The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Ronan’s nightmares used to be one or two of these things. Only rarely were they all. That was back when they wanted him dead.

  The difference was that he’d been alone in those. Now Maura and Calla were supporting him in the waking world — Calla sitting on his hood and Maura sitting in the backseat. He could feel their energy like hands around his head, blocking out some of the dreadful sound. And he had Adam’s mind here in the dream with him. In the real world, he was scrying in the passenger seat again, and in this one, he stood in this ruined forest, hunched over, face unsure.

  No. Ronan had to admit to himself that even though they made it easier, their presence wasn’t the real difference between his old nightmares and this one. The real difference was that, back then, the nightmares had wanted him dead, and so had Ronan.

  He looked around for some safe place in the dream, someplace that his creation might possibly develop in safety. There was no such place. The only uncorrupted things in the dream were Adam and himself.

  So he would hold it himself. Ronan pressed his palms together, imagining a tiny ball of light forming there. The demon did not care for this. In his ear, he heard a gasp. Unmistakably his father. Unmistakably in pain. Dying alone.

  Your fault.

  Ronan pushed it away. He kept thinking about the tiny brilliant thing that he was forming to find Gansey. He imagined its weight, its size, the pattern of its miniature wings.

  “Did you really think I’m going to stay in this place for you?” Adam said in his other ear, all chilly dismissal.

  The real Adam was standing with his head turned to the side as an unreasonable facsimile of his father screamed in his face, the cadence of his voice perfectly and eerily matched to the real Robert Parrish. There was a firm set to Adam’s mouth that was less fear and more stubbornness. He had been slowly untangling himself from his real father for weeks; this duplicate was easier to resist.

  Leavable.

  I’m not asking him to stay, Ronan thought. Only to come back. He wanted badly to check if the object in his hands was what he intended it to be, but he could feel how the demon longed to corrupt the object, to turn it inside out, to make it opposite and ugly. Better to keep it hidden from sight for now, trusting only that he was creating something positive. He had to hold on to the idea of what it was supposed to do when it was brought back to waking life, and not the demon’s idea of what it wanted the object to do when brought back to waking life.

  Something was scratching at Ronan’s neck. Lightly, harmlessly, repeatedly, relentlessly, until it had worked its way through the topmost layer of his skin and found blood.

  Ronan ignored it and felt the object in his hand stir to life against his fingers.

  The dream splattered a body in front of him. Black and torn, ripped and corrupt. Gansey. Eyes still alive, mouth moving. Ruined and helpless. A claw from one of Ronan’s night horrors was still hooked in the corner of his mouth, punched through his cheek.

  Powerless.

  No. Ronan didn’t think so. He felt the dream fluttering against the palms of his hands.

  Adam met Ronan’s gaze, even as the duplicate version of his father kept screaming at him. The strain of whatever energy balance he was doing was visible on his face. “Are you ready?”

  Ronan hoped so. The truth was that they really wouldn’t know who’d won this round until he opened his eyes in the BMW. He said, “Wake me up.”

  Gansey had been here before — seven years and some change. Impossibly, it had been for another Congressional fund-raiser. Gansey remembered that he had been excited to go. Washington, D.C., in the summer was airless and close, its inhabitants reluctant hostages, bags over their heads. Although the Ganseys had just taken an overseas trip to visit mint farms in Punjab (a political trip that Gansey still didn’t fully understand the purpose of), the travel had only served to make the youngest Gansey more restless. The only backyard their Georgetown house had was filled wall to wall with flowers older than Gansey, and he was forbidden to go into it during high summer, because the backyard drowsed with bees. And although his parents took him to antiques shows and museums, horse races and art shindigs, Gansey’s feet grew itchier. He had seen all of these things. He felt greedy for new curiosities and wonders, for things he had never seen before and things he couldn’t understand. He wanted to go.

  So although he was not excited by the idea of politics, he had been excited by the idea of leaving.

  “It will be fun,” his father had said. “There will be other children there.”

  “Martin’s kids,” his mother had added, and the two of them exchanged a private snigger over a long-ago slight.

  It had taken Gansey a moment to realize that they were offering this as an incentive rather than merely reporting the fact as a weather update. Gansey had never found children fun, including the child he had been. He had always looked to a future where he could change his own address at will.

  Now, years later, Gansey stood on the ivy-tangled staircase and looked at the plaque by the door. THE GREEN HOUSE, it read. EST. 1824. Up close, it was hard to say precisely why the property looked grotesque rather than merely shaggy. The attendance of ravens on every horizontal surface of the house didn’t hurt. He tried the front door: locked. He clicked on the flashlight function on his phone and leaned against the sidelight windows, trying to see inside. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He would know it when he saw it, maybe. Perhaps a back door was unlocked, or a window could be slid open. Though there was no particular reason why the interior of the neglected house should hold any secrets relevant to Gansey, the part of him that was good at finding things battered silently against the glass, wanting in.

  “Look at this,” Henry called from a few yards away. His voice was theatrically shocked. “I have discovered that, at some point, this side door was broken into by a teenage Korean vandal.”

