The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  This phone hadn’t rung in weeks. He thought he’d finally gotten out of it.

  It rang.

  He debated for a long time if it was more dangerous to pick it up or to ignore it.

  He readjusted. He was no longer Declan Lynch, ingratiating political whippersnapper. He was Declan Lynch, Niall Lynch’s steel-jawed son.

  It rang.

  He picked it up.

  “Lynch.”

  “Consider this a courtesy call,” said the person on the other end of the phone. Music was playing in the background; some wailing string instrument.

  A thin, viscous string of nerves stretched and dribbled down Declan’s neck.

  He said, “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that’s all this is.”

  “I would not expect any such thing,” replied the voice on the other line. It was clipped, amused, accented, invariably accompanied by music of some kind. Declan knew her only as Seondeok. She didn’t buy many artifacts, but when she did, there was no drama. The understanding was clear: Declan presented a magical object, Seondeok made an offer, Declan handed it over to her, and they parted ways until next time. At no point did Declan feel he might be capriciously stuffed in the trunk of his father’s car while listening to his father being roughed up, or handcuffed and forced to watch his parents’ barn get tossed in front of him, or beaten senseless and left half dead in his Aglionby dorm room.

  Declan appreciated the little things.

  But none of them could be trusted.

  Caution, not paranoia.

  “The situation is very volatile back in Henrietta,” Seondeok said. “I have heard it is no longer Greenmantle’s store.”

  Volatile, yes. That was a word. Once upon a time, Niall Lynch had sold his “artifacts” to dealers all over the world. Somehow that had gotten narrowed down to Colin Greenmantle, Laumonier, and Seondeok. Declan assumed it was for security, but maybe he was giving his father too much credit. Maybe he’d just alienated everyone else.

  “What else have you heard?” Declan asked, neither confirming nor denying.

  “I am glad to hear you do not trust me,” Seondeok replied. “Your father talked too much.”

  “I don’t appreciate the tone,” Declan said. His father had talked too much. But that was for a Lynch to say, not some Korean dealer of illegal magical antiquities.

  The music in the background wailed in apology. “Yes, that was rude of me. The word is that someone may be selling something special in Henrietta,” Seondeok said.

  The nerves drooled down Declan’s collar. “Not me.”

  “I did not think so. Like I said: courtesy call. I thought you might want to know if wolves were coming to your door.”

  “How many wolves?”

  The music tripped; restarted. “There may possibly be packs and packs.”

  Maybe they had found out about Ronan. Declan’s fingers tightened on the phone. “Do you know what they are howling for, seonsaengnim?”

  “Mm,” Seondeok said. It was an evocative noise that conveyed both that she knew he was sucking up and that she accepted it nonetheless. “This secret is still very young. I called in hope that I could give you enough time to act.”

  “And how do you think that I should act?”

  “It is hardly my place to tell you. I am not your parent.”

  Declan said, “You know I have no parents.”

  The music whispered and sighed behind her. Finally, she repeated, “I am not your parent. I am just another wolf. Don’t forget that.”

  He pushed off the window. “I’m sorry. Now I was being rude. I appreciate the call. ”

  His mind was already digging through worst-case scenarios. He needed to get Ronan and Matthew out of Henrietta — that was all that mattered.

  Seondeok said, “I miss your father’s finds; they are most beautiful. He was a very troubled man, but he had a most beautiful mind, I think.”

  She was imagining Niall Lynch going through closets and collections and basements, carefully curating the objects he found. Declan imagined something closer to the truth: his father dreaming at the Barns, in hotel rooms, on couches, in the backseat of the BMW that was now Ronan’s.

  “Yeah,” Declan said. “Yeah, I think so, too.”

  Sleep, snatched. Breakfast, skipped. School, attended.

