The Raven King

by Maggie Stiefvater

  But it might be able to refashion him into something new.

  It just had to remember what humans were like.

  Images flashed from Cabeswater to the magician, and he whispered them to the psychic’s daughter. She began to direct her mirror-magic at the trees that remained in Cabeswater, and she whispered please as she did, and the tir e e’lintes recognized her as one of theirs.

  Then Cabeswater began to work.

  Humans were such tricky and complicated things.

  As it began to spin life and being out of its dreamstuff, the remaining trees began to hum and sing together. Once upon a time, their songs had sounded different, but in this time, they sang the songs the Greywaren had given to them. It was a wailing, ascending tune, full of both misery and joy at once. And as Cabeswater distilled its magic, these trees began to fall, one by one.

  The psychic’s daughter’s sadness burst through the forest, and Cabeswater accepted that, too, and put it into the life it was building.

  Another tree fell, and another, and Cabeswater kept returning again and again to the humans who had made the request. It had to remember what they felt like. It had to remember to make itself small enough.

  As the forest diminished, the Greywaren’s despair and wonder surged through Cabeswater. The trees sang soothingly back to him, a song of possibility and power and dreams, and then Cabeswater collected his wonder and put it into the life it was building.

  And finally, the magician’s wistful regret twisted through what remained of the trees. Without this, what was he? Simply human, human, human. Cabeswater pressed leaves against his cheek one last time, and then they took that humanity for the life it was building.

  It was nearly human-shaped. It would fit well enough. Nothing was ever perfect.

  Make way for the Raven King.

  The last tree fell, and the forest was gone, and everything was absolutely silent.

  Blue touched Gansey’s face. She whispered, “Wake up.”

  June evenings in Singer’s Falls were beautiful things. Lush and dark, the world painted in complicated greens. Trees: everywhere trees. Adam drove the winding road back to Henrietta in a slick little BMW that smelled of Ronan. The radio was playing Ronan’s terrible techno, but Adam didn’t turn it off. The world felt enormous.

  He was going back to the trailer park.

  It was time.

  It was a thirty-minute drive from the Barns to the trailer park, so he had plenty of time to change his mind, to go back to St. Agnes or Monmouth Manufacturing instead.

  But he drove past Henrietta to the trailer park, and then he drove down the long, bumpy drive to the trailers, his tires kicking up a disintegrating thunderhead of dust behind him. Dogs leapt out to chase the car, vanishing by the time he arrived in front of his old home.

  He didn’t have to ask if he was really doing this.

  He was here, wasn’t he?

  Adam climbed the rickety stairs. These stairs, once painted, now peeled and cracked, drilled with the perfectly round tracks of carpenter bees, weren’t very different from the stairs up to his apartment above St. Agnes. Just fewer of them here.

  At the top of the stairs, he studied the door, trying to decide if he should knock or not. It had not been that many months since he had lived here, coming and going without announcement, but it felt like it had been years. He felt taller than he had been when he had been here last, too, although he surely couldn’t have grown that much since the summer before.

  This was not his real home anymore, so he knocked.

  He waited, hands in the pockets of his pressed khaki slacks, looking at the clean toes of his shoes and then up again at the dusty door.

  The door opened, and his father stood there, eye to eye with him. Adam felt a little more kindly to the past version of himself, the one who had been afraid of turning out like this man. Because although Robert Parrish and Adam Parrish didn’t look alike at first glance, there was something introverted and turned-inward about Robert Parrish’s gaze that reminded Adam of himself. Something about the knit of the eyebrows was similar, too; the shape of the furrow between them was precisely the shape of the continued difference between what life was supposed to be and what life was actually like.

  Adam was not Robert, but he could have been, and he forgave that past Adam for being afraid of the possibility.

  Robert Parrish stared at his son. Just behind him, in the dim room, Adam saw his mother, who was looking past Adam to the BMW.

  “Invite me in,” Adam said.

