The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Gwenllian stood between the mirrors. The magic of them tugged and howled. The glass was not meant to show so many times at once; most people were not built to process so many possibilities at once. Gwenllian was just another mirror, though, and so the magic glanced off her harmlessly as she pressed her palms to either glass. She reached into all the possibilities and looked around, darting from one false truth to another.

  “Mother, mother,” Gwenllian said out loud. Her disordered thoughts transmuted if she didn’t say them out loud at once.

  And there her mother was: in this real present, this current possibility, this reality where Neeve herself was dead. A forest, being unmade, and Gwenllian’s mother, unmade with them.

  Unmade

  Unmade

  Un

  With a scream, Gwenllian smashed the mirrors to the ground. A cry came from downstairs; the house was waking. Screaming again, Gwenllian cast about her room for a tool, a weapon. There was little in this attic that could make a dent — ah. She snatched up a lamp, the cord slapping from the wall, and clattered down the stairs. Thump thump thump thump each foot on the stair, double time.

  “Artemusssssssss!” she cooed, her voice snapping halfway through. She slid into the dim kitchen. It was lit only by the little bulb over the oven and the diffuse gray through the window above the sink. It was only fog, no sun. “Artemusssss!”

  He was awake; probably he had had the same dream as she. They had the same starry stuff in their veins, after all. His voice came through the door. “Go away.”

  “Open the door, Artemussss!” Gwenllian said. She was out of breath. She was shaking. The forest, unmade, her mother, unmade. This coward magician hiding in this closet having killed everyone through his inactivity. She tried the door; he had secured it with something from the inside.

  “Not today!” Artemus said. “No, thank you! Too many events this decade. Perhaps later! Cannot do the shock! Thank you for your time.”

  He had been an adviser to kings.

  Gwenllian smashed the lamp against the door. The bulb shattered with a silvery sound; the end of the lamp split the thin laminate of the door. She sang, “Little rabbit down the hole, down the hole, / Little foxen down the hole, down the hole, / Little houndlet down the hole, down the hole! Come out, little rabbit, I have questions. About demons.”

  “I am a slow-growing creature!” Artemus wailed. “I cannot adapt so quickly!”

  “If someone is robbing us, come back after business hours!” Calla’s voice came from upstairs.

  “Do you know what has happened to my mother, foul branch?” Gwenllian ripped the lamp free from the door so that she could smash it against the surface once more. The crack widened. “I will tell you what I saw in my mirror mirrors!”

  “Go away, Gwenllian,” Artemus said. “I can do nothing for any of you! Leave me alone!”

  “You can tell me where my father is, little shrub! What hole did you throw him in?”

  Shwack

  The door cleaved in two; Artemus shrank back into the darkness. He was folded over among Tupperware and reusable grocery bags and sacks of flour. He shielded his long face from her as she wielded the lamp.

  “Gwenllian!” Blue said. “What are you doing? Doors cost money.”

  Here was Artemus’s little daughter — he did not deserve her in any way — come to rescue him. She had caught hold of Gwenllian’s arm to stop her from cleaving his coward’s skull with the lamp.

  “Don’t you want to riddle him, blue lily?” Gwenllian screamed. “I’m not the only one who wants answers. Did you hear my mother’s scream, Artemussss?”

  Blue said, “Gwenllian, come on, it’s early, we’re sleeping. Or we were.”

  Gwenllian dropped the lamp, pulled her arm free and instead snatched Artemus by a hand and his hair. She dragged him from the closet as he whimpered like a dog.

  “Mom!” Blue shouted, her hand cupped over one eye. Artemus sprawled between them, peering up at them.

  “Tell me how strong this demon is, Artemus,” Gwenllian hissed. “Tell me who it is coming for next. Tell me where my father is. Tell me, tell me.”

  Suddenly, he was up and on his feet. He ran for it, as Gwenllian pawed and grasped for him, slipping and sliding on the shattered glass bulb. She went down on one hip, hard, and clawed her way back up. He was through the sliding glass door to the backyard before she found her footing, and by the time she burst into the foggy backyard, he had already made it up to the first branch of the beech tree.

