The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “There he is,” Henry said, same as he had at Raven Day. “It is a terrible thing to see someone else scared, isn’t it?”

  “What is in my hand?”

  “A secret. I am going to trust you with this secret,” Henry said. Now he sounded a little uncertain himself. “Because I want you to trust me. But to do that, if we are to be friends, you have to know the truth.”

  Henry took a deep breath, and then he took his hand off the top of Gansey’s palm to reveal a bee of extraordinary size.

  Gansey barely had time to react when Henry touched his fingers again.

  “Easy, Mr. Gansey. Look again.”

  Now that Gansey had settled, he could see that it wasn’t an ordinary bee at all; it was a beautiful robotic insect. Beautiful was perhaps not the best word, but Gansey couldn’t immediately think of another. The wings, antennae, and legs were clearly fashioned of metal, with fine articulated joints and thin wire wings, but it was as delicately and elegantly colored as a flower petal everywhere else. It was not alive, but it looked vital. He could see it in this darkness because it had a tiny heart that emitted an amber glow.

  Gansey knew that Henry’s family was in the business of robotic bees, but he had not thought of this when he considered robotic bees. He felt fairly certain that he had seen images of robotic bees, and while they had been impressive bits of nanorobotics, they were nothing like actual bees, having more in common with tiny helicopters than with living insects. Henry’s bee, though, was fearfully and impossibly constructed. It reminded him so strongly of Ronan’s dream objects that it was hard to shake the idea once it had occurred to him.

  Henry dug his phone out of his pocket. Tapping rapidly, he brought up a rainbow-slicked screen that was somehow just as strange to look at. “RoboBee interfaces with ChengPhone via this app. It’s fingerprint specific, so you see I press my finger here and tell it what I want it to find — RoboBee, find great hair! — oh and look, there it goes.”

  Gansey startled violently as the bee took flight with the same sound as before, lifting into the air and alighting upon his hair. The weight of it there was even worse than having it in his palm. Stiffly, he said, “Could you remove that? It makes me very uncomfortable.”

  Henry pressed his finger to the screen again, and the bee lifted back into the air, buzzing onto his shoulder.

  Gansey said, “You didn’t say anything that time.”

  “No, I don’t have to say anything. It reads my thoughts through my fingerprint,” Henry said. He didn’t look up from the screen as he said this, but Gansey could see in the light that he was gauging Gansey’s reaction. “So I just tell it what to do and — whoosh! — off it goes, thank you, thank you, little bee.”

  Henry held his hand out and the bee whirred into it like a mobile blossom; the light extinguished. He tucked it back into his pocket. It was impossible, of course, and Henry was waiting for Gansey to say it was impossible. This was why it was secret, because it couldn’t exist.

  The net looped down around Gansey; he felt it.

  “Your parents make robotic bees,” he started carefully.

  “My father. My father’s company, yes.” There was a line drawn there, though Gansey didn’t understand it.

  “And it makes bees like this.” Gansey did not try to make it sound like he believed it.

  “Gansey Boy, I think we have to decide if we trust each other or not,” Henry said. “I think this is the moment in our young friendship.”

  Gansey considered his words, “But trusting someone and confiding in them are not the same thing.”

  Henry laughed approvingly. “No. But I have already both trusted in you and confided in you. I have kept the secret of what you had in the back of your SUV and the secret of Adam Parrish not getting killed by those roof tiles. That is trust. And I have confided in you: I showed you RoboBee.”

  All of this was true. But Gansey knew enough people with secrets to not be dazzled into easily using them as currency. And so much of what Gansey lived with now put other people’s lives on the line, not just his own. That was a lot of trust for a toga party and a hole in the ground. He said, “There’s a psychological principle that car salesmen use. They buy you a drink from a Coke machine with their own money, and then you feel obligated to buy a car from them.”

  There was humor in Henry’s voice. “Are you saying your secrets are to my secrets as an automobile is to a carbonated beverage?”

