansey confirmed, as Blue toed her sandals back on with humour in her eyes and Adam snapped shut the new notebook.
Not half an hour later, they crested a ridge to find a little town spread out before them like an illustration in a children’s book.
*
The thrill of this would never wear off, Blue thought, as the four of them half ran, half stumbled down the rise, toward buildings and cobblestone streets. She had never really believed that she’d be here, halfway across the world on one of Gansey’s quests. But already this felt inevitable. Just as much her quest as Gansey’s. It was a fresh start, a new beginning, far removed from the tangled danger searching for Glendower in Henrietta had become.
It had seemed like everything was coming together. The ley line was awakened and repaired, Cabeswater returned. It had gifted them an entrance that seemed certain to be the next step. Of course it was never that simple.
Half a world away, there was a cave that had almost killed them. They knew that their next steps were there, but their first few forays inside had shown that the cave was as unsafe as it was unpredictable - and it was very, very unpredictable. Somewhere in that place, where thought made reality and time didn’t work, Glendower slept, possibly steps away from the place Blue and the boys had given up searching for him.
But they had given up. If the cave wasn’t safe even for Adam and the Greywaren, it wasn’t safe for anyone. After they’d had a chance to recover from their cave-oriented ordeal, Adam had coolly explained his insight: if they were going to return, they would need a key. Anyone could enter the cave, but to bring anything out they would need the same artefact Glendower used to navigate it all in the first place. They needed to go backwards in order to go forward.
So they had returned to the realm of Gansey, research and exploration. He had risen to the occasion magnificently, summoning up a destination, an embarrassing number of contacts, and a sudden but all-encompassing enthusiasm for learning how, exactly, Glendower managed to sleep eternally in the first place. Blue wished she could switch polarity so easily: a glimpse of a castle could not sustain her, not when she knew the depth of strangeness waiting for her at home.
Gansey seemed to have no such hesitations. He was wild and determined, and his glee at finding this town was undeniably contagious. Gansey, who was leading the way into the town, hair mussed by hours of wind, his shoes muddly enough to be indistinguishable from Blue’s. As he landed on the cobblestone street he surveyed it like it was his, like he was orienting himself in a township he presided over, not a completely unknown and unexpected handful of buildings somewhere in middle-of-nowhere Scotland.
It didn’t seem like a real town - nothing in the UK had, so far. There was no sign of any cars, no power lines or neon signs. It was all cobblestone streets and thatched roofs, little shops with delightfully quirky names like Dervish and Banges. Quaint could describe Henrietta: this town could have been hidden here for the past few centuries without noticing the world changing outside it.
Gansey spun slowly on the spot, joyful and thoroughly charmed. Adam had walked a ways down the street, now standing in front of the town sign in the process of unfolding a map.
Ronan had frozen, staring down the street at an approaching pedestrian. She had flyaway grey hair, wore flowing robes in a sort of pale blue colour, and had an owl sitting on her shoulder. She made a fine pair with Ronan, in his ripped jeans and black muscle tee, Chainsaw perched on his shoulder staring down the fluffy owl. As strangely as she was dressed, the woman was the one who looked at home here: the outfit matched the narrow streets and bright shop windows filled with oddities. It all clashed with Ronan, stark and modern.
The woman ducked into a store that Blue was fairly certain she’d had no intention of visiting before Ronan caught her in his stare. It was called Honeydukes: the smell of sugar wafted out the door after her.
“Where are we?” Gansey asked as Adam walked back toward them.
“Nowhere,” he said. Gansey gave him a do tell look, and Adam elaborated: “this town isn’t on our maps.”
Gansey’s grin became several shades brighter. “And what’s nowhere called?”
“Hogsmeade.”
“ Hogsmeade, ” Ronan repeated, and he managed to sound both scathingly skeptical and rather impressed.
"Do you think this is what we saw?” Adam asked.
"No,” Gansey said, and Blue knew that the castle was impressed into his mind as well as hers after all those hours of searching. Gansey shook his head, but his grin crept back in. “But I imagine they'll know where it is."
They stared around the street. The row of shops, all leaning together, was really quite intimidating. Blue had absolutely no idea what to ask of whom, where to start. You couldn’t just walk up to someone and ask whether their town was hidden from maps, could you?
In the end their decision was quite practical. They had walked for hours in the baking sun, and a couple sandwiches had done little to assuage their hunger.
So they went into the first pub they saw - the Three Broomsticks, Blue noticed, amused. They tried to avoid each others’ sunburnt arms and sweaty knees as they piled into a booth, and five minutes later they were all drinking deliciously cooling glasses of pumpkin juice.
