The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  In Piper’s defense, the sleeper was unsettling. She’d been expecting a human, and instead she’d found a murder-black six-legged creature that she would have called a hornet if she didn’t firstly find hornets repellent and secondly think hornets had no business being eleven inches long.

  “That is a demon,” Neeve had said. Neeve was the third leg on their uncomfortable tripod. She was a mild-voiced, squat woman with pretty hands and bad hair; Piper thought she was a television psychic but could not remember how she’d arrived at this information.

  Neeve had not seemed happy to have uncovered a demon, but Piper had been dying at the time and unchoosy with her friends. She’d skipped over all other social niceties and said to the demon, “I woke you. Do I get a favor? Fix my body.”

  I will favor you.

  And it had. The air in the darkened tomb had gone a little shifty, and then Piper had stopped bleeding to death. She had expected that to be the end of it. It turned out, though, that a favor was a one-time affair, but favoring was forever.

  Now look at her. They were out of that cave, the sun was sort of shining, and Piper had just killed her cowardly dirtbag husband. Magic was churning through her and, to be honest, she was feeling pretty badass. Beside her, a waterfall was crashing upward, backward, the water spraying up into the sky in great gasps. The tree closest to Piper was shedding its bark in peeling, wet clumps.

  “Why does the air feel like this?” Piper asked. “It’s like it’s scratching me. Is it going to twitch like this the entire time?”

  “I believe it is calming,” Neeve said in her faded voice. “The further we travel from the moment of your husband’s death. These are aftershocks. The forest is trying to rid itself of the demon, which seems to use the same power source, focused through the forest. The forest is reacting to being used to kill. I can sense that this place is about creation, and so any step you take that is opposite to that will cause this kind of spiritual quake.”

  “We all do things we don’t want to,” Piper said. “And it’s not like we’re going to be killing loads of people. This was just to prove to my father that I was being serious about making up with him.”

  The demon asked, Now what do you wish?

  It was clinging to the marled old bark of a tree, back hunched in the way hornets curl when they are in the cold or damp or breeze off a waterfall. Its antennae quivered in her direction, and it still hummed in time with a swarm that was no longer in evidence. Overhead, the sun shook; Piper had a thought that it wasn’t really daytime at all. Another bit of bark sloughed off the tree.

  “Are you harmful to the environment?” Piper had always been attentive to her carbon footprint. It seemed pointless to have spent two decades recycling if she was going to destroy an entire ecosystem.

  I am a natural product of this environment.

  A branch sagged to the ground beside Piper. Its leaves were black and running with a thick yellow liquid. The air continued to shudder.

  “Piper.” Neeve took Piper’s hand in a tender way, looking as serene as someone could when dressed in tattered rags beside a waterfall traveling in reverse. “I know that when you plunged into the sleeper’s tomb, pushing me out of the way, ensuring that you and you alone would have the sleeper’s favor, you were hoping to cut me out of the loop and continue in a future where you and you alone controlled your own choices and enjoyed the demon’s favor, probably leaving me in the cavern to wander at best and die at worst. At the time, I’ll admit I was very upset with you, and the feelings I had then are not feelings that I’m proud of now. I see now that you not only have some trust issues, and you didn’t know me. But if you want …”

  Piper missed a large part of this as she noticed Neeve’s shapely fingernails. They were enviably perfect little coins of keratin. Piper’s own nails were ragged from clawing out of the collapsed cavern.

  “… there are better ways to accomplish your goals. Really it’s essential that you learn to rely on my considerable experience in magic.”

  Piper’s attention focused. “All right. I zoned out there, but what? Skip all the feelings parts.”

  “I don’t think it’s wise to pair yourself with a demon. They are inherently subtractive rather than additive. They take more than they give.”

  Piper turned to the demon; it was hard to tell how attentive it was. Hornets didn’t have eyelids, so it was possible it was asleep. “How much of this forest will have to die to get my life back?”

  Now that I am awake, I will unmake all of it either way. Eventually.

