The Raven King

  “Principles? Henry Cheng’s principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter,” Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry’s voice: “Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics.”

  Blue saw Adam both smirk and turn his face away in a hurry so that Gansey wouldn’t see, but it was too late.

  “Et tu, Brute?” Gansey asked Adam. “Disappointing.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Adam replied.

  The light turned green; the Suburban began to pull away from the protestors.

  “Gansey! Gansey! Richard-man!” This was Henry’s voice; even Blue recognized it. There was no vehicle behind them, so Gansey slowed, leaning his head out the window.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Cheng?”

  “You’ve got … your tailgate is open, I think.” Henry’s airy expression had turned complicated. The cheery smile had not quite slipped, but there was something behind it. Blue once again felt the surge of uncertainty; she knew what Henry was like, but she also didn’t know all of what he was like.

  Gansey scanned the dash for notification lights. “It’s not … oh.” His voice had changed to match Henry’s expression. “Ronan.”

  “What?” snapped Ronan. His jealousy of Henry was visible from space.

  “Our tailgate is open.”

  A car honked behind them. Gansey waved at them in his rearview mirror, saluted Henry, and hit the gas. Blue looked over her shoulder in time to see Henry turn back to the other students, his expression once more melting into the uncomplicated wide grin he’d worn before.

  Interesting.

  Meanwhile, Ronan twisted to look in the rear cargo space behind the backseats. He hissed, “Stay down.”

  He was clearly not speaking to Blue. She narrowed her eyes and asked warily, “What exactly is this errand again?”

  Gansey was glad to answer. “Lynch, in his infinite wisdom, decided to dream instead of going to school, and he brought back more than he asked for.”

  The Henry encounter had left a ding in Ronan’s cheerful aggression, and now he snapped, “You could’ve just told me to handle this myself. My dreaming’s nobody’s business but mine.”

  Adam interjected, “Oh, no, Ronan. I don’t take sides — but that’s bullshit.”

  “Thank you,” Gansey said.

  “Hey, old man —”

  “Don’t,” Gansey said. “Jesse Dittley’s dead because of the people interested in your family’s dreaming, so don’t act like others aren’t affected by whether it stays secret or not. It’s yours first, but we’re all in the blast zone.”

  This silenced Ronan. He slammed himself back into his seat, looked out the window, and put one of his leather bracelets between his teeth.

  Blue had heard enough. She tugged out her seat belt to give herself room to turn around, and then she put her chin on the leather seat to look into the rear cargo area behind her. She did not immediately see anything. Perhaps she did, but didn’t want to acknowledge it, because once her eyes picked out Ronan’s dream, it was impossible to imagine how she hadn’t seen it at once.

  Blue had been absolutely dead set against shock.

  But she was shocked.

  She demanded, “Is that — is that a child?”

  There was a creature curled small beside a gym bag and Gansey’s messenger bag. It had enormous eyes nearly eclipsed by a skullcap pulled down low. It wore a tattered and manky oversized fisherman’s sweater and had either dark gray legs or gray leggings. Those things at the end of the legs were either boots or hooves. Blue’s mind was bending.

  Ronan’s voice was flat. “I used to call her Orphan Girl.”

  Adam had suggested Cabeswater, so they took her to Cabeswater.

  He wasn’t sure, yet, what they would do there; it was just the first thing he’d thought of. Actually, it was the second, but his first thought was so shameful that he’d immediately regretted it.

  He’d taken one look at her and thought if she’d been another night horror they could have just killed it or left it somewhere.

  A second later — no — no, less than a second, half a second, simultaneously — he hated himself for thinking it. It was exactly the sort of thought he’d expect from his father’s son. What, you want to leave? You’re going to go? Is that your bag? Believe me, if I was allowed to let you go, I’d have dropped you in a ditch myself. Everything’s a production with you.

  He hated himself, and then he hated his father, and then he gave the emotion to Cabeswater in his head and Cabeswater rolled it away.

