The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Those were his. Fanciful, purposeless, but lovely.

  Ronan Lynch loved to dream about light.

  There had been a time when the Barns was Ronan’s entire ecosystem. The Lynches rarely left it when he was young, because they didn’t need to, because it was a lot of work, because Niall Lynch didn’t trust many people to take care of it in their absence.

  It was better to meet friends at their houses, their mother, Aurora, explained, because Dad had a lot of breakable things around the farm.

  One of the breakable things: Aurora Lynch. Golden-haired Aurora was the obvious queen of a place like the Barns, a gentle and joyous ruler of a peaceful and secret country. She was a patron of her sons’ fanciful arts (although Declan, the eldest, was rarely fanciful), and she was a tireless playmate in her sons’ games of make-believe (although Declan, the eldest, was rarely playful). She loved Niall, of course — everyone loved larger-than-life Niall, the braggart poet, the musician king — but unlike everyone else, she preferred him in his silent moods. She loved the truth, and it was difficult to love both the truth and Niall Lynch when the latter was speaking.

  She was the only person who he could not dazzle, and he loved her for it.

  It was not until many years later that Ronan learned that the king had dreamt up his queen. But in retrospect, it made sense. His father loved to dream of light, too.

  Inside the farmhouse, Ronan switched on a few lamps to push the darkness outside. A few minutes’ search turned up a bucket of alphabet blocks, which he overturned for Chainsaw to sort through. Then he put on one of his father’s Bothy Band records, and as the fiddle and pipes crackled and fuzzed through the narrow hallways, he wiped dust off the shelves and repaired a broken cabinet hinge in the kitchen. As the morning sun finally spilled golden into the protected glen, he continued the process of restaining the worn wood staircase up to his parents’ old room.

  He breathed in. He breathed out.

  He forgot how to exhale when he wasn’t at home.

  Time kept its own clock here. A day at Aglionby was a smash-cut slideshow of images that didn’t matter and conversations that didn’t stick. But the same day, spent at the Barns, proceeded with lazy aplomb, full of four times as many things. Reading in the window seat, old movies in the living room, lazy repairing of a slamming barn door. Hours took as long as they needed.

  Slowly his memories of before — everything this place had been to him when it had held the entire Lynch family — were being overlapped with memories and hopes of after — every minute that the Barns had been his, all of the time he’d spent here alone or with Adam, dreaming and scheming.

  Home, home, home.

  It was time to sleep. To dream. Ronan had a specific object he was trying to create, and he wasn’t stupid enough to think he’d be able to get it on the first try.

  Rules for dreams, intoned Jonah Milo.

  Ronan was in English class. Milo, the English teacher, stood before a glowing Smart Board, dressed in plaid. His fingers were a metronome on the board, clicking with his words: Rules for dreamers. Rules for the dreamt.

  Cabeswater? Ronan asked the classroom. Hatred glazed his thoughts. He would never forget the smell of this place: rubber and industrial cleaner, mildew and cafeteria teriyaki.

  Mr. Lynch, do you have something you want to share?

  Sure: I’m not staying in this goddamn class a second longer —

  No one’s keeping you here, Mr. Lynch. Aglionby is a choice. Milo looked disappointed. Let’s focus. Rules for dreams. Read it out loud, Mr. Lynch.

  Ronan didn’t. They couldn’t make him.

  Dreams are easily broken, Milo sang. His words were a laundry detergent advertising jingle. It’s difficult to maintain the necessary balance between subconscious and conscious. There’s a chart on page four of your text.

  Page three was black. Page four was gone. There was no chart.

  Rules for the dreamt. Mr. Lynch, maybe sit up a bit, tuck in that shirt, and show me some Aglionby focus? A psychopomp could help you keep your waking thoughts. Everyone check to see if their dream buddy is here.

  Ronan’s dream buddy was not there.

  Adam was, though, in the very back row of chairs. Attentive. Engaged. This Aglionby Student Represents America’s Legacy. His textbook was visible in the thought bubble above his head, dense with writing and diagrams.

