The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  He and Adam remained in the living room, standing, thinking. A window looked out at the dark parking area where the BMW and Adam’s shitbox and the glorious Camaro sat. The Pig looked like a rocket ship in the porch light; Gansey’s heart still felt full with promise and magic, both dark and light.

  “You know about Blue’s curse, right?” Adam asked in a low voice.

  If you kiss your true love, he’ll die.

  Yes, he knew. He also knew why Adam was asking, and he could feel the temptation to bluster and joke his way out of it, because it was strangely embarrassing to be talking about him and Blue. Blue and him. He had been transformed into a middle schooler again. But this was a night for truth, and Adam’s voice was serious, so he said, “I do.”

  “Do you think it applies to you?” Adam asked.

  Carefully, Gansey replied, “I think so.”

  Adam glanced to see that Ronan and Blue were still safely in the kitchen; they were. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “The curse says you’re her true love. What about you? Do you love her?” Adam pronounced love very carefully, as if it were an unfamiliar element on the periodic table. Gansey was prepared to deflect this answer, but a glance at Adam told him both that his friend was quite invested in the answer and that the question was probably really about something else entirely.

  “Yes,” Gansey answered plainly.

  Now Adam turned to him, intense. “What does that mean? How did you know it was different than just being her friend?”

  Now it was really obvious that Adam was thinking about something else entirely, and so Gansey wasn’t sure how to answer. It reminded him in a flash of being in the hole with Henry earlier that day, when Henry hadn’t needed anything from him but for Gansey to listen. This was not that. Adam needed something. So he tried to find a way to articulate it. “I suppose … she makes me quiet. Like Henrietta.” He had told Adam this once before; about how the moment he had found the town, something inside him had gone still — something he hadn’t even realized was always agitating inside him. Adam hadn’t understood, but then again, Henrietta had always meant something different to him.

  “And that’s it? It’s that simple?”

  “I don’t know, Adam! You’re asking me to define an abstract concept that no one has managed to explain since time began. You sort of sprang it on me,” Gansey said. “Why do we breathe air? Because we love air? Because we don’t want to suffocate. Why do we eat? Because we don’t want to starve. How do I know I love her? Because I can sleep after I talk to her. Why?”

  “Nothing,” said Adam, a lie so outrageous that they both looked out into the yard again in silence. He tapped the fingers of one hand on the palm of his other.

  Ordinarily, Gansey would have given him room to roam; it was always dubiously productive to bully either Adam or Ronan into talking before they were ready. But in this case, it was late, and Gansey didn’t have months to wait for Adam to come round to the topic of discussion. He said, “I thought this was a night for truth.”

  “Ronan kissed me,” Adam said immediately. The words had clearly been queued up. He gazed studiously into the front yard. When Gansey didn’t immediately say anything, Adam added, “I also kissed him.”

  “Jesus,” Gansey said. “Christ.”

  “Are you surprised?”

  He was chiefly surprised Adam had told him. It had taken Gansey several furtive months of dating Blue before he’d been able to bring himself to tell the others, and then, only under extreme circumstances. “No. Yes. I don’t know. I’ve been given about one thousand surprises today and so I can’t tell anymore. Were you surprised?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  Now that Gansey had had more than a second to think about it, he considered all the ways such a thing might have played out. He imagined Adam, ever the scientist. Ronan, ferocious and loyal and fragile. “Don’t break him, Adam.”

  Adam continued peering out the window. The only tell to the furious working of his mind was the slow twisting together of his fingers. “I’m not an idiot, Gansey.”

  “I’m serious.” Now Gansey’s imagination had run ahead to imagine a future where Ronan might have to exist without him, without Declan, without Matthew, and with a freshly broken heart. “He’s not as tough as he seems.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Gansey.”

  Gansey didn’t think Adam was an idiot. But he had had his own feelings hurt over and over by Adam, even when Adam had meant no harm. Some of the worst fractures had appeared because Adam hadn’t realized that he was causing them.