  Now there was humor in Gansey’s. “Your father’s company didn’t build that bee, did it?”

  “No.”

  He might as well get it over with. “What do you want me to say? The word magic?”

  “You’ve seen magic like my RoboBee before,” Henry said. “That’s not the same sort of magic as watching Parrish deflect a ton of slate. Where have you seen this kind of magic?”

  Gansey couldn’t. “That’s not my secret.”

  Henry said, “I’ll spare you the agony; I know it. Declan Lynch. He sold my mother two of them.”

  This was so unexpected that Gansey was glad they were in total dark again; he was sure the shock had made it to his face. He struggled to piece this information together. Declan — so this bee was Niall’s work. If Henry’s mother was a client, did that mean Declan was selling to people at the school? Surely Declan wasn’t that stupid. “How did your mother know to buy them? Did you tell her about them?”

  “You have it backward. She doesn’t know because I’m here. I’m here because she knows. Don’t you see? I am her excuse. She visits me. Buys something from Declan Lynch. Back she goes. No one the wiser. Ah! I have wanted to say this out loud for two years. They fester, secrets.”

  “Your mother sent you to Aglionby just so she could have a cover for when she does business with Declan?” Gansey asked.

  “Magical artifacts, bro. Big business. Scary business. Good way to get yourself kneecapped. Or killed like our man Kavinsky.”

  Gansey was going to choke on revelations. “She did business with him?”

  “No way. He only dealt drugs, but she said they were magic, too. And come on. You were at that Fourth of July party this year. Explain the dragons.”

  “I can’t,” Gansey said. “We both know.”

  “Yes, we do,” Henry said, satisfied. “Once, he nearly killed Cheng Two for the fun of it. He was the worst.”

  Gansey leaned back against the dusty wall.

  “Are you collapsing? Are you fine? I thought we were conversing.”

  They were conversing, just not in any way that Gansey had anticipated. He had spoken to plenty of uncanny people in his pursuit of Glendower. In many ways, his travels were defined not by cities or countries traveled between, but people and phenomena. The difference was that Gansey had gone looking for them. They had never come looking for him. He had never really met anyone else like himself, and even though Henry was far from Gansey’s twin, he was the closest that Gansey had yet found.

  He hadn’t realized the loneliness of this belief until it was tested. He asked, “Are there any other magical people at Aglionby I should know about?”

  “Other than the ones who run with you? No one that I know. I’ve been trying to get your number for a year.”

  “It’s in the student directory.”

  “No, you fool. Idiomatically. Get. Your. Number. See if you were a creeper like K or not. Get. Your. Number. Who here is English as a second language? Hint, not you.”

  Gansey laughed, then he laughed some more. He felt he’d gone through every emotion known to man in the last few days.

  “I’m not a creeper,” he said. “I’m just a guy looking for a king. You said your mother bought two of those things. Where’s the other?”

  Henry shuffled the jeweled insect back out of his pocket. It amber heart warmed light through the pit again. “Back in the lab, of course, as father dear tries to copy it with nonmagical parts. My mother told me to keep this one to remind me of what I am.”

  “And what is that?”
/>   The bee illuminated both itself and Henry: its translucent wings, Henry’s wickedly cut eyebrows.

  “Something more.”

  Gansey looked at him sharply. Somewhere along the way, during this hunt for Glendower, he’d forgotten to notice how much magic there was in the world. How much magic that wasn’t just buried in a tomb. He was feeling it now.

  “Here is the thing I need to tell you before we are friends,” Henry said. “My mother sells magic. She told me to watch you to find your secrets. I do not mean to use you now, but that is what I was supposed to do. I did not begin this game looking for a friend.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing yet,” Henry said. “I want you to think about it. And then I hope you will choose to trust me. Because I’m overfull on secrets and underfed on friends.”

  He held the bee between them so that Gansey was looking at him through the glow of its marvelous body. Henry’s eyes were lively and ferocious.

