The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  When she found herself next to the Gray Man, Greenmantle’s old hired muscle, in an off-campus Aglionby Academy lot, and discovered that the blood on his shoes was Laumonier’s, she was instantly interested in what he had to say.

  “A brave new way of doing business,” the Gray Man said in a low voice, as the parking lot was quickly beginning to fill up with a small but potent number of forbidding-looking people. It was not that they looked dangerous, necessarily. Just odd in a way that suggested they didn’t look at the world at all like you did. They were a very different group than the people who had come to the school the night before. Technically both gatherings had a lot to do with politics. “An ethical way. There are no armed guards outside of furniture stores to prevent people from bludgeoning employees and carrying out sofas. That is the business I want.”

  “That will not be an easy goal,” Seondeok said, her voice also low. She kept her eyes on the cars pulling up, and also on her phone. She knew that Henry had been told to stay away, and she trusted him to keep his head down, but she also didn’t trust Laumonier in the slightest. There was no point tempting them by showing that Henry — and by extension, his bee — were within close proximity. “The people have gotten used to carrying sofas, and one does not like to stop stealing sofas when others haven’t yet agreed to.”

  “Persuasion might be required at the beginning,” the Gray Man admitted.

  “You are talking years.”

  “I am committed,” he replied. “So long as I can get a decent number of people who are interested in that vision. People I like.”

  Here was Laumonier, finally, one of them on the phone. His face suggested he was trying to contact the third one, but the third one was not in a condition to answer. The Gray Man would discuss this with them after the sale had happened. In a persuasive way aided with some truly fantastic weapons that he had found on the Lynch farm.

  Seondeok said, “I am not people you like.”

  “You are people I respect, which is nearly the same.”

  Her smile said she knew he was sucking up to her and she accepted it nonetheless. “Perhaps, Mr. Gray. This is according to my interest.”

  This was when Piper Greenmantle arrived.

  Well, it was not her, at first. It was dread first, then Piper. The feeling struck them like a wave of nausea, rocking from feet to head, sending hands to throats and knees to pavement. It was early afternoon, but the sky suddenly seemed darker. This was the first sign that this sale was going to be something remarkable.

  So, first dread, then Piper. She arrived flying, which was the second sign that things were going to be somewhat unusual.

  When she landed, it became obvious that she had arrived on a rug of tiny black wasps, which dissolved when they touched the asphalt.

  She looked good.

  This was striking for a several reasons, first because rumor had it that she had died before her smarmy husband had been killed by wasps in his apartment, and she was clearly not dead. And secondly because she was holding a black wasp that was nearly a foot long, and most people didn’t look as serene and put together as she did when holding a stinging insect of any size.

  She strode over to Laumonier, clearly intending to cheek-kiss, but they both bowed back from the insect. This was the third sign that things were going to be somewhat unusual, because Laumonier ordinarily made a point to never look alarmed.

  “This is not good,” the Gray Man said under his breath.

  Because it was obvious now that the dread was coming from either Piper or the wasp. The sensation kept hitting Seondeok in ill waves, reminding her painfully of her year of being mad. It took a moment for her to realize that it was verbally reminding her of her year of being mad — she could hear the words being said directly into her head. In Korean.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Piper said grandly. She cocked her head, eyes narrowed, and Seondeok knew that she was being whispered to also. “Now that I am single, I intend to move independently into the business of luxury magical items, curating only the most extraordinary and otherworldly of crazy shit. I hope you all start to trust me to be a quality source. And our kickoff piece — the thing you’ve come all this way for — is this.” She lifted her arm, and the wasp stepped a little farther toward her hand. The crowd shuddered as one; there was something quite wrong about it. The dread, plus the size, the real weight of it moving the fabric of her sleeve. “This is a demon.”

  Yes. Seondeok believed this.

  “It’s favored me, as you can probably tell by my fabulous hair and skin, but I’m ready to pass it along to the next user so I can find the next great thing! It’s all about the journey, right? Right!”