  “Well then,” Piper said. She had the sense of relief that came from a bad decision being made for her. “That’s settled. We might as well make hay while the sun shines. Hey — where are you going? Don’t you want to be …” Piper listened, and the demon leaned on her thoughts. “… famous?”

  Neeve blinked. “Respected.”

  “Same diff,” Piper said. “Well, don’t go just yet. I did sort of shaft you, before, because I was dying and sort of rude. Just a little? But I want to make it right.”

  Neeve looked less enthusiastic about this than Piper had hoped, but she at least didn’t try to run away again. This was positive; Piper didn’t really want to be alone with the demon. Not because she was scared, but because she felt more energized with an audience. She’d taken an online quiz that said she was some special sort of extrovert and that she was likely to be this way for the rest of her life.

  “This is going be a new start for both of us,” Piper assured Neeve.

  The demon tilted its head, its antennae waving again. Hornet eyes were not meant to be so large, Piper thought. They were like big brown-black aviator sunglasses. Possibilities of life and death moved darkly in them.

  What now?

  Piper said, “Time to call Dad again.”

  It was not 6:21.

  It was either late at night or early in the morning.

  When Adam and Ronan arrived at the Mountain View Urgent Care, they found a small waiting room empty except for Gansey. Music strummed overhead; the fluorescent lights were soulless and innocent. His khakis were bloody, and he sat in a chair with his head in his hands, either sleeping or grieving. A painting of Henrietta hung on the wall opposite him, and water dripped from it, because that was apparently the world they lived in now. Another time, Adam might have tried to understand what such a sign meant; tonight, his mind was already overflowing with data points. His hand had stopped twitching now that Cabeswater had regained some of its strength, but Adam had no illusions that this meant the danger was over.

  “Hey, Shitlord,” Ronan said to Gansey. “Are you weeping?” He kicked the side of Gansey’s shoe. “Sphincter. You asleep?”

  Gansey removed his face from his hands and looked up at Adam and Ronan. There was a small smear of blood by his jawline. His expression was sharper than Adam had expected, and only grew sharper when he saw Ronan’s filthy clothing. “Where were you?”

  “Cabeswater,” Ronan said.

  “Cabeswa— What is she doing here?” Gansey had just caught sight of the Orphan Girl as she stumbled through the door behind Adam. She was clumsy in a pair of muck boots that Ronan had pulled from the trunk of the BMW. They were far too big for her legs and of course entirely the wrong shape for her hooves, but that was kind of the desired effect. “What was the point of us using an entire afternoon to take her out there if you were just going to bring her back out again?”

  “Whatever, man,” Ronan said, an eyebrow raised at Gansey’s fury. “It was two hours.”

  Gansey said, “Maybe two hours doesn’t mean anything to you, but some of us go to school, and two hours is what we had for ourselves.”

  “Whatever, Dad.”

  “You know what?” Gansey said, standing. There was something unfamiliar in his tone, a bowstring drawn back. “If you call me that one more time —”

  “How’s Blue?” Adam interrupted. He already assumed that she was not dead, or Gansey would not have had the bandwidth to be arg
uing with Ronan. He assumed, actually, that it had looked worse than it had really been, or Gansey would have led with a status report.

  Gansey’s expression was still edged and glistening. “She’ll keep the eye.”

  “Keep the eye,” Adam echoed.

  “She’s getting stitches now.”

  “Stitches,” Ronan echoed.

  Gansey said, “Did you think I was just panicking over nothing? I told you: Noah was possessed.”

  Possessed, like by a devil. Possessed, like Adam’s hand. In between that simmering black in Cabeswater and this violent result of Noah’s possession, Adam was beginning to get a feel for what his own hand might be capable of if Cabeswater couldn’t protect him. Part of him wanted to tell Gansey about it, but part of him had never forgotten Gansey’s agonized shout when Adam had made the bargain with Cabeswater in the first place. He didn’t really think Gansey would say I told you so, but Adam would know that he would have been within his rights to do so, which was worse. Adam had always been the most negative voice in his own head.