  And now they were at Cabeswater itself, Cabeswater in the flesh, here at Adam’s second thought that he wished had been his first, taking the Orphan Girl to Ronan’s mother, Aurora. This was the field they had spotted from the air long ago, with a huge raven formed of shells. Gansey could not avoid driving over the scattered shells, but he took care to avoid the raven itself. Adam appreciated this part of Gansey, his endless concern for the things in his care.

  The vehicle stopped. Gansey, Blue, and Adam got out. Ronan and his strange little girl did not; it seemed there was some negotiation occurring.

  They waited.

  Outside, the sky was low and gray and torn by the peaks over the brown-red-black of Cabeswater’s trees. From where they stood, it was nearly possible to imagine it was just an ordinary forest on an ordinary Virginia mountain. But if one squinted into Cabeswater long enough, in the right way, one could see secrets dart between the trees. The shadows of horned animals that never appeared. The winking lights of another summer’s fireflies. The rushing sound of many wings, the sound of a massive flock always out of sight.

  Magic.

  This close to the forest, Adam felt very … Adam. His head was crowded with the ordinary sensation of his coveralls folded at the small of his back, the ordinary thought of the literature exam the next day. It seemed like he should become stranger, more other, when he was near Cabeswater, but in reality, the closer he was to Cabeswater, the more firmly present he remained. His mind didn’t have to wander far to communicate with Cabeswater when his body was able to lift a hand to touch it.

  Strange he hadn’t had a premonition of what this place would become to him all those months ago. But maybe not. So much of magic — of power, in general — required belief as a prerequisite.

  Gansey took a phone call. Adam took a piss. Ronan remained in the SUV.

  Adam rejoined Blue on the other side of the vehicle. He took pains to stare at neither her breasts nor her lips. Adam and Blue were no longer together — insofar as they had ever been together in the first place — but being broken up and aware that it was good for both of them had not diminished the aesthetic appeal of either set of body parts. Her hair had gotten wilder since he first met her, less contained by all of her clips, and her mouth had gotten messier since he met her, more desirous of forbidden kisses, and her stance had gotten harder, her spine sharpened by grief and peril.

  “I think you and I need to talk about,” she said. She didn’t finish the sentence, but her eyes were on Gansey. He wondered if she knew how transparent her gaze was. Had she ever looked that hungry when she’d looked at him?

  “Yes,” Adam replied. Too late, he realized she probably meant to discuss the search for Glendower’s favor, not to confess her secret relationship with Gansey. Well, they needed to talk about that, too.

  “When?”

  “I’ll call you tonight. Wait — I have work. Tomorrow after school?”

  They nodded. It was a plan.

  Gansey was still talking to his phone. “No, traffic is nonexistent unless it’s a bingo night. A shuttle? How many people are you expecting? I can’t imagine — oh. The activity bus could be pressed into service, surely.”

  “KERAH!”

  Both Blue and Gansey started wildly at the feral shriek. Adam, recognizing Chainsaw’s name for Ronan, searched the sky.

  “Jesus Mary,” Ronan snarled. “Stop being impossible.”

  Because it wasn’t
Chainsaw who had screamed the raven’s name for Ronan. It was the waifish little Orphan Girl. She was folded into an impossibly small shape in the colorless field grass behind the SUV, looking like a pile of clothing. She rocked and refused to stand. When Ronan hissed something else at her, she screamed in his face again. Not a child’s scream, but a creature’s scream.

  Adam had seen many of Ronan’s dreams made real by now, and he knew how savage and lovely and terrifying and whimsical they could be. But this girl was the most Ronan of any of them that he’d seen. What a frightened monster she was.

  “It’s the apocalypse. Just text me if you think of anything else.” Gansey hung up. “What’s wrong with her?” His tone was hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure if something was wrong with her, or if this was just the way she always was.

  “She doesn’t want to go in,” Ronan said. Without any ceremony, he leaned in, scooped up the girl, and began to march toward the forest’s edge. It was clear now, with her spidery legs dangling over one of his arms, that they ended in dainty hooves.

  On the other side of Adam, Blue put her fingers to her lips and then dropped them again. In a very low voice, she said, “Oh, Ronan!” But it was in the same way one would whisper, Oh man!

