The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Oh, you know, overeducated young people who drive themselves to nervous breakdowns in the worthy pursuit of excellence,” Henry said. Gansey’s parents laughed. Blue picked at her napkin. Gansey had been rescued; Blue had been stranded.

  Mr. Gansey saw it, though, and he caught the ball before it even hit the ground. “I would love to read something from you, Blue, on growing up in a house of psychics. You could go academic or you could go memoir, and either way, it would just be fascinating. You have such a distinct voice, even when speaking.”

  “Oh yes, I noticed that, too, the Henrietta cadence,” Mrs. Gansey said warmly; they were excellent team players. Good save, point to the Ganseys, win for Team Good Feeling.

  Helen said, “I nearly forgot about the bruschetta; it’s going to burn. Dick, would you help me carry it in?”

  Team Good Feeling was abruptly disbanded. Gansey was about to find out why he was in trouble.

  “Right, sure,” he said. “Can I get anyone anything while I’m inside?”

  “Actually, if you’d bring back my schedule by the Ellie-furniture, that would be great, thanks,” his mother said. “I need to call Martina to make sure she’s going to be there in enough time.”

  The Gansey siblings headed inside, where Helen first removed the toast from the oven and then turned to him. She demanded, “Do you remember when I said, ‘tell me what kind of dirt I will find on your brodude friends so that I can spin it before Mom gets out here’?”

  “I trust that’s a rhetorical question,” Gansey said. He garnished bruschetta.

  Helen said, “You did not get back to me with any information on that front.”

  “I sent you clippings of the Turk Week pranks.”

  “And yet you failed to mention that you had bribed the headmaster.”

  Gansey stopped garnishing bruschetta.

  “You really did,” Helen said, reading him effortlessly. Gansey siblings were tuned to the same radio frequency. “Which one did you do it for? Which friend? The trailer park one.”

  “Don’t be insulting,” Gansey replied crisply. “Who told you?”

  “Paperwork told me. You’re not eighteen yet, you know. How did you even manage to convince Brulio to write that document for you? I thought he was supposed to be Dad’s attorney.”

  “This has nothing to do with Dad. I didn’t spend his money.”

  “You’re seventeen. What other money do you have?”

  Gansey looked at her. “I take it you only read the first page of the document then.”

  “That’s all that would open on my phone,” Helen said. “Why? What does the second page say? Jesus Christ. You gave Child that warehouse of yours, didn’t you?”

  It sounded so clean when she put it that way. He supposed it was. One Aglionby diploma in exchange for Monmouth Manufacturing.

  You probably won’t be around to miss it, he told himself.

  “First of all, what has he possibly done to deserve such a thing?” Helen demanded. “Are you sleeping with him?”

  Indignation cooled his voice. “Because friendship isn’t worthy enough?”

  “Dick, I see you stretching to stand on the high ground, but trust me, you’re failing. You don’t just need a morality ladder to get there, you need a booster chair to put the ladder on. Do you understand what an incredibly bad position this puts Mom in if this stupidity of yours comes to light?”

  “It’s not Mom. It’s me.”

  Helen put her head on its side. Ordinarily he didn’t notice the age difference between them, but just then, she was very obviously a polished adult and he was a — whatever he was. “Do you think the press would care? You’re seventeen. It was the family lawyer, for God’s sake. Example of family corruption, et cetera, et cetera. I cannot believe you wouldn’t at least wait until after the election to do it.”

  But Gansey didn’t know how long he had. He didn’t know if he had until after the election. This made his chest feel tight and his breaths go instantly small, so he pushed the thought away from himself as quickly as he could.

  “I didn’t think about the ramifications,” he said. “For the campaign.”

  “Obviously! I don’t even know what you were thinking. I was trying all the way out here to put it together and I just couldn’t.”

  Gansey pushed around a lump of tomato on the cutting board. His heart was still feathered inside him. In a much smaller voice, he said, “I didn’t want him to throw it all away because his father died. He doesn’t want it now, but I wanted him to have it later, when he realized he did.”

