The Raven Boys

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 12

 

  It took her a while to make sense of what the journal was really about. It was organized into rough sections, but it was clear that whoever had created it had run out of space in some and begun anew later in the journal. There was a section on ley lines, invisible energy lines that connected spiritual places. There was a section on Owain Glyndr, the Raven King. There was a section about legends of sleeping knights who waited beneath mountains for discovery and new life. There was a section of strange stories about sacrificed kings and ancient water goddesses and all of the old things that ravens represented.

  More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.

  A familiar shape stood out from the rest of the doodles. Three intersecting lines: a long, beaked triangle. It was the same shape Neeve had drawn in the churchyard dust. The same shape her mother had drawn on the steamed shower door.

  Blue flattened the page to get a better look. This section was on ley lines: "mystical energy roads that connect spiritual places. " Throughout the journal, the writer had doodled the three lines again and again, along with a sickly-looking Stonehenge, strangely elongated horses, and a labeled sketch of a burial mound. There was no explanation of the symbol.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  There was no way this journal could possibly belong to that presidential raven boy. Someone must’ve given it to him.

  Maybe, she thought, it’s Adam’s.

  He gave her the same sensation as the journal did: the sense of magic, of possibility, of anxious danger. That same feeling as when Neeve had said that a spirit touched her hair.

  Blue thought, I wish you had been Gansey. But as soon as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. Because whoever Gansey was, he didn’t have long to live.

  Chapter 9

  Gansey woke in the night to find the moon full on his face and his phone ringing.

  He fumbled for where it was nestled in the blankets beside him. Blind without his glasses or contacts, he had to hold the screen an inch from his eyes to read the caller ID: MALORY, R. Now Gansey understood the bizarre timing of the call. Dr. Roger Malory lived in Sussex, a five-hour time difference from Henrietta. Midnight in Virginia was five in the morning for Malory-the-early-riser. Malory was one of the prime authorities on British ley lines. He was either eighty or one hundred or two hundred years old and had written three books on the subject, all classics in the (very limited) field. They’d met the summer Gansey was splitting his time between Wales and London. Malory had been the first one to take fifteen-year-old Gansey seriously, a favor for which Gansey would not soon stop being grateful for.

  "Gansey," Malory said warmly, knowing better than to call him by his Christian name. Without further preamble, Malory launched into a one-sided conversation about the weather, the historical society’s past four meetings, and how frustrating his neighbor with the collie was. Gansey understood about three quarters of the monologue. After living in the UK for nearly a year, Gansey was good with accents, but Malory’s was often difficult, due to a combination of slurring, chewing, extreme age, bad breeding, and a poor phone connection.

  Getting out of bed to crouch beside his model of Henrietta, Gansey half-listened for a polite twelve minutes before breaking in, gently. "It’s nice of you to call. "

  "I found a very interesting textual source," Malory said. There was a sound like he was either chewing or wrapping something in cellophane. Gansey had seen his flat and it was quite possible he was doing both. "Who suggested that the ley lines are dormant. Sleeping. Sound familiar?"

  "Like Glendower! So what does that mean?"

  "Might explain why they’re so hard to dowse. If they’re still present but not active, the energy would be very faint and irregular. In Surrey, I was following a line with this fellow — fourteen miles, rotten weather, raindrops like turnips — and then it just disappeared. "

  Retrieving a tube of glue and some cardboard shingles, Gansey used the strong moonlight to work on a roof while Malory went on about rain. He asked, "Did your source say anything about waking the ley lines up? If Glendower can be woken, the ley lines could be, too, right?"

  "That’s the thought. "

  "But all it takes to wake Glendower is discovery. People have been walking all over the ley lines. "

  "Oh no, Mr. Gansey, that’s where you’re mistaken. The spirit roads are underground. Even if they weren’t always, they’re now covered by meters of dirt accumulated over the centuries," Malory said. "No one’s really touched them for hundreds of years. You and I, we don’t walk the lines. We just follow the echoes. "

  Gansey recalled how the trail had seemed to come and go for no reason while he and Adam dowsed the lines. Malory’s theory had a ring of plausibility, and, really, that was all he needed. He wanted nothing more than to start scouring his books for further support for this new idea, school day be damned. He felt a rare stab of resentment at being a teen, being tied to Aglionby; maybe this was how Ronan felt all the time.

  "Okay. So we go to them underground. Caves, maybe?"

  "Oh, caves are dreadful things," Malory replied. "Do you know how many people die in caves every year?"

  Gansey replied that he was sure he didn’t.

  "Thousands," Malory assured him. "They are like elephant graveyards. Much better to stay aboveground. Spelunking is more dangerous than motorcycle racing. No, this source was all about a ritual way to wake the spirit roads from the surface, letting the ley line know of your presence. You’d do a symbolic laying of hands on the energy there in Marianna. "

  "Henrietta. "

  "Texas?"

