The Raven King Read online

Time tugged at his soul.

  The Aglionby orchestra began to play. The very first measure was a harmonious thicket of sound, but one of the brass instruments got the first note on the next phrase very wrong. At the same moment, an insect buzzed past Gansey’s face, close enough that he could feel it. Suddenly, everything went slanting sideways. The sun overhead burned white. Ravens flapped around Gansey as he turned, looking for Adam or Child or anything that wasn’t just a white shirt, a hand, a bird flapping. His eyes snagged on his own wrist. His watch said 6:21.

  It had been hot when he died.

  He was in a forest of wooden sticks, of birds. The brass instruments muttered; the flutes screamed. Wings buzzed and hummed and shivered around him. He could feel the hornets in his ears.

  They aren’t there

  But that big insect whirred by him again, circling.

  It had been years since Malory had been forced to stop halfway through a hike to wait as Gansey fell to his knees, hands over his ears, shivering, dying.

  He had worked hard to walk away from that.

  They aren’t there. You are at Raven Day. You are going to eat sandwiches after this. You are going to jump-start the Camaro in the parking lot after school. You are going to drive to 300 Fox Way. You will tell Blue about your day you will

  The insects pricked into his nostrils, moved his hair gently, collectively seethed. Sweat ran straight down his spine. The music shimmered. The students had become spirits, brushing past him and around him. His knees would buckle; he would let them.

  He could not re-create his death here. Not now, not when it would be fresh on everyone’s minds at the fund-raiser — Gansey Three lost it at Raven Day, did you hear; Mrs. Gansey can we have a word about your son? — he would not make it about him.

  But time was slipping; he was slipping. His heart ran with black, black blood.

  “GanseyMan.”

  Gansey couldn’t quite focus on the words. Henry Cheng stood before him, all hair and smile, his eyes intense. He took Gansey’s raven from him and instead pressed something cool into Gansey’s hand. Cool, and getting colder.

  “Once, you got me coffee,” Henry said. “When I was losing my mind. Consider the favor returned.”

  Gansey was holding a plastic cup of ice water. It should not have done anything, but something worked: the shocking temperature difference, the ordinary sound of the ice cubes knocking against one another, the eye contact. Students still milled around them, but they were once again students. The music was once again merely a school orchestra playing a new piece on an incredibly hot day.

  “There he is,” Henry said. “Toga party tonight, Richard, at Litchfield House. You should bring your boys and your child bride.”

  Then he was gone, ravens flapping where he had been.

  Adam had thought there was something in his eye. It had begun while he stood in the over-hot theater. Not so much an irritation as a fatigue, like he’d been staring at a screen for too long. He could have lived with it until the end of the school day if it had stayed like that, but his vision was getting a little blurry now. Not a troubling amount on its own, but combined with being able to feel his eye, it seemed like he should take a look at it.

  Instead of returning to one of the academic buildings, he slid down the stairs to the theater’s side door. There were bathrooms in the area under the stage, and it was those he headed to, passing many-legged animals made of stacked old chairs, strange silhouettes of stage-set trees, and depthless oceans of black curtain hung over everything. The hallway was dark and close, the walls horrors of chipped green paint, and with one hand cupped over his eye, Adam found it distorted and unnerving. He recalled again the picture of his skittering hand.

  He needed to do some work with Cabeswater, he thought, and figure out what was going on with that tree.

  The bathroom light was switched off. It was not an obstacle at all — the light switch was just inside the door — but still, Adam didn’t quite want to put his hand into the blackness to find it. He stood there, his heart a little too fast, and he looked behind himself.

  The hall was close and dark and unmoving under sickly fluorescent light. The shadows were inseparable from the stage curtains. Big swaths of black connected everything.

  Turn on the light, Adam thought.

  With his free hand, the one not covering his eye, he reached into the bathroom.

  He did it fast, fingers pressing through cold, through dark, touching something —

  No, it was only a Cabeswater vine, only in his head. He slammed his hand past it and turned on the light.

