The Raven King
Page 61

“Tomorrow?” Gansey asked. “I’m supposed to meet my sister for lunch. Both of you please come.”
Neither Henry nor Blue had to say anything out loud; Gansey surely had to know that merely by asking, he’d assured both would come.
“I take it we’re friends now,” Henry said.
“We must be,” Gansey replied. “Jane says it should be so.”
“It should be so,” Blue agreed.
Now something else lit Henry’s smile. It was genuine and pleased but also something more, and there were not quite words for it. He pocketed his phone. “Good, good. The coast is clear; I leave you. Until tomorrow.”
 
 
That night, Ronan didn’t dream.
After Gansey and Blue had left the Barns, he leaned against one of the front porch pillars and looked out at his fireflies winking in the chilly darkness. He was so raw and electric that it was hard to believe that he was awake. Normally it took sleep to strip him to this naked energy. But this was not a dream. This was his life, his home, his night.
After a few moments, he heard the door ease open behind him and Adam joined him. Silently they looked over the dancing lights in the fields. It was not difficult to see that Adam was working intensely with his own thoughts. Words kept rising up inside Ronan and bursting before they ever escaped. He felt he’d already asked the question; he couldn’t also give the answer.
Three deer appeared at the tree line, just at the edge of the porch light’s reach. One of them was the beautiful pale buck, his antlers like branches or roots. He watched them, and they watched him, and then Ronan could not stand it. “Adam?”
When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teeth-chattering-cold night drive. It was Adam’s ribs under Ronan’s hands and Adam’s mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart. They were both hungry animals, but Adam had been starving for longer.
Inside, they pretended they would dream, but they did not. They sprawled on the living room sofa and Adam studied the tattoo that covered Ronan’s back: all the sharp edges that hooked wondrously and fearfully into each other.
“Unguibus et rostro,” Adam said.
Ronan put Adam’s fingers to his mouth.
He was never sleeping again.
 
 
That night, the demon didn’t sleep.
While Piper Greenmantle slept fitfully, dreaming of the upcoming sale and her rise to fame in the magical artefact community, the demon unmade.
It unmade the physical trappings of Cabeswater – the trees, the creatures, the ferns, the rivers, the stones – but it also unmade the dreamy ideas of the forest. The memories caught in groves, the songs invented only in night-time, the creeping euphoria that ebbed and flowed around one of the waterfalls. Everything that had been dreamt into this place it undreamt.
The dreamer it would unmake last.
He would fight.
They always fought.
As the demon unwound and undid, it kept encountering threads of its own story teased through the underbrush. Its origin story. This fertile place, rich with the energy of the ley line, was not just good for growing trees and kings. It was also good for growing demons, if there was enough bad blood spilled on it.
There was more than enough bad blood pooled in this forest to make a demon.
Little stopped its work. It was the forest’s natural enemy, and the one thing that would stop the demon in its tracks had not yet occurred to anyone. Only the oldest of the trees put up a fight, because they were the only things that remembered how. Slowly and methodically, the demon unpicked them from the inside. Black beaded from their decaying branches; they crashed down as their roots rotted to nothing.
One tree resisted for longer than the others. She was the oldest, and had seen a demon before, and knew that sometimes it wasn’t about saving yourself, it was about holding out for long enough until someone else could save you. So she held out, and stretched for the stars even as her roots were being dug away, and she held out, and she sang to other trees even as her trunk was rotting out, and she held out, and she dreamt of the sky even as she was unmade.
The other trees wailed; if she had been unmade, who could stand?
The demon did not sleep.
 
 
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Gwenllian.
She awoke with a scream that morning at dawn. “Get up!” she howled to herself as she leapt from her bed. Her hair hit the slanted attic ceiling, and then her skull did; she pressed her hand to her head. It was still dull gray outside, early morning, but she hit switches and scrolled knobs and pulled cords until every light was on in the space. Shadows keeled this way and that.
“Get up!” she said again. “Mother, mother!”
Her dreams still clung to her, trees melting black and demons hissing unmaking; she waved her hands around her to clear the cobwebs from her hair and ears. She tugged a dress over her head, and then pulled on another skirt, and her boots, and her sweater; she needed her armour. Then she weaved through the cards she had left spread on the floor and the plants she had burned for meditation and headed directly to the two mirrors that her predecessor had left there in the attic. Neeve, Neeve, lovely Neeve. Gwenllian would have known her name even if the others had not told her, because the mirrors whispered and sang and hissed it all the time. How they loved her and hated her. They judged her and admired her. Lifted her up and tore her down. Neeve, Neeve, hateful Neeve, had wanted the whole world’s respect and had done everything to get it. It was Neeve, Neeve, lovely Neeve, who hadn’t respected herself in the end.
The full-length mirrors were set up to face each other, eternally reflecting a reflection. Neeve had performed some complicated ritual to ensure that they were full of all the possibilities she could imagine for herself and then some, and in the end, one of them had eaten her. Proper witchery, the women of Sycharth would have said. They would have all been shipped off to the woods.
Gwenllian stood between the mirrors. The magic of them tugged and howled. The glass was not meant to show so many times at once; most people were not built to process so many possibilities at once. Gwenllian was just another mirror, though, and so the magic glanced off her harmlessly as she pressed her palms to either glass. She reached into all the possibilities and looked around, darting from one false truth to another.