The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  It was Gansey. Parrish wants to know if you killed yourself dreaming just now please advise

  Before Ronan had time to formulate an emotion about this knowledge of Adam’s, Chainsaw suddenly ducked her head down low on the back of the couch. The feathers on her neck stood in wary attention. Her gaze was fixed on some point across the room.

  Pushing himself up, Ronan followed her attention. At first he saw nothing but the living room’s familiar clutter. The coffee table, the TV, the game cabinet, the walking stick basket. Then his eyes caught movement beneath the end table.

  He froze.

  Slowly, he realized what he was looking at.

  He said, “Shit.”

  Blue Sargent had been thrown out of school.

  Only for a day. Twenty-four hours was supposed to cure her of willful destruction of property and, frankly, Blue, a surprisingly bad attitude. Blue couldn’t quite make herself as sorry as she knew she ought to be; nothing about school felt particularly real in comparison to the rest of her life. As she had stood in the hallway outside the administration offices, she heard her mother explaining how they’d had a recent death in the family and that Blue’s biological father had just returned to town and it was all very traumatic. Probably, Maura added — smelling of mugwort, which meant she’d been doing a ritual with Jimi while Blue was at school — her daughter was acting out even without realizing it.

  Oh, Blue realized it all right.

  Now she sat beneath the beech tree in 300 Fox Way’s backyard, feeling cranky and out of sorts. A very faraway part of her realized that she was in trouble — more serious trouble than she’d been in for a long time. But the more immediate part of her was relieved that for a whole day she didn’t have to try to pretend that she cared about her classes. She hurled a bug-eaten beech nut; it bounced off the fence with a crack like a gunshot.

  “Okay, here’s the idea.”

  The voice came first, then the chill across her skin. A moment later, Noah Czerny joined her, dressed as always in his navy Aglionby sweater. Joined was perhaps the wrong verb. Manifested was better. The phrase trick of the light was even more superior. Trick of the mind was the best. Because it was rare that Blue noticed the moment Noah actually appeared. It wasn’t that he gently resolved into being. It was that somehow her brain rewrote the minute before to pretend that Noah had been slouching beside her all along.

  It was a little creepy, sometimes, to have a dead friend.

  Noah continued amiably, “So you get a trailer. Not an Adam trailer. A commercial trailer.”

  “What? Me?”

  “You. You. What do you call it when it’s everyone, but you say you? It’s grammary.”

  “I don’t know. Gansey would know. What do you mean Adam trailer?”

  “Internal you?” he guessed, as if she hadn’t said anything. “Whatever. I just mean, like, a general you. So you come up with five, like, super great chicken recipes. Like, rotisserie. Those are the ones that cook forever, right?” He ticked off his fingers. “Like, uh, Mexican. Honey-curry. Barbecue. Uh. Teriyaki? And. Garlic-Something. The other thing you need is, like, beverages. Crazy addictive beverages. People have to think, I’m craving that honey-curry chicken and that, uh, lemon tea, hell, yeah, to the max, yeah, Chickie-chickie-chicken!”

  He was more animated than she’d ever seen him. This cheerfully prattling version of Noah was surely closer to the living version of him, the skateboarding Aglionby student with the bright red Mustang. She was struck by the realization that she probably wouldn’t have ever become friends with this Noah. He wasn’t terrible. Just young in a way that she had never been. It was an uncomfortable, sideways thought.

  “— and I would call it — are you ready — CHICKEN OUT. Get it? What do you want tonight? Oh, Mom, please get CHICKEN OUT.” Noah smacked Blue’s little ponytail so that it hit the top of her head. “You could wear a little paper hat! You could be the face of CHICKEN OUT.”

  All at once, Blue lost patience. She exploded, “Okay, Noah, stop beca—”

  A cawing laugh from overhead silenced her. A few dry leaves floated down. Blue and Noah tipped their heads back.

