Call Down the Hawk

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Good,” Ronan said. Drunken loser trashes dorm. “Good. It was my fault. I don’t care what they think about me. It’s not fucking important what they think about me. Are you in trouble?”

  “Of course.” It was impossible to tell how Adam felt about this without seeing his face. He was at his most precise and remote. “I have to fix it. Fletcher had to vouch that it was you instead of me. And I’m not allowed to have you over again. They made me sign something saying you wouldn’t come on campus.”

  The French horn player mourned downward before spiraling up again.

  “I’ll pay for it,” Ronan said. His father had left him some money, and he never touched it. What would he spend money on when he could dream anything he needed?

  Everything except a life here.

  Adam turned around. Ronan turned, too, and they sat facing each other in the center of the labyrinth. Adam wiped one tear from Ronan’s right eye. He showed the finger to Ronan. It glistened damply with the single tear. Then he reached out and wiped the tear from Ronan’s left eye. He showed this finger to Ronan, too.

  It was smeared darkly with black.

  Nightwash.

  “This won’t work, Ronan,” Adam said.

  Ronan already knew this. He knew this because he knew it was late enough that he was supposed to be seeing one of the apartments and Declan hadn’t called him again. He knew that meant Declan had canceled the appointments. He knew it was over because Adam had signed a piece of paper saying Ronan wouldn’t visit him on campus. He knew that meant Ronan would return to waiting at the Barns for him.

  It felt like sadness was like radiation, like the amount of time between exposures was irrelevant, like you got a badge that eventually got filled up from a lifetime of it, and then it just killed you.

  Adam Parrish and the Crying Club.

  “We’re still okay,” Adam said. “This isn’t about that.”

  Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge?

  No.

  Adam went on. “I’m not trapped here on campus. I can still come to you on break.”

  Ronan watched a leaf skitter along the labyrinth, scuttling effortlessly from outer ring to inner before being joined by several others. They huddled together and shivered in the breeze for a moment before hurrying off somewhere together.

  “Tell me to go to school closer to you and I will,” Adam said in a rush, the words piled together. “Just say it.”

  Ronan pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, checking for nightwash, but it wasn’t bad yet. “I’m not that big of an asshole.”

  “Oh, you are,” Adam said, trying for humor. Failing. “Just not about that.”

  The French horn had gone silent and all that was left was the sound of the city that would slowly kill Ronan if he let it. He stood up.

  It was over.

  You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.

  7:07 A.M.: WAKE UP, ASSHOLE. YOU’RE ALIVE.

  Ronan was awake.

  He stared at a list written in dark, cramped handwriting and taped on the slanted plaster wall above his childhood bed at the Barns. After he had failed to answer any texts or calls for four days post-Cambridge, Declan had paid a surprise visit and found the middle Lynch brother in bed eating expired baked beans in the same jeans he’d been wearing on the road trip.

  You need a routine, Declan had demanded.

  I have a routine.

  I thought you said you never lied.

  7:15 A.M.: GET DRESSED AND SHAVE THAT BEAUTIFUL BALD HEAD.

  It had been a long time since Ronan had gotten a proper Declan lecture. After their father died, Declan had become legally responsible for his brothers until they hit eighteen. He’d hectored Ronan constantly: Don’t skip class, Ronan. Don’t get another ticket, Ronan. Don’t stay out late with Gansey, Ronan. Don’t wear dirty socks twice in a row, Ronan. Don’t swear, Ronan. Don’t drink yourself into oblivion, Ronan. Don’t hang out with those using losers, Ronan. Don’t kill yourself, Ronan. Don’t use a double Windsor knot with that collar, Ronan.

  Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it.

  7:45 A.M.: THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY.

  8:00 A.M.: FEED ANIMALS.

  9:30 A.M.: REPAIR BARNS OR HOUSE.

  12:00 P.M.: LUNCH @ THAT WEIRD GAS STATION.

  1:30 P.M.: RONAN LYNCH’S MARVELOUS DREAM EMPORIUM.

  What does this one mean, Ronan?

  It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don’t succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game.

  I don’t ask what you do at work, Declan.

  6:00 P.M.: DRIVE AROUND.

  7:15 P.M.: NUKE SOME DINNER, YO.

  7:30 P.M.: MOVIE TIME.

  11:00 P.M.: TEXT PARRISH.

  Adam’s most recent text said simply: $4200.

  It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs.

  *11:30 P.M.: GO TO BED.

  *SATURDAY/SUNDAY: CHURCH/DC.

  *MONDAY: LAUNDRY & GROCERY.

  *TUESDAY: TEXT OR CALL GANSEY.

  These last items on the list were in Declan’s handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how each week was the same, the routine announced. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything.

  Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed.

  Ronan texted back: why

  He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-red wood shavings.

  Gansey texted back: don’t make me get on a plane I’m currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon

  With a sigh, Ronan took a photo of his elbow bent to make it look like a butt, texted it over, and got up. This late in the year, the mornings were dim, but he didn’t bother turning on the lights as he made himself breakfast and got his work supplies. He could navigate the farmhouse in pitch-black. His fingers knew the shape of the walls and his feet knew the creak of the floorboards and his nose knew the woodsmoke or long-ago lemon scents of the rooms, all of it memorized like a tune on an instrument. The house contained most of his childhood memories, which might have made it a miserable place for others. But for Ronan, the Barns had always felt like one of his few surviving family members.

