Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I kiss you,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s only if you kiss me.”

The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he’d been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him

Gansey stepped on the parking brake and said, “Once I send
the professor off, one of you guys can get into the front. Adam?
Unless he’s sleeping.”
“No,” Adam said. “I’m awake.”

A
dam Parrish was awake.
The opposite of awake was supposed to be asleep, but
Adam had spent much of the last two years of his life being both at once, or neither. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure he had known what awake really felt like until now.

“Go be short somewhere else.”

“Yeah, I know,” he snarled. “Fine. Wait.”
Ducking his head, he pulled off his ghost light and hung it over her shoulder.
She didn’t bother to say, But you’ll be waiting in darkness. Nor did she say, If I vanish immediately into the lake, you’ll have to find your way out of here sightless. Because he’d already known both these things when he’d given it to her.
Instead she said, “You know, you’re not such a shithead.”
“No,” Ronan replied, “really I am.”

Suddenly, she felt arms around her, yanking her away from the lake’s edge. The arms around her were trembling, too, but they were iron tight, scented with sweat and moss.
“It’s not real,” Ronan told her, voice low. “It’s not real, Blue.”

He touched the arched neck of a skeletal creature with respect, and Adam remembered him telling Ronan that he had never left a place worse for being there. Adam understood, then, that Gansey and Blue’s awe changed this place. Ronan and Adam may have seen this place as magical, but Gansey and Blue’s wonder made it holy. It became a cathedral of bones.

They might have been insect nests, but then he heard Ronan, skittering ahead of him, speaking rapidly in Latin, and even as Adam skidded by them, he saw them transmuting to twiggy birds’ nests.

This was their job, Adam realized. This was what they had to offer: making it safe for the others. That was what they had promised: to be Gansey’s magicians.

So they had slid, and they had whispered, and they had asked, and together they’d convinced Cabeswater to transform the nests to something harmless. At least for a while.

It said, Qui facit per alium facit per se.
Greenmantle knew the proverb.
He who does a thing by the agency of another does it himself.