  He tossed the bee into the air. “Let’s get out of this hole.”

  The world didn’t have words to measure hate. There were tons, yards, years. Volts, knots, watts. Ronan could explain how fast his car was going. He could describe exactly how warm the day was. He could specifically convey his heart rate. But there was no way for him to tell anyone else exactly how much he hated Aglionby Academy.

  Any unit of measurement would have to include both the volume and the weight of the hate. And it would also have to include a component of time. The days logged in class, wasted, useless, learning skills for a life he didn’t want. No single word existed, probably, to contain the concept. All, perhaps. He had all the hate for Aglionby Academy.

  Thief? Aglionby was the thief. Ronan’s life was the dream, pillaged.

  He had told himself that he would let himself quit: that was his eighteenth birthday present to himself.

  And yet here he was.

  Quit. Just quit. Either he believed he could do it or he didn’t.

  He could hear Gansey’s voice: Just stick it out until graduation; that’s only a couple more months. Surely you can make it that long.

  So now he tried.

  The school day was a pillow over his head. He would suffocate before the final bell. The only oxygen to be found was the pale band of skin on Adam’s wrist where his watch had been and the glimpse of the sky between classes.

  Four more hours to go.

  Declan wouldn’t stop texting him. When you have a minute, give me a text. Ronan did not just give people texts. Hey I know you’re at school but maybe in between let me know. This was a lie, Declan’s superpower. He assumed Ronan was not at school. Hey I’m in town I need to talk to you.

  This got Ronan’s attention. Now that Declan had graduated, he was generally safely stored two hours away in D.C., a distance that had, in Ronan’s estimation, improved their relationship in all the ways it could possibly be improved. He returned only for Sunday Mass, an extravagant four-hour round-trip that Matthew took for granted and Ronan only partially understood. Surely Declan had better things to be doing in D.eclan C.ity than spending half his day in a town he hated with a family he had never wanted to be a part of.

  Ronan did not care for any of this. It made him feel as if he had won nothing over the summer. Back at Aglionby, his dreams fearful things, trying to avoid Declan.

  Three more hours to go.

  “Lynch,” said Jiang, passing him in the dining hall. “I thought you’d died.”

  Ronan shot him a cool look. He didn’t want to see Jiang’s face unless it was behind the wheel of a car.

  Two more hours to go.

  Declan called during a guest presentation. The phone, on silent, hummed to itself. The sky outside was blue torn by clouds; Ronan longed to be out in it. His species died in captivity.

  One more hour.

  “I thought I was hallucinating,” Adam said, next to the lockers, an announcement droning on over the hall speakers. “Ronan Lynch in the halls of Aglionby.”

  Ronan slammed his locker. He had not put anything in it and had no reason to open or close it, but he liked the satisfying bang of the metal down the hall, the way it drowned out the announcements. He did it again for good measure. “Is this a real conversation, Parrish?”

  Adam didn’t bother to reply. He merely exchanged three textbooks for his gym hoodie.

  Ronan wrenched his tie loose. “You working after school?”

  “With a dreamer.”

  He held Ronan’s gaze over his locker door.

  School had improved.

  Adam gently closed his locker. “I’m done at four thirty. If you’re up for brainstorming some repair of your dream forest. Unless you have homework.”

  “Asshole,” Ronan said.

  Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.

  Ronan’s good mood lasted only as long as the hallway and the set of stairs at the end of it, because outside, Declan’s sleek Volvo was parked on the curb. Declan himself stood next to it, talking to Gansey. Gansey had dirt on the elbows of his uniform shirt — how he’d managed to get them so dirty during the course of the school day was mystifying to Ronan. Declan was dressed in a suit, but it never seemed like a special occasion when he did. He wore a suit the way other people wore pajama bottoms.

  They did not make words to measure Ronan’s hatred for his older brother, or vice versa. There was no unit of measurement for an emotion that was equal parts hatred and betrayal, judgment and habit.

  Ronan pressed his hands into fists.