“Do you know of a castle somewhere around here?” Gansey asked the bartender as she passed around the drinks from her tray. They all felt much more equal to this new mystery now that they were out of the sun.
“Do you mean Hogwarts?” she answered.
Her name was Madam Rosmerta, and she was more than happy to answer their questions. Not a minute later she had pulled up a stool and sat down close to them, smiling around at them like they were going to make an excellent story later.
“You mean to say you’re not wizards?” She asked, surveying the boys. She had looked more delighted with every inquiry they failed to understand.
Gansey’s eyes were wide and excited. He had started out flushed and tumbled, and he fell further into unbridled enthusiasm every time one of Madam Rosmerta’s answers led to five more mysteries. He shook his head, bursting to ask what she meant.
Adam and Ronan were eyeing each other. Both intensely magical, neither a wizard exactly. Trying to decide if either of them would say anything.
“A wizard in what sense?” Blue asked, to save them the trouble.
“This one,” she laughed, shaking a wand from her sleeve into her hand and waving it, causing the empty drinks tray to zoom back into the kitchen.
“Ah. Well, I suppose I’m a witch then.”
The boys all turned to her as one, staring three different types of accusing at her. Gansey looked almost perplexed. Adam looked almost betrayed. Ronan looked almost amused.
Blue shrugged, fished her wand out of her backpack, and turned her glass of juice into a teacup. Gansey opened his mouth and closed it. Adam leaned back in his seat and stared. Ronan laughed, a swift, decisive laugh.
“Oh, good,” Madam Rosmerta said, smiling warmly at Blue. “I was beginning to wonder how you had all gotten past the wards. I’ll just grab you those mains, now, and stop Gus from brushing up on memory charms in the kitchen.”
She left their table, which was suddenly full of a lot of people wanting to say a lot of things.
“Blue…” Gansey said, and there was too much hidden in the way he said her name to parse out. Maybe the fact that he had used her real name was enough.
Adam was more specific. “You could do magic the whole time, and you never told us?”
“Well, it’s kind of a secret,” Blue said. “And besides, it was never relevant.”
“Tell me how this was never relevant,” Gansey said. He had collected himself into something impersonally indignant.
“It’s relevant now, and here I am showing you,” Blue said, possibly testily.
“Showing her,” Adam corrected.
“Okay, then, here you go. Hi, I’m Blue, I come from a family of psychic witches. I can’t see the future, but I can do this.” She shot sparks from the end of her wand; they almost set Adam’s hair on fire, and Ronan sniggered.
Trying to act more calmly than she felt, Blue transfigured her teacup back into a glass and took a sip.
“Did you know about this place?” Adam asked, but he was looking abashed, asking the question like a peace offering.
“I had no idea,” Blue told him truthfully. He nodded, and they were back to being a slightly complicated version of okay.
Madam Rosmerta returned, filling their table with plates. “She did right not to tell you,” she said, patting Adam on the shoulder. “The statute of secrecy is a serious thing to break.” She sat down again, leaning an elbow on the table as she settled in properly. “My question is, if only one of you is a witch, and if none of you knew about this place before stumbling into it, what do you want with Hogwarts?”
It only took a moment for Gansey to be right back in his element. “How much do you know about Welsh kings?”
“Nothing at all,” she said, conversationally, and poured herself a glass of pumpkin juice from the pillar on the table, a clear invitation for Gansey to begin.
So he did, bringing the story to life as successfully in this unexpected pub in Scotland, surrounded by magic he had never imagined, as he did at home in Virginia. He recounted Glendower’s rebellion and goals, the magic that surrounded him - his power of invisibility, the mages he was said to travel with, the prophecies of Merlin he had brought to fruition. Madam Rosmerta nodded along: this was her version of everyday history.
Gansey spoke of ley lines - recognition dawning in Madame Rosmerta’s face - and how he believed Glendower’s body had been transported to the New World. And he stopped there, neatly sidestepping Henrietta, and talked about the quest that had led them to Scotland. Scotland had been an ally of Glendower’s in his war of independence against England, and as it was independent from England at the time, it would have made an excellent safe haven to retreat into when Glendower found himself with a price on his head. Gansey had found signs that linked both Glendower and his magicians to Scotland, and there was a place - just here, Gansey believed - where two ley lines intersected. One led directly to Wales, Glendower’s home. The other arced perfectly to the Americas, landing right in Virginia.