  Helen said nothing, and he knew that his sister was studying him, reading him again. He just kept pushing that lump of tomato around, thinking about how he really wasn’t even sure that Ronan needed the degree after all, and how he regretted making the deal with Child even as he hadn’t been unable to sleep until he did it. He had been wrong about a lot of things, and it was too late, now, with time running out, to fix them. It had been a lonesome and guilty secret to keep.

  To his surprise, Helen hugged him.

  “Little brother,” she whispered, “what’s wrong with you?”

  The Ganseys were not huggers, and Helen would not ordinarily risk wrinkling her blouse, and her fine gold bracelets pressed lines into his arm, and something about all of these things combined made Gansey feel dangerously close to tears.

  “What if I don’t find him,” Gansey said finally. “Glendower.”

  Helen let out a sigh and released him. “You and that king. When will it end?”

  “When I find him.”

  “What then? What if you do find him?”

  “That’s all there is.”

  It wasn’t a good answer, and she didn’t like it, but she merely narrowed her eyes. She patted some wrinkles out of her blouse.

  “I’m sorry I ruined Mom’s campaign,” he said.

  “You didn’t ruin it. I’ll just have to, I don’t know. I’ll find some skeletons in Child’s closet to make sure he’s compliant.” Helen didn’t look entirely displeased by the task. She liked organizing facts. “Jesus. To think I thought I’d have to be dealing with hazing and marijuana possession. Who’s that girl out there, by the way? You kissed her?”

  “No,” Gansey replied truthfully.

  “You should,” she said.

  “Do you like her?”

  “She’s weird. You’re weird.”

  The Gansey siblings smiled at each other.

  “Let’s get this bruschetta out of here,” Helen said. “So we can get out of this weekend alive.”

  It was a mistake.

  Adam knew it the moment he fell into the dark mouth of the scrying bowl, but it wasn’t like he could leave Ronan there in his dream alone.

  His physical body sat cross-legged back at the Barns, a ceramic dog dish serving as his scrying bowl. Ronan’s body curled on the sofa. Orphan Girl sat close to Adam, peering into the bowl along with him.

  That was real.

  But this was also real: this diseased symphony that was Cabeswater. The forest vomited black around him. Trees melted into black, but in reverse — long black strings of goo dripping up toward the sky. The air shuddered and darted. Adam’s mind didn’t understand how to process what it was seeing. It was the horror of the black-bleeding tree they’d seen before, only it had spread to the entire forest, atmosphere included. If there had been nothing of the true Cabeswater left, it would have been less horrifying — more easily dismissed as a nightmare — but he could still see the forest he had come to know struggling to maintain itself.

  Cabeswater?

  There was no answer.

  He didn’t know what happened to him if Cabeswater died.

  “Ronan!” Adam shouted. “Are you here?”

  Maybe Ronan was only sleeping, not dreaming. Maybe he was dreaming somewhere else. Maybe he had arrived here before Adam and had already been killed in his dreams. “Ronan!”

  “Kerah,” moaned the Orphan Girl.

  When he lo
oked for her, though, she was nowhere to be seen. Had she come with him, scrying after him into the bowl? Could Ronan dream another one of her into his dreams? Adam knew the answer to this: yes. He’d watched a dreamt Ronan die in front of the real Ronan. There could be infinite Orphan Girls here in this forest. Damn it. He didn’t know how to call for her. He tried: “Orphan Girl!”

  As soon as he shouted it, he was sorry. Things were what you named them in this place. In any case, there was no reply.

  He began to move through the forest. He was careful to cling to his body back at the Barns. His hands on the cold scrying bowl. His hip bones against the wooden floor. The smell of the fireplace behind him. Remember where you are, Adam.

  He didn’t want to call again for Ronan; he didn’t want this nightmare to forge a duplicate. Everything he saw was terrible. Here a snake dissolving while still alive, here a stag in slow-motion pedal on the ground, vines growing up through its still-living flesh. Here was a creature that was not Adam but was nonetheless somehow clothed like him. Adam flinched, but the strange boy was not attending to him. He was instead slowly eating his own hands.

  Adam shuddered. “Cabeswater, where is he?”

