The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

It was this: Gansey saying, “I like you an awful lot, Blue Sargent.”

  It was this: Blue’s smile — crooked, wry, ridiculous, flustered. There was a lot of happiness tucked in the corner of that smile, and even though her face was several inches from Gansey, some of it still spilled out and got on him. She put her finger on his cheek where he knew his own smile was dimpling it, and then they took each other’s hands, and they climbed back up together.

  It was this: this moment and no other moment, and for the first time that Gansey could remember, he knew what it would feel like to be present in his own life.

  Ronan could tell straightaway that something wasn’t right.

  When they stepped into Cabeswater, Adam said, “Day,” at the same time that Ronan said, “Fiat lux.” The forest was ordinarily quite attuned to the wishes of its human occupants, particularly when those human occupants were either its magician or its Greywaren. But in this case, the darkness around the trees remained stubbornly present.

  “I said, fiat lux,” Ronan snapped, then, grudgingly, “Amabo te.”

  Slowly, the dark began to rise, like water bleeding through a paper. It never made it quite to full daylight, however, and what they could see was … not right. They stood among black trees blossomed with dull gray lichen. The air was gloomy and green. Though there were no leaves left on the trees, the sky felt low, a mossy ceiling. The trees had still said nothing; it was like the dull hush before a storm.

  “Huh,” said Adam out loud, clearly unsettled. He was not wrong.

  “You still up for this?” Ronan asked. Everything was reminding him precisely of his nightmares. The entire evening did: the race to the trailer, Robert Parrish’s specter, this sick gloom. Chainsaw would have normally taken flight to explore by now, but instead she ducked on Ronan’s shoulder, claws dug tight into his jacket.

  And like one of Ronan’s dreams, he felt he knew what was going to happen before it did:

  Adam hesitated. Then he nodded.

  It was always impossible to tell in the dreams if Ronan knew what was going to happen before it did, or if the things only happened because he thought of them first. Did it matter? It did when you were awake.

  They took a moment at the edge of the forest to establish their location. For Ronan, it was merely moving around enough for the trees to see that he was among them; they would do their best to do what he wanted, which included not letting anything supernatural murder him. For Adam, it meant linking in to the ley line that pulsed beneath the forest, unwrapping himself and allowing the bigger pattern inside. It was a process that was both eerie and awesome to watch from the outside. Adam; then Adam, vacated; then Adam, more.

  Ronan thought about the story of Adam’s wandering eye and rogue hand. I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.

  He sliced the thought out of his head. The memory of Adam bargaining part of himself away was too frequent a visitor in his nightmares already; he didn’t need to call it back up again through intention.

  “Are you done with your magician business?” Ronan asked.

  Adam nodded. “Time?”

  Ronan handed him his phone, glad to be rid of it.

  Adam studied it. “6:21,” he said with a frown. Ronan frowned, too. It was not puzzling because it was unexpected here. Time on the ley line was always uncertain, skipping to and fro, minutes taking hours and vice versa. What was surprising was that 6:21 had now happened enough outside of the ley line to arouse their suspicions. Something was happening, but he did not know what.

  “Are you done with your Greywaren business?” Adam asked.

  “That’s ongoing,” Ronan replied. Cupping his hands over his mouth, he shouted into the hush, “Orphan Girl!”

  Far off through the still green air, a raven cawed back. Ha ha ha.

  Chainsaw hissed.

  “Good enough for me,” Ronan said, and set off through the green trees. He wasn’t happy about the gloom, but it wasn’t like he was a stranger to working in nightmares. The key was to learn what rules and fears they were playing off as quickly as possible, and lean into them. Panic was how you got hurt in nightmares. Reminding the dream that you were something alien was a good way to get ejected or destroyed.

  Ronan was good at being a dream thing, especially in Cabeswater.

  They kept going. All the while, the forest continued being wrong around them. It was as if they walked on a slant, though the ground beneath them was level enough.

  “Tell me again,” Adam said carefully, catching up, “how your dreams were wrong. Use less cursing and more specifics.”