  “It won’t have you, you coward!” Gwenllian shouted, although she feared it would. She hurtled after him, beginning to climb herself. She was no stranger to trees and their branches, and she was quicker than him. She snarled, “You schemer, you dreamer, you —”

  Her dress caught on a branch, rescuing him for half a moment. Artemus threw his hands up, found a branch, and clambered up a level. As she began to climb again, leaves clattered urgently and smaller twigs snapped.

  “Help,” he said, only he did not say it like that. He said, “Auxiril!” The word came out rapid and terrified and desperate and hopeless.

  “My mother,” Gwenllian said. Thoughts to words without pause. “My mother, my mother, my mother.”

  The dead leaves of the beech shuddered above them, raining down around both of them.

  Gwenllian leapt for him.

  “Auxiril!” he begged again.

  “This won’t save you!”

  “Auxiril,” he whispered, and he hung on to the tree.

  The remaining fall leaves rattled down. Branches thrashed. The ground buckled as roots tugged urgently through dirt. Gwenllian snatched for a handhold, got it, lost it. The branch beneath her shrugged and bucked in a violent wind. The dirt whispered down below as roots heaved — they were too far from the corpse road for this, and Artemus was going to do it anyway, typical, typical, typical — and then Gwenllian fell free as the branch twitched below her.

  She crashed down heavily on her shoulder, all breath escaping her, and looked up to see Blue and her dead friend staring at her. Others stood in the doorway to the house, but Gwenllian was too dazzled by the fall to identify them.

  “What!” Blue exclaimed. “What just happened? Is he —?”

  “In the tree?” finished Noah.

  “My mother was in a tree and she’s dead,” Gwenllian snapped. “Your father is in a tree and he’s a coward. You’re the unlucky one. I’ll just kill you when you come out, you poisoned branch!” This was in the direction of the tree. Artemus could hear her, she knew, his soul curled inside that tree as he was, damned tree-light, damned magician. It infuriated Gwenllian to know that he could hide there as long as the beech survived. There was no reason for the demon to be interested in a tree so far outside Cabeswater, and so even after everyone else and everything else had died, he would once again emerge unscathed.

  Oh, the fury.

  Blue looked at the beech tree with her mouth gently agape. “He’s … he’s in it?”

  “Of course!” Gwenllian said. She pushed herself up from the ground and took big handfuls of her skirt in her hands so she wouldn’t trip on it again. “That’s who he is! That’s your blood. Didn’t you feel roots in your veins? Curses! Curses.”

  She stomped back to the house, shoving past Maura and Calla.

  “Gwenllian,” Maura said, “what is going on?”

  Gwenllian paused in the hallway. “Demon’s coming! Everyone dies. Except for her useless father. He’ll live forever.”

  On Saturday, Adam woke up to perfect silence. He had forgotten what such a thing was like. Fog moved lightly outside the windows of Declan’s bedroom, muting any birds. The farmhouse was too far from a road for the sounds of any cars to reach him. There was no church administration office clunking behind him, no one walking a dog on the sidewalk, no children shrilling onto a school bus. There was only a quiet so deep that it felt like it was pressing on his ears.

  Then Cabeswater gasped back into existence inside him,
and he sat up. If it had come back, it meant it had gone.

  Are you there?

  He felt his own thoughts, and more of his own thoughts, and then, quietly, barely there, Cabeswater. Something wasn’t right.

  But Adam lingered for a moment after he cast off the covers and stood. Here he was, waking in the Lynch home, wearing last night’s clothing that still smelled of smoke from the grill, having overslept the weight class he had this morning by a magnitude of hours. His mouth remembered Ronan Lynch’s.

  What was he doing? Ronan was not something to be played with. He didn’t think he was playing.

  You’re leaving this state, he told himself.

  But he hadn’t felt the fire on his heels for a long time. There was no longer the understood second half of the statement: and never coming back.

