Oh, Ronan.

Ronan’s eyes were still trained on the road ahead of them. A tear ran down his nose and clung to his chin, but he didn’t so much as blink. When Gansey said nothing else, Ronan reached for the door handle without looking, with the thoughtless stretch of familiarity. He tugged the door free of Gansey’s hand. It closed with less of a bang than Blue had thought Ronan was capable of.

They stood there outside their friend’s car, none of them speaking or moving. The breeze shuffled dried leaves down the street in the direction of Ronan’s line of sight. Somewhere out there was a monster eating his heart. Blue couldn’t think too hard upon the trees of Cabeswater under attack, or she became too restless to even stand.

She said, “Is that the language puzzle box in the backseat? I’m going to need it. I’m going to go talk to Artemus.”

“Isn’t he in a tree?” Adam asked.

“Yeah,” Blue said. “But we’ve been talking to trees for a while.”

Only a few minutes later, she picked her way out across the exposed roots of the beech tree to its trunk. Gansey and Adam had joined her, but had been given strict orders to remain on the patio outside the back door and to come no closer. This was going to be about her, her father, and her tree.

Hopefully.

She could not count how many times she had sat beneath this beech tree. Where others had a favourite sweater or favourite song, a favourite chair or a favourite food, Blue had always had the beech tree in the backyard. It wasn’t just this tree, of course – she loved all trees – but this tree had been a constant her entire life. She knew the dips in its bark and how much it grew each year and even the particular smell of its leaves when they first began to bud in the spring. She knew it as well as she knew anyone else in 300 Fox Way.

Now she sat cross-legged among its torn-up roots with the puzzle box resting on her calves and a notebook resting on top of it. The jostled ground was damp and cold against her thighs; probably if she was being really practical, she would have brought something to sit on.

Or perhaps it was better to feel the same ground the tree felt.

“Artemus,” she said, “can you hear me? It’s Blue. Your daughter.” Right after she said this, she thought maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe he would rather not be reminded of that fact. She corrected, “Maura’s daughter. I’m sorry in advance for my pronunciation, but they don’t really offer books for this.”

She had first begun to have the idea to use this puzzle box of Ronan’s earlier that day while talking to Henry. He had explained to her how the bee translated his thoughts more purely than words did, how the bee was more essentially Henry than anything that actually came out of his mouth. It got her thinking about how the trees of Cabeswater had always struggled to communicate with the humans, first in Latin, then in English, and how they had another language that they seemed to speak with each other – the dream language that was featured on this translation box of Ronan’s. Artemus didn’t seem remotely able to express himself. Maybe this would help. At least it might look like Blue was trying to make an effort.

Now she spun the wheel around to translate the things she wanted to say into the dream language, and jotted down the words that appeared. She read the written sentences out loud, slowly and without surety. She was aware of Adam and Gansey’s presence, but it was comforting, not awkward. She’d done stupider-looking rituals in front of them. Out loud, the sentences sounded a little like Latin. In Blue’s head, they meant:

“Mom always told me that you were interested in the world, in nature, and the way people interact with it, just like me. I thought maybe we could talk about that, in your language.”

She wanted to ask about the demon straightaway, but she’d seen how badly that had gone for Gwenllian. So now she simply waited. The backyard was the same as it had been before. Her hands were clammy. She wasn’t entirely sure what she expected to happen.

Slowly, she moved the dials on the puzzle box to translate another phrase from English. Touching the smooth, skinlike bark of the beech tree, she asked it out loud: “Please, could you at least tell me if you’re listening?”

There was not so much as a rustle from the remaining dry leaves.

When Blue was much younger, she had spent hours setting up elaborate versions of the psychic rituals she’d seen her family undertaking. She’d read countless books on tarot; watched web videos on palmistry; studied tea leaves; conducted séances in the bathroom in the middle of the night. While her cousins effortlessly spoke to the dead and her mother saw the future, Blue struggled for even a hint of the supernatural. She spent hours straining her ears for an otherworldly voice. Trying to predict which tarot card she was about to overturn. Waiting to feel something dead touch her hand.

This was exactly that.

The only thing that was slightly different was that Blue had started this process somewhat optimistic. It had been a very long time since she’d fooled herself into thinking that she herself had any connection with the otherworld. If she wasn’t being bitter about it, it was because she hadn’t thought that this was about the otherworld.

“I love this tree,” Blue said finally, in English. “You don’t have any claim to it. If anyone could live inside it, it should be me. I’ve loved it way longer than you could have.”

With a sigh, she stood up, brushing muck off the back of her legs. She gave Gansey and Adam a rueful look.

“Wait.”

Blue froze. Gansey and Adam both looked sharply behind her.

“Say what you just said.” Artemus’s voice emanated from the tree. Not like the voice of God, but rather like a voice coming from just behind the trunk.

“What?” Blue asked.

“Say what you just said.”

“I’ve loved this tree?”

Artemus stepped from the tree. It was the same as when Aurora had stepped out of the rock back in Cabeswater. There was tree, and then man-and-tree, and then just man. Artemus held out his hands for the puzzle box, and she put it in them. He sank to the ground with the box in his lap, folding his long limbs around it, turning the dials slowly and looking at each side. Watching his long face and tired mouth and slumped shoulders, Blue was amazed by how differently Artemus and Gwenllian wore their age. Gwenllian had been made young and angry by six hundred years of marking time. Artemus looked defeated. She wondered if that was from the six hundred years in total, or only the past seventeen.