When Gansey told the story like this, it sounded like every indicator had led them here. Madame Rosmerta could not have guessed that this was a snap decision, a veering sidequest brought up only when all the paths forward in Henrietta seemed blocked.
Instead, it seemed the natural conclusion to their story so far that, to find where Glendower was buried now, it was essential to find out exactly where he had started.
"That's incredible," Madam Rosmerta said, when Gansey had finished. Blue looked around the table: everyone else's eyes echoed exactly what she herself felt, when they were listening to Gansey unravel the truth like this. "I would love to help you," she continued. “Shame you say you’re a muggle.”
“I say what?” Gansey blinked.
“You’re a non-wizard,” Madam Rosmerta clarified, then shook her head and frowned around at the group. “I really don’t know how you found your way here, unless it was you, young lady.”
Gansey and Blue looked at each other.
“I was leading the way,” Gansey said. “Mostly I followed this.” He took a moment to rifle through his bag, and emerged with the dowsing rod he’d been using.
Madam Rosmerta blinked at him. “But that’s a wand.”
“Is it?” Gansey asked.
Certainly it was unusual for a dowsing rod, but Blue had never questioned it: the line between detection and witchery had always been blurry.
Madam Rosmerta held out a hand for it, and Gansey quite willingly handed it over. She held it, pointed it at the nearest candle. Nothing happened at first; she frowned down at it. “It’s a tricky one,” she allowed, “but still. Nox.” She pointed it again: the candle snuffed, then - “lumos” - it lit again.
Gansey stared at it in much the way he’d stared at Ronan, upon learning that Ronan could take things from dreams. “It could do that all the time?”
“Well, maybe not for you,” Madam Rosmerta said kindly. “A wand is a good start, but even so… it shouldn’t have led you here if you were just carrying it. A wand and a muggle does not a wizard make; there’s no reason the wards should have let you through unless you were truly a wizard. What does it feel like when you hold it?”
Gansey frowned. “Like dowsing always does, I suppose. It’s a very sensitive instrument.”
Madam Rosmerta raised an eyebrow. “But most divining rods are very complicated mechanisms, aren’t they? This is just a stick.”
"Well, I'm sure there's something more to it than meets the eye," Gansey ventured. He had shifted into a self Blue didn't see often, deferential and bright, the eager student.
"There is," Madam Rosmerta said. "But not for you, if you have no magic of your own." She looked him up and down, put his dowsing rod - his wand - down on the table in front of her, then took up her own wand and started casting on Gansey's: "Priori incantatem."
And the wand reacted: pale and strange, a puff of light emerged. Then a dark and smokey shadow. After that it vibrated softly, emitting something like a trail in dark smoke that quickly dissipated.
"Oh, my word," Rosmerta said.
"What is it?" Gansey asked, transfixed. "What does it mean?"
"A sensing charm," she murmured, then levelled a gaze at him. "That does it. Young man, you're a wizard."
*
Madam Rosmerta left the group at their table, both to give them time to process and to tend to the rest of the pub, which was filling up as the evening began in earnest.
They didn’t process, per se, so much as they stuffed themselves on good solid pub fare before falling into satisfied, carb-induced silence. However astonished they’d been by Blue’s revelation, the prevailing mood was of relief. If Gansey was a wizard, if witchery was connected to Glendower in more ways than Blue had imagined, then they had come all this way for good reason.
They were still tentatively basking when Madam Rosmerta returned.
“Well then,” she said. “A group of young wizards and witches, here to research a medieval wizard. I can’t see any reason you won’t be allowed to tour Hogwarts, but you’d best wait until tomorrow. I’ll send word up to the castle, see who’s around to meet you. I imagine they’ll send someone to show you the way up. You’re lucky - most of the staff are here, even in summer, to oversee the preparations.”
“Preparations for what?” Gansey asked.
“Well that’s the question, isn’t it?” Madame Rosmerta said, wiggling her eyebrows. “I’ll set you up with rooms for the night, then?”
They were given two connecting rooms, but everyone piled into the one intended to be for the boys, sitting on the neatly made beds in order to cluster around each other. Gansey wanted a revised history of their entire time together, based around the new information that she was a witch. Blue humoured him, but it didn’t change much: the witching world, or at least her corner of it, had little to do with Glendower and more to do with charms to multiply and mutate the chaos of home life.