  His father lingered, one nostril flaring, but he retreated back into the house. He turned a hand in a sort of mocking invitation, a gesture of pretend fealty to a false king.

  Adam stepped in. He had forgotten how compressed their lives were here. He had forgotten how the kitchen was the same as the living room was the same as the master bedroom, and on the other side of the main room, Adam’s tiny bedroom. He could not blame them for resentfully carving out that space; there was no other place to be in this house that was not looking at each other. He had forgotten how claustrophobia had driven him outside as much as fear.

  “Nice of you to call,” his mother said.

  He always forgot how she used to drive him out, too. Her words were a more slippery kind of assault, sliding out of his memory more easily than his father’s actual blows, sliding in between the ribs of that younger Adam when he wasn’t paying attention. There was a reason why he had learned to hide alone, not with her.

  “I missed you at graduation today,” Adam replied evenly.

  “I didn’t feel welcome,” she said.

  “I asked you to come.”

  “You made it ugly.”

  “Wasn’t me who made it ugly.”

  Her eyes glanced off him, most of her vanishing at the first sign of active conflict.

  “What do you want, Adam?” his father asked. He was still staring at Adam’s clothing, as if he thought that it might be what had changed. “I don’t guess it’s because you’re begging to move back in, now that you’re all graduated and fancy and driving your boyfriend’s beemer.”

  “I came to see if there was any possibility of having a normal relationship with my parents before I leave for college,” Adam replied.

  His father’s mouth worked. It was hard to tell if he was shocked by the content of Adam’s statement, or just by the fact of Adam’s voice at all. It was not a thing that had been heard often in this room. It was perplexing to Adam how he had regarded this as normal for so long. He remembered how the neighbors used to turn away from his bruised face; he used to think, stupidly, that they said nothing because they thought he had somehow deserved it. Now, though, he wondered how many of them had huddled on the floor in front of their sofas, or hidden in their rooms, or cried beneath the little porch in the bitter rain. He felt a sudden urge to save all these other Adams hidden in plain view, though he didn’t know if they would listen to him. It struck him as a Gansey or a Blue impulse, and as he held that tiny, heroic spark in his mind, he realized that it was only because he believed that he had saved himself that he could imagine saving someone else.

  “You were the one who made this impossible,” his father said. “You’re the one who made this ugly, just like your mother said.”

  He seemed petulant to Adam now, not fearsome. Everything about his body language, shoulders curled like a fern, chin tucked, indicated that he would no sooner hit Adam than he would hit his boss. The last time he had raised a hand to his son, he’d had to pull a bloody thorn out of it, and Adam could see the disbelief of that moment still registering in him. Adam was other. Even without Cabeswater’s force, he could feel it glimmering coolly in his eyes, and he did nothing to disguise it. Magician.

  “It was ugly way before then, Dad,” Adam replied. “Do you know I can’t hear out of this ear? You were talking over me in the courtroom when I said it before.”

  His father made a scornful noise, but Adam interrupted him. “Gansey took me to the hospital.
That should’ve been you, Dad. I mean, it shouldn’t have happened at all, but if it had really been an accident, it should have been you in the room with me.”

  Even as he said the words that he’d wanted to say, he couldn’t believe that he was saying them. Had he ever talked back to his father and been certain he was right? And been able to look him right in the eye the entire time? He couldn’t quite believe that he was not afraid: His father was not frightening unless you were already afraid.

  His father blustered and put his hands in his pockets.

  “I’m deaf in this ear, Dad, and that was you.”

  Now his father looked at the floor, and that was how Adam knew that he believed him. It was possible that was the only thing Adam had actually needed out of this meeting: his father’s averted eyes. The certainty that his father knew what he had done.

  His father asked, “What do you want from us?”

  On the way over, Adam had considered this. What he truly wanted was to be left to his own devices. Not by his actual father, who could no longer truly intrude on Adam’s life, but by the idea of his father, a more powerful thing in every way. He replied, “Every time I can’t tell where someone’s calling me from in a room and every time I smash my head into the side of the shower and every time I accidentally start to put my earbuds in both ears, I think about you. Do you think there can be a future when that’s not the only time I think about you?”