  The bathroom was empty.

  Of course it was empty. Of course it was empty. Of course it was empty.

  Two old stalls made of green-painted plywood, nowhere near up to proper accessibility codes, nowhere near up to proper hygiene codes. A urinal. A sink with a yellow ring round the drain. A mirror.

  Adam stepped in front of the glass, his hand over his eye, looking at his gaunt face. His nearly colorless eyebrow was pinched with worry. Lowering his hand, he looked again at himself. He saw no pinkness around his left eye. It didn’t seem to be watering. It was —

  He squinted. Was he slightly walleyed? That was what it was called when your eyes didn’t point in the same direction, right?

  He blinked.

  No, it was fine. It was just a trick of this chilly green light. He leaned in closer to see if there was any redness in the corner.

  It was walleyed.

  Adam blinked, and it was not. He blinked, and it was. It was like one of those bad dreams that was not a nightmare, not really, that was just about trying to put on a pair of socks and finding they suddenly wouldn’t fit on your foot.

  As he watched, his left eye slowly sank down to look at the floor, unhitched from the gaze of his right eye.

  His vision blurred and then focused again as his right eye took dominance. Adam’s breath was uneven. He’d already lost hearing in one ear. He couldn’t lose sight in one eye, too. Was it from his father? Was this a delayed effect of hitting his head?

  The eye rocked slowly, like a marble sliding in a jar of water. He could feel the horror of it in his stomach.

  In the mirror, he thought the shadow of one of the stalls changed.

  He turned to look: nothing. Nothing.

  Cabeswater, are you with me?

  He turned back to the mirror. Now his left eye was traveling slowly around, wandering back and forth, up and down.

  Adam’s chest hitched.

  The eye looked at him.

  Adam scrambled back from the mirror, hand smacked over his eye. His shoulder blade crashed into the opposite wall, and he stood there, gasping for air, scared, scared, scared, because what kind of help did he need, and who could he ask?

  The shadow above the stall was changing. It was turning from a square into a triangle because — oh God — one of the stall doors was opening.

  The long hallway back to the outside felt like a horror gallery gauntlet. Black spilled out of the stall door.

  Adam said, “Cabeswater, I need you.”

  The darkness spread across the floor.

  All Adam could think was that he couldn’t let it touch him. The thought of it on his skin was worse than the image of his useless eye. “Cabeswater. Keep me safe. Cabeswater!”

  There was a sound like a shot — Adam shied away — as the mirror split. A sun from somewhere else burned on the other side of it. Leaves were pressed up against the glass as if it were a window. The forest whispered and hissed in Adam’s deaf ear, urging him to help it find a channel.

  Gratitude burned through him, as hard to bear as the fear. If something happened to him now, at least he wouldn’t be alone.

  Water, Cabeswater urged. Waterwaterwater.

  Scrambling to the sink, Adam twisted on the tap. Water rushed out, scented with rain and rocks. He reached through the flow to smash down the plug. The inky black bled toward him, inches from his shoes.

  Don’t let it t
ouch you—

  He clambered onto the edge of the sink as the darkness reached the bottom of the wall. It would climb, Adam knew. But then, finally, the water filled the plugged basin and flowed over the edge onto the floor. It washed over the blackness, soundless, colorless, sliding toward the drain. It left behind only pale, ordinary concrete.

  Even after the blackness was gone, Adam let the sink pour onto the floor for another full minute, soaking his shoes. Then he slipped off the edge of the sink. He scooped the water up in his palms and splashed the earthy-scented water over his face, over his left eye. Again and again, again and again, again and again, until his eye no longer felt tired. Until he could no longer feel it at all. It was just his eye again, when he peered into the mirror. Just his face. There was no sign of the other sun or a lazy iris. Drops of Cabeswater’s rivers clung damply in Adam’s eyelashes. Cabeswater muttered and moaned, vines curling through Adam, dappled light flashing behind his eyes, stones pressing up beneath the palms of his hands.

