The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  The beast was gone.

  There was not even time for Gansey to register disappointment, though, because of the birds.

  They were everywhere: The air dazzled and shimmered with feathers and down. The birds swirled and dove and plummeted around the neighborhood street, the streetlights catching wings, beaks, claws. Most of them were ravens, but there were others, too. Little chickadees, streamlined mourning doves, compact jays. These smaller birds seemed more chaotic than the ravens, though, as if they had gotten caught up in the spirit of the night without understanding the purpose. Some of them let out little squawks or cries, but mostly the sound was wings. The humming, rushing whoosh of frantic flight.

  Gansey stepped into the yard and the dense flock immediately rushed up around him. They swirled around him, wings brushing against him, feathers touching his cheek. He couldn’t see anything but the birds, every shape and color. His heart was a winged thing itself. He couldn’t catch his breath.

  He was so afraid.

  If you can’t be unafraid, Henry said, be afraid and happy.

  The flock dipped away. They meant to be followed, and they meant to be followed now. They swirled up in a great column over the Camaro.

  Make way! they shouted. Make way for the Raven King! It was loud enough now that lights were beginning to come on in the houses.

  Gansey climbed into the car and turned the key — start, Pig, start. It growled to life. Gansey was all things at once: elated, terrified, overcome, satiated.

  With a squeal of tires, he pursued his king.

  Ronan was operating on emergency battery power. Running on cruise control. He was a drop of water beaded on a windshield. The slightest jolt would be enough to send him skidding downward.

  Because he was practicing such a delicate balancing act between waking and sleep, it wasn’t until the driver’s-side door of the BMW wrenched open that he realized something had happened. The noise was terrific, particularly because Chainsaw flew into the car as soon as the door had opened. The Orphan Girl shrieked in the backseat and Adam jolted awake.

  “I don’t know,” Blue said.

  Ronan wasn’t sure what this meant until he realized that she wasn’t addressing him, but the people behind her. Maura, Calla, and Gwenllian stood in the road in various states of nighttime disarray.

  “I told you, I told you,” Gwenllian cawed. Her hair was a tangle of feathers and oak leaves.

  “Were you sleeping?” Blue asked Ronan. He had not been sleeping. He hadn’t been awake, though, either, not really. He stared at her. He had forgotten her wound until he was staring at it again; it was such a violent signature, written on her skin. So against everything Noah would ordinarily do. Everything backward. Demon, demon. “Ronan. Did you see where Gansey went?”

  Now he was awake.

  “He’s on the hunt!” Gwenllian shrilled gleefully.

  “Shut up,” Blue said, with unexpected rudeness. “Gansey’s gone after Glendower. The Pig’s gone. Gwenllian says he went after birds. Did you see where he went? He’s not picking up his phone!”

  She swept her hand dramatically behind her to demonstrate this truth. The empty curb in front of 300 Fox Way, the street littered with feathers of all colors, the neighbors’ doors opening and closing with curiosity.

  “He can’t go alone,” Adam said. “He’ll do something stupid.”

  “I’m infinitely aware,” Blue replied. “I’ve called him. I’ve called Henry, to see if we could use RoboBee. No one’s picking up. I don’t even know if calls are going through.”

  “Can you locate him?” Adam asked Maura and Calla.

  “He’s tied into the ley line,” Maura said. “Somehow. Somewhere. So I can’t see him. That’s all I know.”

  Ronan’s mind was wobbling as reality began to jostle at him. The horror of every nightmare being made into truth jittered his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Maybe I can scry,” Adam said. “I don’t know that I’ll know where it is, though. If he’s somewhere I haven’t been, I won’t recognize it and we’ll have to piece together clues.”

  Blue spun in an angry circle. “That will take forever.”

  The feathers scattered across the street struck Ronan. Every fine edge of them seemed sharp and real and important against the fuzzed events of the days before. Gansey had gone after Glendower. Gansey had gone without them. Gansey had gone without him.

  “I’ll dream something,” he said. No one heard him the first time, so he said it again.