  Gansey had to pick across a bed of dead lilies to join him at a less elaborate side entrance. Henry had finished the work of a cracked windowpane in order to reach inside and open the lock. “Kids these days. ‘Cheng’ isn’t Korean, is it?”

  “My father isn’t,” Henry said. “I am. I got that, and the vandal part, from my mother. Let us enter, Dick, as I’ve already broken.”

  Gansey hesitated, though, outside the door. “You had RoboBee looking out for me.”

  “It was friendly. That was a friend thing.”

  He seemed anxious for Gansey to believe that his motives were pure, so Gansey said quickly, “I know that. Just — I don’t meet many people who make friends like I do. So — fast.”

  Henry flipped crazy devil horns at him. “Jeong, bro.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Who knows,” Henry said. “It means being Henry. It means being Richardman. Jeong. You never say the word, but you live it anyway. I will be honest, I did not expect to find it in a guy such as yourself. It’s like we’ve met each other before. No, not really. We are friends at once, we would instantly do what friends would do for each other. Not just pals. Friends. Blood brothers. You just feel it. We instead of you and me. That’s jeong.”

  Gansey was aware on a certain level that the description was melodramatic, heightened, illogical. But on a deeper level, it felt true, and familiar, and like it explained much of Gansey’s life. It was how he felt about Ronan and Adam and Noah and Blue. With each of them, it had felt instantly right: relieving. Finally, he’d thought, he’d found them. We instead of you and me.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Henry smiled brilliantly, and then opened the door he had just broken. “Now, what are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” Gansey admitted. He was captured by the familiar scent of the house: whatever it was that made all these old rambling Colonials smell like they did. Mold and boxwood and old floor polish, perhaps. He was struck by not a precise memory, but rather a more carefree era. “Something unusual, I suppose. I think it’ll be obvious.”

  “Should we split
up, or is this a horror movie?”

  “Scream if something eats you,” Gansey said, relieved that Henry had offered to split up. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He switched off his flashlight just as Henry switched his on. Henry looked as if he was about to ask why, and then Gansey would be forced to say Makes my instincts louder, but Henry merely shrugged as they parted ways.

  In the silence, Gansey wandered through the dim halls of the Green House, ghosts dogging his heels. Here had been a buffet; here had been a piano; here had been a pack of political interns that had seemed so worldly. He stood in the very center of what had been the ballroom. A motion light triggered outside as Gansey walked farther into the room, startling him. There was a wide fireplace with an ugly, dated hearth and an ominous black mouth. Dead flies littered the windowsills. Gansey felt as if he were the last man left alive.

  The room had seemed enormous before. If he squinted his eyes, he could still see the party. It was always happening at some point in time. If this were Cabeswater, perhaps he could replay that party, skipping back in time to watch it again. The thought was at once wistful and unpleasant: He had been younger and easier then, unfettered by anything like responsibility or wisdom. But he had done so much between now and then. The idea of living through it again, learning all the hard lessons again, struggling to once again ensure that he met Ronan and Adam, Noah and Blue — it was exhausting, nerve-racking.

  Leaving the ballroom, he trailed through hallways, ducking under arms no longer there, excusing himself as he pressed through conversations long since ended. There was champagne; there was music; there was the pervasive smell of cologne. How are you, Dick? He was fine, excellent, capital, the only possible answers to that question. The sun always shone on him.

  He stepped onto a screen porch and looked out at the black November. The ragged grass was gray in the motion light; the naked trees were black; the sky was dully purple from the distant threat of Washington, D.C. Everything was dead.

  Did he still know any of the children he’d played with at that party? Hide-and-seek: He’d hidden so well that he’d become dead, and even when he’d been resurrected, he was still obscured from them. He had stumbled onto a different road by accident.

  He pushed open the screen door and stepped onto the damp dead grass of the backyard. The party had been here, too, the older children playing a frustrated game of croquet, the wickets hooked on the toes of servers.

  The gray motion light Gansey had triggered before shone across the backyard. He crossed the lawn to the edge of the trees. The porch light filtered all the way out here, and penetrated farther than he would have expected. It was not as unruly as he remembered it, though he couldn’t decide if it was because he was older and had prowled through more woods now, or if it was merely because it was a leaner season of the year. It did not look like a place one could hide now.

  When Gansey had gone to Wales to search for Glendower, he had stood on the edge of many fields like this, places where battles had been fought. He’d tried to imagine what it had been like to be there in that moment, sword in hand, horse beneath him, men sweating and bleeding. What had it been to be Owen Glendower, to know that they fought because you called them to?

  While Malory had loitered on the path or hovered by the car, Gansey had strode to the middle of the fields, as far away as he could get from anything modern. He had closed his eyes, tuned out the sound of faraway airplanes, tried to hear the sounds of six hundred years previous. The youngest version of him had borne tiny hope that he might be haunted; that the field might be haunted; that he might open his eyes and see something more than what he had before.

  But he had not the slightest psychic inclinations, and the minute that began with Gansey alone in a battlefield ended with Gansey alone in a battlefield.

