The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  It was over.

  Gansey had forgotten how many times he had been told he was destined for greatness.

  Was this all there was?

  They had emerged into sun. The tricky ley line had stolen hours from them without them feeling it, and now they sat in the tattered Green House, just a few hundred yards away from where Gansey had died. Gansey sat in the ballroom, leaning against the wall, all of him contained in a square of sunlight coming through the dusty, many-paned windows. He rubbed a hand over his forehead, although he wasn’t tired — he was so awake that he was certain the ley line had somehow affected that as well.

  It was over.

  Glendower was dead.

  Destined for greatness, the psychics had said. One in Stuttgart. One in Chicago. One in Guadalajara. Two in London. Where was it, then? Perhaps he’d used it all up. Perhaps the greatness had only ever been the ability to find historical trinkets. Perhaps the greatness was only in what he could be to others.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gansey said.

  They started back to Henrietta, the two cars traveling close together.

  It only took a few minutes for Gansey’s phone to regain charge after being being plugged into the cigarette lighter, and it only took a few seconds after that for texts to begin pouring in — all the texts that had come in while they were underground. A buzz sounded for each; the phone did not stop buzzing.

  They had missed the fund-raiser.

  The ley line had not taken hours from them. It had taken a day from them.

  Gansey had Blue read the texts to him until he couldn’t bear it anymore. They began with polite query, wondering if he was running a few minutes late. Wandered into concern, contemplating why he wasn’t answering his phone. Descended into irritation, uncertain why he would think it was appropriate to be late to a school function. And then skipped right over anger and headed into hurt.

  I know you have your own life, his mother said to his voicemail. I was just hoping to be part of it for a few hours.

  Gansey felt the sword go right through his ribs and out the other side.

  Before, he had been replaying the failure to wake Glendower over and over again. Now he couldn’t stop replaying the image of his family waiting at Aglionby for him. His mother thinking he was just running late. His father thinking he was hurt. Helen — Helen knowing he’d been doing something for himself, instead. Her only text had come at the end of the night: I suppose the king will always win, won’t he?

  He would have to call them. But what would he say?

  Guilt was building in his chest and his throat and behind his eyes.

  “You know what?” Henry said eventually. “Pull over. There.”

  Gansey silently pulled the Fisker in to the rest stop that he had indicated; the BMW pulled in behind them. They parked in the single row of spots in front of the fancy brick building that held toilets; they were the only cars there. The sun had given way to clouds; it looked like rain.

  “Now get out,” Henry said.

  Gansey looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Stop driving,” he said. “I know you need to. You’ve needed to since we left. Get. Out.”

  Gansey was about to protest this, but he discovered that his words felt rather unsteady in his mouth. It was like his shaking knees in the tomb; the wobble had snuck up on him.

  So he said nothing and he got out. Very quietly. He thought about walking into the toilets, but at the last moment veered to the picnic area beside the rest stop. Out of view of the cars. Very calmly. He made it to one of the picnic benches, but didn’t sit on it. Instead, he slowly sat down just in front of it and curled his hands over his head. He folded himself down small enough that his forehead brushed the grass.

  He could not remember the last time he had cried.

  It was not just Glendower he was mourning. It was all the versions of Gansey he had been in the last seven years. It was the Gansey who had pursued him with youthful optimism and purpose. And it was the Gansey who had pursued him with increasing worry. And it was this Gansey, who was going to have to die. Because it made a fatal sort of sense. They required a death to save Ronan and Adam. Blue’s kiss was supposed to be deadly to her true love. Gansey’s death had been foretold for this year. It was him. It was always going to be him.

  Glendower was dead. He’d always been dead.

  And Gansey kind of wanted to live.

  Eventually, Gansey heard footsteps approaching in the leaves. This was terrible, too. He did not want to stand and show them his teary face and receive their pity; the idea of this well-meaning kindness was nearly as unbearable a thought as his approaching death. For the very first time, Gansey understood Adam Parrish perfectly.