  “What?” Blue asked, at the same time that Maura said, “What kind of something?” and Adam said, “But the demon.”

  Ronan’s mind was still a fresh horror of seeing his mother’s body. The recent memory effortlessly cross-pollinated with the older one of finding his father’s body, creating a toxic and expanding flower. He did not want to go back into his head right now. But he would. “Something to find Gansey. Like Henry Cheng’s RoboBee. It only has to have one purpose. Something small. I can do it fast.”

  “You could be killed fast, you mean,” Adam said.

  Ronan did not reply to this. Already he was trying to think of what form he could swiftly invest with such a skill. What could he most reliably create, even with the hurricane of the demon distracting him? What could he be certain the demon wouldn’t corrupt even as he manifested it?

  “Cabeswater can’t help you,” Adam pressed. “It can only hinder you. You’d have to try to create something not terrible among all that, which seems impossible to start, and then you’d have to bring back that, and only that, from the dream, which sounds even more impossible.”

  Ronan addressed the steering wheel. “I’m aware of how dreaming works, Parrish.”

  He did not say I can’t stand the idea of finding Gansey’s body, too. He did not say If I can’t save my old family, I can save my new one. He did not say I will not let the demon have everything.

  He did not say that the only true nightmare was not being able to do something and that this, at least, was something.

  He just said, “I’m going to try,” and hoped that Adam knew all of the rest already.

  Adam did. So did the others.

  Maura said, “We’ll do our best to support your energy and hold back some of the worst.”

  Adam put the seatback in its fully upright and locked position. He said, “I’ll scry.”

  “Blue,” Ronan said, “I think you’d better hold his hand.”

  The Camaro broke down.

  It was always breaking down and living again, but tonight — tonight, Gansey needed it.

  It broke down anyway. He’d only gotten to the outskirts of town when it coughed, and the lights inside dimmed. Before Gansey even had time to react, the car had died. His power brakes and steering vanished and he had to wrestle it to the shoulder. He tried the key, looked in the mirror, tried to see if the birds were waiting. They were not.

  Make way for the Raven King! they shouted, sailing on. Make way!

  Damn this car!

  Not so long ago, the car had died in just the same way in a pitch-black night, leaving him stranded by the side of the road, nearly getting him killed. Adrenaline hit him in the same way as it had that night, immediate and complete, like time had never progressed.

  He pumped the gas, let it sit, pumped the gas, let it sit.

  The birds were drawing away. He could not follow.

  “Come on,” he pleaded. “Come on.”

  The Camaro did not come on. The ravens cried furiously; they did not seem to want to leave him, but also seemed to be pulled by a force beyond them. With a soft swear, he scrambled out of the car and slammed the door. He didn’t know what he would do. He would give chase on foot, until he had lost them. He would —

  “Gansey.”

  Henry Cheng. He stood before Gansey, his Fisker parked askance in the street behind him, door hanging open. “What’s happening?”

  The impossibility of Henry’s presence hit Gansey harder than anything else that nig
ht, even though it was actually the least impossible thing. They were not far from Litchfield’s side of town, and Henry had clearly arrived to this place by means automotive rather than magical. But still, the timing was too clearly on Gansey’s side, and Henry, unlike the ravens, could not have appeared just because Gansey bade him to.

  “How are you here?” Gansey demanded.

  Henry pointed up into the sky. Not at the birds, but at the tiny, winking body of RoboBee. “RoboBee was told to tell me if you needed me. So I say again unto thee: What’s happening?”

  The ravens were still crying for Gansey to follow. They were getting even farther; soon he wouldn’t be able to see them. His pulse rummaged in his chest. With great effort, he made himself focus on Henry’s question. “The Camaro won’t start. Those birds. They’re taking me to Glendower. I have to go, I have to follow them or they’ll be —”

  “Stop. Stop. Get in my car. You know what? You drive. This thing scares the piss out of me.”

  Henry tossed him the keys.

  He got in.

