The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Declan paused then, sighing, as if the weight of the story was a tangible thing, and he needed to take a moment to regain his strength. It was true that the memory of the ritual was heavy enough. Ronan was all tangled up in half-formed images of his father sitting on the end of Matthew’s bed, the brothers tumbled together at its head, his mother perched on that tatty desk chair no one else would sit at. She loved these stories, too, especially the ones about her.

  A sound like fingernails tapping pattered on the roof of the car, and a second later, a flock of dried leaves skittered across the windshield. It reminded Ronan of the night horror’s claws; he wondered if it had returned to the Barns yet.

  Declan went on. “Once the spear was uncovered, it wouldn’t matter if the hero’s truest love or family was in the room with him; the spear would kill them anyway. Killing was what it was good at, and so killing was what it did.”

  In the backseat, Matthew gasped dramatically to lighten the mood. Like Chainsaw, he could not bear to see Ronan distressed.

  “It was a fine weapon, shaped for fighting and for nothing else,” Declan said. “The hero, defender of the island, tried to use the spear for good. But it cut through enemies and friends, villains and lovers, and the hero saw that the single-minded spear was meant to be kept apart.”

  Ronan picked angrily at his leather wristbands. He was reminded precisely of the dream he’d had only days before. “I thought you said this story was about me.”

  “The spear, Dad told me, was him.” Declan looked at Ronan. “He told me to make sure Ronan was the name of the hero, and not the name of just another spear.”

  He let the words linger.

  On the outside, the three Lynch brothers appeared remarkably dissimilar: Declan, a butter-smooth politician; Ronan, a bull in a china-shop world; Matthew, a sunlit child.

  On the inside, the Lynch brothers were remarkably similar: They all loved cars, themselves, and each other.

  “I know you’re a dreamer like him,” Declan said in a low voice. “I know you’re good at it. I know it’s pointless to ask you to stop. But Dad didn’t want you to be alone like he was. Like he made himself.”

  Ronan twisted the leather bands tighter and tighter.

  “Oh, I get it,” Matthew said finally. He laughed gently at himself. “Duh.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” Ronan asked finally.

  “I got word that something big is about to go down here in Henrietta,” Declan said.

  “Who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Where did this word come from?”

  Declan looked at him heavily.

  “How did they know to call you?”

  Declan replied, “Did you really think Dad kept track of this stuff on his own?”

  Ronan had, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Why do you even think I was in D.C.?”

  Ronan had thought Declan was there to get into politics, but that was so clearly not the correct answer that he kept his mouth shut.

  “Matthew, put your earbuds in,” Declan said.

  “I don’t have them with me.”

  “Pretend you have your earbuds in,” Ronan said. He turned on the radio for a little background cover.

  “I want you to give me a straight answer,” Declan said. “Are you even thinking about going to college?”

  “No.” It was satisfying and terrible to say it out loud, a trigger pulled, the explosion over within a second. Ronan looked around for bodies.

  Declan swayed; the bullet had clearly at least grazed him near a vital organ. With effort, he got the arterial spray under control. “Yeah. I figured. So the endgame is making this a career for you, isn’t it?”

  This was not, in fact, what Ronan wanted. Although he wanted to be free to dream, and free to live at the Barns, he did not want to dream in order to be able to live at the Barns. He wanted to be left alone to repair all of the buildings, to raise his father’s cattle from their supernatural sleep, to populate the fields with new animals to be eaten and sold, and to turn the very rearmost field into a giant mudslick suitable for driving cars around in circles. This, to Ronan, represented a romantic ideal that he would do much to achieve. He wasn’t sure how to tell his brother this in a persuasive, unembarrassing way, though, so he said, in an unfriendly way, “I was actually thinkin’ of being a farmer.”

  “Ronan, for fuck’s sake,” Declan said. “Can we have a serious conversation for once?”

  Ronan flipped him the bird with swift proficiency.

