It's a well-worn tale in Gansey's mouth, one he's told so many times that it has a comfortable rhythm to it.

"I searched in Wales back at the beginning, but we found him in Virginia, on the ley line not too far from Henrietta. There's an enormous system of interconnected caves that runs along the line, and we found everything down there." That's part of the nighttime story, but it's all right to sketch the vague shape of it in the day.

"The legend was that whoever found and woke the sleeping king would be granted a favor. Reality wasn't anything that fantastical, he was just dead. But that was fine, even if it didn't feel very fine at the time--finding him was enough." Enough sounds like sacred, it sounds like anticlimactic, it sounds like a burden I was ready to put down. "It was a bit overshadowed by everything else going on at the time."