  One of the back windows rolled down, revealing Matthew’s golden curls and pathologically sunny smile. He windmilled a single wave at Ronan.

  It had been months since the three of them had been in the same place outside of a church.

  “Ronan,” said Declan. The word was loaded with additional meaning: I see you’ve only just come out of school and already your uniform looks like hell; nothing is shocking here. He gestured to the Volvo. “Join me in my office.”

  Ronan did not want to join him in his office. Ronan wanted to stop feeling like he had drunk battery acid.

  “What do you need with Ronan?” Gansey asked. His “Ronan” was loaded with additional meaning, too: Was this prearranged and tell me what is happening and do you need me to intervene?

  “Just a little family chat,” Declan said.

  Ronan looked at Gansey entreatingly.

  “Is it a family chat that could happen on the way to Fox Way?” Gansey asked, all polite power. “Because he and I were just headed over there.”

  Ordinarily, Declan would have stepped off at the slightest pressure from Gansey, but he said, “Oh, I can drop him off there after we’re done. Just a few minutes.”

  “Ronan!” Matthew reached his hand out the window toward Ronan. His ebullient “Ronan” was another version of please.

  Trapped.

  “Miseria fortes viros, Ronan,” Adam said.

  When he said “Ronan,” it meant: Ronan.

  “Asshole,” Ronan said again, but he felt a little better. He got in.

  Once they were both in the car, Declan didn’t drive far, just to the other side of the parking lot, out of the way of departing cars and buses. He leaned back in his seat, eyes on Aglionby, looking nothing like their mother, only a little like their father. His eyes were pouched with fatigue.

  Matthew had resumed playing a game on his phone, his mouth curved into an inattentive smile.

  Declan started: “We need to talk about your future.”

  “No,” Ronan said. “No, no, we don’t.”

  He was already most of the way out of the car, leaves snapping dead under his shoes.

  “Ronan, wait!”

  Ronan did not wait.

  “Ronan! Before he died, when he and I were out together, Dad told me a story about you.”

  It was wickedly unfair.

  It was wickedly unfair because there was nothing else that would
have stopped Ronan from walking away.

  It was wickedly unfair because Declan knew it, and he’d known Ronan would try to walk away, and he’d had it at the ready, a rare meal from a diminishing pantry.

  Ronan’s feet were burned onto the asphalt. The electricity in the atmosphere crackled beneath his skin. He didn’t know if he was more furious with his brother, for knowing precisely how to loop the wire around his neck, or with himself, for his inability to duck out of the noose.

  “About me,” Ronan echoed finally, his voice as dead as he could manage.

  His brother didn’t reply. He just waited.

  Ronan got back inside the car. He slammed the door. He opened it and slammed it again. He opened it a third time and slammed it another time before hurling the knob of his skull against the headrest and staring through the windshield at the turbulent clouds.

  “All done?” Declan asked. He glanced back at Matthew, but the youngest Lynch was still playing pleasantly on his phone.

  “I was done months ago,” Ronan replied. “If this is a lie …”

  “I was too angry to tell you before.” In an entirely different tone, Declan added, “Are you going to be quiet?”

  This, too, was an unfair shot, because it was what their father used to say when he was about to tell them a story. Ronan was already going to listen; this made him lay his head against the window and close his eyes.

  Declan was unlike his father in many ways, but, like Niall Lynch, he could tell a story. A story, after all, is a lot like a lie, and Declan was an excellent liar. He began:

  “There was an old Irish hero once, long ago, back when Ireland was not so much about men and towns and was instead mostly island and magic. The hero had a name, but I’m not telling it to you until the end. He was a god-hero, terrifying and wise and impetuous. He came to have a spear — the story is about the spear — that was thirsty for blood and nothing else. Whoever had this spear would rule the battlefield, because there was nothing that could stand against its killing magic. It was so voraciously bloodthirsty that it had to be covered to hide its eyes and stop the killing. Only blind would it rest.”