  If he was imprisoned by circumstance, he thought, at least there were worse places than the Barns.

  Outside, the mist lay thick and sluggish across the burnished fields. Long purple shadows fell behind the multiple outbuildings, but the sun-sides of them were lit so bright he had to blink away. As he walked across the slanted fields, dew soaking his legs, he felt his mood lifting. Funny, Ronan thought, how sad an empty house felt and how preferable an empty landscape was.

  As he picked his way, creatures that defied existence crept through the tall grass behind him, some more worrisome in proportion than others. He loved his odd menagerie: his stags and his fireflies, his morning monsters and his shadow birds, his pale mice and small furred dragons. Ethically, he wasn’t sure if they were allowed. If you could dream a life out of nothing, should you? On weekdays, he gave in to the impulse of adding to his strange herds. On weekends, he spent Mass regretfully apologizing to God for his hubris.

  That morning, he was making his way to someone
else’s dream creatures, however. His father’s handsomely colored cattle were permanent residents of the Barns, dew-covered mounds of chocolate, dun, black, gold, bone, chestnut, granite. Like all living dream things, they couldn’t stay awake without their dreamer, and so they had been sleeping since Niall died. It was a fate Ronan had to accept would eventually befall all his own creatures, too.

  Suddenly, Ronan was enveloped in a rank-smelling charcoal cloud. Muscles coiled and shot him in the air before he realized what it was.

  “Gasoline,” he snapped, angrier than he might have been because he knew he’d looked stupid, “you better not go far.”

  Gasoline was a dream creature that was cooler in theory than in practice—an enormous, minivan-sized boar, with small, intelligent eyes and wiry, metallic hair. If it galloped on hard surfaces, sparks came up from its hooves. If it was surprised, it dissipated into a cloud of smoke. When it cried out, it sounded like a bird. It also had no genitalia. This didn’t seem like a memorable livestock feature, but once you noticed its absence, you couldn’t stop.

  The foul-smelling smoke let out a distinctly avian trill before dissipating.

  Ronan waved the rest of it away as he knelt beside one of his father’s sleeping cows, a delicate speckled gray speciman with one crooked horn. He patted her smooth, warm shoulder. “I’ve booked your flight. You get a window and an aisle.”

  He unfolded a dream object he’d brought from the house—a blanket that appeared to be knit out of fall leaves, as large as a tablecloth—and spread it across her shoulders, standing on his toes to toss it over. He searched the edge until he found the hidden drawstring he remembered from the dream it had come from. It was tucked underneath in a way that hurt his logical mind to think about too hard, so he didn’t think. He just tugged it out and down, and watched the blanket tighten until he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore because its movement made no logical sense. It was best not to look straight at some of the dreamfuckery. There were a lot of folktales about wizards and seers going mad from magic, and it was true that some of the dreams felt more brain-breaking than others. The leaf blanket was one of them.

  Ronan gave the drawstring three little twitches and, just as in the dream that had created it, the blanket began to float, taking the cow with it. Now Ronan had a cow on a string. A cow balloon. A bovine blimp. In the back of his head he’d thought he might spend the winter trying again to dream something that would rouse a dead sleeper’s dreams, a task that would be more pleasant in the climate-controlled long barn. He’d just needed a cow transportation device.

  He was pleased the cow transportation device worked, even if he was unconvinced that he would have any more luck waking the cows than he had over the past several months.

  He wondered suddenly if this other dreamer, Bryde, might know how to wake another dreamer’s dreams.

  That would be a thing that made Bryde’s game worth playing.

  “Kerah!” A cry came from overhead. He tilted his head back just as a murder-black bird swooped down to him.

  It was Chainsaw, one of his oldest dream creatures. She was a raven and, like Ronan, all the parts that made her interesting were hidden from the casual glance.

  He reached a hand out to her, but she just barked and shat a few inches from his shoulder as she circled the floating cow.

  “Brat!”

  “Krek!” Chainsaw spat. Her invented vocabulary mostly had room for extremes: stuff she liked a lot (kerah, which was Ronan) or stuff she hated (krek-krek, an emphatic form of krek, her word for dreamthing, referred to a specific and hated dreamthing named Opal, Ronan’s other psychopomp). Snack was a good word, too, already raven-shaped. So was Atom, which was nearly recognizable as Adam if you were listening hard.

  “Yeah,” Ronan said. “Come on if you’re coming.”

  He began to walk his cow balloon to the long barn, keeping a good hold on it. He didn’t think the leaf blanket would ever stop going up if he let go, and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the cow heading out to space.

  As he got to the barn, his phone buzzed. He ignored it as he did a little whistle at the door until it obligingly unlocked. He had a bad moment when he realized the cow was never going to fit through his ordinary entrance, and he had to tie her to the doorknob in order to go inside to open the bigger sliding door.

  His phone buzzed again. He ignored it.