  There was a sick rightness to it, as if somehow, Gansey had always known this was how the chase would go. As they left the Camaro behind, time was slipping and he was inside of it. Above them, the ravens burst and tumbled through the black. They were sometimes stark against buildings, sometimes invisible against trees. They flashed and flickered before the last of the town’s streetlights like fan blades. Gansey and Henry drove through the last vestiges of civilization into the countryside. Henrietta was so large in Gansey’s mind that he was somewhat surprised to see, when he was not paying attention to it, how quickly the lights of the small town vanished in his rearview mirror.

  Out of Henrietta, the ravens streamed and bobbed north. They flew faster than Gansey thought birds ought to be able to fly, ducking into trees and valleys. Pursuing them was not a simple matter; the ravens flew dead-on straight, while the Fisker had to stick to roads. His heart screamed at him, Don’t lose them. Don’t lose him. Not now.

  He could not shake the idea that this was his only chance.

  His head was not thinking. His heart was thinking.

  “Go, go, go,” Henry said. “I’ll watch for cops. Go, go, go.”

  He typed something into the phone and then ducked his head to look out of the car to watch RoboBee spin away to do his work.

  Gansey went went went.

  Northeast, through tangled roads Gansey had probably been on before but didn’t remember. Hadn’t he crawled over this entire state? The ravens led them over the mountains on twisting roads that turned to dirt and then back to asphalt. At one point, the Fisker clung to the side of a mountain and looked down a steep drop with nary a guardrail in sight. Then the road turned back to asphalt and trees hid the sky.

  The ravens were instantly invisible behind the night-black branches, flying off in some direction without them.

  Gansey slammed on the brakes and rolled down the window. Henry, without any questions, did the same. Both boys tilted their heads and listened. Winter trees creaked in the breeze; distant trucks rolled on the highway below; ravens called urgently to one another.

  “There,” Henry said immediately. “Right.”

  The Fisker charged ahead. They were headed along the ley line, Gansey thought. How far would the ravens fly? Washington, D.C.? Boston? All the way across the Atlantic? He had to believe they wouldn’t go where he could not follow. It ended tonight, because Gansey had said it ended tonight, and he had meant it.

  The birds continued on, unerring. An interstate sign loomed in the dark.

  “Does that say 66?” Gansey said. “Is that the ramp for 66?”

  “I don’t know, man. Numbers confuse me.”

  It was I-66. The birds swept forward; Gansey got onto the interstate. It was faster, but a little risky. There were no options to turn off if the ravens altered their path.

  The birds didn’t waver. Gansey poured on speed, and more speed.

  The birds were headed along the ley line, taking Gansey back toward Washington, D.C., and his childhood home. He had a sudden, terrible thought that that was precisely where they were leading him. Back to the Gansey home in Georgetown, where he learned that his ending was his beginning, and he finally accepted that he had to grow up to be just another Gansey with all that entailed.

  “What did you say this was? I-66?” Henry asked, typing in his phone again as another sign flew by them proclaiming the fact of I-66.

  “However do you drive?”

  “I don’t. You do. Mile marker?”

  “Eleven.”

  Henry studied his phone, his face blue by its light. “Hey. Hey. Slow up. Cop in a mile.”

  Gansey let the Fisker glide down to something closer to the speed limit. Sure enough, the dark paint of an unmarked police car glistened in the median a little less than a mile from when Henry had noted it. Henry saluted him as they drove by.

  “Thank you for your service, RoboBee.”

  Gansey let out a breathless laugh. “Okay, now you — wait. Can RoboBee find us an exit?”

  The ravens had been getting slightly farther away from the interstate with each mile, and now it was becoming quite clear that they were diverging in a permanent way.

  Henry tapped into his phone. “Two miles. Exit 23.”

