The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  And yet he’d used it. While waiting for Declan to be done with Ronan, Adam had gone to Boyd’s to get a few oil changes out of the way. He’d been there a few hours when Ronan had called. Then Ronan had texted Gansey and called Fox Way. He said the same thing to each of them: Come to the Barns, he’d said. We need to talk.

  And because Ronan had never really asked them to do anything by phone, they all dropped everything to go.

  By the time Adam got to the Barns, the others had already arrived — or at least the Camaro was there, and Adam assumed Gansey would have brought Blue, especially now that their secret was out. Ronan’s BMW was parked sideways with the wheels jacked in a way that suggested it had slid into its current position. And to Adam’s astonishment, Declan’s Volvo was also parked there, backed into a spot, already ready to leave.

  Adam got out.

  The Barns had a strange effect on Adam. He had not known how to diagnose this feeling the first few times he had visited, because he had not truly believed in the two things that the Barns was made of: magic and love. Now that he had at least a passing acquaintance with both of those things, it affected him in a different way. He used to wonder what he would have looked like if he had grown up in a place like this. Now he thought about how, if he wanted it, he could one day live in a place like this. He did not quite understand what had changed.

  Inside, he found the others in various states of celebration. It took Adam a moment to realize that this was Ronan’s birthday: The grill smoked out back and there were store-bought cupcakes on the kitchen table and a few inflated balloons rolling around the corners of the room. Blue was sitting on the tiles tying strings onto balloons, her bad eye squinted shut, while Gansey and Declan stood by the counter, heads lowered, talking in low, serious voices that made them seem older than they were. Ronan and Matthew jostled into the kitchen from the backyard. They were noisy and brotherly, horsing around, impossibly physical. Was this what it was to have brothers?

  Ronan looked up and caught Adam’s eye.

  “Take your shoes off before you go wandering around, shithead,” Ronan said.

  Adam checked himself and leaned to untie his shoe.

  “Not you — I meant Matthew.” Ronan held Adam’s gaze a moment longer and then watched Matthew chuck off his shoes. As he closely attended to Matthew skidding into the dining room on sock feet, Adam understood: This celebration was for Matthew’s benefit.

  Blue clambered to her feet to join Adam. In a low voice, she explained, “Matthew is going to stay with Declan. He’s moving from Aglionby.”

  The picture grew clearer: This was a going-away celebration.

  Slowly, over the next hour, the story came out in fits and starts, delivered in fragments by each of the people there. The upshot was this: The Barns was changing hands by way of a bloodless revolution, the crown passing from father to middle son as the eldest son abdicated. And if Declan was to be believed, rival states slavered just on the other side of the border.

  This was both a good-bye party and a war council.

  Adam could not quite believe it; he didn’t know if he’d ever seen Ronan and Declan in the same space together without a fight. But it was true that these were the brothers as he hadn’t seen them before. Declan, relieved and exhausted; Ronan, intense and powerful with purpose and joy; Matthew, unchanging and ebullient like the happy dream that he was.

  Something about all of this made Adam feel off-balance. He didn’t quite understand it. He would catch a whiff of boxwood from the open window in the kitchen, and it would make him think of scrying in Ronan’s car. He would catch sight of Orphan Girl hiding with Chainsaw beneath the dining room table with a box of tinker toys and once again remember the shock of discovering that Ronan dreamt Cabeswater. He had wandered into Ronan Lynch’s dream; Ronan had remade everything in this kingdom in the shape of his imagination.

  “Why isn’t it in here?” Ronan’s voice came from the kitchen, exasperated.

  Matthew rumbled in reply.

  A moment later, Ronan hooked his fingers on the doorway of the dining room, looking out. “Parrish. Parrish. Would you see if you could find a damn roll of aluminum foil somewhere? Maybe in Matthew’s room.”

  Adam didn’t quite remember where Matthew’s room was, but he was glad for the excuse to wander. As conversation continued in the kitchen, he made his way through the hallways and up hidden stairways into other half-hallways and to other half-staircases. Downstairs, Ronan said something and Matthew let out a howl of laughter so unholy that it must have been terrible. To Adam’s surprise, he heard Ronan laugh, too, a real thing, unself-conscious, kind.

  He found himself in what must have been Niall and Aurora’s room. The light through the window splashed over the white bedspread, tender and drowsy. Come away o human child said a framed quote beside the bed. There was a framed photo above the dresser: Aurora, mouth open in a wide, surprised, guileless laugh, looking like Matthew. Niall grabbing her, smiling, sharp and handsome, his chin-length dark hair tucked behind his ears. His face was Ronan’s.

  Adam stood looking at the photo for a long time, unsure of why it held him. It could have been surprise, he reasoned, because he had just assumed Aurora was a blank palette, mild and quiet as she was in Cabeswater. It should have occurred to him that she was capable of happiness and dynamism, for Ronan to have believed for so long that she was real, not a dream.

  What was real?

  But it was possible that what kept him was Niall Lynch, that older version of Ronan. The likeness was not perfect, of course, but it was close enough to see Ronan’s mannerisms in it. This ferocious, wild father; this wild, happy mother. Something inside Adam hurt.