  Whenever Gansey talked to British people about America, they always seemed to think he meant Texas. He said, "Virginia. "

  "Right," agreed Malory warmly. "Think how easy it would be to follow that spirit road to Glendower if it’s shouting loud instead of whispering. You find it, perform the ritual, follow it to your king. "

  When Malory said it, it sounded inevitable.

  Follow it to your king.

  Gansey closed his eyes to calm his pulse. He saw a dimly gray image of a king in repose, hands folded on his chest, a sword by his right side, a cup by his left. This slumbering figure was dizzyingly important to Gansey in a way that he couldn’t begin to understand or shape. It was something more, something bigger, something that mattered. Something without a price tag. Something earned.

  "Now, the text was not quite clear on how to perform the ritual," Malory admitted. He rambled about the vagaries of historical documents, and Gansey only paid a little attention until he finished with, "I’m going to try it on the Lockyer road. I’ll let you know how it goes. "

  "Brilliant," Gansey said. "I can’t say thanks enough. "

  "Give my regards to your mother. "

  "I wi —"

  "You’re lucky you still have your mother at your age. When I was about your age, my mother was murdered by the British health-care system. She was perfectly fine until she was admitted after a little cough…. "

  Gansey half-listened to Malory’s oft-repeated story of the government’s failure to cure his mother’s throat cancer. Malory sounded quite cheerful by the time the phone had gone silent.

  Now Gansey felt infected by the chase; he needed to talk to someone before the unfinished feeling of the quest ate him from the inside out. Adam would be the best, but the odds were good that Ronan, who swung wildly between insomnia and hyper-somnia, would be awake.

  He’d only made it halfway to Ronan’s room before the thought struck him that it was empty. Standing in the dark doorway, Gansey whispered Ronan’s name, and then, when that got no response, spoke it aloud.

  Ronan’s room was not to be broached, but Gansey did it anyway. Putting his hand on the bed
, he found it unmade and cool, the blankets thrown aside with the speed of Ronan’s going. Gansey hammered Noah’s closed door with a fist while fumbling to dial Ronan’s number with his other hand. It rang twice before Ronan’s voicemail said merely, "Ronan Lynch. "

  Gansey cut off the recorded voice mid-word, his pulse tripping. For a long moment he debated, and then he dialed another number. This time, it was Adam’s voice that answered, low with sleep and caution. "Gansey?"

  "Ronan’s gone. "

  Adam was quiet. It was not just that Ronan had vanished, it was that he had vanished after a fight with Declan. But it wasn’t an easy thing to leave the Parrish household in the middle of the night. The consequences of getting caught could leave physical evidence, and it was getting too warm for long sleeves. Gansey felt wretched for asking this of him.

  Outside, a midnight bird cried, high and piercing. The little replica of Henrietta was eerie in the half-light, the die-cast cars parked on the streets appearing as though they had just paused. Gansey always thought that, after dark, it felt like anything could happen. At night, Henrietta felt like magic, and at night, magic felt like it might be a terrible thing.

  "I’ll check the park," Adam whispered finally. "And, uh, the bridge, I guess. "

  Adam hung up so softly that it took Gansey a moment to realize the connection had ended. He pressed his fingertips to his eyes, which was how Noah found him.

  "You’re going to look for him?" Noah asked. He looked pale and insubstantial in the yellow, late-night light of the room behind him; the skin beneath his eyes was darker than anything. He looked less like Noah than the suggestion of Noah. "Check the church. "

  Noah didn’t say he would go along, and Gansey didn’t ask him to. Six months ago, the only time it had ever mattered, Noah had found Ronan in an introspective pool of his own blood, and so he was exempt from ever having to look again. Noah hadn’t gone with Gansey to the hospital afterward, and Adam had been caught trying to sneak out, so it was only Gansey who’d been with Ronan when they stitched his skin whole again. It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all.

  Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.

  Pulling on his jacket, he headed out into the greenish light of the chilly parking lot. The hood of Ronan’s BMW was cold, so it hadn’t been driven recently. Wherever he’d gone, he’d gone on foot. The church, its spire illuminated by dusky yellow light, was within walking distance. So was Nino’s. So was the old bridge with the fast current rushing away beneath it.

  He started to walk. His mind was logical, but his traitorous heart stuttered from beat to beat. He wasn’t naive; he carried no illusions that he’d ever recover the Ronan Lynch he’d known before Niall died. But he didn’t want to lose the Ronan Lynch he had now.

  Despite the strong moonlight, the entrance to St. Agnes lay in total darkness. Shivering a bit, Gansey put his hand on the great iron ring that pulled open the church door, unsure if it would be unlocked. He’d only been to St. Agnes once, on Easter, because Ronan’s younger brother, Matthew, had asked them all to come. He wouldn’t have thought of it as a place someone like Ronan would go in the middle of the night, but then again, he wouldn’t have pegged Ronan as a churchgoer at all. And yet all of the Lynch brothers went to St. Agnes every Sunday. For an hour, they managed to sit next to one another in a pew even when they couldn’t meet one another’s eyes over a restaurant table.