  Gwenllian, Glendower’s daughter, lounged in the sturdy branches above them, her long body leaned into the trunk, her legs braced against a smooth-skinned branch. As usual, she was a terrifying and wonderful sight. Her towering rain cloud of dark hair was full of pens and keys and twists of paper. She was wearing at least three dresses, and all of them had managed to hitch clear up to her hip through either climbing or intention. Noah stared.

  “Hi ho, dead thing,” Gwenllian sang, taking a cigarette out of one side of her hair and a lighter from the other.

  “How long have you been there? Are you smoking?” Blue demanded. “Don’t kill my tree.”

  Gwenllian released a puff of clove-scented smoke. “You sound like Artemus.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Blue tried not to sound resentful, but she was. She hadn’t expected Artemus to fill a gaping hole in her heart, but she also hadn’t expected him to merely shut himself away in a closet.

  Blowing a credible smoke ring through the dried leaves, Gwenllian shoved off the trunk and allowed herself to slide to a lower branch. “Your little shrub dweller of a father is not a very easy thing to know, oh blue lily, lily blue. But then again, that thing down there now is not easy to know, either, is it?”

  “What thing — Noah? Noah is not a thing!”

  “We came across a bird in a bush, a bird in a bush, a bird in a bush,” Gwenllian sang. She slipped down, and then down again, enough to dangle her boots at Blue’s eye level. “And thirty of its friends! You were feeling pretty alive-oh, little dead thing, between the two of us, weren’t you? Lily blue with her mirror-power, and lily gwen with her mirror-power, and you in the middle remembering life?”

  It was annoying to realize that Gwenllian was probably right: This effervescent, lively Noah had almost certainly been made possible only by bookended psychic batteries. It was also annoying to see that Gwenllian had completely murdered Noah’s good mood. He had ducked his head so that nothing but the whorl of his cowlick was visible.

  Blue glared up. “You’re horrible.”

  “Thanks.” Gwenllian plunged to the ground with a great, flapping leap and stubbed out her cigarette on the beech’s trunk. It left a black mark that Blue felt mirrored on her soul.

  She scowled at Gwenllian. Blue was very short and Gwenllian was very tall, but Blue very much wanted to scowl at Gwenllian and Gwenllian seemed intent on being scowled at, so they made it work. “What do you want me to say? That he’s dead? What’s the point of rubbing that in?”

  Gwenllian leaned close enough that their noses brushed. Her words came out in a clove-scented whisper: “Have you ever solved a riddle you weren’t asked?”

  Calla thought that Gwenllian had begun singing and riddling as a result of being buried alive for six hundred years. But looking at her gleefully bright eyes now, remembering how she’d been buried for trying to stab Owen Glendower’s poet to death, Blue also thought there was a very credible chance that Gwenllian had always been this way.

  “There is no solving Noah,” Blue replied, “except by having him … pass on. And he doesn’t want that!”

  Gwenllian cackled. “Want and need are different things, my pet.” She nudged the back of Noah’s head with a lifted boot. “Show her what you’ve been hiding, dead thing.”

  “You don’t have to do anything she says, Noah.” Blue said it so quickly that she knew at once that she both believed Gwenllian and feared the truth of him.

  They all knew that Noah’s existence was a fragile one, subject to the whims of the ley line and the location of his physical remains. And Blue and Gansey in particular had seen firsthand how Noah seemed to be having a harder and harder time coping with the vagaries of being dead. What Blue already knew of Noah was scary. If there was worse, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Noah sighed. “It’s what you deserve. Just �
�� I’m sorry, Blue.”

  Nerves started to patter inside her. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  “Yeah,” he said in a small voice, “there is. Don’t … just … okay.”

  Gwenllian stepped back to give him room to stand. He did, slowly, stiffly, turning his back to Blue. He squared his ordinarily slouching shoulders as if preparing himself for battle. She felt the moment that he stopped pulling energy from her. It was as if she’d dropped a backpack to the ground.

  Then he turned to face her.