  He unfolded himself and stood with as much dignity as he could muster. But it was just Blue, and somehow there was no humiliation to her seeing that he’d been leveled. She just looked at him while he brushed the pine needles off his pants, and then, after he had sat on the top of the picnic table, she sat beside him until the others left the cars to see what they were doing.

  They stood in a half circle around his picnic table throne.

  “About the sacrifice,” Gansey said.

  No one said anything. He couldn’t even tell if he had said it out loud.

  “Did I say anything?” Gansey asked.

  “Yeah,” Blue replied. “But we didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I apologize if this is a rudimentary question,” Henry interjected, “as I arrived to class late. But I don’t suppose your treefather gave you any other demon-killing advice?”

  “No, just the sacrifice,” Blue said. Gingerly, she added, “I think … he might have known about Glendower. Not all along, maybe. He might have figured it out while he was wandering around down there after getting with my mom, or maybe from the beginning. But I think he was one of Glendower’s magicians. Maybe also that … other guy.”

  She meant the other body in the tomb. It wasn’t difficult to follow the story she imagined, of Artemus trying to put Glendower to sleep and doing something wrong.

  “So we’re left with the sacrifice,” Gansey pressed. “Unless you have any better ideas, Adam?”

  Adam had been frowning off into the sparse pine trees that bordered the picnic area. He said, “I am trying to think of what else would satisfy the ley line magic, but willing life for unwilling life doesn’t suggest substitutions.”

  Gansey felt a prickle of dread in his stomach. “Well then.”

  “No,” said Ronan. He didn’t say it in a protesting way, or an angry way, or an upset way. He simply said no. Factual.

  “Ronan—”

  “No.” Factual. “I didn’t just come get you out of this hole for you to die on purpose.”

  Gansey matched his tone. “Blue saw my spirit on the ley line, so I already know that I die this year. Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is the right one: We decide that it is me.”

  “Blue did what?” Ronan demanded. “When were you going to tell me?”

  “Never,” Blue said. She didn’t say it in a protesting way, or an angry way, or an upset way. Just never. Factual.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Gansey said. “I don’t want to die. I’m terrified, actually. But I don’t see any other option. And the fact is that I want to make something of myself before I die, and I thought it was going to be something about Glendower. It’s obviously not. So I might as well do something meaningful. And — kingly.” The last bit was a little melodramatic, but it was a melodramatic situation.

  “I think you’re getting king confused with martyr,” Henry said.

  “I’m open to other options,” Gansey said. “In fact, I’d prefer them.”

  Blue said abruptly, “We’re your magicians, right?”

  Yes, his magicians, his court, him their pointless king, nothing to offer but his pulse. How right it had felt at each moment that he met them all. How certain that they plunged toward something bigger th
an even this moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I just — I feel like there has to be something we can all do, like in the cave of bones,” she said. “It was wrong in the tomb because there was no life there to start with. Or something. There was no energy. But if we had more of the pieces right?”

  Gansey said, “I don’t understand the magic well enough.”

  Ronan said, “Parrish does.”

  “No,” Adam protested. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Better than any of the rest of us,” Ronan said. “Give us an idea.”

  Adam shrugged. His hands were gripped together so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Maybe,” he started, then stopped. “Maybe you could die and then come back. If we used Cabeswater to kill you in some way that didn’t damage your body, then it would provoke the time-holding like 6:21. A minute playing out over and over again, so you wouldn’t have time to get, I don’t know, too far away from your body. Too dead. And then …” Gansey could hear that Adam was making this up as he went along, spinning a plausible fairy tale for Ronan. “It would have to take place in Cabeswater. I could scry into the dreamspace while Blue amplified it, and during one of the time spasms we could tell your soul to return to your body before you were ever really dead. So you’d fulfill the requirements of the sacrifice to die. Nothing says you have to stay dead.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Yes,” Gansey said. Factual. “That feels right. Is that kingly enough for you, Ronan? Not martyrdom, Henry?”

