Would you like to explain, now, why we’re in the middle of this puddle?” Adam asked.

“Godforsaken puddle,” Ronan corrected from beside Gansey. As a pale-skinned, dark-haired Celtic sort, he didn’t care for the heat.

The five of them — plus Chainsaw, minus Noah (he had been present, but feebly, when they’d left) — floated in the boat in the middle of the belligerently ugly man-made lake they had found before. It was relentlessly sunny. The smell of the field — warm dirt — reminded Gansey of all the mornings he’d picked up Adam from his parents’ double-wide.

From shore, crows hollered apocalyptically at them. Chainsaw hollered back.

It really was some of the worst Henrietta had to offer.

“We’re looking under it.” Gansey eyed his laptop. He couldn’t get the sonar device to communicate with it, despite a cursory examination of the instructional manual. Vexation was beginning to bead at his temples and on the back of his neck.

Blue, perched at the other end of the boat, asked, “Are we going to sonar every lake on the ley line? Or just the ones that piss you off?”

She was still angry about the couch and the pool table and Orla’s bare midriff. Orla, tanning idly, wasn’t helping. She took up most of the boat, her legs trailing up one side of it and her long bronze torso draped up the other. Every so often she opened her eyes to smile widely at one of the boys, twisting herself this way and that as if she were merely readjusting her spine.

“This is a pilot mission,” said Gansey. He was more profoundly uncomfortable with Blue being angry at him than he cared to admit to anyone, least of all himself. “Odds suggest that Glendower’s not under this lake. But I want to have recourse should we find a body of water we suspect he’s under.”

“Recourse,” echoed Ronan, but without real force. The water reflected the sun at his face from beneath, rendering him a translucent and fretful god. “Shitdamn, it’s hot.”

Gansey’s explanation was not precisely true. He occasionally had hunches, always about finding things, always about Glendower. They were a result of poring over maps and sorting through historical records and recalling the historical finds he’d made before. When you’d found impossible things before, it made the location of another impossible thing more predictable.

The hunch about this lake had something to do with this wide field looking like one of the only easy passes through this section of challenging mountains. Something to do with the name of the tiny lane at the bottom of the hill — Hanmer Road, Hanmer being the last name of Glendower’s wife. Something to do with where it sat on the line, the look of the field, the prickling of stop and look closer.

“Is it possible that you’ve bought a sixty-five-hundred-dollar piece of junk?” Ronan pulled a cord out of the back of the laptop and hooked it up in a different way. The laptop pretended it couldn’t tell the difference. Gansey hit some keys. The laptop pretended he hadn’t. The entire process had looked a lot more straightforward on the instructional video online.

From the deck of the boat, Orla said, “I’m having a psychic moment. It involves you and me.”

Distracted, Gansey glanced up from the computer screen. “Were you talking to me or Ronan?”

“Either. I’m flexible.”

Blue made a small, terrible noise.

“I would appreciate if you’d turn your inner eye toward the water,” Gansey said. “Because — goddamn it, Ronan, that made the screen go black.”

He was beginning to think he had bought a sixty-five-hundred-dollar piece of junk. He hoped the pool table worked better.

“How long are we in D.C. for?” Adam asked suddenly.

Gansey said, “Three days.”

Thank goodness Adam had agreed to go. There was plenty of opportunity to be had at a fund-raiser like this one. Internships, future positions, sponsors. An impressive-sounding name on the bottom of a college recommendation letter. So many pearls to be had, if you were in the mood to open oysters.

Gansey so hated oysters.

Ronan aggressively jerked a cable on the back of the laptop. The sonar device appeared on the laptop screen, shaped like a tiny submarine.

“You brilliant bastard!” Gansey said. “You’ve done it. What did you do?”

“Got tired of sweating is what I did. Let’s look under this damn lake and get back into air-conditioning. Oh, don’t even, Parrish.”

Adam, on the other end of the boat, looked extremely unimpressed with Ronan’s lack of heat tolerance. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Whatever, man,” Ronan replied. “I know that face. You were born in hell, you’re used to it.”

“Ronan,” Gansey said, “Lynch.”

For quite a few minutes, they were all quiet as they puttered slowly through the water, watching the unspecific elements on the screen. Gansey felt the unpleasant and distinct sensation of a single drop of sweat rolling between his shoulder blades.

Orla declared, “I’m having a psychic moment.”

“Pshaw!” Blue replied.

“No, really.” Orla opened her eyes. “Is there something on the screen now?”

There was. On the laptop screen, the images tantalized him. One was a disc of some sort and the other was an indistinct raven. In reality, it could be any sort of bird. But for the group in this particular boat, a suggestion was all they needed. They needed it to be a raven. It was going to be a raven.