  He could tell from their faces that the answer to this was not likely to be yes anytime soon, but that was all right. He hadn’t come with any expectations, so he was not disappointed.

  “I reckon I don’t know,” his father replied finally. “You’ve grown up into someone I don’t like very much, and I’m not afraid to say it.”

  “That’s fair,” Adam said. He didn’t much care for his father, either. Gansey would’ve said I appreciate your honesty, and Adam borrowed from that memory of polite power. “I appreciate your honesty.”

  His father’s face indicated that Adam had just illustrated his point perfectly.

  His mother spoke up. “I’d like you to call. I’d like to know what you’re doing.”

  She lifted her head, and the light through the window made a perfect square of light on her glasses. And just like that, Adam’s thoughts flashed along time, his logic following the same channels his psychic sense used. He could see himself knocking, her standing on the other side of the door, not answering. He could see himself knocking, her standing around the back of the trailer, holding her breath until he was gone. He could even see himself calling, and the phone ringing as she held it in her hands. But he could also see her opening the college brochure. He could see her clipping his name out of a newspaper. Putting a photo of him in his smart jacket and nice pants and easy smile on the fridge.

  At some point she had released him, and she didn’t want him back. She just wanted to see what happened.

  But that was all right, too. It was something. He could do that. In fact, that was probably all he could do.

  He knocked on the cabinet beside him, once, thoughtful, and then he took out the BMW keys. “I’ll do that,” he said.

  He waited just a moment longer, giving them the opportunity to fill the space, to exceed expectation.

  They did not. Adam had set the bar at precisely the height they could jump and no higher.

  “I’ll let myself out,” he said.

  He did.

  On the other side of Henrietta, Gansey and Blue and Henry were just climbing out of the Pig. Henry was last out, as he had been riding in the back, and he squeezed out from behind the passenger seat as if he were being calved. He shut the door and then frowned at it.

  “You have to slam it,” Gansey said.

  Henry shut it.

  “Slam it,” Gansey repeated.

  Henry slammed it.

  “So violent,” he said.

  They were here in this remote location because of Ronan. He had given them vague instructions that afternoon — apparently, they were on a scavenger hunt for Blue’s graduation gift. She’d been out of school for weeks, and Ronan had implied that a gift was waiting, but he’d refused to relinquish directions to it until Gansey and Henry had also graduated. You’re meant to use it together, he had said, ominously. They’d asked him to come — both to graduation, and on this scavenger hunt — but he replied merely that both locations were full of bad memories for him, and he’d see them on the other side.

  So now they walked down a dirt drive toward a dense tree line that hid everything beyond it from their view. It was pleasantly warm. Insects made themselves cozy in the teens’ shirts and around their ankles. Gansey had the sense of doing this before, but he couldn’t tell if he had or not. He knew now that the feeling of time-slipping that he’d lived with for so long was not a product of his first death, but rather his second. A by-product of the bits and bobs Cabeswater had assembled to give him life again. Humans were not meant to experience all times at once, but Gansey had to do it anyway.

  Blue reached over to take his hand as they walked, and they swung this knot of their fingers between them merrily. They were free, free, free. School was over and summer stretched before them. Gansey had bid for a gap year and won; Henry had already planned on one. It was all convenient, as Blue had spent months planning how to cheaply hike across the country post-graduation, destination: life. It was better with company. It was better with three. Three, Persephone had always said, was the strongest number.

  Now they broached the tree line and found themselves in a massive overgrown field of the sort that was not uncommon in this part of Virginia. The furry lamb’s ears was getting tall already among the grass; the thistles were still short and sneaky.

  “Oh, Ronan,” Gansey said, although Ronan was not there to hear it, because he had just realized where Ronan’s directions had taken them.