  They didn’t look thrilled, but they looked willing, which was all that mattered. They only had to want to believe it, not really believe it.

  “Let’s go to Cabeswater,” Gansey said.

  They had only just started back toward the cars when Adam attacked Ronan.

  It took Ronan too long to realize that Adam was killing him.

  Adam’s hands were around Ronan’s neck, thumbs pressed knuckle white into his arteries, his eyes rolled back up in his head. Ronan’s vision produced flashes of light; his body had only been without air for a minute and it already missed it. He could feel his pulse in his eyeballs.

  “Adam?” demanded Blue.

  Part of Ronan still thought there was a mistake.

  Ronan’s breath hitched as the two of them stumbled back through the pine trees around the picnic area. The others were circling them, but Ronan couldn’t focus on what they were doing.

  “Fight back,” Adam growled at Ronan, thin, desperate, an animal dragged by the neck. At the same time that his voice protested, though, his body jammed Ronan’s back against a trunk of a pine tree. “Hit me. Knock me down!”

  The demon. The demon had taken his hands.

  Every beat of Ronan’s heart was an articulated part in a collapsing train. He grabbed Adam’s wrists. They felt frail, snappable, cold. The choice was death or hurting Adam, which wasn’t much of a choice at all.

  Adam suddenly lost his grip, stumbling to his knees before clambering quickly back up. Henry leapt back as Adam snatched for his face in a way that was terrifying in its wrongness. No human would fight in such a way, but the thing that had his hands and his eyes was not human.

  “Stop me!” Adam begged.

  Gansey grabbed for Adam’s fingers, but Adam pulled them free easily. Instead, he snarled fingers into Ronan’s ear, ripping at it, and his other hand hooked into Ronan’s jaw, tearing the other way. His eyes stared hard to his left, waiting for intruders to stop him.

  “Stop me —”

  Pain was a torn piece of paper. Ronan thought about how much it hurt, and then he allowed himself one deeper measure of pain, and he ripped himself free of Adam’s grip. In that moment of opportunity, Blue darted forward and got a handful of Adam’s hair. Instantly Adam whirled on her, and with razor-fast precision, he tore her stitches open.

  Blue exhaled in shock as the blood began to drip blackly over her eyelid again. Gansey dragged her back before Adam could scratch again.

  “Just hit me,” Adam said miserably. “Don’t let me do this.”

  It seemed it should have been simple: There were four of them, one of Adam. But none of them wanted to hurt Adam Parrish, no matter how violent he had become. And the demon operating Adam’s limbs had a superpower: It did not care about the limitations of the human they belonged to. It did not care about pain. It did not care about longevity. So Adam’s knuckles careened past Ronan and smashed into the trunk of a pine tree without the slightest hesitation, even as Adam gasped. Everyone’s breath puffed white all around them, looking like dust clouds.

  “It’s going to break his fucking hands,” Ronan said.

  Blue snatched one of Adam’s wrists. There was a terrible pop as Adam swung around in the opposite direction and snatched her switchblade out of the loose pocket of her sweater. The blade snicked out.

  He had their full attention.

  His rolling eyes, controlled by the demon, focused on Ronan.

  But Adam — the real Adam — was also paying attention. He heaved his body away from the group, crashing himself against the picnic bench, then crashing again, trying to jar the arm that held the knife. As he successfully pinned it under his own weight, though, his other hand clawed up. Quick as a cat, it scratch-scratch-scratched at his own face. Blood beaded instantly. It was digging harder. Punishing.

  “No,” Gansey said. He could not bear it. He ran at Adam. As he slid to him, snatching that angry hand, Henry skidded right on his heels. So when Adam lifted the switchblade over Gansey, Henry was there to catch Adam’s wrist in his hands, pressing his entire weight against the strength of Adam’s right arm. Adam’s eyes darted furiously, weighing his next move. The demon’s next move.

