At the same time another kind of innocence fell away, and he was aware too of immense danger, like a great shadow across the world, waiting for him all through this unfamiliar land of green valleys and dark-misted mountain peaks. He was like a battle leader suddenly given news: suddenly made aware, as he had not been a moment before, that just beyond the horizon a great and dreadful army lay in wait, preparing itself to rise like a huge wave and drown all those who stood in its way.
Trembling with wonder, Will reached across his other arm and fondled the dog’s ears. It let go of his sleeve and stood there gazing at him, tongue lolling pink from a pink-rimmed mouth.
“Good dog,” Will said. “Good dog.” Then a dark figure blotted out the sun, and he rolled abruptly over to sit up and see who stood outlined there against the sky.
A clear Welsh voice said: “Are you hurt?”
It was a boy. He was dressed neatly in what looked like a school uniform: grey trousers, white shirt, red socks and tie. He had a schoolbag slung over one shoulder, and he seemed to be about the same age as Will. But there was a quality of strangeness about him, as there had been about the dog, that tightened Will’s throat and caught him motionless in a wondering stare; for this boy was drained of all colour, like a shell bleached by the summer sun. His hair was white, and his eyebrows. His skin was pale. The effect was so startling that for a wild moment Will found himself wondering whether the hair was deliberately bleached—done on purpose, to create astonishment and alarm. But the idea vanished as swiftly as it had come. The mixture of arrogance and hostility facing him showed plainly that this was not that kind of boy at all.
“I’m all right.” Will stood up, shaking, pulling bits of bracken out of his hair and off his clothes. He said, “You might teach your dog the difference between people and sheep.”
“Oh,” said the boy indifferently, “he knew what he was about. He would have done you no harm.” He said something to the dog in Welsh, and it trotted back up the hill and sat down beside him, watching them both.
“Well—” Will began, and then he stopped. He had looked into the boy’s face and found there another pair of eyes to shake him off balance. It was not, this time, the unearthliness he had seen in the dog; it was a sudden shock of feeling that he had seen them somewhere before. The boy’s eyes were a strange, tawny golden colour like the eyes of a cat or a bird, rimmed with eyelashes so pale as to be almost invisible, they had a cold, unfathomable glitter.
“The raven boy,” he said instantly. “That’s who you are, that’s what it calls you, the old verse. I have it all now, I can remember. But ravens are black. Why does it call you that?”
“My name is Bran,” the boy said, unsmiling, looking unwinking down at him. “Bran Davies. I live down on your uncle’s farm.”
Will was taken aback for a moment, in spite of his new confidence. “On the farm?”
“With my father. In a cottage. My father works for David Evans.” He blinked in the sunshine, pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, and put them on; the tawny eyes disappeared into shadow. He said, in exactly the same conversational tone, “Bran is really the Welsh word for crow. But people called Bran in the old stories are linked up with the raven, too. A lot of ravens in these hills, there are. So I suppose you could say ‘the raven boy’ if you wanted. Poetic licence, like.”
He swung the satchel off his shoulder and sat down beside Will on a rock, fiddling with the leather strap.
Will said, “How did you know who I was? That David Evans is my uncle?”
“I could just as well ask how you knew me,” Bran said. “How did you know, to name me the raven boy?”
He ran one finger idly up and down the strap. Then he smiled suddenly, a smile that illuminated his pale face like quick flaring fire, and he pulled off the dark glasses again.
“I will tell you the answer to both questions, Will Stanton,” he said. “It is because you are not properly human, but one of the Old Ones of the Light put here to hold back the terrible power of the Dark. You are the last of that circle to be born on earth. And I have been waiting for you.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Cooper is one of our most distinguished children’s book writers. She won a Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor for books in her fantasy sequence, The Dark Is Rising, and she is also the author of King of Shadows, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book; Green Boy, which was called “an intriguing and truly lovely book” by the New York Times Book Review, and her acclaimed new novel Victory. Susan Cooper lives on an island in a salt marsh in Massachusetts, and her website is www.thelostland.com.
Susan Cooper, Greenwitch
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