But of course their time together was only the tip of what Gansey wanted to know, and Blue ended up talking about her childhood more freely than she’d ever been able to before. How magic was as natural as life, the air filled with charms, the kitchen with potions, the conversations with prophecy. She hadn’t known it wasn’t normal until she was kindergarten aged and her mom had taken her aside and explained the way the rest of the world lived. Blue’s wand had been made for her before she was born, and there was never any doubt she would grow into it, even as she failed to grow into the psychic half of the family’s powers. In a sense, the magic that Blue could do was the least of her family’s skills, and certainly the most ordinary: she knew that there was a larger community of witches and wizards in the world, and she’d had the option to go to one of a selection of schools for magic, but they were all distant, and she had never questioned her idea to remain at home with the magical home education of a house full of witches.
She had Gansey’s full attention, and it was an undeniable pleasure to be the one holding forth, the centre of a new mystery. He barely even interrupted her to ask questions, just soaking in every bit of information. Was this how it felt to be Gansey in a crowd of curious strangers, with that unexpected power of binding them to his words?
But Blue knew the people she was talking too much too well. Gansey was one thing: Adam and Ronan were another.
Ronan was just watching, absently chewing on the leather bands around his wrists as he reclined on the further bed. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but the general air of satisfaction that had surrounded him since her revelation was still in play.
And Adam.
He retreated further into herself with Blue’s every enthusiastic sentence. She could feel him pulling away into some dark corner, taking what rubbed off on her like resentment and bundling it up inside himself. If she hadn’t known him so well she might have thought he was fine, just quiet, but instead she could feel his muddled disappointment and resignment and sorrow leeching at her. When she looked at him, tried to include him, she got a hard-edged smile with blank behind the eyes.
Finally, she could take it no more. She banished Gansey and Ronan to the sitting area by the room’s charming bay windows.
Adam, realizing a moment too late that she had cornered him, looked to be bracing himself.
“You’re jealous,” Blue said, but quietly. After all, she hadn’t yet given him time to be kind. She wasn’t here to start an argument if she could help it.
Adam looked away. “I’m happy for you,” he said, gently if not truthfully.
“I don’t even know if you need to be, is all I wanted to say,” Blue told him.
He looked back to her, but blankly, like hope was a cruel thing.
Blue shrugged. “You’re our magician.”
“Cabeswater is our magician. And Ronan. And you and Gansey, now, I guess.”
Blue frowned at the beginnings of bitterness in his voice; she stood up suddenly, and he looked up at her, sitting cross legged on the bed. Just looking, delicate and unsure, his eyes holding an apology but the downturn of his mouth still refusing to hope. They further they got from the ley line the more human he seemed; he had been thoroughly mortal bracing his way through the plane ride, and he had retained a sense of approachable mortality ever since.
“Here, just try it,” Blue said, plonking a decorative pillow down in front of him. “Like this, swish and flick, and think levitation. Persephone’s been teaching you - it’s the same kind of focus. If you can make it move some time in the next half hour, you’re a wizard.”
She put her wand in his hand and then turned her back on him: there was nothing worse than having someone watch you as you attempted to perform magic you weren’t sure you could do. Instead she sat down on the floor beside the window, where Ronan and Gansey had begun playing an extremely absentminded game of cards while Ronan examined Gansey’s wand and Gansey put down his cards every few seconds to jot down something in his notebook.
“Deal me in?” Blue asked, and soon she had a handful of cards and realized that they were, improbably, playing Go Fish.
“So men are wizards, women are witches, and you can all do magic spells with wands and put glamours on castles to make them impossible to find,” Gansey confirmed, separating out the present-day pieces from the stories Blue had been telling.
“Pretty much,” Blue agreed.
“Any aces?”
“Nope.”
“Go fish,” Ronan added, holding the wand up to his ear and shaking it. “Is there something inside this?”
"It has a core, I don't remember exactly what,” Gansey explained. “Some kind of hair, I think.”
“Hair?” Ronan repeated. “Creepy.”
Gansey reached for a card: as soon as he touched it it exploded in a bang and a shower of sparks, taking the rest of the draw pile with it.
Ronan roared with laughter as Gansey pointed at it, looking betrayed. “Did I do that?”
“Almost definitely not,” Blue said, half giggling.
“Where’d you get those cards, man?” Ronan asked.
“In the side table.” Gansey turned to Blue. “Magic exploding cards?”
“Magic exploding cards,” Blue agreed gravely.
If it hadn’t been for the quiet that followed, they wouldn’t have heard the sound of Adam’s exhaled breath. Blue turned to Adam just as Adam turned to them, glowing with quiet pride.
Released from his attention, the cushion fell from its hover near the ceiling and landed on the floor with a definitive thud.
The silence in the hotel room was positively dazzling.