  Milo’s beard was longer than it had been at the beginning of class. Rules for dreamers. Really this is about arrogance, isn’t it? Mr. Lynch, do you want to talk about how God is dead?

  This is bullshit, Ronan said.

  If you know better, you can come up and teach this class yourself. I’m just trying to understand why you think you’re not going to end up dead like your father. Mr. Parrish, rules for the dreamer?

  Adam replied with textbook precision. Heaney states clearly on page twenty that dreamers are to be classified as weapons. We see in peer studies how this is borne out in reality. Example A: Ronan’s father is dead. Example B: K is dead. Example C: Gansey is dead. Example D: I am also dead. Example E: God is dead, as you mentioned. I would add Matthew and Aurora Lynch to the list, but they are not human as per Glasser’s 2012 study. I have diagrams here.

  Fuck you, Ronan said.

  Adam looked withering. He was no longer Adam, but Declan. Do your homework, Ronan, for once in your goddamn life. Don’t you even know what you are?

  Ronan woke angry and empty-handed. He abandoned the couch to slam some cabinets around in the kitchen. The milk in the fridge had gone bad, and Matthew had eaten all of the hot dogs the last time he’d come along. Ronan raged into the thin morning light in the screen porch and tore a strange fruit off a potted tree that grew packs of chocolate-covered peanuts. As he paced fitfully, Chainsaw skittered and flapped behind him, stabbing at dark spots that she hoped were dropped peanuts.

  Rules for dreamers: DreamMilo had asked him where his dream companion was. Good question. Orphan Girl had haunted his sleep for as long as he could remember, a forlorn little creature with a white skullcap pulled over her white-blond pixie cut. He thought she’d been older once, but maybe he had been younger. She’d helped him hide during nightmares. Now she more often hid behind Ronan, but she still helped him keep his mind on task. It was weird that she hadn’t shown up when Milo mentioned her. The whole dream had been weird.

  Don’t you even know what you are?

  Ronan didn’t, exactly, but he had thought he was getting better about living with the unfolding mystery of himself. His dream could screw itself.

  “Brek,” said Chainsaw.

  Throwing a peanut at her, Ronan stalked back into the house to search for inspiration. Sometimes putting his hands on something real helped him when he was having a hard time dreaming. To successfully bring back a dream object, he had to know the way it felt and smelled, the way it stretched and bent, the way gravity worked on it or didn’t, the things that made it physical instead of ephemeral.

  In Matthew’s bedroom, a silky pouch of magnetic rocks caught Ronan’s eye. As he studied the fabric, Chainsaw waddled blandly between his legs, making a low growling noise. He never understood why she chose to walk and hop so often. If he had wings, all he’d ever do was fly.

  “He’s not in here,” Ronan told her as she stretched her neck long in an attempt to see on top of the bed. Grunting in response, Chainsaw unsucessfully searched for entertainment. Matthew was a loud, joyful kid, but his room was orderly and spare. Ronan used to think that this was because Matthew kept all his clutter inside his curly-haired head. But now he suspected it was because Ronan had not had enough imagination to dream a fully formed human. Three-year-old Ronan had wanted a brother whose love was complete and uncomplicated. Three-year-old Ronan had dreamt Matthew, the opposite of Declan in every way. Was he human? Dream-Adam/Declan didn’t seem to think so, but Dream-Adam/Declan was also clearly a liar.

  Rules for dreamers.

  Dreamers are to be classified as weapons.

  Ron
an already knew he was a weapon; but he was trying to make up for it. Today’s goal was to dream something to keep Gansey safe in the case that he was stung again. Ronan had dreamt antidotes before, of course, EpiPens and cures, but the problem was that he wouldn’t know if those worked until it was too late if they didn’t.

  So now, better plan: a sheer armored skin. Something that would protect Gansey before he ever got hurt.

  Ronan couldn’t shake the idea that he was running out of time.

  It was gonna work. It was gonna be great.

  At lunchtime, Ronan abandoned his bed after two more failures to produce a successful armor. He pulled on muck boots and an already grubby hoodie and went outside.