  “Is it —” started one of the men in the group. Rodney, Seondeok believed his name was. He didn’t seem to know how to finish his question.

  “How does it work?” Seondeok asked.

  “Mostly I just ask it to do stuff,” Piper said, “and it goes for it. I’m not really religious, but I feel like somebody with some religious background could really make it do some cool tricks. It made me a house, and these pumps. What could it do for you? Stuff. Shall we start the bidding, Dad?”

  Laumonier was still not quite recovered. The thing about being in the demon’s presence was that it got worse instead of better. The opposite of getting used to it — that was the sensation. It was a wound that increased from ache to stab. The whispers were hard to bear, because they were not really whispers. They were thoughts, mingling helplessly with one’s own, difficult to prioritize. Seondeok had survived a year of madness, though, and she could bear this. It was not impossible to tell which thoughts were the demon’s: They were the ugliest, the most backward, the ones that would unmake the thinker.

  A few of the folks in the back were leaving, retreating wordlessly toward their cars before things got ugly. Uglier. Ugliest.

  “Hey!” Piper said. “Don’t just walk away from me. Demon!”

  The wasp twitched its antennae and the people twitched in rhythm. They twirled, eyes wide.

  “You see,” Piper said through gritted teeth, “it’s really quite handy.”

  “I think,” Laumonier said cautiously, looking at the frozen buyers, and then at the faces of their peers, and then at his daughter, “this might not be the best method of displaying this particular good.”

  What he meant was, the demon was creeping everyone out and it was hard to shake the idea that they might all die at any time, which was bad for business both present and future.

  “Don’t use that passive-aggressive stuff on me,” Piper said. “I read an article on how you have basically been undercutting my personhood for my entire life and that is totally an example.”

  “This is totally an example of you overstepping your knowledge,” Laumonier said. “Your ambition is constantly outstripping your education! You don’t even know how to transfer a demon.”

  “I’ll wish it, don’t you get it?” Piper asked. “It has to favor me! It has to do what I say.”

  But Seondeok wasn’t sure that was the same thing.

  “Do you think?” Laumonier asked. “Do you control it, or does it control you?”

  “Oh, please,” Piper said. “Demon, unfreeze those people! Demon, make it sunny! Demon, change my clothing to all white! Demon, do as I say, do as I say!”

  The people unfroze; the sky turned white-hot bright for just a second; her clothing bleached; the demon buzzed up into the air. The whispering in Seondeok’s head had become something fierce.

  Laumonier shot his daughter.

  It made a little oonph sound because of the silencer. Laumonier looked shocked. Both said nothing, just stared at her body, then up at the demon who had whispered it to them.

  Now everyone fled. If Laumonier would shoot his daughter, anything could happen.

  The demon had landed upon the wound in Piper’s neck, its legs sinking into the blood, its head lowered to the hole.

  It was changing. She was changing. Everything wa
s unmaking and violence and perversion.

  “Call me,” Seondeok told the Gray Man, “and get out of here.”

  Piper’s scream played backward. Seondeok had not realized she was still alive.

  The blood around her neck was black.

  Ambition greed hatred violence contempt ambition greed hatred violence contempt

  She was dead.

  The demon began to rise.

  Unmaker, unmaker, I wake, I wake, I wake

  Adam could not decide if this was the worst thing that had happened to him, or if it felt that way because he had been so recently and senselessly happy that the comparison was making it so.

  He was in the backseat of the BMW, his hands still bound, his eyes still covered, one ear deaf. He didn’t even feel real. He felt tired but not sleepy, worn by the effort of being unable to participate in his senses. And still the demon occasionally worked against the ribbon — how his skin sang with pain — and rolled his eyes against his will. Blue sat beside him, and the Orphan Girl on the other side of her, by his request. He didn’t know if he could escape from the ribbon, but he knew that the demon would only hurt Blue in an effort to get to Ronan or the Orphan Girl. So at least they would have a warning if it happened again.