  “Whatever,” Declan said. “So it might not feel like Henrietta’s hot now, but that’s only because I’ve been working my ass off to keep them out of town. I’ve been handling Dad’s sales for a while, so I told everyone I was handling them from D.C.”

  “If Dad wasn’t dreaming you new stuff, what were you selling?”

  “You’ve seen the Barns. It’s just a question of parceling out the old stuff slowly enough that it seems like I’m getting it from other sources instead of just going into the backyard. That’s why Dad traveled all the time, to keep up the ruse that it came from all over.”

  “If Dad wasn’t dreaming you new stuff, why were you selling?”

  Declan ran his hand around the steering wheel. “Dad dug us all a grave. He promised people stuff he hadn’t even dreamt yet. He made deals with people who didn’t always care about paying and who knew where we lived. He pretended he’d found this artifact — the Greywaren — that let people take shit out of dreams. Yeah. Sound familiar? When people came to him to buy it, he foisted something else on them instead. It became legendary. Then, of course he had to play them off each other and tease that psychopath Greenmantle and end up dead. So here we are.”

  Earlier this year, this sort of statement would’ve been enough to instigate a fight, but now the bitter misery in Declan’s voice outweighed the anger. Ronan could step back to weigh these statements against what he knew of his father. He could weigh it against what he knew of Declan.

  He didn’t like it. He believed it, but he didn’t like it. It had been easier to merely fight with Declan.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  Declan closed his eyes. “I tried.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “I tried to tell you he wasn’t who you thought.”

  But that wasn’t exactly true. Niall Lynch was exactly what Ronan had thought, but he was also this thing Declan had known. The two versions were not mutually exclusive. “I meant, why didn’t you tell me you were up against all these people?”

  Declan opened his eyes. They were brilliantly blue, same as all the Lynch brothers’. “I was trying to protect you, you little pissant.”

  “Well, it would’ve been a fuckton easier if I’d known more,” Ronan snapped back. “Instead Adam and I had to run Greenmantle out on our own, while you played cloak and daggers.”

  His brother eyed him appraisingly. “That was you? How — oh.”

  Ronan enjoyed a full minute of his brother’s appreciation.

  “Parrish always was a creepily clever little fuck,” Declan observed, sounding a little like their father despite himself. “Look, here’s the thing. This buyer called me this morning and told me someone’s offering to sell something big here, like I said. People are gonna come from all over to look at it, whatever it is. It’s not going to take much effort to find you and Matthew and the Barns and that forest here.”

  “Who is this person selling something?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. It hardly even matters. Don’t you see? Even after that deal is over, they’re gonna show up because Henrietta’s a giant supernatural beacon. And because who knows what of Dad’s business I haven’t cleaned up yet. And if they find out you can dream — God help you, because it’ll be over. I’m just —” Declan stopped speaking and closed his eyes; when he did, Ronan could see the brother he’d grown up with instead of the brother he’d grown away from. “I’m tired, Ronan.”

 
The car was very quiet.

  “Please —” Declan began. “Just come with me, okay? You can quit Aglionby and Matthew can transfer to a school in D.C., and I’ll pour gasoline on everything Dad built and we can just leave the Barns behind. Let’s just go.”

  It was not at all what Ronan had expected him to say, and he found he had no response. Quit Aglionby; leave Henrietta; quit Adam; leave Gansey.

  Once, when Ronan was quite young, young enough that he had attended Sunday school, he had woken holding an actual flaming sword. His pajamas, which adhered to rigorous safety codes that had to that point seemed academic in interest, had melted and saved him, but his blankets and the better part of his curtains had been entirely destroyed in a small inferno. Declan had been the one who had dragged Ronan from his room and woken their parents; he had never said anything about it, and Ronan had never thanked him.

  When it came to it, it wasn’t like there was an option. The Lynches would always save one another’s lives, if they had to.

  “Take Matthew,” Ronan said.

  “What?”

