The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  And the truth was that if he thought about the things that he loved about Cabeswater, it wasn’t difficult at all to tell the difference between the demon and it. They grew from the same soil, but they were nothing like each other.

  These eyes and hands are mine, Adam thought.

  And they were. He didn’t have to prove it. It was a fact as soon as he believed it.

  He turned his head and rubbed the blindfold off his eyes.

  He saw the end of the world.

  The demon slowly worked at the fibers of the dreamer.

  They were difficult things to unmake, dreamers. So much of a dreamer didn’t exist inside a physical body. So many complicated parts of them snarled in the stars and tangled in tree roots. So much of them fled down rivers and exploded through the air between raindrops.

  This dreamer fought.

  The demon was about unmaking and nothingness, and dreamers were about making and fullness. This dreamer was all of that to an extreme, a new king in his invented kingdom.

  He fought.

  The demon kept pulling him unconscious, and in those short bursts of blackness, the dreamer snatched at light, and when he swam back to consciousness, he thrust the dream into reality. He shaped them into flapping creatures and earthbound stars and flaming crowns and golden notes that sang by themselves and mint leaves scattered across the blood-streaked pavement and scraps of paper with jagged handwriting on them: Unguibus et rostro.

  But he was dying.

  Wanting to live, but accepting death to save others: that was courage. That was to be Gansey’s greatness.

  “It has to happen now,” he said. “I have to do the sacrifice now.”

  Now that the moment had come, there was a certain glory to it. He didn’t want to die, but at least he was doing it for these people, his found family. At least he was doing it for people who he knew were going to really live. At least he was not dying pointlessly, stung by wasps. At least this time it would matter.

  This was where he was going to die: on a sloped field speckled with oak leaves. Black cattle grazed far up the hill, tails swishing as the rain fell in fitful spells. The grass was strikingly green for October, and the shock of color against the fall-bright leaves made it look like a calendar photo. There was no one else around for miles. The only thing out of place was the flower-strewn river of blood across the winding road, and the young man dying in his car.

  “But we’re nowhere near Cabeswater!” Blue said.

  Ronan’s phone was ringing again: Declan, Declan, Declan. Everything was falling apart everywhere.

  Ronan flickered briefly back into consciousness, his eyes awash with black, a rain of flickering pebbles scattering from his hand and skidding to a mucky stop on the bloody pavement. Terribly, the Orphan Girl was just watching blankly from the backseat, black slowly running from her closest ear. When she saw Gansey looking at her, she simply mouthed Kerah without any sound coming out.

  “Are we on the ley line?” All that mattered was that they were on the line, so the sacrifice would count to kill the demon.

  “Yes, but we’re nowhere near Cabeswater. You’ll just die.”

  One of the great things about Blue Sargent was that she never really gave up hope. He would have told her this, but he knew it would only upset her more. He said, “I can’t watch Ronan die, Blue. And Adam — and Matthew — and all this? We don’t have anything else. You already saw my spirit. You already know what we chose!”

  Blue closed her eyes, and two tears ran out of them. She did not cry noisily, or in a way that asked him to say anything different. She was a hopeful creature, but she was also a sensible creature.

  “Untie me,” Adam said from the backseat. “If you’re going to do it now, for God’s sake, untie me.” His blindfold was off and he was looking at Gansey, his eyes his own instead of the demon’s. His chest was moving fast. If there was any other way, Gansey knew Adam would have told him.

  “Is it safe?” Gansey asked.

  “Safe as life,” Adam replied. “Untie me.”

  Henry had been waiting for something to do — he clearly did not know how to process this without having a task — so he leapt to untie Adam. Shaking his reddened wrists free of the ribbon, Adam first touched the top of the Orphan Girl’s head and whispered, “It’s going to be all right.” And then he climbed out of the car and stood before Gansey. What could they possibly say?

  Gansey bumped fists with Adam and they nodded at each other. It was stupid, inadequate.

  Ronan clawed briefly back to consciousness; flowers spilled out of the car in shades of blue Gansey had never seen. Ronan was frozen in place, as he always was after a dream, and black slowly oozed out of one of his nostrils.

  Gansey had never understood really what it meant for Ronan to have to live with his nightmares.

  He understood it now.

  There was no time.

  “Thanks for everything, Henry,” Gansey said. “You’re a prince among men.”

  Henry’s face was blank.

  Blue said, “I hate this.”

  It was right, though. Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping — one last time. The sense of having done this before. He gently laid the backs of his hands on her cheeks. He whispered, “It’ll be okay. I’m ready. Blue, kiss me.”

  The rain spattered about them, kicking up splashes of red-black, making the petals around them twitch. Dream things from Ronan’s newly healed imagination piled around their feet. In the rain, everything smelled of these mountains in fall: oak leaves and hay fields, ozone and dirt turned over. It was beautiful here, and Gansey loved it. It had taken a long time, but he’d ended up where he wanted after all.

  Blue kissed him.

