Ronan glowered at the Orphan Girl, but it was obvious what the scowl really meant. His arms around her were protective.

It did not escape Adam how well they knew each other. The Orphan Girl was no random creature taken from a fitful dream. They had the well-worn emotional ruts of family. She knew just how to navigate his tumultuous moods; he seemed to know just how gruff he could be with her. They were friends, though even Ronan’s dreamed friends were not easy to get along with.

The Orphan Girl kept cawing out her part of the reel, and it was clear that the off-kilter song was working on Gansey’s mood as well as Ronan’s. The argument in the car had obviously slipped from his thoughts, and instead he lifted his arms above his head and swept them in time with the music like a conductor, reaching for falling autumn leaves when they drifted close. Each dead curl that he managed to brush with his fingertips transmuted into a golden fish that swam through the air. Cabeswater listened attentively to his intention; more leaves swirled to him, waiting for his touch. Soon, a flock – school – current of fish surrounded them, flashing and darting and changing colour as their scales caught the light.

“It’s always fish with you,” Blue said, but she laughed as they tickled round her throat and hands. Gansey glanced at her and away, reaching for another leaf to press into service. Joy gleamed between both of them; how purely and simply Blue and Gansey loved the magic of this place.

Easy for them to be so light.

Cabeswater gently prodded Adam’s thoughts, calling up a dozen happy memories in the space of the previous year – well, they would have had to be from just the past year, because even Cabeswater would have had a hard time stirring up glad memories in the time before Gansey and Ronan. When Adam still resisted, images of himself flickered through his mind: himself as seen by the others. His private smile, his surprised laugh, his fingers stretched towards the sun. Cabeswater didn’t quite understand humans, but it learned. Happiness, it insisted. Happiness.

Adam relented. As they kept walking and the Orphan Girl kept piping her song and the fish kept darting through the air around them, he threw out intention of his own.

The volume of the resulting boom surprised even him; he heard it in one ear and felt it in both feet. The others all startled as another bass-heavy boom sounded at the beginning of the next measure of the tune. By the time the third thud came, it was obviously pounding in time with the music. Each of the trees they passed sounded with a processed thud, until the sound around them was the pulsing electronic beat that invariably played in Ronan’s car or headphones.

“Oh God,” Gansey said, but he was laughing. “Do we have to endure that here, too? Ronan! ”

“It wasn’t me,” Ronan said. He looked to Blue, who shrugged. He caught Adam’s eye. When Adam’s mouth quirked, Ronan’s expression stilled for a moment before turning to the loose smile he ordinarily reserved for Matthew’s silliness. Adam felt a surge of both accomplishment and nerves. He skated an edge here. Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These weren’t forces to play with.

The Orphan Girl abruptly fell silent. Adam thought, at first, that she was somehow picking up on his mood. But no: They had reached the rose glen.

Aurora Lynch lived in a clearing bounded on three sides by lush and fruitful roses growing on bushes, vines and trees. Blossoms carpeted the ground and cascaded over the fourth side – a sheer rock ledge built into the mountain. The air was shot through with sun, like light seen through water, and suspended petals floated as if swimming. Everything was blushed pink or tender white or beaming yellow.

All of Cabeswater was a dream, but the rose glen was a dream even within it.

“Maybe the girl will give Aurora company,” Gansey said, watching the last of his fish swim from the clearing.

“I don’t think you can just give someone a child and expect them to be thrilled,” Blue retorted. “She’s not a cat.”

Gansey opened his mouth, and Adam could see that a borderline offensive comment was queuing up. He caught Gansey’s eye. Gansey closed his mouth. The moment passed.

Gansey wasn’t entirely wrong, though. Aurora had been created to love, and love she did, in a fashion specific to the object of her affection. So she hugged her youngest son, Matthew, and she asked Gansey about famous people in history, and she brought Blue strange flowers she found during her walks, and she let Ronan show her what he had dreamt or made in the week before. With Adam, though, she would ask things like, “How do you know that you see the colour yellow like I do?” And she would listen attentively as he reasoned it out. He would sometimes try to get her to reason it out herself, but she didn’t care so much for thinking, just hearing other people being happy to think.

So they already knew that she would love the Orphan Girl. Whether or not it was right to give Aurora someone else to love was another question entirely.

“Mom, are you here?” Ronan’s voice was different when he spoke to either his mother or Matthew. It was Ronan, unperformed.

No. Ronan, unprotected.

This tone reminded Adam of that unshielded smile from before. Don’t play, he told himself. This is not a game.

But it didn’t feel like a game, if he was being honest. Adrenaline whispered in his heart.

Aurora Lynch appeared.

She did not step out of the living area, nor from the path they had used. Instead, she emerged from the wall of roses cascading over the rock. It was impossible for a woman to step through rock and rose, but she did it anyway. Her golden hair hung in a sheet around her head, caught through with rosebuds and braided with pearls. For a brief moment, she was at once the roses and a woman, and then she was fully Aurora. Cabeswater behaved differently for Aurora Lynch than it did for the rest of them; they were human, after all, and she was a dream thing. They vacationed here. Aurora belonged.

“Ronan,” Aurora said, genuinely happy, as she was always genuinely happy. “Where’s my Matthew?”

“Lacrosse or some shit,” Ronan replied. “Something sweaty.”

“And how about Declan?” Aurora asked.

There was a pause, just a breath too long.

“Working,” Ronan lied.

Everyone in the rose glen looked at Ronan.

“Oh well. He’s always been so diligent,” Aurora said. She waved at Adam, Blue and Gansey. Adam, Blue, and Gansey waved back. “Have you found that king yet, Gansey?”