  God, God. He’d nearly killed Ronan. He would have killed him. He had only just been making out with Ronan, and his hands would have nonetheless murdered him while Adam watched.

  How would he go to school? How would he do anything —

  His breath betrayed him, because Blue leaned against his shoulder.

  “Don’t —” he warned.

  She lifted her head, but then he felt her fingers in his hair instead, stroking it gently, and then touching the skin on his cheek where he had gouged himself. She didn’t say anything.

  He closed his eyes behind the blindfold, listening to the slow patter of the rain on the windshield, the shoosh of the wipers. He had no idea how close they were to Cabeswater.

  Why couldn’t he think of another way around the sacrifice? Gansey was only hurrying to do this because of him, because of how his bargain had turned this into an emergency. In the end, Adam was killing him anyway, just like in his vision. A backward, sideways version of the blame, but Adam at its helm just the same. But it was undeniable that Adam was the one who’d made it an emergency.

  Bad feeling hissed inside Adam, but he couldn’t tell if it was guilt or a warning from Cabeswater.

  “What’s that?” Gansey’s voice came from the passenger seat. “On the road?”

  Blue drew away from Adam; he heard her pull herself between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. She sounded dubious. “Is it … blood?”

  “From what?” Ronan asked.

  “Maybe not from anything,” Gansey said. “Is it real?”

  Ronan said, “The rain’s hitting it.”

  “Should we … should we drive through it?” Gansey asked. “Blue, what’s Henry’s face look like? Can you see it?”

  Adam felt Blue’s body brush him as she swiveled to look in the Fisker behind them. His hands strained and twitched, endlessly hungry. The demon felt … close.

  Blue said, “Give me your phone. I’m going to call Mom.”

  “What’s happening?” Adam asked.

  “The road is flooded,” Blue said. “It looks like blood, though. And there’s something floating in it. What is that, Gansey? Is it … petals? Blue petals?”

  There was a heavy silence in the car.

  “Do you ever feel like things are coming full circle?” Ronan said in a low voice. “Do you …”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. The car was quiet again, unmoving — apparently he hadn’t decided whether or not to drive through the flood yet. Rain spattered. The windshield wipers clunk-sighed again.

  “I guess we — Jesus,” Gansey broke off. “Jesus. Ronan?”

  Terror coated his words.

  “Ronan?” repeated Gansey. There was a metallic slap. Groan of a seat. Scuffling. The car shifted beneath them with the ferocity of Gansey shifting his weight. Ronan still hadn’t replied. A roar pitched low behind his words. The engine: Ronan was hitting the gas while the car was out of gear.

  The sick warning in Adam had risen to an alarm.

  The roar suddenly stopped; the car had been turned off.

  “Oh no,” Blue said. “Oh no, the girl, too!” She moved away from Adam, fast; he heard her open the door on the other side of the car. Cool, moist air sucked into the BMW. Another door opened, another. All of them but Adam’s. Henry’s voice came from outside, deep and serious and completely devoid of humor.

  “What’s happening?” Adam demanded.

  “Can we —” Blue’s voice was halfway to a sob, coming from outside the driver’s-side door. “Can we pick it off him?”

  “Don’t,” Ronan gasped. “Don’t touch it — don’t —”

  The driver’s seat knocked back so hard that it smashed into Adam’s knees. Adam heard a sound that was unmistakably Ronan sucking in his breath.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Gansey said again. “Tell me what I can do.”

  Again the seat bucked. Adam’s hands clawed back against the seat behind him, quite against his will. Whatever was happening, they wanted to help it happen faster. From the front seat, Ronan’s phone began to ring and ring and ring. It was the low dull ring that Ronan had programmed for when Declan’s number called.

  The worst was that Adam knew what that meant: something was happening to Matthew. No, the worst was that Adam couldn’t do anything about any of it.

  “Ronan, Ronan, don’t close your eyes,” Blue said, and now she was crying. “I’m calling — I’m calling Mom.”

  “Whoa, stand back!” Gansey shouted.

