The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “Is time weird here?” Piper interrupted. “I can’t tell if we’ve been here for a couple of minutes or not.”

  Neeve was fairly certain they had been here far longer, but that the forest was manipulating their sense of time in order to stall Piper. She didn’t want to say this out loud, though, because she was afraid that Piper would then use that information in some dreadful way. She wondered if she could kill Piper — what. No, she didn’t. That was the demon, whispering into her thoughts as it always was.

  She wondered what it was whispering to Piper.

  Neeve looked at the demon. It looked back. It was beginning to look more at home here among the forest, which was probably a bad sign for the trees. In a low voice, she said, “I do not see how you expect to sell this demon. This is an exercise in arrogance. You cannot control it.”

  The lowered voice was pointless, as the demon was right there, but Neeve couldn’t help herself.

  “It is favoring me,” Piper said. “That’s what it said.”

  “Yes, but in the end, the demon has its own agenda. You are a tool.”

  The demon’s thoughts whispered through the trees; the trees quivered. A bird cried out, but it was a sound in reverse. A few feet away from Neeve, a mouth had opened in the ground and it was slowly opening and closing in a hungry, neglected way. It was not possible, but the demon didn’t care about possible. The forest now lived by nightmare rules.

  Piper seemed unfussed. “And you are a downer. Demon, make me a house. House cave. Whatever you can do fast around here. As long as I can have a bath, I’m on board. Let it be thus, or whatever.”

  It was thus, or whatever, according to the word of Piper.

  The demon’s magic was unlike anything Neeve had ever used before. It was negative, a magical debit card; a psychic proof of energy was neither created nor destroyed. If they wanted to make a building, the demon would have to unmake part of the forest. And it was not an easy process to watch. If it had been a simple deletion, Neeve might not have had such a hard time with it. But it was a corruption. Vines grew and grew and grew, flowering and budding with ceaseless growth until they strangled themselves and rotted. Delicate thorn trees grew razors and spines that twisted and curled until they cut the branch growing them. Birds began to vomit their guts, which became snakes, which ate the birds and then devoured themselves in thrashing agony.

  The worst were the big trees. They were holy — Neeve knew they were holy — and they resisted change for longer than anything else living in the forest. First they bled black sap. Then, slowly, their leaves shriveled. The branches fell against each other, collapsing in black muck. Bark sloughed in peeling slabs like ruined skin. The trees began to moan. It was not a sound a human could produce. It was not a voice. It was a tonal version of the sound a branch makes groaning in the wind. It was a song of a tree falling in a storm.

  It was against everything Neeve stood for.

  She made herself watch it, though. She owed it to this old holy forest to watch it die. She wondered if she had been brought to this forest to save it.

  Everything was a nightmare.

  Piper’s new home filled a massive deep cleft in the rocks, suspended and secured by means magical. The structure was a strange marriage of both Piper’s desires and the stuccoed-wasp-nest sensibility of the demon. In the very center of the main room was a deep, tear-shaped bathing pool.

  As in any good compromise, both parties were vaguely displeased, but said nothing about it. Piper sneered prettily but merely said, “Great. Time to check in with my father.”

  “Instead of possession, you could scry in the bathtub to communicate with your father,” Neeve suggested quickly. What she didn’t say was that she felt scrying would use far less energy than possession. It might not save a tree, but it might preserve it for a little longer.

  The demon twitched its antennae toward Neeve. It knew what she was doing. A second later, Piper looked over appraisingly; the demon had clearly tattled directly into her head. Neeve waited for a retort, but Piper merely ran her fingers around the edge of the bathing pool in a thoughtful way. She said, “They’ll be more moved to love if they see my face, anyway. Demon, connect my father on that thing. Let it be thus, or whatever.”

  It was thus, or whatever.

  Laumonier was in a public men’s room. He stood in front of the mirror, and also in front of the door to the men’s room to make sure no one came in.

  Piper squinted into the pool. “Are you at Legal Sea Foods? I can’t believe it. I hate everything.”