  Gansey could not tell how close it had to be to the end of the world — his world — before he could justify taking school off to chase Glendower, and so he kept going. Adam went, because Adam would cling to his Ivy League dreams even if they were being borne skyward in Godzilla’s jaws. And, to Gansey’s amazement, Ronan went as well, nearly making them both late as he scrounged for a complete uniform in the mess of his room. He suspected that Ronan was only attending to make up for the fight in the urgent care the night before, but Gansey didn’t care. He just wanted Ronan to log some time in a classroom.

  Henry caught up to Gansey in the hallway of Borden House as he left class (French, to replace his defunct Latin studies — Gansey preferred Latin, but he was not terrible at French, so n’y a pas de quoi fouetter un chat). Henry skipped until he was in step with Gansey. “Hey, Junior. Is everything joy in your world after last night?”

  “Two steps down from joy. We had a very good time last night, at Litchfield. It was rude of us to run out when we did.”

  “We only watched music videos on our phones after you left. The mood sagged. I tucked in the children and read them stories but they kept asking after you.”

  This made Gansey laugh. “We were having adventures.”

  “I thought so. That’s what I told them.”

  Carefully, Gansey added, “An old friend wasn’t feeling well.” It was not a lie. Just not an entire truth. It was the edge of a truth.

  Henry raised an eyebrow to demonstrate that he clearly spotted this edge, but he didn’t tug at it. “They’ll be all right?”

  Noah’s face went to inky black. Noah’s sister stood on the auditorium stage. Bones yellowed beneath an Aglionby sweater.

  Gansey said, “We remain optimistic.”

  He did not think there was anything off about the tone of his voice when he said it, but Henry’s gaze darted over to him, quickly. That eyebrow quirked again. “Optimistic. Yes, you are an optimistic person, Gansey Boy. Would you like to see something interesting before lunch?”

  A glance at his watch told Gansey that Adam, at least, would be looking for him at the dining hall soon.

  Henry swiftly interpreted this look. “It’s right here. In Borden. It’s cool. It’s Ganseylike.”

  This struck Gansey as patently absurd. No one knew what Ganseylike was, even Gansey. Teachers and family friends were always collecting articles and stories that they thought might capture his attention, things they thought were Ganseylike. The well-meaning items always addressed the most obvious parts of him. Welsh kings or old Camaros or other young people who had traveled the world for bizarre reasons no one else understood. No one dug down past that, and he supposed he didn’t much encourage it. There was a lot of night in those days behind him, and he preferred to turn his face into the sun. Ganseylike. What was Ganseylike?

  “Does that smile mean yes? Yes, good, follow me,” Henry said. He immediately pitched left through a narrow door labeled STAFF USE ONLY. Borden House had originally been a house, not an academic building, and the door opened into a narrow staircase. One fussy sconce lit the way; the light was swallowed by hideously busy wallpaper. They started down the stairs. “This is a very old building, Dick Three. Seventeen fifty-one. Imagine the things it has seen. Or heard, since houses don’t have eyes.”

  “Currency Act,” Gansey said.

  “What?”

  “Was passed in 1751,” Gansey said. “Banning the issue of currency by New England. And George the Third became Prince of Wales in 1751, if I remember right.”

  “Also” — Henry reached for a light switch. It barely illuminated a low-ceilinged basement with a dirt floor. A glorified crawl space, with n
othing but a few cardboard boxes shoved against one of the foundation walls — “the first performing monkey act in the United States.” He had to duck his head to keep from tangling his hair in the exposed wooden beams supporting the floor above them. The air smelled like a concentrated version of Borden House’s aboveground floors — which was to say, like mold and navy blue carpet — but with the additional damp, living scent peculiar to caves and very old basements.

  “Really?” Gansey asked.

  “Maybe,” Henry said. “I tried to find primary sources, but you know the Internet, man. Here we are.”

  They had come to the far corner of the basement, and the single lightbulb by the base of the stairs did not quite illuminate what Henry was pointing at. It took Gansey a moment to realize what the blacker square in the already dark dirt floor was.

  “Is it a tunnel?” he asked.

  “Nah.”