  The Barns was a conglomerate of outbuildings and sheds and big cattle barns; Ronan stopped at one to fill feed buckets and to heave a salt block on top of the pellets, a variation of his childhood routine. Then he set off toward the high pasture, passing the silent lumps of his father’s dream-cattle stubbornly sleeping in the fields on either side. On the way, he detoured to one of the big equipment barns. Standing on his toes, he felt around the top of the doorjamb until he found the tiny dream flower he’d left there. When he tossed it, the flower hovered just above his head, throwing out a continuous little yellow glow sufficient to illuminate his immediate path through the windowless barn. He made his dusty way past the broken machinery and unbroken machinery until he found his albino night horror curled on the hood of a rusted old car, all white ragged menace and closed eyes. Its pale and savage claws had scratched the hood down to bare metal; the night horror had spent more than a few hours here already. The creature opened a pinkened eye to regard him.

  “Do you need anything, you little bastard?” Ronan asked it.

  It closed its eye again.

  Ronan left it and continued on his way with the feed buckets rattling productively, letting the dream flower follow him although he didn’t need it in the daylight. By the time he passed the largest cattle barn, he was no longer alone. The grass scuffled on either side of him. Groundhogs and rats and creatures that didn’t exist pattered out of the field grass to scamper in his footprints, and in front of him, deer emerged from the wood’s edge, their dusky hides invisible until they moved.

  Some of the animals were real. Most of the deer were ordinary Virginia whitetails, fed and tamed by Ronan for no purpose other than delight. Their domestication had been aided by the presence of a dreamt buckling that lived among them. He was pale and lovely, with long, tremulous eyelashes and foxy red ears. Now, he was the first to accept Ronan’s offering of the salt block as he rolled it into the field, and he allowed Ronan to stroke the short, coarse fur of his withers and worry some burrs out of the soft hair behind his ears. One of the wild deer nibbled pellets from Ronan’s cupped palms, and the rest stood patiently as he poured it into the grass. Probably it was illegal to feed them. Ronan could never remember what was legal to feed or shoot in Virginia.

  The smaller animals crept closer, some pawing at his boots, some alighting on the grass near him, others spooking the deer. He scattered pellets for them, too, and inspected them for wounds and ticks.

  He breathed in. He breathed out.

  He thought about what he wanted the skin armor to look like. Maybe it didn’t have to be invisible. Maybe it could be silver. Maybe it could have lights.

  Ronan grinned at the thought, feeling suddenly silly and lazy and foolish. He stood, letting the day’s failure roll off his shoulders and fall to the ground. As he stretched, the white buckling lifted his head to observe him keenly. The others noted the buckling’s attention and likewise focused their gaze. They were beautiful in a way that Ronan’s dreams could be, the way Cabeswater could be, only now he was awake. Somehow, without Ronan marking the moment, the schism between his waking life and dreaming life had begun to narrow. Although half of this strange herd would fall asleep if Ronan died, so long as he was here, so long as he breathed in and breathed out, he was a king.

  He left his bad mood in the field.

  Back in the house, he dreamed.

  The forest was Ronan.

  He was lying on his face in the dirt, his arms outstretched, his fingers digging down into the soil for the ley line’s energy. He smelled leaves burning and falling, death and rebirth. The air was his blood. The voices muttering to him from the branches were his own, tracked over themselves. Ronan, looped; Ronan, again; Ronan, again.

  “Get up,” the Orphan Girl said in Latin.

  “No,” he replied.

  “Are you trapped?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  “I do.”

  He looked at her, somehow, although he was still all tangled up in his root-fingers and the ink branches growing from the tattoo on his bare back. Orphan Girl stood with a feed bucket in her hands. Her eyes were dark and sunken, the eyes of the always hungry or the always wanting. Her white skullcap was pulled down low over her honey-blond pixie cut.

  “You’re just a piece of dream,” he told her. “You’re just some kind of subfuckery of my imagination.”

  She whimpered like a kicked puppy, and he immediately felt cross with her, or himself. Why shouldn’t he just say what she was?

  “I was looking for you before,” he said, because he’d just remembered this. Her presence kept reminding him, again and again, that he was in a dream.