  “Yes, we wanted oysters,” Laumonier said, his voice emanating from the demon instead of the pool. His eyes were narrowed, trying to get a better view of wherever his daughter was. “Are you in a wasp’s nest?”

  “It’s a shrine,” Piper said.

  “To what?”

  “Me. Oh, I’m glad you asked it like that. You set up my punch line perfectly. Look, I’ll make this quick, since I’m dying for a bath. What have you done on your end?”

  “We have set up a look-see for your item,” Laumonier said, stepping out of one of the stalls. “We have timed it to happen the day after a Congressional fund-raiser at a boys’ school there, in order to allow out-of-town guests to blend in. What is it we’re selling?”

  Piper described the demon. The demon took flight and circled the pool, and from Laumonier’s expression, Neeve could tell that the demon was also describing the demon to them. They were clearly impressed by the twisting of their thoughts.

  “Good find,” Laumonier said. “Let’s be in touch.”

  They vanished from the scrying pool.

  “Bath time,” Piper said triumphantly. She did not tell Neeve to give her privacy, but Neeve did anyway. She needed to get out. She needed to be alone. She needed to find calm, so that she could see things truthfully.

  She wasn’t sure she would ever be calm again.

  Outside, at the top of the waspy stairs, Neeve clutched at her hair. In retrospect, she knew that she had used the universe’s power only for personal gain. That was how she had gotten here. She could not be angry at this lesson. She was going to have to try to save it. That was what it came down to. She could not live with herself otherwise, knowing she’d stood by while a holy place was destroyed.

  She began to run.

  Neeve did not ordinarily run, but once she had started, she couldn’t believe that she had not done it immediately. She should have started running the moment she saw the demon, and not stopped until it was too far away to hear it in her head. Fear and revulsion suddenly caught up to her, and as she heaved through the forest, sobs gasped from her. Demon, demon, demon. She was so afraid. The dry leaves beneath her feet turned into tarot cards with her face on them. She slipped on their surfaces, but as they flipped from under her shoes, they were leaves once more.

  Water, she thought to the forest. I need a mirror if I’m to help you.

  Leaves stirred listlessly over her. A drop of rain spattered on her cheek, mingling with her tears.

  Not rain. Water for a mirror, Neeve thought. She looked over her shoulder as she ran. Stumbled. She felt watched, but of course she would feel watched. This entire place was watching. Skidding down a slope, her hands catching only on dry leaves that shifted her farther, she found herself looking at a hollowed-out stump.

  Water, water. As she watched, water gurgled to fill it. Neeve placed her hand in it and prayed to a few select goddesses, and then she held her hands over it to scry. Her mind filled with images of Fox Way. The attic she had stayed in, the rituals she had done there. The mirrors that she had set to propel her through possibilities that had eventually taken her here.

  She badly wanted to look over her shoulder.

  She couldn’t break focus.

  Neeve felt the moment it took hold. She didn’t recognize the face, but it didn’t matter. If it was a woman in 300 Fox Way, the information would get to people who wanted to do something about it. Neeve whispered, “Can you hear me? There’s a de
mon. It’s unmaking the forest and everything attached to it. I’m going to try to —”

  “You know,” Piper said, “if you had a problem with me, I wish you would have come to me first.”

  Neeve’s connection was broken. The water in the stump rippled, just water, and then the hard black shell of the demon rose up through the surface. With a little shake of its antennae, it crawled onto her arm. Heavy. Malevolent. Whispering terrible possibilities that were increasingly terrible probabilities. Piper came into focus on the other side of the stump, walking through the leaves to them. Her hair was still damp from the bath.

  Neeve did not bother to beg.

  “God, Neeve. You New Age types are the worst.” Piper flipped her hand toward the demon. “Unmake her.”

  There was something living about the night.

  Declan and Matthew had gone. Gansey, Blue, Ronan, and Adam remained at the Barns, sitting in a circle in the hickory-scented living room. The only lights were the things Ronan had dreamt. They hovered overhead and danced in the fireplace. It felt like magic hung between all of them, even in the places the light didn’t touch. Gansey was aware that they all were happier than they had been in a long time, which seemed strange in light of the frightening events of the night before and the ominous news they had just received from Declan.

