The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Blue ran her fingers over an exposed beech root next to her leg. Yes, she knew.

  Artemus spread more roots for his story: “There were enough trees that could hold us in Wales. But as the years went by, Wales turned from a place of forests to a place of fires and plows and boats and houses; it became a place for all the things that trees could be except for alive.”

  The roots were dug in; he began on the trunk. “The amae vias were failing. The tir e e’lintes can only exist in trees near them, but we feed the amae vias too. We are oce iteres. Like the sky, and the water. Mirrors.”

  Despite the heat, Blue put her arms around herself, as chilled as she would have been by Noah’s presence.

  Artemus looked wistfully at the beech tree, or at something past it, something older. “A forest of tir e e’lintes is something, indeed, mirrors pointed to mirrors pointed to mirrors, the amae vias churning up below us, dreams held between us.”

  Blue asked, “What about one of them? What is one of them?”

  He regarded his hands ruefully. “Tired.” He regarded hers. “Other.”

  “And the demon?”

  But this was skipping ahead. He shook his head, backed up.

  “Owain was not like common men,” he said. “He could speak to the birds. He could speak to us. He wanted his country to be a wild place of magic, a place of dreams and songs, crossed by powerful amae vias. So we fought for him. We all lost everything. He lost everything.”

  “All of his family died,” Blue said. “I heard.”

  Artemus nodded. “It is dangerous to spill blood on an ama via. Even a little can plant dark things.”

  Blue’s eyes widened. “A demon.”

  His eyebrows tipped much further along toward the sad side of things. His face was a portrait called Worry. “Wales was unmade. We were unmade. The tir e e’lintes who were left were to hide Owain Glyndŵr until a time when he could rise again. We were to hide him for a time. To slow him as we are slow in trees. But there were not enough places of power left on the Welsh amae vias after the demon’s work. And so we fled here; we died here. It is a hard journey.”

  “How did you meet my mother?”

  “She came to the spirit road intending to communicate with trees, and that is what she did.”

  Blue started, then stopped, then started again. “Am I human?”

  “Maura is human.” He did not say and so am I. He was not a wizard, a human who could be in trees. He was something else.

  “Tell me,” Artemus whispered, “when you dream, do you dream of the stars?”

  It was too much: the demon, Ronan’s grief, the fact of the trees. To her surprise, a tear welled in her eye and escaped; another was queued up behind it.

  Artemus watched it fall from her chin, and then he said, “All of the tir e e’lintes are full of potential, always moving, always restless, always looking for possibilities to reach out and be somewhere else, be something else. This tree, that tree, that forest, that forest. But more than anything, we love the stars.” He cast his eyes up, as if he could see them during the day. “If only we could reach them, maybe we could be them. Any one of them could be our skin-house.”

  Blue sighed.

  Artemus looked at his own hands again; they always seemed to make him anxious. “This form is not the easiest for us. I long — I just want to go back to a forest on the spirit road. But the demon unmakes it.”

  “How do we get rid of it?”

  Very reluctantly, Artemus said, “Someone must willingly die on the corpse road.”

  Darkness descended so rapidly on Blue’s thoughts that she reached to balance herself on the beech tree. She saw Gansey’s spirit walking the ley line in her mind. She remembered abruptly that Adam and Gansey were within earshot; she had completely forgotten that it was not just Artemus and her.

  “Is there another way?” she asked.

  Artemus’s voice was quieter still. “Willing death to pay for unwilling death. That’s the way.”

  There was silence, and then more silence, and finally, Gansey asked, his voice raised from next to the house, “What about waking Glendower and using that favor?”

  But Artemus did not reply. She had missed the moment of him going: He was in the tree and the puzzle box sat askew in the roots. Blue was left holding this terrible truth and nothing else, not even a scrap of heroism.

  “Please come back!” she said.

  But there was only the stirring of dried leaves overhead.

  “Well,” Adam said, his voice as tired as Artemus’s. “That’s that.”

  Night fell; that, at least, could still be relied upon.

  Adam opened the driver’s-side door to the BMW. Ronan had not moved a bit since they had seen him last; he was still looking down the road, feet on the pedals, hands resting on the steering wheel. Ready to go. Waiting for Gansey. It was not grief; it was a safer, more vacant place beyond it. Adam told Ronan, “You can’t sleep here.”

  “No,” Ronan agreed.

  Adam stood in the dark street, shivering in the cold, stepping from foot to foot, looking for any evidence that Ronan might budge. It was late. Adam had called Boyd an hour ago to tell him that he would not be getting to the Chevelle with the exhaust leak he’d promised he would look at. Even if he could have forced himself awake — Adam could nearly always accomplish this — he wouldn’t have been able to stand working in the garage knowing that Cabeswater was under attack, Laumonier was conspiring, and Ronan was mourning.

  “Are you going to come inside and at least eat something?”

  “No,” Ronan said.

  He was impossible and terrible.

  Adam shut the door and lightly pounded his fist three times on the roof. Then he went to the other side of the car, opened the door, made sure Noah wasn’t in there, and climbed in.