  His voice cracked, and Cabeswater heaved, trying to appease its magician. A rock had manifested before him. Or rather, it had always been there, in the way of dreams, in the way Noah appeared or disappeared. Adam had seen this boulder before; its striated surface was covered with purple-black letters in Ronan’s handwriting.

  Adam moved past it as something screamed behind him.

  Here was Ronan. Finally. Finally.

  Ronan was circling something in the burned-out grass between ruined trees; when Adam drew closer he saw that it was a carcass. It was hard to tell what it had first looked like. It seemed to have chalky white skin, but deep slashes bit through the flesh; the edges of them curled in on themselves pinkly. A snarl of intestines roped out from under a greasy gray flap and hooked on a red-tipped claw. Mushrooms burst through parts of all of it, and there was something terribly wrong about them; they were difficult to look at.

  “No,” Ronan said. “Oh no. You bastard.”

  “What is it?” Adam asked.

  Ronan’s hand hovered over two parted beaks, side by side, both rimmed with black and something purple-red that Adam didn’t want to consider too deeply. “My night horror. God. Shit.”

  “Why would it be here?”

  “I don’t know. It cares about what I care about,” Ronan said. He peered up at Adam. “Is this a nightmare, or is this real?”

  Adam held his gaze. This was where they were now: Nightmares were real. There was no difference between dreams and reality when they stood here in Cabeswater together.

  “What’s doing this?” Ronan asked. “I can’t hear the trees. Nothing’s talking to me.”

  Adam held his gaze. He didn’t want to say demon out loud.

  Ronan said, “I want to wake up. Can we? I don’t want to bring any of it back. And I can’t keep my thoughts — I can’t —”

  “Yes,” Adam interrupted. He couldn’t, either. “We need to talk to the others. Let’s —”

  “Kerah!”

  The Orphan Girl’s thin cry caught Ronan immediately; he craned his neck to see her among the dark branches and pools.

  “Leave her,” Adam said. “She’s with us in real life.”

  But Ronan hesitated.

  “Kerah!” she wailed again, and this time Adam heard the pain in her voice. It was small and childlike and piteous, and everything in him had been coded to respond to it. “Kerah, succurro!”

  It was impossible to tell if this was the Orphan Girl they had back at the Barns, or if this was a copy, or if it was a monstrous devil bird with her voice. Ronan didn’t care. He ran anyway. Adam crashed after him. Everything he passed was hideous: a forest of willows sagged into each other, a bird singing a note backward, a fist of black insects crawling over the stub of a rabbit carcass.

  The voice did not belong to a monstrous devil bird. It was the Orphan Girl, or something that looked just like her, and she knelt in a scruff of dry grass. She had not been crying, but she burst into tears when she saw Ronan. As he reached her, out of breath, she held out her arms to him imploringly. Adam did not think she was a copy; she wore his watch with its bite marks on the band, and in any case, this feeble Cabeswater lacked the strength to produce such an incorrupt version of her.

  “Succurro, succurro,” she sobbed. Help, help — The arms she stretched to Ronan were coated and spattered in blood up to the elbow.

  Ronan skidded to his knees, his arms around her, and it hurt Adam, somehow, to watch how ferociously he hugged his little strange dream creature, and how she buried her face into his shoulder. He stood with her in his arms, holding her tightly, and he heard him saying, No, you did good, it’s going to be okay, we’re waking up.

  Then Adam saw it. He saw it before Ronan did, because Ronan had not yet looked beyond the Orphan Girl. No, no. The Orphan Girl had not stopped here because it was all the farther she could run. She had knelt there because that was all the farther she could drag the body. Body was a tender word for it. Long strands of hair stuck to the largest of pieces; all of it was strung out long like a string of viscous pearls. This was how Orphan Girl’s arms had gotten painted with blood; this futile rescue effort.

  “Ronan,” Adam warned as dread welled up in him.

  At the tone in Adam’s voice, Ronan turned.

  There was a brief moment where he was looking just at Adam, and Adam wished that he could keep him in it forever. Just wake up, he thought, but he knew Ronan wouldn’t.