  “Without changing Cabeswater around us?” Even though Cabeswater had been slow to respond to their request for light, it didn’t mean that it would be slow to respond to a nightmare prompt. Not when it already looked like this, a gray-green half-world of black trunks.

  “Obviously.”

  “They were wrong like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Ronan said, “Just like this.”

  He didn’t say anything more. He shouted, “Orphan Girl!”

  Caw caw caw!

  This time it sounded a little more like a girl, a little less like a bird. Ronan picked up the pace a little; now they were climbing. To their right, a bare rock surface slanted steeply down with only a few small trees bursting from cracks in the naked surface. They picked their way cautiously along this precarious edge; a loose step would send them sliding for yards with no fast way to climb back up.

  He glanced behind to make sure Adam was following; he was, looking at Ronan with narrowed eyes.

  “Do you think your dream is wrong because Cabeswater is wrong?” Adam asked.

  “Probably.”

  “So if we fix Cabeswater, we would fix your dreams.”

  “Probably.”

  Adam was still processing, thinking so hard that Ronan imagined he could feel it. Actually, in Cabeswater, with Adam so close to him, it was possible he really did.

  “You could dream things into being before we found Cabeswater, right? Can you do it without Cabeswater?”

  Ronan stopped and squinted through the gloom. About fifteen yards below, the slanted rock slide they’d been walking along ended in a pool of perfectly clear water. It was tinted green because the air was green, because everything was green, but otherwise the water was clear. Ronan could see all the way to its rocky bottom. It was clearly far deeper than it was wide, a chasm filled with water. It held his attention. “Why?”

  “If you cut yourself off from Cabeswater, somehow, until I fixed it, would your dreams be normal?”

  Here it was. Adam was finally asking the right questions; the questions that meant he probably already knew the answer. The longer they spent in Cabeswater, the more they worked together with Ronan’s dreams, the more Cabeswater’s nightmares were reflected in Ronan’s and vice versa. The more the evidence piled up.

  But now that they were to it, Ronan wasn’t sure he wanted to be on the other side. So many days on a pew with his knuckles pressed to his forehead, silently asking what am I am I the only one what does this mean —

  He said, “I can do it better with Cabeswater. With Orphan Girl, too. But —”

  He stopped. He looked at the ground.

  “Ask me,” he said. “Just do it. Just —”

  “Ask you what?”

  Ronan didn’t reply, just looked at the ground. The green air moved all around him, tinting his pale skin, and the trees curved black and real around him, everything in this place looking like his dreams, or everything in his dreams looking like this place.

  Adam pressed his lips together, and then he asked, “Did you dream Cabeswater?”

  Ronan’s blue eyes flicked up to Adam.

  It was 6:21.

  “When?” Adam asked. “When did you know that you dreamt Cabeswater? Right away?”

  They faced each other at the top of the slanted rock face, that clear pool far down below. Adam’s heart was racing with either adrenaline or with sheer proximity
to the ley line.

  “Always,” said Ronan.

  It should not have changed the way he saw Ronan. The dreaming had always been impressive, unusual, a god-glitch, a trick of the ley line that allowed a young man to make his thoughts into concrete objects. Magic, but a reasonable magic. But this — to not only dream an entire forest into being, but to create a dreamspace outside of one’s own head. Adam stood in Ronan’s dreams; that was what this realization meant.

  Ronan corrected himself. “Sort of always. Just — the moment we got here, I recognized it. My handwriting on that rock. I guess I knew right away. It just took me longer to believe it.”

  Every one of Adam’s memories of those early forays into the forest were slowly shifting inside him. Pieces falling into place. “That’s why it calls you the Greywaren. That’s why you’re different to it.”

  Ronan shrugged, but it was a shrug from caring too much instead of too little.

  “That’s why its Latin grammar is terrible. It’s your grammar.”