  “I think you’re the opposite of an idiot,” Gansey said. “I don’t mean to imply otherwise. I just meant …”

  Everything Ronan had ever said about Adam restructured itself in Gansey’s mind. What a strange constellation they all were.

  “I’m not going to mess with his head. Why do you think I’m talking to you? I don’t even know how I …” Adam trailed off. It was a night for truth, but they both had run out of things they were sure about.

  They looked out the window again. Gansey took a mint leaf out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. The feeling of magic that he had felt at the beginning of the night was even more pronounced. Everything was possible, good and bad.

  “I think,” Gansey said slowly, “that it’s about being honest with yourself. That’s all you can do.”

  Adam released his hands from each other. “I think that’s what I needed to hear.”

  “I do my best.”

  “I know.”

  In the quiet, they heard Blue and Ronan talking to the Orphan Girl in the kitchen. There was something quite comforting about the fond and familiar murmur of their voices, and Gansey felt that uncanny tugging of time again. That he had lived this moment before, or would live it in the future. Of wanting and having, both the same. He was startled to realize that he longed to be done with the quest for Glendower. He wanted the rest of his life. Until this night, he hadn’t really thought that he believed that there was anything more to his life.

  He said, “I think it’s time to find Glendower.”

  Adam said, “I think you’re right.”

  Depending on where you began the story, it was about Henry Cheng.

  Henry had never been good with words. Case in point: The first month he’d been at Aglionby, he had tried to explain this to Jonah Milo, the English teacher, and had been told that he was being hard on himself. You’ve got a great vocabulary, Milo had said. Henry was aware he had a great vocabulary. It was not the same thing as having the words you needed to express yourself. You’re very well-spoken for a kid your age, Milo had added. Hell, ha, even for a guy my age. But sounding like you were saying what you felt was not the same as actually pulling it off. A lot of ESL folks feel that way, Milo had finished. My mom said she was never herself in English.

  But it wasn’t that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.

  So he had no real way to explain how he felt about trying to befriend Richard Gansey and the members of Gansey’s royal family. He had no words to articulate his reasons for offering up his most closely guarded secret in the basement of Borden House. There was no description for how difficult it was to wait to see if his peace branch was accepted.

  Which meant he just had to kill time.

  He kept himself busy.

  He delighted Murs in history with his focused study on the spread of personal electronics through the first world; he aggravated Adler in administration with his focused study on the disparity between Aglionby’s publicity budget versus their scholarship budget. He screamed himself hoarse at the sidelines of Koh’s soccer match (they lost). He spray-painted the words PEACE, BITCHES on the Dumpster behind a gelato parlor.

  There was so much day left. Was he expecting Gansey to call? He didn’t have words for what he was expecting. A weather event. No. Climate change. A permanent difference in the way that
crops were grown in the northwest.

  The sun went down. The Vancouver crowd returned to Litchfield to roost and receive marching orders from Henry. He felt 20 percent guilty for longing to become friends with Gansey and Sargent and Lynch and Parrish. The Vancouver crowd was great. They just weren’t enough, but words failed him to say why. Because they were always looking up to him? Because they didn’t know his secrets? Because he no longer wanted followers, he wanted friends? No. It was something more.

  “Take out the trash,” Mrs. Woo told Henry.

  “I’m very busy, aunt,” Henry replied, although he was clearly watching video game walk-throughs in his underwear.

  “Busy carrying these,” she said, and dropped two bags next to him.

  So now he found himself stepping out the back door of Litchfield House into the gravel lot in just a Madonna T-shirt and his favorite black sneakers. The sky overhead was purple-gray. Somewhere close by, a mourning dove swooned dreamily. The feelings inside Henry that had no words rushed up anyway.