  Because it was impossible. The dream creature was a girl; she was not; she was an orphan; they were not parents. Adam could not very well judge Ronan for dreaming so vastly; Adam was also trading in magic he didn’t understand perfectly. These days, they all had their hands thrust into the sky, hoping for comets. The only difference was that Ronan Lynch’s wild and expanding universe existed inside his own head.

  “Excelsior,” said Gansey.

  They followed Ronan in.

  Inside the forest, Cabeswater murmured, voices hissing from the old autumn trees, disappearing into the old mossy boulders. This place meant something different to all of them. Adam, the forest’s caretaker, was bound by bargain to be its hands and eyes. Blue’s power of amplification was somehow connected to it. Ronan, the Greywaren, had been here long before the rest of them, early enough to leave his handwriting scrawled on rocks. Gansey — Gansey just loved it, fearfully, awesomely, worshipfully.

  Overhead, the trees whispered in a secret language, and in Latin, and then in a corrupted version of both, with English words thrown in. They hadn’t spoken any English when the teens had first found them, but they were learning. Fast. Adam couldn’t help but think that there was some secret hidden beneath this language evolution. Were the teens really the first English speakers to encounter the trees? If not, why were the trees only fumbling through English now? Why Latin?

  Adam could almost see the truth hidden behind this puzzle.

  “Salve,” Gansey greeted the trees, always polite. Blue reached up to touch a branch; she didn’t need words to greet them.

  Hello, the trees rustled back. The leaves flickered against Blue’s fingertips.

  “Adam?” Gansey asked.

  “Give me a second.”

  They waited for Adam to get his bearings. Because time and space were negotiable on the ley line, it was entirely possible that they could emerge from the forest at an entirely different time or place than they had entered. This phenomenon had seemed capricious at first, but slowly, as Adam became more in tune with the ley line, he had begun to realize that it did follow rules, just not the linear ones they took for granted in the ordinary world. It was more like breathing — you could hold a breath; you could breathe faster or slower; you could match your breaths to someone standing close to you. Moving through Cabeswater in a predictable way meant getting oriented to the current breathing patterns. Moving with it, not against it, as you tried to work your way back to the time and place you had left behind.

  Closing his eyes, Adam allowed the ley line to seize his heart for a few beats. Now he knew which direction it ran beneath their feet, and he could feel how it intersected with another line many miles to their left and how it intersected with two even farther away to his right. Tilting his head back, he sensed the stars pricking overhead, and he felt how he was oriented in relation to them. Inside him, Cabeswater unfurled careful vines, testing his mood as it did, never pushing boundaries these days unless under duress, and it used his mind and his eyes to search the ground beneath him, digging to find water and rock for further orientation.

  Because Adam practiced at many things, Adam was good at many things, but this — what was it even called? Scrying, sensing, magic, magic, magic. He was not only good at it, but he longed for it, wanted it, loved it in a way that nearly overwhelmed him with gratitude. He had not known that he could love, not really. Gansey and he had fought about it, once — Gansey had said, with disgust, Stop saying privilege. Love isn’t privilege. But Gansey had always had love, had always been capable of love. Now that Adam had discovered this feeling in himself, he was more certain than ever that he was right. Need was Adam’s baseline, his resting pulse. Love was a privilege. Adam was privileged; he did not want to give it up. He wanted to remember again and again how it felt.

  Now that Adam had fully opened his senses, Cabeswater clumsily attempted to communicate with its human magician. It took his memories and turned them sideways and inside out, repurposing them for a hieroglyphic language of dreams: a fungus on a tree; Blue nearly falling over herself in her haste to get away from him; a scab on his wrist; the particular knit of skin that Adam knew was Ronan’s frown just between his eyebrows; a snake disappearing beneath the muddy surface of a lake; Gansey’s thumb on his lower lip; Chainsaw’s beak parted open and a worm crawling out of it instead of in.

  “Adam?” Blue asked.

  He withdrew from his thoughts. “Oh, yes. I’m ready.”