  Two miles in an ever-widening triangle would put a lot of space between the ravens and the car. “Can RoboBee keep up with the birds?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  So they barreled on ahead as the flock grew harder to see in the darkness and eventually disappeared. Gansey’s pulse raced. He had to trust Henry; Henry had to trust RoboBee. At the exit, Gansey sent the Fisker racing off the interstate. There was no sign of the ravens: only ordinary Virginia night all around them. He felt strange as he recognized where they were, near Delaplane, quite far from Henrietta now. This was a world of old money, horse farms, and politicians and tire-company billionaires. It was not a place of archaic wild magic. By day it would reveal itself as a place of genteel loveliness, a place so long beloved and cultivated that it was impossible to imagine it running amok.

  “Where now?” Gansey asked. They were driving into nowhere, into ordinariness, into a life Gansey had already lived.

  Henry didn’t immediately reply, his head bowed over his phone. Gansey wanted to stomp the gas, but there was no point if they were going the wrong way.

  “Henry.”

  “Sorry sorry. Got it! Floor it, turn right when you can.”

  Gansey did as directed with such efficiency that Henry placed a hand on the ceiling to brace himself.

  “Yay,” said Henry. “Also, woo.”

  And then, suddenly, there were the ravens again, the flock tumbling and remaking itself above the tree line, perfect black against the deep purple sky. Henry pounded the ceiling in silent triumph. The Fisker wheeled onto a broad, four-lane highway, empty in both directions. Gansey had only begun to accelerate again when the ravens swirled up in a tornado of birds, tossed aloft by an invisible updraft, changing course abruptly. The Fisker’s headlights found a real-estate sign at the end of a driveway.

  “There. There!” Henry said. “Stop!”

  He was right. The birds had peeled up the driveway. Gansey had already blown by it. He scanned ahead; there was no turnaround immediately in view. He would not lose the birds. He would not lose them. Rolling down his window, he craned his head out the window to be sure the night road behind him was still black, then backed up, the transmission whining in excitement.

  “Aight,” said Henry.

  The Fisker climbed the steep driveway. Gansey didn’t even pause as he considered that someone might be home. It was late, he was strange and memorable in this fancy car, and this was a private corner of an old-fashioned world. It didn’t matter. He would think of something to say to the home owners if it came to that. He would not leave the ravens. Not this time.

  The headlights illuminated ill-kept grandeur: the oversized teeth of landscaping stones lining th
e driveway, grass growing between them; a four-board fence with a board hanging loose; asphalt cracked and spewing dead weeds.

  The sensation of time slipping was even greater now. He had been here before. He had done this, or lived this life before.

  “This place, man,” Henry said, craning his neck, trying to look. “It’s a museum.”

  The driveway climbed until it rose above the tree line and reached the crest. There was a grand circle at the end of the drive, and behind that, a dark and looming house. No, not house. Gansey, who had grown up in a mansion, knew a mansion when he saw one. This one was far larger than his parents’ current home, adorned with columns and roof decks and porticoes and conservatories, a sprawling entity of brick and cream. Unlike his parents’ home, however, this mansion’s boxwoods were overgrown by weedy tall locust trees, and the ivy had crawled off the brick walls onto the stairs leading to the front door. The rosebushes had shot up uneven and ugly.

  “Not a lot of curb appeal,” Henry noted. “Bit of a fixer-upper. Would be some great zombie parties on the roof though, yo.”

  As the Fisker pulled slowly around the circle, the ravens watched them from the roof and the roof deck railings. Déjà vu plucked at Gansey’s mind, like looking at Noah and seeing both the living and dead version of him.

  Gansey touched his lower lip pensively. “I’ve been here.”

  Henry peered up at the ravens, who peered back, unmoving. Waiting. “When?”

  “This is where I died.”

  Ronan had known before he fell asleep that Cabeswater was going to be unbearable, but he had not realized how unbearable.

  It was not the sights that were the worst; it was the emotions. The demon was still working on the trees and the ground and the sky, but it was also corrupting the feel of the forest, the things that make a dream a dream even if there is no scenery in it. Now it was every guilty breath sucked in after a sort-of lie. It was the drop of the stomach after finding a body. It was the gnawing suspicion that you were leavable, that you were too much trouble, that you were better off dead. It was the shame of wanting something you shouldn’t; it was the ugly thrill of nearly being dead. It was all of those things, all at once.