The Raven King
Page 89

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 towards 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 any more.”
“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 learning 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 for ever 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.
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.