  “A hidey hole?” Gansey asked. He crouched. It seemed like it. The hole was no more than three feet square with edges worn by the centuries. Gansey touched a groove in one edge. “It had a door at one point, I guess. They called them priest’s holes in the UK. Must’ve been for slaves, or for … alcohol during prohibition, maybe?”

  “Something like that. Interesting, yes?”

  “Mmm,” Gansey said. It was historical. That was Ganseylike, he supposed. He was vaguely disappointed, which must have meant that he had hoped for something more, even if he didn’t know what that something more would have been.

  “No, the Ganseylike part is inside,” Henry said. To his surprise, Henry slid into the pit, landing at the bottom with a dull thud. “Check it out.”

  “I assume you have a plan for getting back out if I do.”

  “There’s handholds.” When Gansey did not move, Henry explained, “Also, this is a test.”

  “Of what?”

  “Merit. No. Ma— No. There’s an m word for bravery, but I can’t recall it. My frontal lobe is still drunk from last night.”

  “Mettle.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s it. This is a test of mettle. That’s the Ganseylike part.”

  Gansey knew that Henry was right by the zing of feeling in his heart. It was very similar to the sensation he’d felt at the toga party. That feeling of being known. Not in a superficial way, but in something deeper and truer. He asked, “What is my prize if I pass?”

  “What is ever any prize of a test of mettle? The prize is your honor, Mr. Gansey.”

  Doubly known. Triply known.

  Gansey wasn’t precisely sure how to cope with being so accurately pegged by a person who was, after all, only a recent acquaintance.

  So there was nothing left but to lower himself into the hole.

  It was almost completely dark, and the walls intruded. He was close enough to Henry to both smell the bite of Henry’s hair product and hear his slightly accelerated breathing.

  “History, that complicated bitch,” Henry said. “Are you claustrophobic?”

  “No, I have other vices.” If this had been Cabeswater, it would have been rapidly working with Gansey’s fear to produce stinging insects. Gansey was grateful that intention was not such a powerful thing outside of Cabeswater. This hole in the ground could remain simply a hole in the ground. In this world, he only had to worry about schooling his exterior, not his interior. “Can you imagine having to hide in one of these? Did I pass the test?”

  Henry scratched at the wall or something similar; it made a dead, hissing sound as dirt crumbled to the floor. “Have you ever been kidnapped, Richard Gansey?”

  “No. Am I being kidnapped now?”

  “Not on a school night. I was kidnapped once,” Henry said. His tone was so light and ordinary that Gansey wasn’t certain if he was making a joke or not. “For ransom. My parents were not in the same country, and so communication was not good. They put me in a hole like this. It was perhaps a bit smaller.”

  He was not joking.

  “Jesus,” said Gansey. He could not see Henry’s face in the darkness to know how he felt about the story he was telling; his voice was still light.

  “Jesus was not there, unfortunately,” Henry said. “Or perhaps fortunately. The hole was barely big enough for me.”

  Gansey could hear Henry rubbing his fingers against each other, or making and unmaking fists; every sound was amplified in this dusty chamber. And now he could smell that peculiar scent that came with fear: the body producing chemicals that reeked of anxiety. He could not tell, however, if it was his or Henry’s. Because Gansey’s mind knew that this hole would not produce a sudden swarm of bees to kill him. But Gansey’s heart remembered hanging in the cave in Cabeswater and hearing the swarms develop beneath him.

  “This is Ganseylike too, yes?” Henry asked.

  “Which part?”

  “Secrets.”

  “True enough,” Gansey admitted, because admitting you had secrets was not the same as telling them. “What happened?”

  “What happened, he asks. My mother knew that to pay the ransom right away was only to encourage others to kidnap her children while she was not watching, and so she haggled with my captors. They did not like this, as you can imagine, and they had me tell her on the phone what they intended to do to me every day she did not pay.”

  “They had you tell her?”