  “Kerah,” she said, still hurt by his earlier statement. Ronan was annoyed to hear her steal Chainsaw’s name for him.

  “Find your own,” he said, but he’d lost the taste for being firm with her, even if it was just honesty. She sat beside him, pulling her knees up to her chest.

  Pressing his cheek against the cool soil, he stretched farther into the earth. His fingertips brushed grubs and earthworms, moles and snakes. The grubs uncurled as he passed them. The earthworms joined him in his journey. The moles’ fur pressed against him. The snakes coiled around his arms. He was all of them.

  He sighed.

  Aboveground, Orphan Girl rocked and sang a little lament to herself, looking anxiously up at the sky.

  “Periculosum,” she warned. “Suscitat.”

  He didn’t feel any danger, though. Just earth, and the ley’s energy, and the branches of his veins. Home, home.

  “It’s down here,” he said. The dirt swallowed his words and sent up new shoots.

  Orphan Girl hunched her back up against his leg and shivered. “Quid —” she began, then continued, stumbling, in English, “What is it?”

  It was a skin. Shimmering, nearly transparent. Enough of him was below the surface of the forest that he could see the shape of it among the dirt. It was fashioned like a body, like it was germinating beneath the ground, like it was waiting to be dug free. The fabric of it felt like the cloth of the bag in Matthew’s room.

  “I have it,” Ronan said, his fingers brushing the surface. Help me hold it. He might have only thought it, not said it out loud.

  Orphan Girl began to cry. “Watch out, watch out.”

  She had barely finished saying it when he felt …

  Something

  Some

  one?

  It was not the cool, dry scales of the snakes. Nor the warm, rapid heartbeats of the moles. It was not the moving-dirt-softness of earthworms or the smooth, slow flesh of the grubs.

  It was dark.

  It seeped.

  It was not so much a thing as not a thing.

  Ronan did not wait. He knew a nightmare when he felt it.

  “Girl,” he said, “pull me out.”

  He snatched the dream skin in one of his root-hands, rapidly trying to commit the feeling of it to memory. The weight, the density, the realness.

  Orphan Girl was pawing at the soil around him, burrowing like a dog, making frightened little noises. How she hated his dreams.

  The darkness that was not darkness crept up through the dirt. It was eating the things it touched. Or rather, they were there, and then they were not.

&nb
sp; “Faster,” Ronan snapped, retreating with the skin clutched in his root fingers.

  He could leave the dream skin behind and wake himself up.

  He didn’t want to leave it. It could work.

  Orphan Girl had a hold of his leg, or his arm, or one of his branches, and she was pulling, pulling, pulling, trying to unearth him.

  “Kerah,” she wept.

  The darkness gnawed up. If it got ahold of Ronan’s hand, he might wake up without one. He was going to have to cut his losses —

  Orphan Girl fell back, tugging him free of the soil. The blackness burst up through the ground behind him. Without thinking, Ronan threw himself over the girl protectively.

  Nothing is impossible, said the forest, or the darkness, or Ronan.

  He woke. He was trapped in place, as he always was after he brought something of any size from a dream. He couldn’t feel his hands — please, he thought, please let me still have hands — and he couldn’t feel his legs — please, he thought, please let me still have legs. He spent several long minutes staring up at the ceiling. He was in the living room on the old plaid couch, looking at the same three cracks that had made the letter M for years. Everything smelled of hickory and boxwood. Chainsaw flapped over him before settling heavily on his left leg.

  So he must at least still have one leg.

  He couldn’t quite formulate what had made the darkness so terrifying, now that he wasn’t looking at it.

  Slowly, his fingers began to move, so he must still have them, too. The dream skin had come with him and was draped halfway off the couch. It was gauzy and insubstantial looking, stained with dirt and ripped to shreds. He had his limbs, but the suit was a wash. He was also starving.

  His phone buzzed, and Chainsaw flapped up to the back of the couch. Ordinarily he would not have checked it, but he was so unnerved by the memory of the nothingness in the dream that he used his newly mobile fingers to pluck it from his pocket to be sure it wasn’t Matthew.