  He didn’t understand anything.

  He found Ronan’s room. He knew it was Ronan’s room by its clutter and its whimsy; it was a brighter cousin to his room at Monmouth. Strange little objects were tucked into all of the corners and stuffed under the bed: a younger Ronan’s dreams, or maybe a father’s gifts. There were ordinary things as well — a skateboard, a tattered roller-board suitcase, a complicated-looking instrument that must have been bagpipes lying dustily in an open case. Adam lifted a shiny model car from the shelf and it began to play an eerie, lovely tune.

  Adam had to sit.

  He sat on the edge of the downy white bedspread, a square of pure white light splashed across his knees. He felt drunk. Everything in this house felt so certain of its identity, so sure of its place. So certain it was wanted. He still held the model car balanced on his knees, although it had fallen silent. It was not any particular sort of car — it was every-muscle-car-ever dreamt into a form that was no-muscle-car-ever — but it reminded Adam of the first thing he had ever bought himself. It was a hateful memory, the sort of memory he would sometimes skirt the edges of by accident as he was falling asleep, his thoughts rolling close to it and then recoiling, burned. He couldn’t remember how old he had been; his grandmother had sent him a card with ten dollars in it, back when his grandmother still sent cards. He had bought a model car with it, about this size, a Pontiac. He didn’t remember anything about where he had bought the model, or why that model, or even what the occasion for the card had been. All he remembered was lying on the floor of his bedroom, driving tire tracks into the carpet, and hearing his father say from the other room —

  Adam’s thoughts rolled close to the memory and jerked back.

  But he touched the hood of the dream model and remembered the moment anyway. The fearsome anticipation of recalling the memory was worse than the memory itself, because it would go on for as long as Adam resisted it. Sometimes it was better to just give in at once.

  I regret the minute I squirted him into you, Adam’s father had said. He didn’t shout it. He wasn’t angry. It was just a fact.

  Adam remembered the moment he realized him was Adam. He didn’t remember exactly what his mother had said afterward, only the sentiment of her reply — something like I didn’t imagine it this way, either or This isn’t what
I wanted. The only thing he remembered with precision was that car, and the word squirted.

  Adam sighed. It was impossible how some memories never decayed. In the old days — maybe even a few months before — Adam would have recalled that memory again, and again, it playing on a miserable, obsessive loop in his head. Once he had given in, he wouldn’t have known how to stop. But now, at least, he could merely feel its sting once and then put it away for some other day. He was ever so slowly moving himself out of that trailer.

  A floorboard cracked; knuckles tapped once on the open door. Adam looked up to see Niall Lynch standing in the doorway. No, it was Ronan, face lit bright on one side, in stark shadow on the other, looking powerful and at ease with his thumbs tucked in the pockets of his jeans, leather bracelets looped over his wrist, feet bare.

  He wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress. When he held out his hand, Adam put the model into it.

  “This old thing,” Ronan said. He turned the front tire, and again the music played out of it. They sat like that for a few minutes, as Ronan examined the car and turned each wheel to play a different tune. Adam watched how intently Ronan studied the seams, his eyelashes low over his light eyes. Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam.

  Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain traveling across the vast dry field toward him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him.

  That was this kiss.

  They kissed again. Adam felt it in more than his lips.

  Ronan sat back, his eyes closed, swallowing. Adam watched his chest rise and fall, his eyebrows furrow. He felt as bright and dreamy and imaginary as the light through the window.

  He did not understand anything.

  It was a long moment before Ronan opened his eyes, and when he did, his expression was complicated. He stood up. He was still looking at Adam, and Adam was looking back, but neither said anything. Probably Ronan wanted something from him, but Adam didn’t know what to say. He was a magician, Persephone had said, and his magic was making connections between disparate things. Only now he was too full of white, fuzzy light to make any sort of logical connections. He knew that of all the options in the world, Ronan Lynch was the most difficult version of any of them. He knew that Ronan was not a thing to be experimented with. He knew his mouth still felt warm. He knew he had started his entire time at Aglionby certain that all he wanted to do was get as far away from this state and everything in it as possible.

  He was pretty sure he had just been Ronan’s first kiss.

  “I’m gonna go downstairs,” Ronan said.

  There was a story Niall had once told Ronan that he couldn’t quite remember but always liked. It was something about a boy — who sounded an awful lot like Ronan, as the boys often did in Niall’s stories — and about an old man — who sounded an awful lot like Niall, as the men often did in Niall’s stories. The old man might have been a wizard, actually, and the boy might have been his apprentice, though Ronan may have conflated it with a movie he’d seen once. In the story, there’d been a magical salmon who would confer happiness on the person who ate it. Or perhaps it was wisdom, not happiness. In any case, the old man had been too lazy or busy or on a business trip to spend the time trying to catch the salmon, and so he had set the boy on catching it for him. When the boy caught it, he was to cook it and bring it to the old man. The boy did as he was told, since he was just as clever as the old wizard, but as he’d cooked up the salmon, he’d burned himself. Before he thought about it, he put his burned finger in his mouth and thus got the salmon’s magic for himself.