  They proceeded. It was hard to say how long it would take them to get to where Ronan’s mother lived — sometimes it took no time at all and sometimes it took ages, a fact Ronan complained about bitterly as he carried the Orphan Girl. He tried to convince her to walk on her own again, but she crumpled at once into boneless resistance on the forest floor. He didn’t bother to spend minutes fighting with her; he simply scooped her back up again, his expression cross.

  The Orphan Girl seemed to divine that she was pressing Ronan’s buttons too hard, however, because as he walked, jostling her with each step, she released a single purposeful note, kicking her hooved legs in time with it. A second later, an unseen bird sang back another note beautifully pitched three steps above hers. The Orphan Girl piped a tone just above her last one, and a different unseen bird sang another one pitched three steps above. A third note: a third bird. Back and forth they all went until a song spun around the teens, a syncopated reel made from a child’s voice and hidden birds that may or may not have really existed.

  Ronan glowered at the Orphan Girl, but it was obvious what the scowl really meant. His arms around her were protective.

  It did not escape Adam how well they knew each other. The Orphan Girl was no random creature taken from a fitful dream. They had the well-worn emotional ruts of family. She knew just how to navigate his tumultuous moods; he seemed to know just how gruff he could be with her. They were friends, though even Ronan’s dreamed friends were not easy to get along with.

  The Orphan Girl kept cawing out her part of the reel, and it was clear that the off-kilter song was working on Gansey’s mood as well as Ronan’s. The argument in the car had obviously slipped from his thoughts, and instead he lifted his arms above his head and swept them in time with the music like a conductor, reaching for falling autumn leaves when they drifted close. Each dead curl that he managed to brush with his fingertips transmuted into a golden fish that swam through the air. Cabeswater listened attentively to his intention; more leaves swirled to him, waiting for his touch. Soon, a flock — school — current of fish surrounded them, flashing and darting and changing color as their scales caught the light.

  “It’s always fish with you,” Blue said, but she laughed as they tickled round her throat and hands. Gansey glanced at her and away, reaching for another
leaf to press into service. Joy gleamed between both of them; how purely and simply Blue and Gansey loved the magic of this place.

  Easy for them to be so light.

  Cabeswater gently prodded Adam’s thoughts, calling up a dozen happy memories in the space of the previous year — well, they would have had to be from just the past year, because even Cabeswater would have had a hard time stirring up glad memories in the time before Gansey and Ronan. When Adam still resisted, images of himself flickered through his mind: himself as seen by the others. His private smile, his surprised laugh, his fingers stretched toward the sun. Cabeswater didn’t quite understand humans, but it learned. Happiness, it insisted. Happiness.

  Adam relented. As they kept walking and the Orphan Girl kept piping her song and the fish kept darting through the air around them, he threw out intention of his own.

  The volume of the resulting boom surprised even him; he heard it in one ear and felt it in both feet. The others all startled as another bass-heavy boom sounded at the beginning of the next measure of the tune. By the time the third thud came, it was obviously pounding in time with the music. Each of the trees they passed sounded with a processed thud, until the sound around them was the pulsing electronic beat that invariably played in Ronan’s car or headphones.

  “Oh God,” Gansey said, but he was laughing. “Do we have to endure that here, too? Ronan!”

  “It wasn’t me,” Ronan said. He looked to Blue, who shrugged. He caught Adam’s eye. When Adam’s mouth quirked, Ronan’s expression stilled for a moment before turning to the loose smile he ordinarily reserved for Matthew’s silliness. Adam felt a surge of both accomplishment and nerves. He skated an edge here. Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These weren’t forces to play with.

  The Orphan Girl abruptly fell silent. Adam thought, at first, that she was somehow picking up on his mood. But no: They had reached the rose glen.

  Aurora Lynch lived in a clearing bounded on three sides by lush and fruitful roses growing on bushes, vines, and trees. Blossoms carpeted the ground and cascaded over the fourth side — a sheer rock ledge built into the mountain. The air was shot through with sun, like light seen through water, and suspended petals floated as if swimming. Everything was blushed pink or tender white or beaming yellow.