The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Henry said, “You’re a lady of action. I see why R. Gansey added you to his cabinet. Walk with me, President.”

  They walked with him. They walked through the cereal aisle, the baking aisle, and the canned goods aisle. As they did, Henry described what he had been told about the upcoming sale with all the enthusiasm of a good student delivering a presentation on a natural disaster. The meeting of artifact-selling denizens was to happen the day after the Aglionby fund-raiser, the better to disguise the influx of strange cars and people into Henrietta. An unknown number of parties would descend for a viewing of the object for sale — a magical entity — so that these potential buyers could confirm for themselves the otherworldliness of the product. Then an auction would follow — payment and the exchange of the item, as always, to take place in a separate location out of the view of prying eyes; no one wanted to have their proverbial wallet lifted by a fellow buyer. Further pieces might be available for sale; inquire within.

  “A magical entity?” Blue and Gansey echoed at the same time that the Gray Man said, “Further pieces?”

  “Magical entity. That was all the description was. It is meant to be a big secret. Worth the trip! They say.” Henry traced a smiley face on the exterior of a box of microwave macaroni and cheese. The logo was a tiny bear with a lot of teeth; it was hard to tell if it was smiling or grimacing. “I have been told to keep myself busy and to not accept candy from any strange men.”

  “Magical entity. Could it be Ronan?” Gansey asked anxiously.

  “We just saw Ronan; they wouldn’t try to sell him without having him in hand, right? Could it be a demon?” Blue said.

  Gansey frowned. “Surely no one would try to sell a demon.”

  “Laumonier might,” Mr. Gray said. He did not sound fond. “I don’t like the sound of ‘further pieces.’ Not when it is Laumonier.”

  “What’s it sound like?” Gansey asked.

  “Pillaging,” Henry answered for him. “What do you mean Ronan’s a magical entity? Is he a demon? Because this all makes sense if so.”

  Neither Blue nor Gansey hurried to answer this question; the truth of Ronan was such an enormous and dangerous secret that neither of them was willing to play with it, even with someone they both liked as well as Henry.

  “Not exactly,” Gansey said. “Mr. Gray, what are you thinking about the idea of all of these people descending? Declan seemed worried.”

  “These people are not the most innocent of folks,” the Gray Man said. “They come from all walks of life, and the only thing that they have in common is a certain opportunism and flexibility of morality. Unpredictable enough on their own, but put them together in a place with something they really want, and it’s hard to say what could happen. There’s a reason they were told not to bring their money with them. And if Greenmantle rears his head again to squabble with Laumonier? There’s bad blood between all of them and the Lynches.”

  “Colin Greenmantle is dead,” Henry said in a very precise way. “He will not be rearing anywhere soon, and if he does, we’ll have bigger problems to consider.”

  “He’s dead?” the Gray Man said sharply. “Who sa— wait.”

  The Gray Man’s eyes were abruptly cast upward. It took Blue a moment to realize that he was looking at a convex mirror meant to prevent shoplifting. Whatever he saw in the mirror instantly transformed him into something abrupt and powerful.

  “Blue,” he said in a low voice, “do you have your knife?”

  Her pulse slowly revved up to speed; she felt it in her stitches. “Yes.”

  “Go around with the boys to the next aisle over. Not that way. The other. Quietly. I don’t remember if the entrance to the back room is on that wall, but if it is, go out that way. Don’t go out any door that might set off an alarm.”

  Whatever he had seen in the mirror was gone now, but they didn’t hesitate. Blue led the way quickly down the end of the canned goods aisle, glanced to either side, and rounded the other side. Laundry detergent. Boxes and boxes in an aggressive assembly of colors. On the other side of them was a large case of butter and eggs. No storeroom exit. The front of the store seemed far away.

  On the other side of the aisle, they heard the Gray Man’s voice, low and level and dangerous. It was a chillier tone than he had just used with them. Another voice replied, and Henry went very still beside them. His fingers touched the edge of one of the shelves — $3.99 price slash! — and he turned his head, listening.