  Ronan felt that he had caught happiness without meaning to.

  He could do anything.

  “Ronan, bro, what are you doing up there?” Declan called. “Dinner’s done!”

  Ronan was on the roof of one of the small equipment sheds. It was as high as he could get on short notice without wings. He didn’t lower his arms. Fireflies and baubles and his dream flower were glowing and swirling all around him, and they kept sweeping by his vision as he gazed up at the pink-streaked sky.

  After a moment, the roof groaned, and Declan groaned, and then his older brother pulled himself up beside Ronan. He stood looking not at the sky but at the things floating around his younger brother.

  He sighed. “You sure have done a lot with the place.” He reached out to catch one of the fireflies. “Jesus Mary, Ronan, there’s not even any bug here.”

  Ronan lowered his arms and looked at the light Declan had snagged. He shrugged.

  Declan released the light back into the air. It floated right in front of him, illuminating the sharp Lynch features, the knot of worry between his eyebrows, the press of disappointment to his mouth.

  “It wants to go with you,” Ronan said.

  “I can’t take a glowing ball with me.”

  “Here,” Ronan said. “Wait.”

  He shifted his weight to remove something from his pocket and proffered it to Declan in the palm of his hand. It looked like a crude heavy-duty metal washer, about an inch and a half across, a steampunk paperweight from a strange machine.

  “You’re right, that’s much less likely to stick out,” Declan said wryly.

  Ronan delivered a sharp tap to the object, and a small cloud of fiery orbs sprayed up with a sparkling hiss.

  “Jesus, Ronan!” Declan jerked his chin away.

  “Please. Did you think I’d blow your face off?”

  He demonstrated it again, that quick tap, that burst of brilliant orbs. He tipped it into Declan’s hand, and before Declan could say anything, jabbed it to activate it once more.

  Orbs gasped up into the air. For a moment, he saw how his brother was caught inside them, watching them soar furiously around his face, each gold sun firing gold and white, and when he saw the spacious longing in Declan’s face, he realized how much Declan had missed by growing up neither dreamer nor dreamt. This had never been his home. The Lynches had never tried to make it Declan’s home.

  “Declan?” Ronan asked.

  Declan’s face cleared. “This is the most useful thing you’ve ever dreamt. You should name it.”

  “I have. ORBMASTER. All caps.”

  “Technically you’re the orbmaster, though, right? And that’s just an orb.”

  “Anyone who holds it becomes an ORBMASTER. You’re an ORBMASTER right now. There, keep it, put it in your pocket. D.C. ORBMASTER.”

  Declan reached out and scuffed Ronan’s shaved head. “You’re such a little asshole.”

  The last time they’d stood on this roof together, their parents had both been alive, and the cattle in these fields had been slowly grazing, and the world had been a smaller place. That time was gone, but for once, it was all right.

  The brothers both looked back over the place that had made them, and then they climbed down from the roof together.

  Depending on where you began the story, it was about Neeve Mullen.

  Neeve had the sort of career that most psychics longed to have. Part of this was because she had a very easily monetized variety of clairvoyance: She was good with specific numbers, specific letters, pulling telephone numbers out of people’s wallets, birthdays out of people’s heads, accurately pinpointing the times of future events. And part of this was because she was single-mindedly ambitious. Nothing was ever enough. Her career was a glass that never seemed to ge
t full. She started with a phone line, and then published some books, landed herself a television gig that came on very early in the morning. She had respect within the community.

  But.

  Outside of the community, she was always going to be just a psychic. These days, this century, even the very best psychic had the nose-wrinkled stigma of a witch and none of the awe.

  Neeve could put her hands on the future and the past and other worlds, and nobody cared. And so she’d done the spells and dreamt the dreams and asked her spirit guides for a path. Tell me how to become powerful in a way people can’t ignore.

  Henrietta, whispered one of her guides. Her television screen stuck on weather maps of Virginia. She dreamt of the ley line. Her half sister called. “Come to Henrietta and help me!” Mirrors showed her a future with all eyes on her. The universe was pointing the way.

  And here she was in a blackened forest with Piper Greenmantle and a demon.

  Neeve should have guessed that her fixation with power would bring her to an opportunity to bargain with a demon, but she hadn’t. She wasn’t 100 percent on ethics, but she was no idiot: She knew there was no happy ending to such a bargain. So this was a dead end. Probably literally.

  Morale was low.

  Piper, on the other hand, remained enthusiastic. She had replaced her tattered rags with a perfect sky-blue dress with pumps to match; she was a shock of color in an increasingly colorless landscape. She told Neeve, “No one wants to buy a luxury item from a hobo.”

  “What are you selling?” Neeve asked.

  “The demon,” Piper replied.

  Neeve wasn’t sure if it was a failure of imagination or psychic perception on her part, but she hadn’t anticipated this either. A rush of bad feeling accompanied Piper’s answer. Neeve attempted to articulate it. “It seems to me that the demon is tied in with this geographical location and exists for a specific purpose, i.e., in this case unmaking all energy artifacts associated with this place, and so it seems unlikely to me that you would be able to move it without considerable har—”