  Ronan shrugged again. Questions cascaded through Adam, too difficult to say aloud. Was Ronan even human? Half a dreamer, half a dream, maker of ravens and hoofed girls and entire lands. No wonder his Aglionby uniform had choked him, no wonder his father had sworn him to secrecy, no wonder he could not make himself focus on classes. Adam had realized this before, but now he realized it again, more fully, larger, the ridiculousness of Ronan Lynch in a classroom for aspiring politicians.

  Adam felt a little hysterical. “That’s why it speaks Latin at all, and not Portuguese, or Welsh. Oh, God. Did I —”

  He had made a bargain with this forest. When he fell asleep and Cabeswater was in his thoughts, tangled through his dreams, was that Ronan —

  “No,” Ronan said, fast, his tone unschooled. “No, I didn’t invent it. I asked the trees after I figured it out, why the hell — how the hell this happened. Cabeswater existed, somehow, before me. I just dreamt it. I mean, I made it look this way. I chose these trees and this language and all that shit for it, without knowing. Wherever it was on the ley line before, it got destroyed, and then it didn’t have a body, a shape — when I dreamt it, I brought it back into physical form, that’s all. What did they call it? Manifested it. I just manifested it from whatever other fucking plane it was on. It’s not me.”

  Adam’s thoughts spun in the mud; he made no progress.

  “Cabeswater isn’t me,” Ronan repeated. “You’re still just you.”

  It was one thing to say it and another thing to see Ronan Lynch standing among the trees he had dreamt into being, looking of a piece with them because he was of a piece with them. Magician — no wonder Ronan was all right with Adam being uncanny. No wonder he needed him to be.

  “I don’t know why the fuck I told you,” Ronan said. “I should’ve lied.”

  “Just give me a second with it, will you?” Adam asked.

  “Whatever.”

  “You can’t be pissed off because I’m thinking this through.”

  “I said whatever.”

  “How long did it take you to believe it?” Adam demanded.

  “I’m still trying,” Ronan replied.

  “Then you can’t —” Adam broke off. He suddenly felt as if he had been dropped from a height. It was the same sensation as when he had known Ronan was dreaming something big. He just had time to wonder if it had truly been the ley line or merely the shock of Ronan’s revelation when it happened again. This time, the light around them sagged in time with it.

  Ronan’s expression had sharpened.

  “The ley line …” Adam began and then broke off, uncertain of how to finish this thought. “Something is happening to the ley line. It feels like when you’re dreaming something big.”

  Ronan spread his arms out, meaning clear. It’s not me. “What do you wanna do?”

  “I don’t know if we should stay here while it’s like this,” Adam said. “I definitely don’t think we should try to make it to the rose glen. Let’s call her just a few more times.”

  Ronan eyed Adam, assessing his status. Correctly seeing that Adam was feeling like he needed to kneel in his apartment with his hands over his head and think about what he had just learned. He said, “How about just once more?”

  Together they shouted: “Orphan Girl!”

  Intention sliced through their shared words, sharper than the gloom.

  The forest listened.

  The Orphan Girl appeared, her skullcap pulled low over her enormous eyes, sweater even mankier than before. She could not help but be off-putting in this gray-green wood, not arriving like she did, skittering between dark trees. She looked like she belonged in the vintage photographs Adam had seen in the Barns, a lost immigrant child from a destroyed country.

  “There you are, you urchin,” Ronan said as Chainsaw chattered nervously. “Finally.”

  The girl offered Adam’s watch back to him, reluctantly. The band had acquired some toothmarks since he’d last seen it. The face of it said 6:21. It was very grubby.

  “You can keep it,” Adam said, “for now.” He couldn’t really spare the watch, but she didn’t have anything, even a name.

  She started to say something in the strange, complicated language that Adam knew was the old and basic language of whatever this place was — the language that young Ronan must have mistaken for Latin in his long-ago dreams — and then stopped herself. She said, instead, “Watch out.”

  “For what?” Ronan asked.

  Orphan Girl screamed.

  The light dimmed.

  Adam felt it in his chest, this plummeting energy. It was as if every artery to his heart had been scissored.

  The trees howled; the ground shivered.

