The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Both women mused upon this.

  Calla said, “He’s the one who died on the ley line? Maybe Cabeswater made him strong enough to stay conscious for all of this, beyond when he should have passed on. If he’s too cowardly to go on, that crazy forest could be giving him enough power to stick it out here.”

  Maura gave Calla another withering look. “It’s called scared, Calla Lily Johnson, and he is just a kid. Ish. Remember he was murdered. Remember he’s one of Blue’s best friends.”

  “So what’s the plan? You want me to get ahold of him and find things out? Or are we trying to send him on?”

  Uneasily, Maura said, “Remember the frogs, though.”

  A few years before, Blue had caught two tree frogs while out performing neighborly errands. She’d triumphantly set up a makeshift terrarium for them in one of Jimi’s largest iced tea pitchers. As soon as she’d gone to school, Maura had immediately divined — through ordinary channels, not psychic ones — that these tree frogs were in for a slow death if tended by a young Blue Sargent. She had set them free in the backyard and thus began one of the largest arguments she and her daughter had yet or since had.

  “Fine,” Calla hissed. “We won’t free any ghosts while she’s at a toga party.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  Both Maura and Calla jumped.

  Of course Noah was standing beside them. His shoulders were slumped and his eyebrows tipped upward. Under it all were threads and black, dust and absence. His words were soft and slurred. “Not yet.”

  “You don’t have much time, boy,” Calla told him.

  “Not yet,” Noah repeated. “Please.”

  “No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Maura said.

  Noah shook his head sadly. “They … already have. They … will again. But this … I want to do it for me.”

  He held his hand out to Calla, palm up, as if he were a beggar. It was a gesture that reminded Calla of another dead person in her life, one who still hung sadness and guilt around her neck, even after two decades. In fact, now that she considered it, the gesture was too perfectly accurate, the wrist too limply similar, the fingers too delicately and intentionally sprawled, an echo of Calla’s memories —

  “I’m a mirror,” Noah said bleakly, responding to her thoughts. He stared at his feet. “Sorry.”

  He started to drop his hand, but Calla was finally moved to a reluctant and genuine compassion. She took his cool fingers.

  Immediately a blow smashed into her face.

  She should have expected it, but still, she barely had time to recover when the next came. Fear spewed up, then the pain, and then another blow — Calla nimbly blocked this one. She did not need to relive Noah’s entire murder.

  She moved around it and found … nothing. Ordinarily, her psychometry worked exceptionally well on the past, digging through all recent events to any strong distant events. But Noah was so decayed that his past was mostly gone. All that remained were thready cobwebs of memories. There was more kissing — how did Calla’s day end up involving living through so many Sargents with so many tongues in their mouths? There was Ronan, appearing far more kind through Noah’s memories. There was Gansey, courageous and solid in ways Noah clearly envied. And Adam — Noah was afraid of him, or for him. This fear tangled through images of him in increasingly dark threads. Then there was the future, spreading out with thinner and thinner images and —

  Calla took her hand away from Noah and stared at him. For once, she had nothing clever to say.

  “Okay, kid,” she said finally. “Welcome to the house. You can stay here as long as you can.”

  Although Gansey liked Henry Cheng, agreeing to go to a party of his felt like a strange shift in power. It was not that he felt threatened by Henry in any way — both Henry and Gansey were kings in their respective territories — but it felt more loaded to meet Henry on his own turf rather than on the neutral ground of Aglionby Academy. The four Vancouver kids all lived off-campus in Litchfield House, and parties there were unheard of. It was an exclusive club. Undeniably Henry’s. To dine in fairyland was to be forced to stay there forever or to pine for it once you left, and all that.

  Gansey wasn’t sure he was in a position to be making new friends.

  Litchfield House was an old Victorian on the opposite edge of downtown from Monmouth. In the damp, cooling night, it rose out of curls of mist, turrets and shingles and porches, every window lit with a tiny electric candle. The driveway was double-parked with four fancy cars, and Henry’s silver Fisker was an elegant ghost on the curb in front, right behind a dutiful-looking old sedan.