  As Ronan watched him, he fumbled around with the seat controls until he found the one that made it recline all the way, and then he clawed for Ronan’s Aglionby jacket. Both it and the Orphan Girl were hopelessly balled up among the other things in the backseat — the Orphan Girl snuffled and pushed the jacket toward his hand. He wadded it beneath his neck as a pillow, draping the sleeve over his eyes to block out the streetlight.

  “Wake me up if you have to,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  Inside 300 Fox Way, Blue watched Gansey let himself be convinced to stay there instead of returning to Monmouth for the night. Even though there were now plenty of empty beds in the house, he took the couch, accepting just a quilt and a pillow with a light pink pillowcase. His eyes weren’t closed by the time she went upstairs and put herself to bed in her own room. Everything felt too quiet inside the house, with everyone gone, and too loud outside the house, with everything menacing.

  She did not sleep. She thought of her father becoming one with a tree, and she thought about Gansey sitting in the Camaro with his head ducked, and she thought about the whispered voice of the dark sleeper she’d encountered in the cave. Things felt like they were spooling to the end.

  Sleep, she told herself.

  Gansey slept in a room a dozen feet below her. It should not have mattered — it did not matter. But she could not stop thinking of the nearness of him, the impossibility of him. The promise of his death.

  She was dreaming. It was dark. Her eyes didn’t get used to it; her heart did. There was no light to speak of. It was so completely dark that eyes were unimportant. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she had eyes. This was a strange idea. What did she have?

  Cool damp at her feet. No. Her roots. Stars pressing down above her, so close that they could surely be reachable if only she grew a few more inches. A warm, vital skin of bark.

  This was the shape of her soul. This was what she had been missing. This was how she felt in her human skin, tree-shaped feelings in a human body. What a slow, stretching joy.

  Jane?

  Gansey was there. He must have been there all along, because now that she thought about it, she couldn’
t stop sensing him there. She was something more; he was still human. He was a king stolen away into this tree by the tir e e’lint that was Blue. She was all around him. The joy from her previous revelation overlapped slowly onto this joy. He was still alive, she had him with her, she was as close to him as she could possibly be.

  Where are we?

  We’re a tree. I’m a tree. You’re — haha I can’t say that. It would be filthy.

  Are you laughing?

  Yes, because I’m happy.

  Slowly, her joy tapered, though, as she felt his rapid pulse against her. He was afraid.

  What are you afraid of?

  I don’t want to die.

  This felt true, but it was hard to put together thoughts with any speed. This tree was just as ill-fitted to her essential Blueness as her human body. She remained half one, half the other.

  Can you see if Ronan has come in from the car?

  I can try. I don’t really have eyes.

  She stretched out with all of the senses available to her. They were ever so much better than her human ones, but they were interested in very different things. It was exceptionally difficult to focus on the affairs of the humans around the base of the trunk. She had not properly appreciated how much effort it had taken the trees to attend to their needs before now.

  I don’t know. She held him tightly, loving him and keeping him. We could just stay here.

  I love you, Blue, but I know what I have to do. I don’t want to. But I know what I have to do.

  All of the sounds and smells of Fox Way were magnified after dark, when all of its human occupants were quiet. All of the fragrant teas and candles and spices became more distinct, each declaring their origin, when in daytime they mingled into something Gansey had only previously identified as Fox Way. Now it struck him as something both powerful and homey, secret and knowing. This house was a place of magic, same as Cabeswater, but one had to listen harder for it. Gansey lay on the couch with a quilt over him, his eyes closed against the dark, and listened to the rattle of air or breath through a vent somewhere, to the scratch of leaves or nails against a window somewhere, to the thump of popping wood or footsteps from the other room.

  He opened his eyes, and there was Noah.

  This was Noah without any daylight to cloud what he really had become. He was very close, because he had forgotten that the living could not focus on things closer than three inches. He was very cold, because he now required massive amounts of energy to remain visible. He was very afraid, and because Gansey was afraid, their thoughts tangled.

  Gansey kicked off the quilt. He tied on his shoes and put on his jacket. Quietly, taking great care to tread lightly on these old floors, he followed Noah out of the living room. He didn’t turn on any lights, because his mind was still tossed together with Noah’s, and he was using Noah’s eyes, which no longer cared if it was dark or not. The dead boy didn’t take him outside, as he’d expected, however, but up the stairs to the second floor. For the first half of the stairs, Gansey thought that he was being led on Noah’s usual haunt around the house, and for the second, he thought that he was being taken to Blue. But Noah passed her door and instead waited at the base of the attic stairs.

  The attic was a charged location, having been occupied first by Neeve and then by Gwenllian, two people difficult in different ways. Gansey would not have regarded either of them as possible paths forward, but Noah had led him there, and so Gansey hesitated there with his hand over the knob. He did not want to knock; he would wake the rest of the house.

  Noah pushed on the door.

  It fell open lightly — it had not been latched — and Noah proceeded up the stairs. Wan light came from the top of them, accompanied by a biting chill scented with oak. It felt like a window was open.

  Gansey followed Noah.

  A window was open.