  “That’s —” he whispered. “That’s Laumonier.”

  Laumonier. It was a name that carried more emotion than fact. Blue had heard it whispered in conversations about Greenmantle. Laumonier. Danger.

  They heard Laumonier say in his accented voice, “It is so surprising to see you here in Henrietta. Where is your master, hound?”

  “I think we both know the answer to that,” Mr. Gray said, voice so even that it was impossible to know that he had himself just discovered the news about Colin Greenmantle. “And in any case, I have been working alone since this summer. I thought that was common knowledge. It is more interesting to me to see you here in Henrietta.”

  “Well, the town belongs to no one now,” Laumonier said, “so it is, as they say, a free country.”

  “Not so free,” the Gray Man said. “I understand that you have something to sell here. I’d like you in and then out again: Henrietta is now my home, and I’m not a fan of houseguests.”

  There was some mirth over this. “Is this the part where I say ‘or what’? Because it seems like it would be.”

  Their voices dropped for a time — it seemed like it might be getting unpleasant — and Gansey began to text furiously. He turned the phone to Blue and Henry.

  He is stalling for us to get out. Henry can robobee find a door?

  Henry took Gansey’s phone and added to the text:

  I will have to keep robobee out of sight tho bc they have always wanted it that is part of why they took me

  Blue snatched the phone from him and texted, more slowly, because she had rather less practice than they did:

  Who is Mr Gray trying to keep hidden from them? All of us or just you Henry

  Henry touched his chest lightly.

  Blue typed:

  Leave when you can. I’ll catch up

  She handed Gansey’s phone back to him, swiftly removed several price tags from the shelves until she had a bouquet of them, and stepped around the end of the aisle. She was startled to discover that it was not one man with Mr. Gray, but two. It took her too long to realize that the tilting feeling she got while looking at the strangers was because they looked eerily similar to each other. Brothers. Twins, maybe. Both had a look that she had grown to despise during her time working at Nino’s. Customers who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who weren’t easily negotiated with, who always ended up getting part of their meal taken off the ticket. In addition, they had a slow, bullish way about them that somehow smacked of a lifetime of blunt trauma.

  They were a little terrifying.

  Mr. Gray blinked at Blue in a vague way, no recognition in his face.

  The other two men eyed Blue’s hoodie first — not very professional looking — and then her handful of price tags. She ran her thumb over the ends of them in a bored, casual way and said, “Sir? Guys? I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m going to need you to move your vehicles.”

  “Excuse me, why?” asked the first. Now that she could hear him better, his accent was more pronounced. French? Maybe.

  “We are shopping,” said the other, with vague amusement.

  Blue leaned on her Henrietta accent; she’d learned early on that it rendered her innocuous and invisible to outsiders. “I know. I’m sorry. We have a street sweeper coming in to do the lot, and he wants the whole thing cleared out. He’ll be right pissed if there’s still cars here when he starts.”

  Mr. Gray made a great show of rummaging for his keys in such a way that he twitched up his pant leg to reveal a gun. Laumonier mutter
ed and exchanged looks with each other.

  “Sorry again,” Blue said. “You can just ease over to the laundromat lot if you’re not done here.”

  “Street sweeper,” said Laumonier, as if only just hearing the phrase.

  “Corporate makes us do it to keep the franchise,” Blue replied. “I don’t make the rules.”

  “Let’s keep things civil,” Mr. Gray said, with a thin smile at the other two. He did not look at Blue. She continued looking bored and beleaguered, running her thumbs over the price tags every time she felt her heart thump. “I’ll catch you two later.”

  The three of them moved toward the front door with the uneasy, widening formation of opposing magnets, and by the time they had gone, Blue had skidded hastily down the aisle, through the back-room doors, past the grubby bathrooms, into a warehouse room stacked with boxes and bins, and outside to where Gansey and Henry had just reached the trash bins full of cardboard behind the store.