  Blue was in a terrible mood. Something had clearly happened while she was on shift, but Gansey’s attempts to pry it from her had established only that it was neither about the toga party nor him. Now, she was the one driving the Pig, which had a threefold benefit. For starters, Gansey couldn’t imagine anyone whose mood wouldn’t be marginally lifted by driving a Camaro. Second, Blue said she never got a chance to practice driving in Fox Way’s communal vehicle. And third, most importantly, Gansey was outrageously and eternally driven to distraction by the image of her behind the wheel of his car. Ronan and Adam weren’t with them, so there was no one to catch them in what felt like an incredibly indecent act.

  He had to tell them.

  Gansey wasn’t sure he was in a position to be falling in love, but he’d done it anyway. He didn’t quite grasp the mechanics of it. He understood his friendship with Ronan and Adam — they both represented qualities that he both lacked and admired, and they liked the versions of himself that he also liked. That was true of his friendship with Blue, too, but it was more than that. The better he got to know her, the more it felt like he did when he was swimming. There stopped being dissonant versions of him. There was only Gansey, now, now, now.

  Blue paused the Pig at the quiet stop sign opposite Litchfield House’s corner, assessing the parking situation.

  “Mruh,” she said unpleasantly, eyes on the high-end cars.

  “What?”

  “I just forgot how Aglionby he was.”

  “We really don’t have to go,” Gansey said. “I mean, I just need to stick my head in the door to tell him thanks, but that’s it.”

  They both peered across the road at the house. Gansey thought about how strange it was that he felt uncomfortable doing this, a purposeless visit with a crowd he almost certainly knew in its entirety. He was about to admit this out loud when the front door opened. The act created a square of yellow, like a portal to another dimension, and Julius Caesar stepped out onto the wraparound porch. Julius waved a hand at the Camaro and shouted, “Yo, yo, Dick Gansey!”

  Because it was not Julius Caesar; it was Henry in a toga.

  Blue’s eyebrows disappeared into her bangs. “Are you going to wear one of those?”

  This was going to be terrible.

  “Absolutely not,” Gansey told her. The toga looked more real than he would have liked now that he was looking right at it. “We’re not staying long.”

  “Park around the corner and don’t hit any cats!” Henry shouted.

  Blue circled the block, successfully avoided a white cat, and did a slow but credible job of parallel parking, even with Gansey watching closely, even with the power steering belt whining a protest.

  Although Henry must have known it would not take them long, he had retreated back inside in order to be able to grandly answer the door when they rang the bell. Now he shut the door behind them, sealing them in a slightly over-warm pocket of garlic-and-rose-scented air. Gansey had expected to find students swinging from chandeliers and skating on alcohol, and although he had not necessarily wanted that, the discrepancy was off-putting. The interior was fussily tidy; a dark hall hung with carved mirrors and cramped with brittle antique furniture stretched dimly into the guts of the house. It did not look remotely like a place that might host a party. It looked like a place old ladies might go to die and remain undiscove
red until the neighbors noticed a strange smell. It was utterly at odds with what Gansey knew of Henry.

  It was also very quiet.

  Gansey had a sudden, terrible thought that it was possible the party might be simply Henry and the two of them in togas in a fancy sitting room.

  “Welcome, welcome,” Henry told them, as if he had not just seen Gansey a moment before. “Did you hit the cat?”

  He had taken enormous care with his appearance. His toga was tied with more care than any tie Gansey had ever knotted, and Gansey had knotted a lot of ties. He was wearing the most chrome watch Gansey had ever seen, and Gansey had seen a lot of chromed things. His black spiked hair strove frantically upward, and Gansey had seen a lot of things striving frantically upward.

  “We zigged,” Blue said tersely. “It zagged.”

  “Wendybird came!” Henry exclaimed, as if he had only just noticed her. “I googled lady togas in case you did. Good work on the cat. Mrs. Woo would poison us in our sleep if you’d squashed it. What’s your name again?”

  “Blue,” Gansey said. “Blue Sargent. Blue, do you remember Henry?”