  His mother was the only one who knew what Henry meant when he said that he wasn’t good with words. She was always trying to explain things to his father, especially when she had decided to become Seondeok instead of his wife. It is that, she forever said, but also something more. The phrase had come to live in Henry’s head. Something more explained perfectly why he could never say what he meant — something more, by its definition, would always be different than what you already had in your hand.

  He let the feelings out with a breath through his teeth and then minced across the gravel to the trash bins.

  When he turned around, there was a man standing in the door he had just come from.

  Henry stopped walking. He did not know the name of the man — wiry, white, self-possessed — but he felt he knew the sort of man he was. Earlier he’d told Richard Gansey about his mother’s career, and now, hours later, he faced someone who was undoubtedly here about his mother’s career.

  The man said, “Do you think we could have a chat?”

  “No,” Henry replied. “I do not think we can.” He reached for his phone in his back pocket before remembering, partway through, that he was not wearing pants. He glanced up at the windows of the house. He was looking not for help — no one inside knew enough about Henry’s mother to even suspect the kind of peril he was in, even if they were looking right at it — but for any cracked windows that might allow RoboBee to come to him.

  The man made a great show of displaying his palms so Henry could see he didn’t have any weapons. As if that made a difference. “I assure you we have the same goals.”

  “My goal was to finish watching the walkthrough for EndWarden II. I can’t believe I’ve finally found someone who shares my vision.”

  The man regarded him. He seemed to be considering options. “Word has come to me that something is moving here in Henrietta. I do not like people moving things around in Henrietta. I assumed you, too, preferred to not have people milling about in your life.”

  “And yet,” Henry said lightly, “here we are.”

  “Are you going to do this the easy way? Save me the trouble.”

  Henry shook his head.

  The man sighed. Before Henry had time to react, he closed the distance between the two of them, embraced Henry in a less than friendly way, and perfunctorily performed a maneuver that made Henry emit a soft squeak and stagger back holding his shoulder. Some people might have screamed, but Henry was as committed as the man to keeping secrets.

  “Do not waste my time,” the man said, “when I began this in a very civil way.”

  RoboBee, Henry thought. Come find me.

  There had to be a window cracked somewhere in the house; Mrs. Woo always turned the heat on too high.

  “If you are trying to get a secret out of me,” Henry replied, touching his shoulder gingerly, “you’re wasting your own time.”

  “For God’s sake,” the man said. He leaned to pull his pistol out of his ankle holster. “Any other time I’d find this really honorable. But now just get in my car before I shoot you.”

  The gun won, as it usually does. Henry cast a last glance at the house before making his way to the car across the road. He recognized the white car, though he didn’t understand what that meant. He began to get into the back.

  “The passenger seat is fine,” the man said. “I told you, this is a chat.”

  Henry did as he was told, glancing back at the house a third time as the man settled behind the wheel and pulled away from the curb. The man turned down the radio (they sang Yes, I’m a lover not a fighter) and said, “I just want to know who to expect and if they’re going to be trouble. I have no interest in ever interacting with you again.”

  In the passenger seat, Henry looked out the window before buckling the seat belt. He pulled up his knees and put his arms around his bare legs. He was starting to shiver a little. The man turned up the heater.

  “Where are you taking me?” Henry asked.

  “We’re circling the block like reasonable people do when they are trying to have a conversation.”

  Henry thought about a hole in the ground.

  “I have never had a reasonable conversation with someone with a pistol.” He looked out the window again, craning his neck to look behind him. It was dark apart from the streetlights. He would be too far away from the RoboBee to communicate with it soon, but he sent out a last plea: Tell someone who can make this stop.

  It wasn’t a request that made sense in words, but it made sense in Henry’s thoughts, and that was all that mattered to the bee.

  “Look,” said the man. “I regret your shoulder. That was habit.”

  A metallic clink sounded at the top of the windshield. As the man craned his neck to see what had hit the car, Henry sat up attentively. Leaning forward, he saw three slender black lines at the edge of the window.

  A phone rang.