  He had dreamt of it often enough, and here it was, willed into life. In another world, it would just be this: a girl softly pressing her lips to a boy’s. But in this one, Gansey felt the effects of it at once. Blue, a mirror, an amplifier, a strange half-tree soul with ley line magic running through her. And Gansey, restored once by the ley line’s power, given a ley line heart, another kind of mirror. And when they were pointed at each other, the weaker one gave.

  Gansey’s ley line heart had been gifted, not grown.

  He pulled back from her.

  Out loud, with intention, with the voice that left no room for doubt, he said, “Let it be to kill the demon.”

  Right after he spoke, Blue threw her arms tightly around his neck. Right after he spoke, she pressed her face into the side of his. Right after he spoke, she held him like a shouted word. Love, love, love.

  He fell quietly from her arms.

  He was a king.

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

  The problem with being dead was that your stories stopped being lines and started being circles. They started to begin and end in the same moment: the moment of dying. It was difficult to focus on other ways of telling stories, and to remember that the living were interested in the specific order of events. Chronology. That was the word. Noah was more interested in the spiritual weight of a minute. Getting killed. There was a story. He never stopped noticing that moment. Every time he saw it, he slowed and watched it, remembering precisely every physical sensation that he had experienced during the murder.

  Murder.

  Sometimes he got caught on a loop of constantly understanding that he had been murdered, and rage made him smash things in Ronan’s room or kick the mint pot off Gansey’s desk or punch in a pane of glass on the stairs up to the apartment.

  Sometimes he got caught in this moment instead. Gansey’s death. Watching Gansey die, again and again and again. Wondering if he would have been that brave in the forest if Whelk had asked him to die instead of forcing him to. He didn’t think he would have. He wasn’t sure they’d been that sort of friends. Sometimes when he went back to see the still-living Gansey, he forgot whether or not this Gansey already knew that he was going to die. It was easy to know everything when time was circ
ular, but it was hard to remember how to use it.

  “Gansey,” he said. “That’s all there is.”

  This was not the right moment. Noah had been sucked into Gansey’s spirit life instead, which was a different line entirely. He moved away from it. It was not a spatial consideration but a timing one. It was a bit like playing skip rope with three — Noah could no longer remember who he had done such a thing with, only that he must have done it at some point to remember it — you had to wait for the right moment to move forward or you got repelled by rope.

  He didn’t always remember why he was doing this, but he remembered what he was doing: looking for the first time Gansey had died.

  He couldn’t remember the first time that he’d made this choice. It was hard, now, to remember what was remembering and what was actually repeating. He wasn’t even certain now which he was doing.

  Noah just knew he had to keep doing it until the moment. He only had to stay solid long enough to make sure it stuck.

  Here he was: Gansey, so young, twitching and dying in the leaves of a wood at the same time that Noah, miles away, had been twitching and dying in the leaves of a different wood.

  All times were the same. As soon as Noah died, his spirit, full of the ley line, favored by Cabeswater, had felt spread over every moment he had experienced and was going to experience. It was easy to look wise when time was a circle.

  Noah crouched over Gansey’s body. He said, for the last time, “You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.”

  Gansey died.

  “Good-bye,” Noah said. “Don’t throw it away.”

  He quietly slid from time.

  Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.

  Her family traded in predictions. They read cards and they held séances and they upturned teacups onto saucers. Blue had never been part of this, except in one important way: She was the person with the longest-standing prediction in the household.

  If you kiss your true love, he’ll die.

  For most of her life, she’d considered how it would happen. She’d been warned by all sorts of clairvoyants. Even without a hint of psychic ability, she had lived enmeshed in a world that was equal parts present and future, always knowing in a certain sense where she was headed.

  But not anymore.

  Now she was looking at Gansey’s dead body in its rain-spattered V-neck sweater and thinking, I have no idea what happens now.

  The blood was draining off the highway, and crows had landed a few yards off to peck at it. All active signs of demonic activity had vanished at once.

  “Get him,” Ronan started, and then had to gather himself to finish, in a snarl, “Get him off the road. He’s not an animal.”

  They dragged Gansey’s body into the green grass by the side of the little road instead. He still looked entirely alive; he had only been dead for a minute or two, and there just wasn’t a lot of difference between being dead and sleeping until things started to go bad.

  Ronan crouched beside him, black still smeared on his face under his nose and around his ears. His dreamt firefly rested on Gansey’s heart. “Wake up, you bastard,” he said. “You fucker. I can’t believe that you would …”

  And he began to cry.

  Beside Blue and Henry, Adam was dry-cheeked and dead-eyed, but the Orphan Girl hugged his arm as if comforting a weeper as he stared off into nothingness. His watch twitched the same minute over and over.

  Blue had stopped crying. She’d used up all her tears beforehand.

  The sounds of Henrietta made their way to them; an ambulance or a fire truck was wailing somewhere. Engines were revving. A loudspeaker was going. In a tree close by, little birds were singing. The cows were starting to move down the field toward them, curious about how long they’d been parked there.