  Ronan’s gaze dropped.

  “Mom?”

  Depending on where you began the story, it was about the Gray Man.

  The Gray Man liked kings.

  He liked official kings, the sorts who had the title and crown and all that, but he also liked unofficial kings, who ruled and led and stewarded without any noble bloodline or proper throne. He liked kings who lived in the past and kings who lived in the future. Kings who had become legends only after their death and kings who had become legends during their lives and kings who had become legends without living at all. His favorites were the kings who used their power in the pursuit of learning and peace rather than status and property, who used violence only to create a country that did not have to live by violence. Alfred, the king the Gray Man most idolized, epitomized this, having conquered the squabbling kinglings of Anglo-Saxon England to create a unified country. How acutely the Gray Man admired such a man, even as he found himself a hit man instead of a king.

  It seemed peculiar that he couldn’t quite remember his decision to become a hit man.

  He remembered the academic portions of his life as a historian back in Boston: the lectures, the papers, the parties, the archives. Kings and warriors, honor and wergild. He remembered the Greenmantles, of course. But everything else was difficult to piece together. Hard to discern what was true recollection and what was merely dream. Back then he’d strung one gray day into another, and it seemed likely that he had lost weeks or months or years to this foggy dissociation. Somewhere in there someone had breathed the word mercenary, and somewhere in there someone had given up his identity and become the Gray Man.

  “What are we expecting to find here?” Maura asked him now.

  They were in the car together, headed out toward Singer’s Falls. The presence of only two parts of Laumonier at the grocery store had been gnawing at the Gray Man ever since he had left them, and he’d spent much of the night in a dedicated search for the third and most unpleasant brother. Now, although they’d lost sight of his rental car, they continued on toward the Barns.

  “We are hoping to find nothing,” the Gray Man said. “We are expecting, however, to find Laumonier rifling through Niall Lynch’s closets.”

  The part of the Gray Man who used to be a hit man was not thrilled by the idea of Maura insisting on coming with him; the part of him that was very in love
with her was deeply satisfied.

  “Still no answer from Ronan,” Maura said, peering at the Gray Man’s phone. Blue had told them that morning that Ronan Lynch and Adam Parrish were working at the Barns.

  “Possibly he wouldn’t pick up my number,” the Gray Man demurred. Also, possibly he was dead. Laumonier could be very difficult when cornered.

  “Possibly,” Maura echoed with a frown.

  They found the Barns looking idyllic as usual, with only two cars in the gravel area — the Lynch BMW and the Parrish tri-color jalopy. There was no sign of Laumonier’s rental, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t parked nearby and walked in.

  “Don’t tell me to stay in the car,” Maura said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, opening the door slowly to avoid jamming it into a plum tree still growing barely hidden fruit. “A parked car is a vulnerable place.”

  He retrieved his gun and Maura put his phone in her back pocket and they tried the front door — unlocked. It took them very little time to discover Adam and Ronan in the living room.

  They were not dead.

  But they were not quite alive, either. Ronan Lynch was unresponsive on the faded leather couch, and Adam Parrish was keeled back beside the fireplace. A young girl sat bolt upright in front of a dog bowl, unblinking. She had hooves. None of the room’s occupants responded to Maura’s voice.

  The Gray Man found himself strangely affected by the sight of them in such a state, which seemed contradictory given that he had killed Ronan’s father. But it was precisely because he had killed Niall that he now felt responsibility and guilt howling in the corridors of his heart. He was his own man now, and in his position as someone else’s tool, he had left Ronan and the Barns without a protector.

  “Is this magic or poison?” the Gray Man asked Maura. “Laumonier loves his poisons.”

  Maura leaned over the scrying bowl before flinching back from it. “I think it’s magic. Not that I’m any good at whatever kind of magic they’ve been playing with.”

  “Should we shake them?” he asked.

  “Adam. Adam, come back.” She touched his face. “I don’t want to wake Ronan, in case he’s keeping Adam’s soul close by. I guess … I will go in and get Adam. Hold my hand. Don’t let me go for more than, I don’t know, ninety seconds.”