  The field was filled with cars. They were all mostly identical. They were all mostly a little strange in one way or another. They were all mostly white Mitsubishis. The grass growing up around them and the pollen clouding their windshields made the scene rather apocalyptic.

  “I don’t want any of these for our great American road trip,” Henry said with distaste. “I don’t care if it’s free and I don’t care if it’s magical.”

  “Concur,” said Gansey.

  Blue, however, seemed unconcerned. “He said there was one here that we’d know was for us.”

  “You knew it was a car?” Gansey demanded. He’d been unable to get the smallest of hints from Ronan.

  “I wasn’t going to follow his directions without any information at all,” Blue retorted.

  They waded through the grass, locusts whirring up before them. Blue and Henry were intently searching, comparing the vehicles. Gansey was dawdling, feeling the summer evening fill his lungs. It was this widening gyre of his path that brought him to the graduation gift. “Guys, I found it.”

  It was the obvious outlier: a furiously orange old Camaro parked in the midst of all the new Mitsubishis. It was so obviously identical to the Pig that Ronan must have dreamt it.

  “Ronan thinks he’s so funny,” Gansey said as Blue and Henry made their way to him.

  Henry picked a tick off his arm and threw it into the field to suck on someone else. “He wants you guys to drive matching cars? That seems sentimental for a man without a soul.”

  “He told me that it had something I’m gonna love under the hood,” Blue said. She prowled round to the front and fumbled for the hood release. Hefting it open, she began to laugh.

  They all peered inside, and Gansey laughed too. Because inside the engine bay of this Camaro was nothing. There was no engine. No inner workings. Just empty space clear down to the grass growing by the tires.

  “The ultimate green car,” Gansey said, at the same time that Henry said, “Do you think it really runs?”

  Blue clapped her hands and jumped up and down; Henry snapped a picture of her doing it, but she was too cheerful to mak
e a face at him. Skipping around to the driver’s side, she got in. She was barely visible over the dash. Her smile was still enormous. Ronan was going to be sorry he’d missed it, but Gansey understood his reasons.

  A second later, the engine roared to life. Or rather, the car roared to life. Who knew what was even making the sound. Blue made a ridiculous whooping sound of glee.

  The year stretched out in front of them, magical and enormous and entirely unwritten.

  It was marvelous.

  “Do you think it ever breaks down?” Gansey shouted over the sound of the not-engine.

  Henry began to laugh.

  “This is going to be a great trip,” he said.

  Depending on where you began the story, it was about this place: the long stretch of mountain that straddled a particularly potent segment of the ley line. Months before, it had been Cabeswater, populated by dreams, blooming with magic. Now it was merely an ordinary Virginia forest, green thorns and soft sycamores and oaks and pine trees, everything slender from the effort of growing through rock.

  Ronan guessed it was pretty enough, but it was no Cabeswater.

  Off along one of the banks, a scrawny hooved girl crashed merrily through the undergrowth, humming and making disgusting chewing noises. Everything in the forest was interesting to her, and interesting meant tasting it. Adam said she was a lot like Ronan. Ronan was going to choose to take that as a compliment.

  “Opal,” he snapped, and she spat out a mouthful of mushroom. “Stop dicking around!”

  The girl galloped to catch up with him, but she didn’t pause when she reached him. She preferred to form a lopsided perimeter of frantic activity around his person. Anything else might give the appearance of willing obedience, and she would do a lot to avoid that.

  Up ahead, Chainsaw shouted, “Kerah!”

  She kept hollering until Ronan had caught up with her. Sure enough, she had found something out of place. He kicked through the leaves. It was a metal artifact that looked centuries old. It was the wheel off a 1973 Camaro. It matched the ancient, impossible wheel they’d found on the ley line months earlier. Back then, Ronan had taken that to mean that at some point in the future, they would wreck the Camaro in the pursuit of Glendower, and the ley line’s bending of time would have sent them back in time and then forward again. All times being the same-ish on the ley line.