  “I don’t really know what to do,” Henry confessed. “This isn’t how I thought it would end. I thought we were all going to Venezuela.”

  He was wry and pragmatic, and Blue saw that this was the only way he could cope with the fact of Richard Gansey’s dead body lying in the grass.

  “I can’t think about that,” Blue said truthfully. She couldn’t really think about anything. Everything had come to an end at once. Every bit of her future was now unwritten for the first time in her life. Were they supposed to call 911? Practical concerns of dead true loves stretched out in front of her and she found she couldn’t focus on any of them clearly. “I can’t really … think at all. It’s like I have a lampshade over my head. I keep waiting for — I don’t know.”

  Adam suddenly sat down. He said nothing at all, but he covered his face with his hands.

  Henry sucked in a very uneven breath. “We should get the cars out of the road,” he said. “Now that things are not bleeding, traffic will …” He stopped himself. “This isn’t right.”

  Blue shook her head.

  “I just don’t understand,” Henry said. “I was so sure that this was going to … change everything. I didn’t think it would end like this.”

  “I always knew it was going to end like this,” she said, “but it still doesn’t feel right. Would this ever feel right?”

  Henry shifted from foot to foot, looking for other cars, making no move toward their cars despite his earlier care about traffic. He looked at his watch — like Adam’s, it was still restlessly trying out the same few minutes, though not as violently as before — and repeated, “I just don’t understand. What is the point of magic, if not for this?”

  “For what?”

  Henry stretched a hand over Gansey’s body. “For him to be dead. You said you were Gansey’s magicians. Do something.”

  “I’m not a magician.”

  “You just killed him with your mouth.” Henry pointed at Ronan. “That one just dreamed that pile of shit beside the car! That one saved his own life at the school when things fell from a roof!”

  Adam’s attention focused sharply at this. Grief sharpened his tone to a knife’s edge. “That’s different.”

  “Different how! It breaks the rules, too!”

  “Because it is one thing to break the rules of physics with magic,” Adam snapped. “It’s a different thing to bring someone back from the dead.”

  But Henry was relentless. “Why? He’s already come back once.”

  It was impossible to argue with that. Blue said, “That required a sacrifice, though. Noah’s death.”

  Henry said, “So find another sacrifice.”

  Adam growled, “Are you offering?”

  Blue understood his anger, though. Any degree of hope was impossible to bear in this situation.

  There was silence. Henry looked down the road again. Finally, he said, “Be magicians.”

  “Shut up,” Ronan suddenly snapped. “Shut up! I can’t take it. Just leave it.”

  Henry actually stepped back a step, so fierce was Ronan’s grief. They all fell silent. Blue couldn’t stop looking at the time twitching away on Henry’s watch. It was becoming ever less frantic the further they got from the kiss, and Blue couldn’t help but dread when time returned entirely to normal. It felt like Gansey would really, truly be dead when it did.

  The minute hand quivered. It quivered again.

  Blue was already tired of a timeline without Gansey in it.

  Adam looked up from where he was folded in the grass. His voice was small. “What about Cabeswater?”

  “What about it?” Ronan asked. “It’s not powerful enough to do anything anymore.”

  “I know,” Adam replied. “But if you asked — it might die for him.”

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

  Cabeswater was not a forest. Cabeswater was a thing that happened to look like a forest right now. This was a peculiar magic that meant that it was always very old and very young at once. It had always been and yet it was always learn
ing itself. It was always alive and waiting to be alive again.

  It had never died on purpose before.

  But it had never been asked.

  Please, the Greywaren said. Amabo te.

  It was not possible. Not like he thought. A life for a life was a good sacrifice, a brilliant base for a fantastic and peculiar magic, but Cabeswater was not quite mortal, and the boy the humans wanted to save was. It was not as simple as Cabeswater dying and him rising. If it was going to be anything at all, it would have to be about Cabeswater making some essential part of itself human-shaped, and even Cabeswater wasn’t certain if that was possible.

  The magician-boy’s mind moved through Cabeswater’s tattered thoughts, trying to understand what was possible, projecting images of his own to help Cabeswater understand the goal of resurrection. He did not realize that it was a much harder concept for him to grasp than Cabeswater; Cabeswater was always dying and rising again; when all times were the same, resurrection was merely a matter of moving consciousness from one minute to another. Living forever was not difficult for Cabeswater to imagine; reanimating a human body with a finite timeline was.

  Cabeswater did its best to show him the reality of this, though nuance was difficult with the ley line as worn down as it was. What little communication they could muster was only possible because the psychic’s daughter was there with him, as she had always been there in some form, amplifying both Cabeswater and the magician.

  What Cabeswater was trying to make them understand was that Cabeswater was about creation. Making. Building. It could not unmake itself for this sacrifice, because it was against its nature. It could not quite die to bring a human back just as before. It would have been easier to make a copy of the human who had just died, but they did not want a copy. They wanted the one they had just lost. It was impossible to bring him back unchanged; this body of his was irreversibly dead.