  Her shadow reached them first, cast by the lights fixed to the back of the supermarket, and they both flinched at the movement before realizing who it belonged to.

  “You magical thing,” Gansey said, and hugged her head, freeing much of her hair from its clips. They were both shivering in the cold. Everything felt false and stark under this black sky, with Laumonier’s two faces still in her memory. She heard car doors shutting, maybe from the front parking lot, every sound both far and close in the night.

  “That was brilliant.” Henry held his hand above his head, palm to the sky. An insect swirled from it, momentarily lit dark by the streetlights, and then lost to the blackness. He watched it go and then fished out his phone.

  Blue demanded, “What did they want? Why did Mr. Gray think they would be interested in you?”

  Henry watched a text feed scroll across the face of his phone. “RoboBee — did Gansey Boy tell you what it was? Good — RoboBee was one of the first things Laumonier and Greenmantle fought about. Lynch was talking about selling it to one of them but sold it to my mother instead because she wanted it for me; she never forgot that; that is why they hate her and she hates them.”

  “But Laumonier isn’t here for you, right?” Gansey asked. He, too, was reading Henry’s phone screen. It seemed to be reporting back where Laumonier was.

  “No, no,” said Henry. “I would bet they recognized your man Gray’s car from the old days and came to see if there was anything to be had from Kavinsky while they were down here. I do not pretend to know the ways of the French. I do not know if they would still recognize me from that hole in the ground; I’m older now. But still. Your assassin man seemed to think they might. He did me a favor. I will not forget that.”

  He turned the phone around so that Blue could watch the live reporting of Laumonier’s actions. The text came in fits and starts, and was strangely conversational, describing Laumonier’s slow progress out of the parking lot in the same way that Henry had described the upcoming artifact sale. Henry’s thoughts, on screen. It was a weird and specific magic.

  As they watched it together, Gansey opened up his overcoat and tucked Blue inside it with him. This, too, was a weird and specific magic, the ease of it, the warmth of him around her, his heartbeat thumping against her back. He cupped a hand over her injured eye as if to protect it from something, but it was only an excuse for his fingertips to touch her.

  Henry was unaffected by this public display of closeness. He pressed fingers against the screen of his phone; it blinked a few times and reported something to him in Hangul.

  “Do you want …” Blue started, and hesitated. “Should you stay with one of us tonight?”

  Surprise lit Henry’s smile, but he shook his head. “No, I can’t. I must go back to Litchfield, a captain to his ship. I wouldn’t forgive myself if they came looking for me and found Cheng Two and the others instead. I will set RoboBee watch until we can —” He circled one finger in a gesture that indicated something like a rendezvous.

  “Tomorrow?” Gansey asked. “I’m supposed to meet my sister for lunch. Both of you please come.”

  Neither Henry nor Blue had to say anything out loud; Gansey surely had to know that merely by asking, he’d assured both would come.

  “I take it we’re friends now,” Henry said.

  “We must be,” Gansey replied. “Jane says it should be so.”

  “It should be so,” Blue agreed.

  Now something else lit Henry’s smile. It was genuine and pleased but also something more, and there were not quite words for it. He pocketed his phone. “Good, good. The coast is clear; I leave you. Until tomorrow.”

  That night, Ronan didn’t dream.

  After Gansey and Blue had left the Barns, he leaned against one of the front porch pillars and looked out at his fireflies winking in the chilly darkness. He was so raw and electric that it was hard to believe that he was awake. Normally it took sleep to strip him to this naked energy. But this was not a dream. This was his life, his home, his night.

  After a few moments, he heard the door ease open behind him and Adam joined him. Silently they looked over the dancing lights in the fields. It was not difficult to see that Adam was working intensely with his own thoughts. Words kept rising up inside Ronan and bursting before they ever escaped. He felt he’d already asked the question; he couldn’t also give the answer.