  The man made a noise before flipping the phone over in the center console. Whoever it was earned his attention, because he picked it up and wedged it on his shoulder in order to allow himself to still use the stick shift. To the phone, he said, “That’s a very strange question to ask.”

  Henry took the opportunity to roll down his window an inch. RoboBee immediately whirred off the windshield and through the crack.

  “Hey —” the man said.

  The bee flew into Henry’s palm. He cupped it gladly to his chest. The weight of it felt like security.

  The man frowned at him, and then said to the phone, “I haven’t kidnapped anyone in years, but I do have a student in my car right now.” A pause. “Both of those statements are accurate. I was trying to get some clarification on some rumors. Would you like to talk to him?”

  Henry’s eyebrows shot up.

  The man handed Henry his phone.

  “Hello?” Henry said.

  “Well,” Gansey said on the other side of the phone, “I hear you’ve met Mr. Gray.”

  Henry was wearing pants by the time Blue and Gansey met up with him and the Gray Man in the Fresh Eagle. The grocery store was almost completely empty and had the glittering timelessness that such places began to take on after a certain hour of night. Overhead, a song played about getting out of someone’s dreams and into their car. There was only one cashier, and she didn’t look up as they walked through the automatic doors. They found Henry standing in the cereal aisle looking at his phone, while Mr. Gray stood at the end of the aisle convincingly reading the back of a tin of steel cut oats. Neither drew attention. Mr. Gray blended in because his profession had taught him to blend in. Henry did not blend in — he reeked of money from his snazzy jacket and Madonna shirt down to his black sneakers — but he nonetheless failed to stand out in any remarkable way: Henrietta was no stranger to his sort of youthful Aglionby money.

  Henry had been holding a box of cereal of the sort that was bad for you but good for marshmallows, but he put it back on the shelf when he spotted them. He seemed far more jittery than he
had been at the toga party. Probably, Blue mused, a side effect of being held at gunpoint earlier.

  “The question I’m asking myself,” Gansey said, “is why I’m in the Fresh-Fresh-Eagle at eleven P.M.”

  “The question I was asking myself,” Henry replied, “was why I was in a thug’s car at I-don’t-even-know P.M. Sargent, tell me you are not part of this sordid ring of thieves.”

  Blue, hands in the pockets of her hoodie, shrugged apologetically and gestured with her chin to the Gray Man. “He’s sort of dating my mom.”

  “What a tangled web we weave,” Gansey said in an electric, jagged sort of way. He was keyed up after the night at the Barns, and Henry’s presence only encouraged it. “This wasn’t the next step I wanted to take in our friendship, though. Mr. Gray?”

  He had to repeat Mr. Gray’s name, because it turned out that the Gray Man had not been pretending to look at the oatmeal tin; he had actually been reading the back of it.

  He joined them. He and Blue exchanged a side hug and then he turned her by her shoulders to examine the stitches above her eyebrow. “Those are neatly done.”

  “Are they?”

  “You probably won’t have a scar.”

  “Damn,” Blue said.

  Gansey asked him, “Was the Fresh Eagle your idea or Henry’s?”

  Mr. Gray replied, “I thought it might be comforting. It’s well-lit, on camera, but not audio-recorded. Safe and secure.”

  Blue had not thought about the Fresh Eagle that way before.

  Mr. Gray added cordially, “I am sorry about the fright.”

  Henry had been watching this entire exchange closely. “You were doing your job. I was doing my job.”

  What a truth this was. While Blue had grown up learning the principles of internal energy and getting told bedtime stories, Henry Cheng had grown up contemplating how far he would go to protect his mother’s secrets under duress. The idea that they had been any part of this made her feel so uncomfortable that she said, “Let’s stop doing jobs now and start doing solutions. Can we talk about who’s coming here and why? Wasn’t that the whole point of this exchange? Someone’s coming somewhere to get something, and everybody’s freaked out?”