Gansey contemplated whether he could dive for the object. The first thing that occurred to him was his teal polo shirt — it would have to be removed. The next thing that occurred to him was his chinos — could they be removed in the presence of all these females? Dubious. And finally he considered his contact lenses. They rebelled even in pool water, and this was certainly not a swimming pool.

Blue peered over the edge into the brown water. “How deep is the water here?”

“It should say.” Gansey squinted at the laptop. “Ten feet.”

“Well, then.” Blue flipped her sandals onto Orla’s bare belly, ignoring Orla’s vague protests.

Gansey said, “What! You can’t go in.”

“I actually can,” she replied, twisting her vestigial ponytail into a tiny knot on the back of her skull. “I really, really can.”

“But!” he tried. “You won’t be able to open your eyes in that. Without irritating them.”

“Your highly cultured eyes, maybe,” Blue replied. Pulling off her topmost tank top, she tossed it on top of Orla as well. Bare skin flashed through the tears in the remaining tank. “My swamp eyes’ll be great.”

Gansey was stung, but before he could protest, he was forced to snatch the laptop as it toppled. Orla had suddenly and swiftly stood, sending the boat crazily off-kilter. Everyone in the boat braced themselves and gazed at the bell-bottomed giantess.

“Stop, Blue. I’ll do it,” Orla ordered. Her pierced belly button was precisely at Gansey’s eye level. The silver ball winked at him. It said, Watch this, boys! “You’re wearing clothing. I have a bikini.”

Blue replied ferociously, “None of us can forget.” If not for the sun, her voice would’ve iced the lake.

Orla tossed her head, her magnificently large nose describing a circle in the air. Then she tore off her bell-bottoms so fast that all the boys in the boat just stared at her, dazzled and stunned. Gansey couldn’t understand the speed of it. One moment, she was wearing clothing, and the next moment, she was wearing a bikini. Fifty percent of the world was browned skin and fifty percent was orange nylon. From the Mona Lisa smile on Orla’s lips, it was clear she was pleased to finally be allowed to demonstrate her true talents.

A tiny part of Gansey’s brain said: You have been staring for too long.

The larger part of his brain said: ORANGE.

“Oh, for the love of God,” Blue said, and jumped out of the boat.

Ronan began to laugh, and it was so unexpected that the spell was broken. He laughed as Chainsaw hurled herself into the air to circle where Blue had gone in, and he laughed as Orla let out a honking sound and cannonballed into the water. He laughed as the image on the laptop distorted with the rollicking water. He laughed as he stretched out his arm for Chainsaw to return to him, and then he sealed his lips with an expression that indicated he still found them all hilarious on the inside.

The boat, previously stuffed to capacity, now contained only three boys and a small, discarded pile of girls’ shoes and clothing. Adam looked at Gansey, expression dazed. “Is this really happening?”

It was really happening, because the side-scan sonar showed two forms below the surface. One of them was nowhere near the objects and seemed to be moving in rather aimless circles. The other shot purposefully toward the vicinity of the raven, moving in brief surges that suggested a breaststroke. Gansey, former captain of the Aglionby crew team and a not untalented swimmer, approved.

“I feel rather ashamed,” Gansey admitted.

Ronan ran a hand over his shaved head. “I didn’t want to mess up my hair.”

Adam just watched the ripples spread across the water.

Only a second later, Orla reemerged. Like her dive, her reappearance was dramatic: a great frothy breach that ended with her floating idly on her back, hands behind her head.

“It’s too dark,” she said, eyes closed against the sun. She seemed in no hurry to try again or get back into the boat. “But it’s nice and cool. Y’all should come in.”

Gansey had no desire to join her. He peered anxiously over the edge of the boat. One more second and he was going to —

Blue burst up beside them. Dark hair plastered her cheeks. With one white-knuckled hand, she clutched the edge of the boat, pulling herself half out of the water.

“Good God,” Gansey said.

Blue cheerfully spit a mouthful of brown water on his boat shoes. It pooled in the canvas over his toes.

“Good God,” he said.

“Now they’re really boat shoes,” she replied. Swinging her free arm, she tossed her prize in; it landed on the boards with a dense thud. Chainsaw immediately leapt down from Ronan’s shoulder to investigate. “There’s something else down there. I’m going back for it.”

Before Gansey had time to say anything to her, the murky water closed over her head. He was struck by what a glorious and fearless animal Blue Sargent was, and he made a mental note to tell her that very thing, if she didn’t drown getting whatever the second thing was.

She was only gone for a moment this time. The boat surged as she emerged again, gasping and triumphant. She hooked an elbow over the side. “Help me in!”

Adam hauled Blue in as if she were the catch of the day, stretched out on the base of the boat. Although she wore much more clothing than Orla, Gansey still felt he ought to avert his eyes. Everything was wet and clinging in ways that seemed more titillating than he’d come to expect from Blue’s wardrobe.