  Three deer appeared at the tree line, just at the edge of the porch light’s reach. One of them was the beautiful pale buck, his antlers like branches or roots. He watched them, and they watched him, and then Ronan could not stand it. “Adam?”

  When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teeth-chattering-cold night drive. It was Adam’s ribs under Ronan’s hands and Adam’s mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart. They were both hungry animals, but Adam had been starving for longer.

  Inside, they pretended they would dream, but they did not. They sprawled on the living room sofa and Adam studied the tattoo that covered Ronan’s back: all the sharp edges that hooked wondrously and fearfully into each other.

  “Unguibus et rostro,” Adam said.

  Ronan put Adam’s fingers to his mouth.

  He was never sleeping again.

  That night, the demon didn’t sleep.

  While Piper Greenmantle slept fitfully, dreaming of the upcoming sale and her rise to fame in the magical artifact community, the demon unmade.

  It unmade the physical trappings of Cabeswater — the trees, the creatures, the ferns, the rivers, the stones — but it also unmade the dreamy ideas of the forest. The memories caught in groves, the songs invented only in nighttime, the creeping euphoria that ebbed and flowed around one of the waterfalls. Everything that had been dreamt into this place it undreamt.

  The dreamer it would unmake last.

  He would fight.

  They always fought.

  As the demon unwound and undid, it kept encountering threads of its own story teased through the underbrush. Its origin story. This fertile place, rich with the energy of the ley line, was not just good for growing trees and kings. It was also good for growing demons, if there was enough bad blood spilled on it.

  There was more than enough bad blood pooled in this forest to make a demon.

  Little stopped its work. It was the forest’s natural enemy, and the one thing that would stop the demon in its tracks had not yet occurred to anyone. Only the oldest of the trees put up a fight, because they were the only things that remembered how. Slowly and methodically, the demon unpicked them from the inside. Black beaded from their decaying branches; they crashed down as their roots rotted to nothing.

  One tree resisted for longer than the others. She was the oldest, and had seen a demon before, and knew that sometimes it wasn’t about saving yourself, it was about holding out for long enough until someone else could save you. So she held out, and st
retched for the stars even as her roots were being dug away, and she held out, and she sang to other trees even as her trunk was rotting out, and she held out, and she dreamt of the sky even as she was unmade.

  The other trees wailed; if she had been unmade, who could stand?

  The demon did not sleep.

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

  She awoke with a scream that morning at dawn.

  “Get up!” she howled to herself as she leapt from her bed. Her hair hit the slanted attic ceiling, and then her skull did; she pressed her hand to her head. It was still dull gray outside, early morning, but she hit switches and scrolled knobs and pulled cords until every light was on in the space. Shadows keeled this way and that.

  “Get up!” she said again. “Mother, mother!”

  Her dreams still clung to her, trees melting black and demons hissing unmaking; she waved her hands around her to clear the cobwebs from her hair and ears. She tugged a dress over her head, and then pulled on another skirt, and her boots, and her sweater; she needed her armor. Then she weaved through the cards she had left spread on the floor and the plants she had burned for meditation and headed directly to the two mirrors that her predecessor had left there in the attic. Neeve, Neeve, lovely Neeve. Gwenllian would have known her name even if the others had not told her, because the mirrors whispered and sang and hissed it all the time. How they loved her and hated her. They judged her and admired her. Lifted her up and tore her down. Neeve, Neeve, hateful Neeve, had wanted the whole world’s respect and had done everything to get it. It was Neeve, Neeve, lovely Neeve, who hadn’t respected herself in the end.

  The full-length mirrors were set up to face each other, eternally reflecting a reflection. Neeve had performed some complicated ritual to ensure that they were full of all the possibilities she could imagine for herself and then some, and in the end, one of them had eaten her. Proper witchery, the women of Sycharth would have said. They would have all been shipped off to the woods.