  Every summer, a traveling carnival came to Henrietta. They set up in the big stock sale fields behind the Walmart, and for a few nights it was flattened grass and funnel cakes and lights spasming in the dark. Blue always wanted to like it — she’d gone a few times with people from school (she’d always wanted to like them, too) — but in the end she had just felt like she was still waiting for the real event to happen. Thinking she needed thrills, she’d tried the drop tower. It had lifted them all up — ker-chunk, ker-chunk — and then — nothing. Some sort of malfunction had meant they were not dropped, merely lowered in the same way they’d climbed. Even though they had never plummeted, for a brief moment, Blue’s stomach had dropped as if she had been set free, a feeling made even stranger for the rest of her body not moving an inch.

  It was precisely what she felt now.

  “Oh,” said Blue.

  It was hollow eyes dead and teeth-bared lips and soul threaded through naked bones. It had not been alive for years. It was impossible to not see how decayed the soul was, how removed from humanity, how stretched thin from time away from a pulse.

  Noah Czerny had died.

  This was all that was left.

  That was the truth.

  Blue’s body was a riot of shivers. She had kissed this. This thin, cold memory of a human.

  Because it was only energy, it read her memories as easily as her words. She felt it haunt her thoughts and then pass out the other side.

  It hissed, “I said I was sorry.”

  She took a deep breath. “I said there was nothing to be sorry for.”

  And she meant it.

  Blue didn’t care that he — it — Noah — was strange and decaying and frightening. She knew that he — it — Noah — was strange and decayed and frightened, and she knew that she loved him anyway.

  She hugged it. Him. Noah. She didn’t care if he wasn’t quite human anymore. She would keep calling whatever this was Noah for as long as it wanted to be called Noah. And she was glad that he could read her thoughts in that moment, because she wanted him to know how thoroughly she believed that.

  Her body went icily cold as she let Noah draw energy from her, her arms tight around his neck.

  “Don’t tell the others,” he said. When she stepped back, he’d pulled his boyish face over his features again.

  “Do you need to go?” Blue asked. She meant go forever, but she couldn’t say it out loud.

  He whispered, “Not yet.”

  Blue wiped a tear from her face with the heel of her hand, and he wiped a tear from her other cheek with the heel of his. His chin dimpled in that way that comes before tears, but she put her fingers against it and it resolved.

  They were wheeling toward the end of something, and they both knew it.

  “Good,” said Gwenllian. “I hate liars and cowards.”

  Without pause, she began to climb the tree once more. Blue turned back to Noah, but he was gone. Possibly he had gone before Gwenllian had spoken; just as with his arrival, it was hard to tell the exact moment of his leaving. Blue’s brain had already rewritten all of the seconds around his disappearance.

  Blue’s school suspension felt like a faded dream. What was real? This was real.

  The kitchen window groaned open, and Jimi shouted out, “Blue! Your boys are out front, looking like they’re fixing to bury a body.”

  Again? Blue thought.

  When Blue climbed into Gansey’s black Suburban, she discovered that Ronan was already installed in the backseat, his head freshly shaven, boots up on the seat, dressed for a brawl. His presence in the backseat instead of in his usual passenger-seat throne suggested that trouble was afoot. Adam — in a white T-shirt and a pair of clean work coveralls rolled down to the waist — had his seat instead. Gansey sat behind the wheel, wearing both his Aglionby uniform and an electric expression that startled Blue. It was wide-awake and glittering, a match struck just behind his eyes. She’d seen this vivid Gansey before, but usually only when they were alone.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said, and his voice was as bright and intense as his eyes. It was hard not to be captured by this Gansey; he was both powerful and worrisome in his tension.

  Don’t stare — too late. Adam had caught her at it. She averted her eyes and busied herself tugging up her thigh-highs. “Heya.”

  Gansey asked, “Do you have time to run an errand with us? Do you have work? Homework?”

  “No homework. I got suspended,” Blue replied.

  “Get the fuck out,” Ronan said, but with admiration. “Sargent, you asshole.”

  Blue reluctantly allowed him to bump fists with her as Gansey eyed her meaningfully in the rearview mirror.

  Adam swiveled the other way in his seat — to the right, instead of to the left, so that he was peering around the far side of the headrest. It made him look as if he were hiding, but Blue knew it was just because it turned his hearing ear instead of his deaf ear toward them. “For what?”