  “Take Matthew to D.C. and keep him safe,” Ronan repeated.

  “Yeah? And what about you?”

  They looked at each other, warped mirror images of each other.

  “This is my home,” Ronan said.

  The stormy weather perfectly mirrored Blue Sargent’s soul. Her first day back at school after suspension had been interminable. A small part of it was that the time away from school had been extraordinary: the absolute opposite of the mundane experience at Mountain View High. But the much bigger part of it was the memory of the most unmagical element of her suspension: Henry Cheng’s toga party. The enchantment of that experience was made more impressive by the fact that it had actually contained no magic. And her instant kinship with the students there only underlined how she had absolutely failed to experience anything like it in her years at Mountain View. What was it that had made her feel so instantly comfortable with the Vancouver crowd? And why did that kinship have to be with people who belonged to a different world? Actually, she knew the answer to that. The Vancouver crowd had their eyes on the stars, not trained on the ground. They didn’t know everything, but they wanted to. In a different world, she could have been friends with people like Henry for her entire teen years. But in this world, she stayed in Henrietta and watched people like that move away. She was not going to Venezuela.

  Blue was filled with frustration that her life was so clearly demarcated.

  Things that were not enough, but that she could have.

  Things that were something more, that she couldn’t.

  So she stood like a prickly old lady, hunched over in a long mutilated hoodie that she’d made into a dress, waiting for the buses to pull out and free up her bike. She wished she had a phone or a Bible so she could pretend to be super busy with it like the handful of shy teens standing in the bus line ahead of her. Four classmates stood perilously close, holding a conversation about whether or not the bank robbery sequence in that movie everyone had seen was indeed awesome, and Blue was afraid they would ask her opinion on it. She knew, in a broad way, that there was nothing wrong with their topic, but she also knew in a more specific way that there was no way she could talk about the movie without sounding like a condescending brat. She felt one thousand years old. She also felt like maybe she was a condescending brat. She wanted her bike. She wanted her friends, who were also one-thousand-year-old condescending brats. She wanted to live in a world where she was surrounded by one-thousand-year-old condescending brats.

  She wanted to go to Venezuela.

  “Hey, hey, lady! Want to come for the ride of your life?”

  Blue didn’t immediately realize that the words were being directed at her. Truth only dawned after she realized that all of the faces around her were pointed at her. She pivoted slowly to discover that there was a very silver and expensive car parked in the fire lane.

  Blue had managed to go months hanging out with Aglionby boys without looking like she hung out with Aglionby boys, but here was the most raven-boy-looking raven boy of them all parked in the fire lane next to her. The driver wore a watch that even Gansey would have considered gauche. The driver had hair tall enough to touch the ceiling of the car. The driver was wearing big black-framed sunglasses despite a notable lack of sun. The driver was Henry Cheng.

  “Whooooooooooo,” said Burton, one of the bank robbery boys, swiveling slowly. “Not Your Bitch has a date? Is that who roughed you up?”

  Cody, the second of the bank robbers, stepped toward the curb to gape at the Fisker. He asked Henry, “Is that a Ferrari?”

  “No, it’s a Bugatti, man,” Henry said through the open passenger window. “Ha-ha, I’m kidding you, man. It’s totally a Ferrari. Sargent! Don’t keep me waiting!”

  Half the bus line was looking at her. Until that moment, Blue had never really stacked up all of her public statements against gratuitous commercialism, offensive boyfriends, and Aglionby students in one place. Now that everyone was looking at Henry and then at her, though, she was eyeing the stack and finding it enormous. She was also seeing how every student was slowly labeling the stack BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE.

  There was no easy way to establish that Henry was not her boyfriend, and moreover, it seemed somewhat pointless in light of the fact that her secret boyfriend was only slightly less overwhelmingly Aglionby than the specimen currently in front of her.

  Blue was filled with the uncomfortable certainty that she probably needed to label the stack BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE in her own handwriting.