  “This is a night for truth,” Gansey said, and any other time, they would have laughed at him for it, perhaps. But not tonight. Tonight, they all could tell they were part of a slow, wheeling machine, and the enormity of it staggered them. “Let’s piece this thing together.”

  Slowly they described what had happened to them the day before, pausing to allow Gansey to write it in his journal. As he jotted down the facts — the ley line seizing at 6:21, Noah’s attack, the black-oozing tree, Adam’s eye moving of its own accord — he began to feel the shape of the roles they played. He could nearly see the end if he looked hard enough.

  They discussed whether they felt they had a responsibility to protect Cabeswater and the ley line — they all did. Whether they thought Artemus knew more than he was saying — they all did. Whether they thought he would ever talk freely about it — they were all unconvinced.

  Partway through this, Ronan got up to pace. Adam went to the kitchen and returned with a coffee for himself. Blue made herself a nest of sofa cushions beside Gansey and put her head in his lap.

  This was not allowed.

  But it was. The truth was sliding into the light.

  They also talked about the town. Whether or not it was wiser to hide from or to fight with outsiders coming to Henrietta to dig for supernatural relics. As they threw around ideas for dreamt defenses and dangerous allies, weaponized monsters and acid moats, Gansey gently touched the hair above Blue’s ear, careful not to brush the skin near her eyebrow because of her wound, careful not to meet Ronan’s or Adam’s eyes because of self-consciousness.

  It was allowed. He was allowed to want this.

  They talked about Henry. Gansey was mindful that he was telling Henry’s closely guarded secrets, but he had also decided by the end of the school day that to tell Gansey something was to tell Adam and Ronan and Blue. They were a package deal; Gansey could not be expected to be won without winning them as well. Adam and Ronan made puerile jokes at Henry’s expense (“He’s half Chinese” “Which half?”) and sniggered clannishly; Blue called them on it (“Jealous, much?”); Gansey told them to put aside their preconceptions and think about him.

  No one had yet said the word demon.

  It hung there, unspoken, defined by the shape of the conversation around it. The thing Adam and Ronan had driven in pursuit of, the thing that had inhabited Noah, the thing that was possibly attacking Cabeswater. It was quite possible that they might have gone the entire evening not addressing it if Maura had not called from 300 Fox Way. Gwenllian had seen something in the attic mirrors, she said. It had taken this long to work out what she had really seen, but it seemed like it had been Neeve with a warning.

  Demon.

  Unmaker.

  Unmaking the forest and everything attached to it.

  This revelation made Ronan stop in his pacing and Adam go completely silent. Neither Blue nor Gansey interrupted this curious silence, and then, at the end of it, Adam said, “Ronan, I think you need to tell them, too.”

  Ronan’s expression, if anything, was betrayed. This was wearying; Gansey could see precisely the argument that it was heaving toward. Adam would shoot something cool and truthful over the bow, Ronan would fire back a profanity cannon, Adam would drip gasoline in the path of the projectile, and then everything would be on fire for hours.

  But Adam merely said, in an earnest tone, “It’s not gonna change anything, Ronan. We’re sitting here with dream lights around us, and I can see a hooved girl you dreamt up eating Styrofoam in the hall. We ride around in a car you pulled out of your dreams. It’s surprising, but it’s not going to change the way they see you.”

  And Ronan retorted, “You didn’t handle the revelation well.”

  In his hurt tone, Gansey thought that he suddenly understood something about Ronan.

  “I had other things going on,” Adam replied. “That made it a little hard to take on.”

  Gansey definitely felt like he understood something about Ronan.

  Blue and Gansey exchanged looks. Blue had an eyebrow raised into her bangs; her other eye was still squinted shut. It made her appear even more curious than she would have normally looked.

  Ronan plucked at his leather wristbands. “Whatever. I dreamt Cabeswater.”