  They eyed each other. At their previous brief meeting, Henry had managed to thoroughly offend Blue through casual self-deprecation. Gansey understood on a basic level that Henry made outrageous and offensive fun of himself because the alternative was storming into a room and flipping tables onto the money changers behind them. Blue, however, had clearly thought that he was merely a callow Aglionby princeling. And in her current mood —

  “I remember,” she said coolly.

  “It was not my finest moment,” Henry said. “My car and I have since made amends.”

  “His electric car,” Gansey inserted with subtlety, in case Blue had missed the environmental ramifications.

  Blue narrowed her eyes at Gansey and then pointed out, “You could bike to Aglionby from here.”

  Henry wagged a finger. “True, true. But it is important to practice safe bicycling, and they have not yet made a helmet to accommodate my hair.” To Gansey, he said, “Did you see Cheng Two out there?”

  Gansey didn’t really know Cheng2 — Henry Broadway, actually, confusingly nicknamed not because he was the second of two Chengs at Aglionby, but rather because he was the second of Henrys — aside from what everyone knew: that he was a high-speed shaker with energy drinks pumping continual voltage to his extremities. “Not unless he got a Camry while I wasn’t looking.”

  This made Henry laugh mirthfully, as if Gansey had touched upon some previous conversation. “That’s Mrs. Woo’s. Our tiny overlord. She’s around here somewhere. Check your pockets. She could be there. Sometimes she falls into these cracks between the floorboards — that’s the hazard of these great old houses. Where are Lynch and Parrish?”

  “Both busy, alas.”

  “That is incredible. I knew the president did not always have to act in concert with Congress and the Supreme Court; I just never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  Gansey asked, “Who else is coming?”

  “Just the usual suspects,” Henry said. “No one wants to see a casual acquaintance in a bedsheet.”

  “You don’t know me,” Blue pointed out. It was impossible to tell what her facial expression meant. Nothing good.

  “Richard Gansey the Third vouches for you, so close enough.”

  A door opened at the end of the hallway, and a very small Asian woman of any age stomped out with an armful of folded sheets.

  “Hello, auntie,” Henry said sweetly. She glared at him before stomping through another doorway. “Mrs. Woo was thrown out of Korea for her bad temper, poor thing; ha, she has the charm of a chemical weapon.”

  Gansey had vaguely figured that some sort of authority figure lived at Litchfield House, but he hadn’t thought much harder. Politeness dictated that he should have sourced flowers or food in the case of a small gathering. “Should I have brought something for her?”

  “Who?”

  “Your aunt.”

  “No, she’s Ryang’s,” Henry said. “Come, come, let’s go farther in. Koh is upstairs cataloging beverages. You do not have to get drunk, but I will be getting drunk. I’m told I don’t get loud, but sometimes I can get very philanthropic. Fair warning.”

  Now Blue looked properly judgmental, which was about two ticks off from her ordinary expression and one tick off from Ronan’s. Gansey was beginning to suspect that these two worlds were not going to mingle.

  A mighty crash sounded as Cheng2 and Logan Rutherford appeared through another door, plastic bags in hands. Rutherford had the sense God gave him to keep his mouth shut, but Cheng2 had never learned that skill.

  He said, “Holy fuck, we got girls?”

  Beside Gansey, Blue grew four times taller; all the sound sucked in from the room in preparation for the explosion.

  This was going to be terrible.

  It was 6:21.

  No, it was 8:31. Ronan had read the car clock wrong.

  The sky was black, the trees were black, the road was black. He pulled up to the curb in front of Adam’s. Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan’s worship into one downtown block. Ronan, who had been neglecting his phone as usual, had missed a call from Adam several hours before. The voicemail had been brief: “If you’re not going to Cheng’s with Gansey tonight, would you come help me with Cabeswater?”

  Ronan was not going to Henry Cheng’s under any circumstances. All that smiling and activism gave him a rash.

  Ronan was certainly going to Adam’s.