  She stomped over to the passenger window.

  “Don’t blow him here, Sargent!” someone shouted. “Make him get you steak first!”

  Henry smiled sunnily. “Ho! The natives are restless. Hello, my people! Don’t worry, I’ll establish a higher minimum wage for you all!” Looking back at Blue, or at least turning his sunglasses toward her, he said, “Hi, hi, Sargent.”

  “What are you doing here!” Blue demanded. She was feeling — she wasn’t sure. She was feeling a lot.

  “I’m here to talk about the men in your life. To talk about the men in my life. I like the dress, by the way. Very boho chic or whatever. I was on my way home, and I wanted to find out if you had a good time at the toga party and also make sure that our plans for Zimbabwe were still on. I see you tried to claw your own eye out; it’s edgy.”

  “I thought … I guess … it was Venezuela.”

  “Oh, right, we’ll do that on the way.”

  “God,” she said.

  Henry inclined his head in humble acknowledgment.

  “Graduation breathes on us, redneck lady,” he said. “Now is the time to make sure we have the strings to all the balloons we want to keep before they all float away.”

  Blue looked at him cannily. It would have been easy to reply that she was not floating anywhere, that this balloon was going to slowly lose its helium and sink to the floor in the same place it had been born, but she thought of her mother’s predictions for her and didn’t. Instead she thought of how she wanted to travel to Venezuela and so did Henry Cheng, and that meant something in this minute, even if it didn’t mean something next week.

  A thought occurred to her. “I don’t have to remind you I’m with Gansey, right?”

  “Naturally not. I’m Henrysexual, anyway. Can I take you home?”

  Stay away from Aglionby boys, because they are bastards.

  Blue said, “I can’t get in this car. Do you see what’s happening behind me? I don’t even want to look.”

  Henry said, “How about you give me the finger and shout at me now and withdraw with your principles?” He smiled winningly and held up three fingers. He counted to two with devil horns.

  “This is incredibly unnecessary,” Blue told him, but she could feel herself smiling.

  “Life’s a show,” he replied. He counted one with his middle finger, and then his face melted into exaggerated shock.

 
Blue shouted, “Drop dead, you bastard!”

  “FINE!” Henry screamed back, with slightly more hysteria than the role required. He attempted to squeal out of the lot, stopped to take off the parking brake, and then limped out more sedately.

  She had not even had time to turn to see the results of their play in three parts before she heard a very familiar rumble. Oh no —

  But sure enough, before she could live down her last visitor, a bright orange Camaro pulled up to the curb in front of her. The engine was bucking a little bit; it was not quite as happy to be alive as the vehicle that had previously occupied the fire lane, but it was doing its best. It was also just as obviously an Aglionby car holding an Aglionby boy as the one that had just left.

  Before, Blue had had half of the bus line’s attention. Now she had all of it.

  Gansey leaned across the passenger seat. Unlike Henry, he at least had the good grace to acknowledge the school’s attention with a grimace. “Jane, I’m sorry this couldn’t wait. But Ronan just called me.”

  “He called you?”

  “Yes. He wants us. Can you come?”

  The letters BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE were most certainly scrawled in her own handwriting. She felt she had some self-examination to do later.

  There was relative silence.

  The self-examination was happening now.

  “Stupid raven boys,” she said, and got in the car.

  No one could quite believe that Ronan had used his phone.

  Ronan Lynch had many habits that irritated his friends and loved ones — swearing, drinking, street-racing — but the one that maddened his acquaintances the most was his inability to answer phone calls or send texts. When Adam had first met Ronan, he had found Ronan’s aversion to the fancy phone so complete that he assumed there must have been a story behind it. Some reason why, even in the press of an emergency, Ronan’s first response was to hand his phone to someone else. Now that Adam knew him better, he realized it had more to do with a phone not allowing for any posturing. Ninety percent of how Ronan conveyed his feelings was through his body language, and a phone simply didn’t care.