  It was once more absolutely quiet in the room.

  On a certain level, Gansey realized why Ronan had been hesitant to tell them: The ability to pull a magical forest out of your head added an otherworldly cast to your persona. But on every other level, Gansey was slightly confused. He felt as if he was being told a secret that he’d already been told before. He couldn’t tell if this was because Cabeswater itself had possibly already whispered this truth to them on one of their walks there, or if it was merely that the weight of evidence was already so conclusive that his subconscious had accepted ownership of the secret before the parcel had been officially delivered.

  “To think you could have been dreaming the cure for cancer,” Blue said.

  “Look, Sargent,” Ronan retorted. “I was gonna dream you some eye cream last night since clearly modern medicine’s doing jack shit for you, but I nearly had my ass handed to me by a death snake from the fourth circle of dream hell, so you’re welcome.”

  Blue looked appropriately touched. “Ah, thanks, man.”

  “No problem, bro.”

  Gansey tapped his pen on his journal. “While we’re being forthright, have you dreamt any other geographical locations that you should tell us about? Mountains? Water features?”

  “No,” Ronan said. “But I did dream Matthew.”

  “For God’s sake,” Gansey said. He lived in a continuous state of impossibility, occasionally agitating to a higher state of even more impossibility. All of this was hard to believe, but things had been hard to believe for months. He had already drawn the conclusion that Ronan was unlike anyone else; this was only another piece of supporting evidence. “Does that mean you know what the visions in that tree mean?”

  He meant the hollowed-out tree that delivered visions to whomever was standing in it; they had discovered it the first time they explored Cabeswater. Gansey had seen two visions in it: one where he seemed quite on the verge of kissing Blue Sargent, and one where he seemed quite on the verge of finding Owen Glendower. He had a keen interest in both of these things. Both had felt very real.

  “Nightmares,” Ronan replied dismissively.

  Both Blue and Adam blinked. Blue echoed, “Nightmares? Is that all? Not visions of the future?”

  Ronan said, “When I dreamt that tree, that’s what it did. Worst-case scenarios. Whatever mindfuckery it thought would be most likely to mess you up the next day.”

  Gansey
was not certain that he would have classified either of his visions as worst-case scenarios, but it was true that they had both provided a certain measure of mindfuckery. Blue’s bemused expression suggested she agreed. Adam, on the other hand, let out a breath so enormous that it seemed he’d been holding it for months. This was not surprising. Adam’s real life had already been a nightmare when he’d stepped into that tree. Mindfuckery above and beyond the truth must have been truly terrible.

  “Is it possible,” Gansey started, and then stopped, thinking. “Is it possible that you could dream some protection for Cabeswater?”

  Ronan shrugged. “Black stuff in Cabeswater means black stuff in my dreams. I told you, I couldn’t even get some eyeball ChapStick out for Sargent last night, and that’s a nothing-thing. A child could manifest that. I got nothing.”

  “I can try to help you,” Adam said. “I could scry while you dream. I might be able to clear the energy enough for you to get something useful.”

  “That feels so insubstantial,” Gansey said. He really meant the monster feels so enormous.

  Blue sat up and groaned, holding her eye. “I’m fine with insubstantial. I don’t think we should do anything substantial until we talk to Mom. I want to hear more about what Gwenllian saw. Ugh. I think you have to take me home, Gansey. My eye is driving me crazy and making me feel like I’m more tired than I am. Sorry, guys.”

  But there were no more ideas to be had without more information, so the rest of them used this as excuse to get up and stretch, too. Blue headed toward the kitchen and Ronan jogged on ahead of her, jostling her intentionally with his hip. “You asshole,” she said, and he laughed merrily.

  Gansey was deeply moved by the sound of that laugh, here of all places, here in the Barns, here in a room that was only fifty feet from where Ronan had found his father dead and his life in pieces. It was such a throwaway sound now, that laugh. An easy one that said it could be spent so easily because there were more where that one came from. The wound was healing against all odds; the victim would make it after all.