  Unbelievably, Ronan and Gansey were still fighting. Adam tuned back in as Ronan said, “Oh come on — there was no way I cared if Henry Cheng asked me to a party.”

  “The point was that I asked you,” Gansey said. “Not that Henry asked. He didn’t care; I cared.”

  “Aw,” said Ronan, but not in a kind way.

  “Ronan,” Adam said.

  Gansey flicked at the bloodstain on his slacks. “And instead, you went to Cabeswater. You could have died there, and I wouldn’t have even known where you were because you couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone. Do you remember that tapestry that Malory and I were talking about while he was here? The one with Blue’s face on it? Oh, of course you do, Adam, because you dredged up those nightmare Blues in Cabeswater. When the Noah thing was over, Blue looked just like it.” He lifted his hands, palms out. “Her hands were all red. Her own blood. You were the one who told me, Ronan, that something was starting, all those months ago. Now’s not the time to be going rogue. Someone’s going to get killed. No more playing around. There’s no more time for anything but truth. We’re supposed to be in this together, whatever this is.”

  There was no effective protest to be made to any of this; it was all unquestionably true. Adam could have said that he had been to Cabeswater countless times to do the ley line’s work and that he had thought this was just like any other time, but he knew full well that he had realized something was off about the forest and continued anyway.

  The Orphan Girl knocked over the coat hanger behind the office door and skittered away from the crash.

  “Quit screwing around,” Ronan snapped. Counterintuitively, him losing his temper meant that the argument was over. “Put your hands in your pockets.”

  She hissed something back to him in a language that was neither English nor Latin. Here in this mundane office, it was especially clear that she had been assembled according to rules from some other world. That old-fashioned sweater, those enormous black eyes, the slender legs with their hooves hidden in boots. It was impossible to believe that Ronan had pulled her from his dreams, but it had been impossible to believe his other outlandish dream objects, too. It seemed obvious now that they had been walking briskly for quite some time toward a world where a demon was plausible.

  They all looked up sharply as the door to the back opened. Blue and Maura stepped into the waiting room as a nurse began to shuffle behind the counter. All attention immediately shifted to Blue.

  She had two visible stiches in her right eyebrow, pinning together the cleaned-up edges of a gouge that continued down her cheek. Faint scratches on either side of the deepest wound told the story of fingers clawing into her skin. Her right eye was squinted mostly shut, but at least it was still there. Adam could tell that she was hurting.

  He knew he cared about her because his stomach was tingling uncomfortably just looking at her wound, the suggestion of violence scratching through him like fingers on a chalkboard. Noah had done that. Adam curled his own hand into a fist, remembering what it had felt like for it to move on its own accord.

  Gansey was right: Any of them could have died tonight. It was time to stop playing around.

  For a strange second, none of them spoke.

  Finally, Ronan said, “Jesus God, Sargent. Do you have stitches on your face? Bad. Ass. Put it here, you asshole.”

  With some relief, Blue lifted her fist and bumped it against his.

  “Corneal abrasion,” Maura said. Her humorless, businesslike tone betrayed her concern more than any crying could have. “Antibiotic drops. Should be okay.”

  She eyed the Orphan Girl. The Orphan Girl eyed her back. Like Ronan, her attentive stare landed somewhere between sullen and aggressive, but the effect was slightly more uncanny when presented by a waif of a girl in muck boots. Maura looked as if she was about to ask something, but instead, she retreated to the counter to pay for the visit.

  “Look,” Gansey said in a low voice. “I need to say something. This is a strange time to say it, but I — I kept waiting for the right moment to do it and I can’t stop thinking about how, if tonight had gone worse, I might have never got that moment. So here it is: I cannot ask you to be truthful if I haven’t been myself.”

  He gathered himself. Adam saw his gaze land on Blue. Judging, perhaps, whether or not she knew what he was about to say, or whether he should say it. He touched his thumb to his lower lip, caught himself at it, lowered his hand.