  “Yes, yes. You see, that is part of the haggling. If the parent knows that the child is afraid, it will make them pay faster, and more, that is the wisdom.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Who does? Now you do.” The walls felt closer. Henry went on, with a little laugh — a laugh. “She said, ‘I do not pay for damaged goods.’ And they said that was all she would get, so on and so forth. But my mother is very good at bargains. And so after five days, I was returned to her, with all of my fingers and both of my eyes still. For a good price, they say. I was a little hoarse, but that was my own fault.”

  Gansey didn’t know how he felt about this. He had been given this secret, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what Henry wanted from him. He had many assembled reactions prepared to deploy — sympathy, advice, concern, support, indignation, sorrow — but he didn’t know which combination was called for. He was used to knowing. He didn’t think Henry needed anything from him. This was a landscape with no map.

  Finally, he said, “And now we’re standing in a hole just like that, and you sound quite calm.”

  “Yes. That’s the point. I have spent … I have spent many years in the pursuit of being able to do this,” Henry said. He took a short, thin breath, and Gansey was certain that his face was telling a far different story than his still airy voice. “Instead of hiding, facing the thing I was afraid of.”

  “How many years? How old were you?”

  “Ten.” Henry’s sweater rustled; Gansey sensed him repositioning. His voice went a little different. “How old were you, Whoop Whoop Gansey Boy, when you were stung by those bees?”

  Gansey knew the factual answer, but he wasn’t sure if that was the answer Henry wanted. He still didn’t know why this conversation was happening. “I was ten as well.”

  “And how have those years treated you?”

  He hesitated. “Some better than others. You saw, I suppose.”

  “Do you trust me?” Henry asked.

  It was a loaded question here in the dark and the more dark. Here in the test of mettle. Did he? Gansey’s trust had always been based in instinct. His subconscious rapidly assembling all markers into a picture that he understood without knowing why he understood it. Why was he in this hole? He already knew the answer to this question.

  “Yes.”

  “Give me your hand,” Henry said. With one of his hands, he found Gansey’s palm in the darkness. And with the other, he placed an insect in it.

  Gansey did not breathe.

  At first, he didn’t think it really was an insect. In the dark, in this closeness, he was imagining it. But then he felt it shift its weight on his palm. Familiar. Slender leg
s supporting a more vast body.

  “Richardman,” Henry said.

  Gansey did not breathe.

  He could not snatch his hand away: That was a losing game he’d played before. Then, terribly, it buzzed, once, without lifting off. It was a noise that Gansey had long since stopped interpreting as a sound. It was a weapon. It was a crisis where he who flinched first died first.

  “Dick.”

  Gansey did not breathe.

  The odds of being stung by an insect were astonishingly low, actually. Think about it, Gansey had often told a worried friend of the family as they stood outside, insects bright in the dusk. When’s the last time you were stung? He could not process why Henry had done this. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be thinking. Was he supposed to be remembering all that had happened to him? All of the good and the bad? Because if so, the recorder was stuck, playing only this moment.

  “Gansey,” Henry said. “Breathe.”

  Little lights moved at the corner of Gansey’s vision. He was breathing, just not enough. He couldn’t risk moving.

  Henry touched the back of Gansey’s hand, and then he cupped his other hand over the top of Gansey’s. The insect was trapped against Gansey and Henry, inside a globe of fingers.

  “Here is what I have learned,” Henry said. “If you cannot be unafraid —”

  There was a place where terror stopped and became nothingness. But today, in this hole, with an insect on his skin, with a promise that he was to die soon, the nothingness never came.

  Henry finished, “— be afraid and happy. Think of your child bride, Gansey, and the times we had last night. Think about what you are afraid of. That weight that tells you it is a bee? Does it have to be something that kills you? No. It is just a little thing. It could be anything. It could be something beautiful instead.”

  Gansey could not hold his breath any longer; he had to pass out or take a proper breath. He released a ragged stream of worthless air and sucked in another. The dark became just the dark again; the dancing lights were gone. His heart was still making a racket in his chest, but it was slowing.