Out of breath, Blue asked, “What’s the first thing? Do you know?”

He accepted the first object from Ronan. Yes, he knew. Gansey rubbed his fingers over the slimy surface. It was a scarred metal disc about seven inches in diameter. There were three ravens embossed on it. The others must’ve been too buried in the silt to show on the sonar display. It was incredible that they’d seen even one of them. It would have been so easy for the disc to be completely obscured. Even easier for the identifying bird to be crusted and hidden by algae.

Some things want to be found.

“It’s a boss,” Gansey said with wonder. He ran his thumb around the uneven edge of it. Everything about it spoke to age. “Or an umbo. From a shield. This bit reinforced the middle of the shield. The rest of it must’ve rotted away. It would’ve been wood and leather, probably.”

It wasn’t what he would’ve expected to find here, or at all. From what he could remember of his history, shields like this weren’t in popular use by Glendower’s time. Good armor had rendered them unnecessary. It could’ve been a ceremonial shield, though. Certainly the fine workmanship seemed excessive for a working piece of weaponry. And it did seem like the sort of thing that would be brought along to bury with a king. He traced the ravens. Three ravens marked in a triangle — the coat of arms of Urien, Glendower’s mythological father.

Who else had touched this boss? A craftsman, his mind busy with Glendower’s purpose. A soldier, loading it into a boat to cross the Atlantic.

Maybe even Glendower himself.

His heart was on fire with it.

“So, it’s ancient,” Blue said from the other end of the boat.

“Right.”

“And what about this?”

At the tone in her voice, he lifted his eyes to the large object that rested upright against the tops of her thighs.

He knew what it was. He just didn’t know why it was.

He said, “Well, that’s a wheel off the Camaro.”

And it was.

It looked identical to the wheels currently residing on the Pig — except this wheel was clearly several hundred years old. The discolored surface was pocked and lumpy. With all of the deterioration, the elegantly symmetrical wheel didn’t appear that out of place beside the shield boss. If you overlooked the tattered Chevrolet logo in the middle.

“Do you remember losing one a little while ago?” Ronan asked. “Like, five hundred years or so?”

“We know the ley line messes with time,” Gansey said immediately, but he felt undone. Not exactly undone, but unmoored. Released from the ruts of logic. When the rules of time became flexible, the future seemed to hold too many possibilities to bear. This wheel promised a past with the Camaro in it, a past that both hadn’t happened and had. Hadn’t because the keys were still in Gansey’s pocket and the car was still parked back at Monmouth Manufacturing. And had because Blue held the wheel in her still-damp hands.

“I think you should leave these with me while you go to your mom’s this weekend,” Blue said. “And I’ll see if I can convince Calla to do her thing on them.”

The boat was steered back toward shore, Orla was handed her bell-bottoms, the laptop was packed back into a bag, and the sonar device was dredged from the water. Adam wearily helped fix the boat to the trailer before climbing into the truck — Gansey was going to have to talk to him, though he didn’t know what he would say; it would be good for them to get out of town together — and Ronan retreated to the BMW to drive back by himself. Probably Gansey needed to talk to him, too, though he didn’t know what he would say to him, either.

Blue joined him in the shade of the boat, the shield boss in her hand. This discovery was not Cabeswater, and it was not Glendower, but it was something. Gansey was getting greedy, he realized, hungry for Glendower and Glendower alone. These tantalizing clues used to be enough to sustain him. Now it was only the grail he wanted. He felt grown old inside his young skin. I tire of wonders, he thought.

He watched Orla’s orange bikini disappear hopefully into the BMW. His mind was far away, though: still absorbed with the mystery of the ancient Camaro wheel.

In a low voice, Blue asked meaningfully, “Seen enough?”

“Of — oh, Orla?”

“Yeah.”

The question annoyed him. It judged him, and in this case, he didn’t feel he’d done anything to deserve it. He was not Blue’s business, not in that way.

“What care is it of yours,” he asked, “what I think of Orla?”

This felt dangerous, for some reason. He possibly shouldn’t have asked it. In retrospect, it wasn’t the question itself at fault. It was the way that he’d asked it. His thoughts had been far away, and he hadn’t been minding how he looked on the outside, and now, too late, he heard the dip of his own words. How the inflection seemed to contain a dare.

Come on, Gansey, he thought. Don’t ruin things.

Blue held his gaze, unflinching. Crisp, she replied, “None at all.”

And it was a lie.

It should not have been, but it was, and Gansey, who prized honesty above nearly every other thing, knew it when he heard it. Blue Sargent cared whether or not he was interested in Orla. She cared a lot. As she whirled toward the truck with a dismissive shake of her head, he felt a dirty sort of thrill.

Summer dug its way into his veins. He got into the truck.

“Let’s go,” he told the others, and he slid on his sunglasses.