He could not remember the last time he had cried.

It was not just Glendower he was mourning. It was all the versions of Gansey he had been in the last seven years. It was the Gansey who had pursued him with youthful optimism and purpose. And it was the Gansey who had pursued him with increasing worry. And it was this Gansey, who was going to have to die. Because it made a fatal sort of sense. They required a death to save Ronan and Adam. Blue’s kiss was supposed to be deadly to her true love. Gansey’s death had been foretold for this year. It was him. It was always going to be him.

Glendower was dead. He’d always been dead.

And Gansey kind of wanted to live.

Eventually, Gansey heard footsteps approaching in the leaves. This was terrible, too. He did not want to stand and show them his teary face and receive their pity; the idea of this well-meaning kindness was nearly as unbearable a thought as his approaching death. For the very first time, Gansey understood Adam Parrish perfectly.

He unfolded himself and stood with as much dignity as he could muster. But it was just Blue, and somehow there was no humiliation to her seeing that he’d been levelled. She just looked at him while he brushed the pine needles off his trousers, and then, after he had sat on the top of the picnic table, she sat beside him until the others left the cars to see what they were doing.

They stood in a half circle around his picnic table throne.

“About the sacrifice,” Gansey said.

No one said anything. He couldn’t even tell if he had said it out loud.

“Did I say anything?” Gansey asked.

“Yeah,” Blue replied. “But we didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I apologize if this is a rudimentary question,” Henry interjected, “as I arrived to class late. But I don’t suppose your treefather gave you any other demon-killing advice?”

“No, just the sacrifice,” Blue said. Gingerly, she added, “I think … he might have known about Glendower. Not all along, maybe. He might have figured it out while he was wandering around down there after getting with my mom, or maybe from the beginning. But I think he was one of Glendower’s magicians. Maybe also that … other guy.”

She meant the other body in the tomb. It wasn’t difficult to follow the story she imagined, of Artemus trying to put Glendower to sleep and doing something wrong.

“So we’re left with the sacrifice,” Gansey pressed. “Unless you have any better ideas, Adam?”

Adam had been frowning off into the sparse pine trees that bordered the picnic area. He said, “I am trying to think of what else would satisfy the ley line magic, but willing life for unwilling life doesn’t suggest substitutions.”

Gansey felt a prickle of dread in his stomach. “Well then.”

“No,” said Ronan. He didn’t say it in a protesting way, or an angry way, or an upset way. He simply said no. Factual.

“Ronan—”

“No.” Factual. “I didn’t just come get you out of this hole for you to die on purpose.”

Gansey matched his tone. “Blue saw my spirit on the ley line, so I already know that I die this year. Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is the right one: We decide that it is me.”

“Blue did what?” Ronan demanded. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Never,” Blue said. She didn’t say it in a protesting way, or an angry way, or an upset way. Just never. Factual.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Gansey said. “I don’t want to die. I’m terrified, actually. But I don’t see any other option. And the fact is that I want to make something of myself before I die, and I thought it was going to be something about Glendower. It’s obviously not. So I might as well do something meaningful. And – kingly.” The last bit was a little melodramatic, but it was a melodramatic situation.

“I think you’re getting king confused with martyr,” Henry said.

“I’m open to other options,” Gansey said. “In fact, I’d prefer them.”

Blue said abruptly, “We’re your magicians, right?”

Yes, his magicians, his court, him their pointless king, nothing to offer but his pulse. How right it had felt at each moment that he met them all. How certain that they plunged towards something bigger than even this moment.

“Yes,” he said.

“I just – I feel like there has to be something we can all do, like in the cave of bones,” she said. “It was wrong in the tomb because there was no life there to start with. Or something. There was no energy. But if we had more of the pieces right?”

Gansey said, “I don’t understand the magic well enough.”

Ronan said, “Parrish does.”

“No,” Adam protested. “I don’t think I do.”

“Better than any of the rest of us,” Ronan said. “Give us an idea.”

Adam shrugged. His hands were gripped together so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Maybe,” he started, then stopped. “Maybe you could die and then come back. If we used Cabeswater to kill you in some way that didn’t damage your body, then it would provoke the time-holding like 6:21. A minute playing out over and over again, so you wouldn’t have time to get, I don’t know, too far away from your body. Too dead. And then …” Gansey could hear that Adam was making this up as he went along, spinning a plausible fairy tale for Ronan. “It would have to take place in Cabeswater. I could scry into the dreamspace while Blue amplified it, and during one of the time spasms we could tell your soul to return to your body before you were ever really dead. So you’d fulfil the requirements of the sacrifice to die. Nothing says you have to stay dead.”

There was a long pause.

“Yes,” Gansey said. Factual. “That feels right. Is that kingly enough for you, Ronan? Not martyrdom, Henry?”

They didn’t look thrilled, but they looked willing, which was all that mattered. They only had to want to believe it, not really believe it.

“Let’s go to Cabeswater,” Gansey said.

They had only just started back towards the cars when Adam attacked Ronan.

It took Ronan too long to realize that Adam was killing him.

Adam’s hands were around Ronan’s neck, thumbs pressed knuckle white into his arteries, his eyes rolled back up in his head. Ronan’s vision produced flashes of light; his body had only been without air for a minute and it already missed it. He could feel his pulse in his eyeballs.