The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)

by Maggie Stiefvater

“Why would you go alone?” Blue asked. She flung her arms around him, and he felt her trembling. “I was trying to be heroic,” Gansey said, holding her tight. She was real. They were all real. They’d all come here for him, in the middle of the night. The completeness of his shock told him that no part of him had really thought they would do such a thing for him. “I didn’t want you guys to hurt anymore.”

It was not the Gansey way to command anyone to do anything. They asked, and hoped. Did unto others and silently hoped that they would do unto them. They’d come here for him. They’d come here for him. They’d come here for him. “Please,” Gansey said. “Please help me.”

If Glendower had always been dead, it could not have been him who spared Gansey. If Glendower had not saved Gansey’s life, he did not know who to thank, or who to be, or how to live.

Gansey had forgotten how many times he had been told he was destined for greatness. Was this all there was?

Eventually, Gansey heard footsteps approaching in the leaves. This was terrible, too. He did not want to stand and show them his teary face and receive their pity; the idea of this well-meaning kindness was nearly as unbearable a thought as his approaching death. For the very first time, Gansey understood Adam Parrish perfectly.

The choice was death or hurting Adam, which wasn’t much of a choice at all.

All Adam cared about was his autonomy.

The Orphan Girl crept in close. She carefully undid the dirty watch on her wrist, and then she fastened it on one of Adam’s, loosely, above where he was tied. Then she kissed his arm. “Thank you,” he said, dully. Then, to Gansey, in a low voice, “I might as well be the sacrifice. I’m ruined.” “No,” Blue, Gansey, and Ronan said at once.

“Let’s not get carried away just because you just tried to kill someone,” Henry clarified. He sucked on his bloody knuckles.

Depending on where you began the story, it was about Seondeok. She had not meant to be an international art dealer and small-time crime boss. It had begun as a mere desire for something more, and then a slow realization that something more was never going to be reachable on her current path.

Henry, her middle son, shone brightly, but he never seemed able to direct that light outside of himself. And so when Niall Lynch offered to find her a bauble, a token, a magical toy, that would help him, she was listening. The beautiful bee struck her the moment she saw it. Of course he had also shown it to Laumonier and to Greenmantle and to Valquez and to Mackey and to Xi, but that was to be expected because he was a scoundrel and could not help himself. But when he had met Henry, he had let Seondeok have it for nearly nothing, and she would not forget that.

Seondeok said, “I am not people you like.” “You are people I respect, which is nearly the same.”

The thing about being in the demon’s presence was that it got worse instead of better. The opposite of getting used to it — that was the sensation. It was a wound that increased from ache to stab.

“Don’t use that passive-aggressive stuff on me,” Piper said. “I read an article on how you have basically been undercutting my personhood for my entire life and that is totally an example.” “This is totally an example of you overstepping your knowledge,” Laumonier said. “Your ambition is constantly outstripping your education!

“Do you control it, or does it control you?” “Oh, please,” Piper said. “Demon, unfreeze those people! Demon, make it sunny! Demon, change my clothing to all white! Demon, do as I say, do as I say!” The people unfroze; the sky turned white-hot bright for just a second; her clothing bleached; the demon buzzed up into the air. The whispering in Seondeok’s head had become something fierce. Laumonier shot his daughter. It made a little oonph sound because of the silencer. Laumonier looked shocked. Both said nothing, just stared at her body, then up at the demon who had whispered it to them.

Adam could not decide if this was the worst thing that had happened to him, or if it felt that way because he had been so recently and senselessly happy that the comparison was making it so.

Why couldn’t he think of another way around the sacrifice? Gansey was only hurrying to do this because of him, because of how his bargain had turned this into an emergency. In the end, Adam was killing him anyway, just like in his vision. A backward, sideways version of the blame, but Adam at its helm just the same. But it was undeniable that Adam was the one who’d made it an emergency.

From the front seat, Ronan’s phone began to ring and ring and ring. It was the low dull ring that Ronan had programmed for when Declan’s number called. The worst was that Adam knew what that meant: something was happening to Matthew. No, the worst was that Adam couldn’t do anything about any of it.

It was impossible to believe that Adam had thought that the previous moment was the worst. This was the worst: being blindfolded and tied in the back of a car and knowing that the soft, gasping sound was Ronan Lynch choking for breath every time he waded back to consciousness. So much of Ronan was bravado, and there was none left. And Adam was nothing but a weapon to kill him faster.

His thoughts were a battlefield now, and Adam ran away into the blackness of the blindfold. It was a dangerous game, scrying when Cabeswater was so endangered, when everyone else would be too busy to notice if he also began to die in the backseat, but it was the only way he could survive being so close to Ronan’s pained gasps.

Maybe he wouldn’t find his way back to his corrupted body. Maybe he would be lost, like Persephone Persephone As soon as he thought her name, he realized that she was with him. He couldn’t tell how he knew, since he couldn’t see her. In fact, he couldn’t see anything. In fact, he found that he was once more intensely aware of the fabric of the blindfold against his eyes and the dull ache of his fingers braided and jammed against each other. Once more intensely aware of his physical reality; once more grounded inside his useless body. “You pushed me back here,” he accused. Ish, she replied. Mostly you let yourself get pushed.

Who did you make that deal with? “Cabeswater.” Who is using your hands? “The demon.” That is not the same thing.

You made your deal with Cabeswater, not with a demon. Even though they look the same and feel the same, they are not the same. “They feel the same.” They are not the same. The demon has no claim to you. You didn’t choose the demon. You chose Cabeswater. “I don’t know what to do,” Adam said. Yes, you do. You have to keep choosing it.

That does not make you a demon. You will be one of those gods without magic powers. What are they called? “I don’t think there is a word.” King. Probably. I am going to go now. “Persephone, please — I —” miss you.

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.

The demon was about unmaking and nothingness, and dreamers were about making and fullness.

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.

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

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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!”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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.

It was nearly human-shaped. It would fit well enough. Nothing was ever perfect. Make way for the Raven King.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.