  Cabeswater had taken so long to come to his aid. Only a few weeks before, a heap of roofing tiles had fallen on top of him, and Cabeswater had swept instantaneously to save him. If that had happened today, he would have been dead.

  The forest whispered at him in its language that was equal parts pictures and words, and it made him understand why it had been so slow to come to him.

  Something had been attacking them both.

  As Maura had already pointed out, being suspended was not a vacation, so Blue had her after-school shift at Nino’s as usual. Although the sun outside was overpowering, the restaurant was strangely dim inside, a trick of the thunderheads darkening the western sky. The shadows beneath the metal-legged tables were gray and diffuse; it was hard to tell if it was dark enough to turn on the lights that hung over each table or not. The decision could wait; there was no one in the restaurant.

  With nothing to occupy her mind except for sweeping the Parmesan cheese from the corners of the room, Blue thought about Gansey inviting her to a toga party tonight. To her surprise, her mother had urged her to go. Blue had said that an Aglionby toga party went against everything she stood for. Maura had replied, “Private school boys? Using random pieces of fabric as apparel? That seems like exactly what you stand for these days.”

  Shoof, shoof. Blue swept the floor aggressively. She could feel herself hurtling toward self-awareness, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

  In the kitchen, the shift manager chortled. Dissonant, clunky music warred with the electric guitar playing overhead; he was watching videos on his phone with the cooks. A loud ding sounded as the restaurant door opened. To her surprise, Adam stepped in and warily assessed the empty tables. His uniform was strangely bedraggled: the pants wrinkled and muddied, his white shirt smudged and damp in places.

  “Wasn’t I supposed to call you later?” Blue asked. She eyed his uniform. Ordinarily it would have been impeccable. “Are you okay?”

  Adam slid into a chair and touched his left eyelid cautiously. “I remembered I had Weights and Discovery after school and didn’t want you to miss me. Uh, phys ed and a scientific method extracurricular.”

  Blue walked her broom over to his table. “You didn’t say if you were okay.”

  He flicked his fingers irritably against one of the damp places on his sleeve. “Cabeswater. Something’s up with it. I don’t know. I have to do some work with it. I’ll need someone to spot me, I guess. What are you doing this evening?”

  “Mom says I’m going to a toga party. Are you?”

  Disdain dripped from Adam’s voice. “I’m not going to a party at Henry Cheng’s, no.”

  Henry Cheng. Things made marginally more sense. In a Venn diagram where one circle held the words toga party and one held the words Henry Cheng, Gansey might possibly end up where they intersected. Blue’s mixed feelings returned in force. “What is the actual deal with you and Henry Cheng? And do you want some pizza? Someone placed a wrong order and we have extras.”

  “You’ve seen him. I don’t have time for that. And yes, please.”

  She fetched the pizza and sat opposite Adam as he inhaled it as politely as possible. The truth was that until he’d walked in the door, she’d forgotten that they had arranged a call to talk about Gansey and Glendower. She was feeling pretty short on ideas after discussing it with her family members in the bathtub. She admitted, “I should tell you I don’t really have any ideas about Gansey other than finding Glendower, and I don’t know what to do next about that.”

  Adam said, “I didn’t get a lot of time to think about it today, either, because of—” He gestured to his rumpled uniform again, though she couldn’t tell if he meant Cabeswater or school. “And so I don’t have an idea, I only have a question. Do you think Gansey could order Glendower to appear?”

  Something about this question neatly upended Blue’s stomach. It was not that she hadn’t thought about Gansey’s power of command; it was just that his uncanny authoritative voice was so closely allied with his ordinary bossy voice that it was sometimes difficult to convince herself that she had not imagined it. And then when she did admit that there was something there — for instance, when he had clearly magically dissolved the false Blues during their last visit to Cabeswater — it was still nonetheless somewhat difficult to think of in a magical sense. The knowledge slid sideways, pretending to be normal. Now that she thought of the phenomenon more firmly, though, holding on to the entirety of it as best she could, she realized that it was a lot like Noah’s appearing and disappearing, or like the dream logic of Aurora appearing through rock. Her mind was quite happy to let her believe that there was nothing magic about it; to sketchily rewrite it as simply Gansey being Gansey.