  Gwenllian had turned the room to witchy clutter, and it was currently full of every strange thing but herself. Her bed was empty. Cold night air came through a round porthole window.

  By the time Gansey had climbed through it, Noah had vanished.

  “Hello, little king,” Gwenllian greeted. She was far out on one of the house’s small, mismatched roof angles, boots braced against the shingles, a dark and strange silhouette in the ambient and flickering light of the haunted streetlights below. There was nonetheless something noble about her, a brave and arrogant tilt to her chin. She patted the roof beside her.

  “Is it safe?”

  She cocked her head. “Is this how you die?”

  He joined her, picking his way carefully, dirt and tree litter crumbling beneath his shoes, and then sat beside her. From this vantage point, there were trees and more trees. The oaks that were merely featureless trunks at ground level were complicated worlds of ascending branches at roof level, the patterns of them made more complex by the shadows thrown by the orange glow below.

  “Hi ho hi ho,” Gwenllian sang in a low, disdainful voice. “Are you coming to me for wisdom?”

  Gansey shook his head. “Courage.”

  She appraised him.

  “You tried to stop your father’s war,” Gansey said. “By stabbing his poet at the dinner table. You had to be almost certain it wouldn’t end well for you. How did you do it?”

  Her act of bravery had happened hundreds of years before. Glendower had not been fighting on Welsh soil for centuries now, and the man Gwenllian had tried to kill had been dead for generations. She’d been trying to save a family that now no longer existed; she’d lost everything to sit upon this roof of 300 Fox Way in a different world entirely.

  “Haven’t you learned yet? A king acts so that others will act. Nothing comes from nothing comes from nothing. But something makes something.” She drew in the air with her long fingers, but Gansey did not think that she was drawing anything intended for a gaze other than her own. “I am Gwenllian Glen Dŵr, and I am the daughter of a king and the daughter of a tree-light, and I did something so that others would do something. That is kingly.”

  “But how?” Gansey asked. “How did you manage it?”

  She pretended to stab him in the ribs. Then, when he looked at her ruefully, she laughed wildly and freely. After she had been merry for a full minute, she said, “I stopped asking how. I just did it. The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.”

  She did not say anything more, and he did not ask anything more. They sat there beside each other on the roof, she dancing her fingers through the air, he watching the lights of Henrietta dance similarly in time to some hidden and sputtering ley line.

  Finally, he said, “Would you take my hand?”

  Her fingers stopped moving, and she looked at him cannily, holding his gaze for a long minute, as if daring him to look away or change his mind. He did not.

  Gwenllian leaned close, smelling of clove cigarettes and coffee, and much to his great surprise, kissed his cheek.

  “Godspeed, King,” she said, and took his hand.

  In the end, it was such a simple, small thing. He had felt flashes of it before in his life, the absolute certainty. But the truth was that he’d kept walking away from it. It was a far more terrifying idea to imagine how much control he really had over how his life turned out. Easier to believe that he was a gallant ship tossed by fate than to captain it himself.

  He would steer it now, and if there were rocks near shore, so be it.

  “Tell me where Owen Glendower is,” he said to the darkness. Crisp and sure, with the same power he had used to command Noah, to command the skeletons in the cave. “Show me where the Raven King is.”

  The night began to wail.

  The sound came from everywhere — a wild scream. A primal scream. A battle cry.

  It got louder and louder, and Gansey clambered to his feet, his hands half-held over his ears. Gwenllian shouted something in delight and fervor, but the sound drowned out her voice. It drowned out the rattle of the remaining dry oak leaves in the trees, and it drowned out the sound of Gansey’
s shoes scuffing on the roof as he minced toward the edge for a better vantage point. The sound drowned out the lights, and the street was plunged into blackness. The scream drowned out everything, and when the sound stopped and the lights returned, a dull white-horned beast stood askance in the middle of the street down below, hooves splayed on the asphalt.

  Somewhere there was the ordinary world, a world of stoplights and shopping malls, of fluorescent lights at gas stations and light blue carpet in a suburban home. But here, now: There was only the moment before the scream and the moment after.

  Gansey’s ears rang.

  The creature lifted its head to look at him with brilliant eyes. It was the sort of animal that everyone thought they knew the name of until they saw it, and then the name ran away and left behind only the feeling of seeing it. It was older than anything, more lovely than anything, more terrible than anything.

  Something winning and frightened sang in Gansey’s chest; it was the precise same feeling that had taken him the first time he’d seen Cabeswater. He realized that he had seen something like this creature before: the herd of white beasts that had stampeded through Cabeswater. Now that he was looking at this one, though, he realized that those were copies of this, descendants of this, dreamt memories of this.

  The beast twitched an ear. Then it plunged into the night.

  Gwenllian asked Gansey, “Well, aren’t you going to follow it?”

  Yes.

  She pointed at the oak branches, and he did not question her. He edged quickly to where a great branch overhung the roof, climbed out onto it, getting a handhold here and there on upright spurs. He slipped down from branch to branch and then jumped the eight or nine feet to the ground, feeling the jolt of the landing from the balls of his feet to his teeth.