  Inside, the barn was piled with his dream creations—clawsome machines, gearish creatures, supernatural weather stored under tarps, and heartbeats contained in glass bulbs—the mess adhering to no system but his own. He hastily cleared a cow-sized area in front of the sliding door.

  His phone buzzed again. He ignored it.

  Ronan towed the still-floating cow in, careful not to knock her head on the doorway. He wrinkled his nose. Something smelled rank around here.

  His phone buzzed, buzzed, buzzed.

  “Goddamn it,” Ronan remarked to Chainsaw, who flew skillfully into the barn without touching a feather against any of the clutter. Gripping the cow-leash with one hand, he answered the phone. “What, Declan? I’m trying to fucking tow a cow.”

  “I just had a very troubling parent-teacher conference. I need you up here.”

  This didn’t immediately make sense to Ronan, as he had neither parents nor teachers in his life. Then he worked it out as he backed another careful step into the barn, the cow bobbing after. “Matthew?”

  “Who else?” Declan said. “Do you have another brother you dreamed who’s fucking up?”

  A dreamer, a dream, and Declan: that was the brothers Lynch.

  Chainsaw was an old dream of Ronan’s, but Matthew was older. An accident. Ronan had been a toddler. He hadn’t even realized it at the time; he’d just accepted the new presence of a surprise baby brother who, unlike Declan, was nearly always happy. He’d loved him at once. Everyone loved Matthew at once. Ronan didn’t like to think about it, but it was possible that this lovability had been dreamt into him.

  Here was the reason why Bryde’s game would be worth the hassle if he knew how to wake dead dreamer’s dreams: Matthew would go to sleep with the rest of Ronan’s dreams if Ronan died.

  There wasn’t enough confession time in the Catholic Church to make Ronan feel good about the weight of dreaming another human into being.

  Matthew didn’t know that he was a dream.

  “Okay,” Ronan said. The awful smell was building; it was nearly to the breathe-through-your-mouth place. “I—”

  Abruptly, the unpleasant smell took concrete form as Gasoline, the minivan-sized boar, rematerialized. Ronan was knocked from his feet. His phone skirled merrily across the gravel and dirt. The cow flitted into the air, rope flapping like a kite tail.

  Ronan spewed every single swear he’d ever learned. The cow, eyes closed, oblivious, innocent, gently drifted toward the sun.

  “Chainsaw!” Ronan shouted, although he wasn’t immediately sure what words he thought would follow that one. “The—the—krek!”

  Chainsaw winged out of the barn, circling him and barking gleefully, “Kerah!”

  “No!” He pointed at the cow, which had now floated to the level of the barn roof. “The krek!”

  Chainsaw flapped upward to circle the cow ascendant, looking at it curiously. What a fun game, her body language suggested. What an excellent cow, what strong decisions it had made this morning, how delightful that it had taken to the air like she had. With several cheerful barks, she swirled close before wheeling back playfully.

  “Bring me the krek! There’s a cookie in it for you! Snack! Beef!” Ronan offered everything in his potential treat arsenal. “Cake! Cheese!”

  Cow and raven appeared ever smaller as they ascended.

  “Trash!” Ronan offered desperately, the one thing Chainsaw always desperately wanted and was not allowed to have.

  Chainsaw clamped claws onto the drawstring.

  For a second, Ronan was worried the leaf blanket’s levitation would be weightier than the ra
ven. But then Chainsaw made headway, flapping just a little more strenuously than usual as she towed steadily. He stretched a hand out to her supportively. At the end, there were another few fraught moments as he worried that she’d let go of the string right before he could reach it—Chainsaw could be a quitter—but then the drawstring was in his hand and he had towed the cow inside the barn.

  Flicking out his pocketknife, he sliced the blanket off the cow. She dropped the final few inches to the dirt floor.

  Finally he allowed himself to be relieved.

  Out of breath, he kicked the lid off the metal trash can to fulfill his promise to Chainsaw, and then he stalked over to his fallen phone. The caller ID still showed an active call with DBAG LYNCH.

  Ronan put it on his shoulder. “You still there? I was —”

  “I don’t want to know,” Declan said. “Get here when you can.”

  Declan Lynch was a liar.

  He’d been a liar his entire life. Lies came to him fluidly, easily, instinctively. What does your father do for a living? He sells high-end sports cars in the summer, life insurance in the winter. He’s an anesthesiologist. He does financial consulting for divorcees. He does advertising work for international companies in English-speaking markets. He’s in the FBI. Where did he meet your mother? They were on yearbook together in high school. They were set up by friends. She took his picture at the county fair, said she wanted to keep his smile forever. Why can’t Ronan come to a sleepover? He sleepwalks. Once he walked out to the road and my father had to convince a trucker who’d stopped before hitting him he was really his son. How did your mother die? Brain bleed. Rare. Genetic. Passes from mother to daughter, which is the only good thing, ’cause she only had sons. How are you doing? Fine. Good. Great.

  At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, and Secrets.

  He lied to everyone. He lied to his lovers, his friends, his brothers.

  Well.

  More often he simply didn’t tell his brothers the truth.