  “I don’t know,” Blue said. “If he could, wouldn’t he have tried it before now?”

  “Honestly —” Adam started, and then stopped. His face changed. “Are you going to the party tonight?”

  “I guess so.” Too late, she got the sense that the question meant more than the words she’d heard. “Like I said, Mom told me I was going, so …”

  “With Gansey.”

  “Yeah, I guess. And Ronan, if he’s going.”

  “Ronan won’t go to Henry’s.”

  Carefully, Blue said, “Then, yeah, I guess, with Gansey.”

  Adam frowned at the edge of the table, looking at his own hand. He was taking his time with something, measuring the words, testing them before he said them. “You know, when I first met Gansey, I couldn’t figure out why he was friends with someone like Ronan. Gansey was always in class, always getting stuff done, always a teacher’s pet. And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped. I knew I couldn’t complain, ’cause I hadn’t come first. Ronan had. But one day, he’d done some stupid shit I don’t even remember, and I just couldn’t take it. And I asked why Gansey was even friends with him if he was such an asshole all the time. And I remember Gansey told me that Ronan always told the truth, and the truth was the most important thing.”

  It was not at all difficult to imagine Gansey saying such a thing.

  Adam looked up to Blue then, and he pinned her with his gaze. Outside, the wind chucked leaves against the glass. “Which is why I wanna know why you two won’t tell me the truth about you two.”

  Now her stomach turned over the other direction. You two. Gansey and her. Her and Gansey. Blue had imagined this conversation dozens of times. Endless permutations of how she brought it up, how he reacted, how it ended. She could do this. She was ready.

  No, she wasn’t.

  “About us?” she said. Lamely.

  His expression, if possible, turned more disdainful than it had over Henry Cheng. “Do you know what hurts the most? What this means you think of me. You didn’t even give me the chance to be okay with it. You were just so sure I’d be eaten by jealousy. That’s how you see me?”

  He wasn’t wrong. But he had been a rather more brittle version of himself back when they’d first made the decision to not t
ell him. Saying this out loud felt rather unsporting, though, so she just tried, “You — things — were different then.”

  “ ‘Then’? How long has it been going on?”

  “Going on isn’t exactly what is happening,” Blue said. A relationship that was squeezed into stolen glances and secret phone calls was so drastically less than what she wanted that she refused to consider it dating. “And it’s not exactly like starting a new job. ‘The start date was x!’ I can’t tell you precisely how long it’s been going on.”

  “You just said ‘going on,’ ” Adam said.

  Blue’s mental state surfed the crest of a wave that divided empathy and frustration. “Don’t be impossible. I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be something, and then it was, and then I didn’t know how to say anything. I didn’t want to risk messing up our friendship.”

  “So even though I might have been decent about it, some part of you thought I’d be so shittily in constant competition with Gansey that you figured it was better to just lie?”

  “I didn’t lie.”

  “Sure, Ronan. Lying by omission is still lying,” Adam said. He was sort of half-smiling, but in that way people did when they were annoyed rather than when anything was funny.

  Outside, a couple paused by the door to read the menu attached to it; both Blue and Adam waited in irritated silence until they moved on, leaving the restaurant empty. Adam opened his hands as if he expected her to tip a satisfactory explanation into them.

  The fair part of Blue was well aware that she was in the wrong and so it was her job to defuse his legitimate hurt, but the prideful part of her still would’ve preferred to point out how difficult he had been back when she and Gansey had first realized they had feelings for each other. With some effort, she went with a middle ground. “It wasn’t as calculated as you make it sound like it was.”

  Adam rejected the middle ground. “But I saw you guys trying to hide it. The crazy thing is — like, I’m right here. I’m with you guys every day. Do you think I didn’t see it? He’s my best friend. You think I don’t know him?”