  Adam dropped to a crouch, pressing his hands into the ground for breath, for help, for Cabeswater to give him back his heartbeat.

  Orphan Girl was gone.

  No, not gone. She was plummeting yards down the slanted rock face, fingers clawing for purchase, hooves scraping dully, tiny rocks tumbling down with her. She didn’t cry for help — she just tried to save herself. They watched her slide straight into that pool of clear water, and because it was so transparent, they could see how far she plummeted into it.

  Without pause, Ronan leapt after her.

  It was 6:21.

  Ronan hit the water hard enough that he saw sparks behind his vision. The pool was as warm as blood, and the moment he thought about that heat, he realized that he remembered this pool. He had dreamt it before.

  It was acid.

  The heat was because it was eating him. At the end of this dream there was nothing left of him but bones, white-picked sticks in a uniform, like Noah.

  Immediately Ronan threw all of his intention out toward Cabeswater.

  Not acid, he thought. Make it not acid.

  Still his skin warmed.

  “Not acid,” he said out loud, to the pool, as his eyes stung. Liquid flowed into his mouth, sucked into his nostrils. He could feel it bubbling under his fingernails. Somewhere below him was Orphan Girl, and she’d been in the strange sea for a few seconds longer than he had. How long did he have? He couldn’t recall the dream well enough right now to know. He breathed words directly into the acid. “Make it safe.”

  Cabeswater heaved around him, shuddering, shrugging, trying to grant his appeal. Now he could see Orphan Girl sinking slowly just below him. She’d covered her eyes; she didn’t know that he’d come after her. Probably didn’t expect any help. Orphan girl, orphan boy.

  Ronan struggled toward her — he was an okay swimmer, but not without air, not through acid.

  The liquid growled against his skin.

  He snatched her oversized sweater, and her eyes opened wide and strange and startled. Her mouth formed Kerah? and then she seized his arm. For a moment they both sank, but she was not stupid, and she began to paddle with her free hand and kick off the stone walls.

  It felt like they had sunk miles beneath the surface.

  “Cabeswater,�
�� Ronan said, huge bubbles escaping from his mouth. His brain was failing to problem-solve. “Cabeswater, air.”

  Cabeswater would keep him safe, ordinarily. Cabeswater knew how fragile his human body was, ordinarily. But it wasn’t listening to him now, or it was, but it couldn’t do anything about it.

  The pool boiled around them.

  He was going to die, and all he could think was how if he did, Matthew’s life was over, too.

  Suddenly, something hit his feet. Pressed against his hands. Crushed his chest. His breath — he only had time to seize the Orphan Girl before everything went black.

  And then he burst out of the water, propelled from below. He was vomited up onto the rocky edge of the pool. Orphan Girl rolled from his arms. Both of them coughed up the liquid; it was pinkish from the blisters on his tongue. Leaves were plastered all over Ronan’s arms, all over the Orphan Girl’s arms. So many leaves.

  Looking woozily over his shoulder, Ronan found that the entire pool was filled with vines and shrubs. Tendrils still grew slowly out of the pool. The submerged parts of the plants were already being eaten away by the acid.

  This was what had saved them from drowning. They had been lifted by the branches.

  Adam crouched on the other side of the pool, head dropped low like he was about to sprint or pray, his hands pressed to the rock on either side of him, knuckles white. He had placed a few small stones between his hands in a pattern that must have made sense to him. One of the still growing tendrils had tangled around his ankles and his wrists.

  The proper truth struck Ronan: The plants had not saved their lives. Adam Parrish had saved their lives.

  “Parrish,” Ronan said.

  Adam looked up, eyes blank. He was quivering.

  Orphan Girl scrambled around the pool, keeping well back from the edge, to Adam’s side. Hurriedly, she knocked the tiny stones into the pool with her finger and thumb. At once, the vines stopped growing. Adam sat back with a shiver, expression still far away and ill. His right hand twitched in a way that was not quite comfortable to look at. Orphan Girl took his left hand and kissed the palm — he merely closed his eyes — and then she turned her urgent gaze to Ronan.