  He headed downstairs, peering into each room that he passed, but he seemed to be alone. For a brief, trippy moment, he imagined that he was dreaming, walking through this desaturated farmhouse in his sleep. Then his stomach growled and he found the kitchen. He ate two leftover hamburger buns with nothing on them since he couldn’t find butter, and then drank the remainder of the milk directly from the carton. He borrowed a jacket from the coat rack and went out.

  Outside, the fields drifted mist and dew. Autumn leaves stuck to the tops of his boots as he walked down the path between the pastures. He listened for sounds of activity in any of the barns, but on an essential level, he was fine with the silence. This quiet, this absolute quiet, nothing but the low gray sky and Adam’s thoughts.

  He was so still inside.

  The silence was interrupted as a creature darted up to him. She skittered so quickly and so oddly on her hooves that it wasn’t until her hand had slid into his that he realized it was the Orphan Girl. She held a black-wet stick, and when he looked down at her, he saw that she had bits of bark stuck to her teeth.

  “Should you eat that?” he asked her. “Where’s Ronan?”

  She pressed her cheek to the back of his hand with affection. “Savende e’lintes i firen —”

  “English or Latin,” he said.

  “This way!” But instead of leading him in any particular direction, she released his hand and galloped around him in circles, flapping her arms like a bird. He kept walking, and she kept circling, and overhead, a flying bird checked itself midflight. Chainsaw had spotted the movement of the Orphan Girl, and now she cawed, wheeled, and headed back toward the upper fields. This was where Adam found Ronan, a black smudge in fog-washed field. He had been watching something else, but Chainsaw had alerted him, and so now he turned, hands in the pockets of his dark jacket, and watched Adam approach.

  “Parrish,” Ronan said. He eyed Adam. He was clearly taking nothing for granted.

  Adam said, “Lynch.”

  Orphan Girl trotted up between them and poked Ronan with the end of her stick.

  “You little puke,” Ronan told her.

  “Should she be eating that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if she has internal organs.”

  Adam laughed at that, at the ridiculousness of all of it.

  “Did you eat?” Ronan asked.

  “Other than sticks? Yeah. I missed weights.”

  “Jesus weeps. You want to carry some hay bales? That’ll put hair on your chest. Hey. You poke me with that one more time —” This was to the Orphan Girl.

  As they scuffled in the grass, Adam closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He could nearly scry just like this. The quiet and the cold breeze on his throat would take him away and the dampness of his toes in his shoes and the scent of living creatures would keep him here. Within and without. He couldn’t tell if he was letting himself idolize this place or Ronan, and he wasn’t sure there was a difference.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that Ronan was looking at him, as he had been looking at him for months. Adam looked back, as he had been looking back for months.

  “I need to dream,” Ronan said.

  Adam took Orphan Girl’s hand. He corrected, “We need to dream.”

  Twenty-five minutes away, Gansey was wide awake, and he was in trouble.

  He didn’t know yet what he was in trouble for, and knowing the Gansey family, he might never know. He could feel it, though, sure as he could feel the net of the Glendower story lowering over him. Annoyance in the Gansey household was like a fine vanilla extract. It was used sparingly, rarely on its own, and was generally only identifiable in retrospect. With practice, one could learn to identify the taste of it, but to what end? There’s some anger in this scone, don’t you think? Oh, yes, I think a little —

  Helen was pissed at Gansey. That was the upshot.

  The Gansey family had convened at the schoolhouse, one of the Gansey investment properties. It was a comfortably shabby old stone schoolhouse located in the verdant and remote hills between Washington, D.C., and Henrietta, where it earned its keep as a short-term rental. The rest of the family had stayed the night there — they’d tried to convince Gansey to come spend the night with them, a request he might have fulfilled if not for Ronan, if not for Henry. Maybe that was why Helen was annoyed with him.

  In any case, surely he had made up for it by bringing interesting friends for them to play with. The Ganseys loved to delight other people. Guests meant more people to display elaborate cooking skills for.