  The entire car rocked.

  Henry demanded, “What was that?”

  “He’s brought it back from his dreams,” Gansey said. “When he passed out. It won’t hurt us.”

  “What’s happening?” Adam demanded.

  Gansey’s voice was low and miserable. It reached the edge and cracked. “He’s being unmade.”

  It was impossible to believe that Adam had thought that the previous moment was the worst.

  This was the worst: being blindfolded and tied in the back of a car and knowing that the soft, gasping sound was Ronan Lynch choking for breath every time he waded back to consciousness.

  So much of Ronan was bravado, and there was none left.

  And Adam was nothing but a weapon to kill him faster.

  It felt like years ago that he had made his bargain with Cabeswater. I will be your hands. I will be your eyes. How horrified Gansey had been, and maybe he had been right. Because here was Adam stripped of all of his options. Rendered so easily and simply powerless.

  His thoughts were a battlefield now, and Adam ran away into the blackness of the blindfold. It was a dangerous game, scrying when Cabeswater was so endangered, when everyone else would be too busy to notice if he also began to die in the backseat, but it was the only way he could survive being so close to Ronan’s pained gasps.

  He wheeled far and fast, throwing his unconscious far away from his conscious thoughts, as far away as he could get from the truth of the car as quickly as he could manage it. There was very, very little Cabeswater left. Mostly darkness. Maybe he wouldn’t find his way back to his corrupted body. Maybe he would be lost, like

  Persephone

  Persephone

  As soon as he thought her name, he realized that she was with him. He couldn’t tell how he knew, since he couldn’t see her. In fact, he couldn’t see anything. In fact, he found that he was once more intensely aware of the fabric of the blindfold against his eyes and the dull ache of his fingers braided and jammed against each other. Once more intensely aware of his physical reality; once more grounded inside his useless body.

  “You pushed me back here,” he accused.

  Ish, she replied. Mostly you let yourself get pushed.

  He didn’t know what to say to her. He was too pa
infully glad to feel her presence again. It was not that Persephone, vague Persephone, was a creature given to providing comfort. But her brand of sense and wisdom and rules had comforted him greatly when he was chaos, and even though she had not yet really said anything to him, the mere recollection of that comfort gave him a burst of outsized happiness.

  “I’m ruined.”

  Mmm.

  “It’s my fault.”

  Mmm.

  “Gansey was right.”

  Mmm.

  “Stop saying mmm!”

  Then perhaps you should stop saying things you got tired of saying to me weeks ago.

  “My hands, though. My eyes.” When he named them, he felt them. The clawing hands. The rolling eyes. They were thrilled by the destruction of Ronan. This was their purpose. How they longed to help in that dreadful task.

  Who did you make that deal with?

  “Cabeswater.”

  Who is using your hands?

  “The demon.”

  That is not the same thing.

  Adam didn’t reply. Once again Persephone was giving him advice that sounded good but was impossible to use in the real world. It was wisdom, not an actionable item.

  You made your deal with Cabeswater, not with a demon. Even though they look the same and feel the same, they are not the same.

  “They feel the same.”

  They are not the same. The demon has no claim to you. You didn’t choose the demon. You chose Cabeswater.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Adam said.

  Yes, you do. You have to keep choosing it.

  But Cabeswater was dying. Soon there might be no Cabeswater left to choose. Soon it might just be Adam’s mind, Adam’s body, and the demon. He didn’t say it out loud. It didn’t matter. In this place, his thoughts and his words were the same thing.

  That does not make you a demon. You will be one of those gods without magic powers. What are they called?

  “I don’t think there is a word.”

  King. Probably. I am going to go now.

  “Persephone, please — I —” miss you.

  He was alone; she had gone. He was left, as always, with equal parts comfort and uncertainty. The feeling that he knew how to move forward; the doubt that he was capable of executing it. But this time, she’d come an awfully long way to give him his lesson. He didn’t know if she could see him anymore now, but he didn’t want to let her down.