  “Emptying another student’s backpack over his car. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “I do,” Ronan said.

  “Well, I don’t. I’m not proud of it.”

  Ronan patted her leg. “I’ll be proud for you.”

  Blue cast a withering look in his direction, but she felt grounded for the first time that day. It was not that the women in 300 Fox Way weren’t her family — they were where her roots were buried, and nothing could diminish that. It was just that there was something newly powerful about this assembled family in this car. They were all growing up and into each other like trees striving together for the sun. “So what’s happening?”

  “If you can believe it,” Gansey said, still in his chilly, superpolite tone that meant he was annoyed, “I was originally planning on coming over to talk to Artemus about Glendower. But Ronan has decided to change all that. He has different ideas for our afternoon. More important uses of our time.”

  Ronan leaned forward. “Tell me, Dad, are you mad that I fucked up, or are you just mad that I skipped school?”

  Gansey said, “I think those both count as fuckups, don’t you?”

  “Oh, don’t,” Ronan retorted. “It just sounds vulgar when you say it.”

  As Gansey sent the vehicle off from the curb at a brisk speed, Adam gave Blue a knowing look. His expression said, Yes, they’ve been at this awhile. Blue was strangely grateful for this nonverbal exchange. After their fractious breakup (had they even been dating?), Blue had reconciled herself to Adam being too hurt or uncomfortable to be good friends with her. But he was trying. And she was trying. And it seemed to be working.

  Except that she was in love with his best friend and hadn’t told him.

  Blue’s feeling of calm immediately dissolved, replaced by the exact same sensation that she had experienced right before she had shaken out Holtzclaw’s backpack over the hood of his car. All emotions fuzzing to white.

  She really needed to find some coping mechanisms.

  “GANSEY BOY!”

  They all startled at the cry through Gansey’s open window. They’d pulled up to the stoplight adjacent to Aglionby’s main gate; a group of students stood on the sidewalk holding placards. Gansey reluctantly offered the group a three-fingered salute, which provoked further cries of Whoop, whoop, whoop!

  The sight of all the boys in their uniforms immediately provoked an unpleasant emotion in Blue. It was a long-held, multiheaded sensation formed from judgment, experience, and envy, and she did
n’t care for it. It wasn’t that she necessarily thought that her negative opinions on raven boys were wrong. It was just that knowing Gansey, Adam, Ronan, and Noah complicated what she did with those opinions. It had been a lot more straightforward when she’d just assumed that she could despise them all from the thin air of the moral high ground.

  Blue craned her neck, trying to see what the signs said, but none of the boys were doing a very good job pointing them toward the road. She wondered if Blue Sargent, Aglionby student, would have been Blue Sargent, placard holder. “What are they protesting?”

  “Life,” replied Adam drily.

  She realized then that she recognized one of the students standing on the sidewalk. He had an unforgettable tuft of styled black hair and a pair of high-top sneakers that could only have looked more expensive if they had been wrapped in dollar bills.

  Henry Cheng.

  She’d been on a secret date with Gansey the last time she’d seen him. She didn’t remember the fine details, only that his electric super car had broken down by the side of the road, that he’d made a joke that she didn’t find funny, and that he had reminded her of all the ways Gansey was not like her. It had not been a good end to the date.

  Henry clearly remembered her, too, because he gave her a wide smile before pointing two fingers at his eyes and then hers.

  Her already mixed feelings were joined by yet more mixed feelings.

  “What do you call it when you say ‘you’ to mean everyone in general?” Blue asked, leaning forward, eyes still on him.

  “Universal you,” Gansey replied. “I think.”

  “Yes,” Adam said.

  “What a bunch of fancy posers,” Ronan said. It was hard to tell if he meant Gansey and Adam with their grammar prowess or the Aglionby students standing outside with their hand-lettered placards.

  “Oh, sure,” Gansey said, still cold and annoyed. “God forbid young men display their principles with futile but public protests when they could be skipping school and judging other students from the backseat of a motor vehicle.”