  So now he climbed out of the BMW, clucking to Chainsaw so that she’d stop trying to worry a seam free in the passenger seat, and scanned the lot beside the church for the tri-colored Hondayota. He spotted it, the headlights still on, engine off. Adam was crouched in front of it, staring unflinchingly into the headlights’ brilliance. His fingers were spread on the asphalt and his feet braced like a runner waiting for the starting shot. Three tarot cards splayed before him. He’d taken one of the floor mats out of the car to crouch on to keep from dirtying his uniform pants. If you combined these two things — the unfathomable and the practical — you were most of the way to understanding Adam Parrish.

  “Parrish,” Ronan said. Adam didn’t respond. His pupils were pinhole cameras to another world. “Parrish.”

  Just one of Adam’s hands lifted in the direction of Ronan’s leg. His fingers twitched in a way that conveyed don’t bother me with the absolute minimum of motion.

  Ronan crossed his arms to wait, just looking. At Adam’s fine cheekbones, his furrowed fair eyebrows, his beautiful hands, everything washed out by the furious light. He had memorized the shape of Adam’s hands in particular: the way his thumb jutted awkwardly, boyishly; the roads of the prominent veins; the large knuckles that punctuated his long fingers. In dreams Ronan put them to his mouth.

  His feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he’d let them overflow and now there wasn’t a damn place in the ocean that wouldn’t catch fire if he dropped a match.

  Chainsaw flapped to where the tarot cards were laid out, beak parted curiously, and when Ronan silently pointed at her, she sulked underneath the car. Ronan turned his head sideways to read the cards. Something with flames, something with a sword. The Devil. One thousand images were triggered by that single word, devil. Red skin, white sunglasses, his brother Matthew’s terrified eyes in the trunk of a car. Dread and shame together, thick enough to vomit up. Ronan was uneasily reminded of his recent nightmares.

  Adam’s fingers tensed, and then he sat back. He blinked, and then blinked again, rapidly, touching the corner of his eye with just the tip of his ring finger. This didn’t suffice, so he rubbed his palms over them until they watered. Finally, he tilted his chin up to Ronan.

  “Headlights? That’s hardcore, Parrish.” Ronan held out his hand; Adam took it. Ronan hauled him up, his mind all palm against palm, thumb crossed over thum
b, fingers pressed into wrist bone — and then Adam was facing him and he released his hand.

  The ocean burned.

  “What the hell’s wrong with your eyes?” Ronan asked.

  Adam’s pupils were still tiny. “Takes me a while to come back.”

  “Creepy bastard. What’s with the Devil?”

  Adam stared up at the dark stained glass of the church. He was still partway caught in the kingdom of the headlights. “I can’t understand what it’s telling me. It feels like it’s holding me at an arm’s length. I need to find a way to scry deeper, but I can’t without someone to watch me in case I get too far away from myself.”

  Someone in this case being Ronan.

  “What are you trying to find out?”

  Adam described the circumstances surrounding his eye and his hand with the same level tone he would use to answer a question in class. He allowed Ronan to lean in to compare his eyes — close enough that Ronan felt his breath on his cheek — and he allowed Ronan to study the palm of his hand. The latter was not strictly necessary, and they both knew it, but Adam watched Ronan closely as he lightly traced the lines there.

  This was like walking the line between dream and sleep. The night-sharp balance of being asleep enough to dream and awake enough to remember what he wanted.

  He knew Adam had figured out how he felt. But he didn’t know if he could step off this knife-slender path without destroying what he had.

  Adam held Ronan’s gaze as Ronan released his hand. “I’m trying to find the source of what’s attacking Cabeswater. I can only assume it’s the same thing as what was attacking that black tree.”

  “It’s in my head, too,” Ronan admitted. His day at the Barns had been marked by dreams that he’d hastily woken himself from.

  “Is it? Is that why you look like hell?”

  “Thanks, Parrish. I like your face, too.” He briefly described how the corruption of the nightmare tree seemed identical to the corruption of his dreams, hiding his relative distress over the content of the dreams and the fact that it was evidence of a larger secret with an excess of swear words. “So, I’m just never sleeping again.”