  But he was still in trouble. Not with his parents. They were delighted to see him — How tan you are, Dick — and they were, as predicted, even more delighted to see Henry and Blue. Henry immediately passed some sort of friend-peer test that Adam and Ronan had always seemed to struggle with, and Blue was — well, whatever it was about Blue’s sharply curious expression that had attracted the youngest Gansey in the first place clearly also caught the older Ganseys. They immediately began to question Blue about her family’s profession as they diced eggplant.

  Blue described an average day at 300 Fox Way with rather less wonder and bewilderment than she’d just used in the car to tell Gansey about the unaverage experience of her father disappearing into a tree. She listed the psychic hotline, the cleansing of houses, the meditation circles, and the laying out of cards. Her perfunctory method of describing it only charmed Gansey’s parents more; if she had tried to sell it to them, it would have never worked. But she was just telling them how it was and not asking a thing from them and they loved it.

  With Blue there, Gansey was excruciatingly aware of how they all must look through her eyes — the old Mercedes in the drive, the hemmed pants, even skin, straight teeth, Burberry sunglasses, Hermes scarves. He could even see the schoolhouse through her lens now. In the past, he wouldn’t have thought that it looked particularly moneyed — it was sparsely decorated, and he would’ve assumed that came off as austere. But now that he had spent time with Blue, he could see that the sparseness was exactly what made it look rich. The Ganseys did not need to have a lot of things in the house because every object they did have was exactly the right thing for its purpose. There was not a cheap bookshelf also pressed into service as a repository for extra dishes. There was not a desk that had to carry paperwork as well as sewing materials as well as toys. There were not pots and pans piled on cabinets or toilet plungers sitting in cheap plastic buckets. Instead, even in this crumbling schoolhouse, everything was aesthetic. That was what money did. It put plungers in copper pots, and extra dishes behind glass doors, and toys into carved hope chests, and hung skillets from iron pot racks.

  He felt quite squirmy about it.

  Gansey kept trying to catch Blue’s and Henry’s gazes to see if they were all right, but the trick with trying to be subtle in a room full of Ganseys was that subtlety was a language they all spoke. There was no discreetly asking if rescue was needed; all messages would be intercepted. And so light conversation proceeded until lunch could be removed to the porch out back. Henry and Blue were seated in chairs too far away for him to air-drop aid to them.

  Helen made a point to sit next to hi
m. He was tasting vanilla by the bucket load.

  “Headmaster Child said you were a bit late with your college applications,” Mr. Gansey said as he leaned forward to spoon quinoa onto plates.

  Gansey busied himself getting a gnat from his iced tea.

  Mrs. Gansey waved her hand at an invisible gnat out of solidarity. “It seems like it should be too cold for insects. There must be standing water around here.”

  Gansey carefully wiped the dead insect on the edge of the table.

  “I’m still in touch with Dromand these days,” Mr. Gansey said. “He’s still got his fingers stuck in all the pies in the Harvard history department, if that’s what you’re still thinking about.”

  “Jesus, no,” Mrs. Gansey said. “Yale, surely.”

  “What, like Ehrlich?” Mr. Gansey laughed gently at some private joke. “Let this be a lesson to us all.”

  “Ehrlich’s an outlier,” Mrs. Gansey replied. They clinked their glasses together in a mysterious toast.

  “What have you put in already?” Helen asked. There was danger in her voice. Unidentifiable to non-Ganseys, but enough that their father frowned at her.

  Gansey blinked up. “None, yet.”

  “I can’t remember the timing for these things,” Mrs. Gansey said. “Soon, though, right?”

  “Time got away from me.” It was the simplest possible version of theoretically I am to die before it matters so I used my evenings for other things.

  “I’ve read a study on gap years,” Henry said. He smiled at his plate as Mrs. Gansey placed it before him, and in that smile was an understanding that he was fluent in this language of subtlety. “It is supposed to be good for people like us.”

  “What are people like us?” Gansey’s mother asked, in a way that suggested she enjoyed the idea of commonality between them.