  Now he stood there on the edge of the Virginia forest for perhaps a minute, until the very act of standing felt odd, as if his legs shook, though they didn’t. Then he stepped in.

  The bare branches overhead creaked in the breeze, but the leaves beneath his feet were damp and soundless.

  Seven years ago he had stepped on the hornets here. Seven years ago he had died. Seven years ago he had been born again.

  He had been so afraid.

  Why had they brought him back?

  Twigs caught the sleeves of his sweater. He was not yet to the place it had happened. He told himself that the nest would no longer be there; the fallen tree he had collapsed beside would have rotted; it was too dark in this ghost light; he wouldn’t recognize it.

  He recognized it.

  The tree had not rotted. It was unchanged, as sturdy as before, but black with damp and with night.

  This was where he had felt the first sting. Gansey stretched out his arm, examining the back of his own hand in shocked wonder. He took another step, faltering. This was where he’d felt them on the back of his neck, crawling along his hairline. He didn’t smack the sensation; it never helped to brush them away. His fingers, though, twitched upward, resisting.

  He took another uncertain step. He was a foot away from that old, unchanged black tree. That long-ago Gansey had stumbled to his knees. They had crawled over his face here, over his closed eyelids, along quivering lips.

  He had not run. There was no running from them, and in any case, the weapon had done its work already. He remembered thinking that it would only ruin the party by reappearing covered with hornets.

  He caught himself on his hands, only for a moment, and then rolled onto his elbow. Poison razed his veins. He was on his side. He was curled. Wet leaves pressed against his cheek as every part of him seemed to suffocate. He was shaking and done and afraid, so afraid.

  Why? he wondered. Why me? What was the purpose of it?

  He opened his eyes.

  He was standing, hands fisted, looking at the place it had happened. He must have been saved to find Glendower. He must have been saved to kill this demon.

  “Dick! Gansey! Dick! Gansey!” Henry’s voice carried across the yard. “You’ll want to see this.”

  There was a cave opening beneath the house. Not a grand, aboveground opening like the cave they’d entered in Cabeswater. And not the sheltered hole-in-the-ground entrance they’d used to enter the cavern Gwenllian had been buried in. This was a wet, wide-open maw of an opening, all collapsed ramps of dirt spread over concrete bones and bits of furniture, the ground splitting and part of a basement falling into the resulting pit. The freshness of it made Gansey warily suspect that it had opened as a result of his command to Chainsaw back at Fox Way.

  He had asked to see the Raven King. He was being shown the way to the Raven King, no matter what earth had to be moved to make that happen.

  “It really is a helluva fixer-upper,” Henry said, because someone had to say it. “I feel like they should possibly renovate this basement if they want to get a good sale price. Hardwood floors, update the doorknobs, maybe put the wall back.”

  Gansey joined him at the edge of the chasm and peered in. Both of them shone the lights on their phones into the pit. Unlike the fresh wound of the opening, the cavern below looked worn and dry and dusty, like it had always existed beneath the house. It was merely this entrance that had been invented in response to his request.

  Gansey looked out the window at the Fisker parked out front, mentally aligning himself with the highway, with Henrietta, with the ley line. Of course, he already knew this house was on the ley line. Hadn’t it been said at the very beginning that he had only survived his death on the ley line because someone else was dying elsewhere on it?

  He wondered if there had ever been an easier way to get to this cavern. Was there another natural opening elsewhere along the line, or had it been waiting all along for him to order it to reveal itself?

  “Well,” Gansey said eventually. “I’m going in.”

  Henry laughed, and then realized that he was serious. “Shouldn’t you have a helmet and a manservant for expeditions like that?”

 
; “Probably. But I don’t think I have time to go back to Henrietta for my equipment. I’ll just have to go slowly.”

  He didn’t ask Henry to come along, because he didn’t want Henry to have to feel bad when he said that he wasn’t coming along. He didn’t want Henry to feel that Gansey had ever expected him to do such a thing along with him, to climb into a hole in the ground when the only thing Henry really feared was holes in the ground.

  Gansey removed his watch and put it in his pocket so it would not catch on anything if he had to climb. Then he cuffed his pants and considered the entrance once more. It was not a terrible drop down, but he wanted to be sure he could get back out of it if he returned and no one else was there to help him out. With a frown, he fetched one of the chairs that had not been destroyed in the collapse. He lowered it into the blackness; once he righted it, it would give him the few extra feet he’d need to scramble back out.

  Henry watched all of this and then said, “Wait. You’re going to junk up your nice coat, white man. Take this.” He shouldered out of his Aglionby sweater and proffered it.

  “So you’re literally giving me the shirt off your back,” Gansey said, swapping him for his coat. He was grateful. He looked up to Henry. “See you on the other side. Excelsior.”

  As Gansey walked through the tunnel, he felt a sort of insane joy and sadness rising in him, higher and higher. There was nothing around him but a featureless stone pathway, but still, he could not shake the rightness of it. He had imagined this moment so many times, and now that he was in it, he could not remember the difference between imagining it and experiencing it. There was no dissonance between expectation and reality, as there always had been before. He had meant to find Glendower, and now he was finding Glendower.