  “Blue and I have been seeing each other,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt any feelings, but I want to keep seeing her. I don’t want to hide it anymore. It’s eating me, and nights like this, having to stand here and look at Blue with her face like this and pretend like —” He drew himself to a stop, a full stop, a silence so intense that no one tipped any other sound into it. Then he finished, repeating, “I cannot ask you to do things I haven’t been doing myself. I’m sorry for being a hypocrite.”

  Adam had never quite believed that Gansey would acknowledge the relationship in such a pointed way, and now that the confession hung in the air, it was intensely unpleasant. There was no joy to be gained by Gansey looking so miserable, and there was no satisfaction to be gained by Gansey and Blue essentially asking for permission to continue seeing each other. Adam wished that they had just told him the truth all along; then it would have never come to this.

  Ronan raised an eyebrow.

  Blue drew her fingers into small, tight fists at her sides.

  Gansey added nothing else, simply waited for judgment, his uncertain gaze on Adam in particular. He was such a tattered version of the person Adam had first met, and Adam couldn’t tell if Gansey was becoming someone different, or if he was returning to someone he’d already been long before. Adam rummaged within himself for anything that he wanted Gansey to say now, but nothing stood out. Respect was what he had wanted all this time, and respect was what he was looking at, even if it was belated.

  “Thank you,” Adam said. “For finally telling us.” He meant for telling me. Gansey knew it; he gave an infinitesimal nod. Blue and Adam regarded each other. She sucked in her lip; he lifted a shoulder. They were both sorry.

  “Good. I’m glad that’s out,” Gansey said in an airy voice. Long ago, Adam would have found this breezy response unbearable; he would have assumed it was flippancy. Now he knew that it was the opposite. When pressed too close to something huge and personal, Gansey ducked away into cheery politeness. It was so out of place here in this urgent care, in this tumultuous night, that it was truly unsettling, particularly paired with the continued disarray of his expression.

  Blue took Gansey’s hand.

  Adam was glad she did.

  “Gross,” Ronan said, which was the most juvenile response possible.

  But Gansey said, “Thanks for the input, Ronan,” with a proper look on his face again, and Adam saw how cleverly Ronan had released the tension of the moment. They could all breathe again.

>   Maura returned to them from the counter. Adam got the distinct impression that she had been loitering there intentionally, giving them all room. Now she took out her car keys and said, “Let’s get out of here. These places make me nervous.”

  Adam leaned to bump his knuckles against Gansey’s.

  No more playing around. There was only time for truth.

  Depending on where you began the story, it was about Declan Lynch.

  Although it was hard to believe, he hadn’t been born paranoid.

  And really, was it paranoia when you weren’t necessarily wrong?

  Caution. That was what it was called when people really were out to kill you. He’d learned caution, not paranoia.

  He’d been born pliant and trusting, but he’d learned. He’d learned to be suspicious of people who asked you where you lived. He’d learned to talk to his father only on disposable cell phones bought at gas stations. He’d learned not to trust anyone who told you that it wasn’t honorable to long for a historical town house in a corrupt city, a master suite with a tiger-skin rug, a case full of beautifully winking bourbons, and a German car that knew more about the world than you did. He’d learned that lies were only dangerous if you sometimes told the truth.

  The eldest and most natural son of Niall Lynch stood in his Alexandria, Virginia, town house and leaned his forehead against the glass, staring out at the quiet morning street below. D.C. traffic was only beginning to growl to life, and this neighborhood had yet to shake itself to waking.

  He was holding a phone. It was ringing.

  It was clunkier than the work phone that he used for his internship with Mark Randall, political denizen and golf ball killer. He’d intentionally chosen a model with a decidedly different shape for his father’s work. Didn’t want to scrape his hand through his messenger bag and grab the wrong one. Didn’t want to feel the nightstand in the middle of the night and speak easily to the wrong person. Didn’t want to give the wrong phone to Ashley to hold for him. Anything he could do to remind himself to be paranoid — cautious — while running the Niall Lynch business was a help.