  All Adam cared about was his autonomy.

  As Adam jerked his wrist in Henry’s grasp — “Stop, you idiot, you’re going to break it!” — and knocked his fist back against Gansey’s teeth — “You’re okay, Adam, we know it’s not you!” — Ronan wrapped his arms around Adam, pinning Adam’s upper arms against him.

  He was contained.

  “Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” Ronan said into Adam’s hearing ear, and Adam’s body sagged against Ronan, chest heaving. His hands still jerked and strained to violence. He gasped, “You asshole,” but Ronan could hear how near tears he was.

  “Let’s tie his hands while we figure this out,” Blue said. “Could you — oh, you’re so clever, thank you.”

  This was because the Orphan Girl had already anticipated how this might end and fetched a long red ribbon of unknown origin. Blue accepted it and then squeezed between Henry and Gansey. “Give me some room — put his wrists together.”

  “No, President,” Henry said out of breath, “cross them like this. Haven’t you seen any cop dramas?”

  Blue braided Adam’s fingers together, which took some doing as they still had a mind of their own, and then tied his still bucking wrists together. She wrapped the length of them with the ribbon and tied it. Adam’s shoulders still twitched, but he couldn’t unlink his fingers once they were braided together and tied.

  Finally it was quiet.

  With a great sigh, she stepped back. Gansey touched her bloody forehead with care and then looked at Henry’s knuckles, which had somehow gotten abraded in the scuffle.

  Adam’s hands had stopped jerking as the demon realized that they were well secured. His head rested miserably on Ronan’s shoulder, everything shaking, standing only because Ronan did not allow him to sink. The fresh horror of it kept rising in him. The permanence of it, the corruption of Adam Parrish, the deadness of Glendower.

  The Orphan Girl crept in close. She carefully undid the dirty watch on her wrist, and then she fastened it on one of Adam’s, loosely, above where he was tied. Then she kissed his arm.

  “Thank you,” he said, dully. Then, to Gansey, in a low voice, “I might as well be the sacrifice. I’m ruined.”

  “No,” Blue, Gansey, and Ronan said at once.

  “Let’s not
get carried away just because you just tried to kill someone,” Henry clarified. He sucked on his bloody knuckles.

  Adam finally lifted his head. “Then you better cover my eyes.”

  Gansey looked puzzled. “What?”

  “Because,” Adam said bitterly, “otherwise they’ll betray you.”

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

  She had not meant to be an international art dealer and small-time crime boss. It had begun as a mere desire for something more, and then a slow realization that something more was never going to be reachable on her current path. She was married to a clever man she’d met in Hong Kong, and she had several bright children who mostly took after him except for the one, and she had seen how her life would play out.

  Then she had gone mad.

  It hadn’t been a long madness. A year, perhaps, of fits and visions and being found prowling through the streets. And when she had come out the other side, she had discovered that she had a psychic’s eyes and a shaman’s touch and that she was going to make a career of it. She’d renamed herself Seondeok and the legend had been born.

  She handled wonder every day.

  The robotic bee was the moment she realized she was on a fated path. Henry, her middle son, shone brightly, but he never seemed able to direct that light outside of himself. And so when Niall Lynch offered to find her a bauble, a token, a magical toy, that would help him, she was listening. The beautiful bee struck her the moment she saw it. Of course he had also shown it to Laumonier and to Greenmantle and to Valquez and to Mackey and to Xi, but that was to be expected because he was a scoundrel and could not help himself. But when he had met Henry, he had let Seondeok have it for nearly nothing, and she would not forget that.

  Of course, it had been a gift and a penalty, since later, Laumonier had kidnapped Henry for it.

  She would have revenge for that.

  She didn’t regret it. She couldn’t make herself regret it, even when it threatened her children. This was a fated path, and she felt right on it, even when it was hard.