Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Farooq-Lane said it was a nightmare, not a promise, Hennessy thought, her thoughts loud as a shout in Ronan’s head. Don’t be only human just now, Ronan Lynch.

Adam looked at the future swimming hole site with his cool-eyed gaze. Ronan believed it could be done, and that was all that mattered. Ronan made reality, either through dreaming or stubbornness, both good and bad.

It was a hot and inviting Virginia summer. They took road trips into the mountains. They made out in every room in the farmhouse. They tried to fix Adam’s car. They sorted through the old dreams in the outbuildings. They burned food in the kitchen. They dug the swimming hole and it was a disaster so they dug it again, and then they taught Ronan’s little hooved dream Opal to swim, and they took turns using a ragged pair of dreamt wings to hover over the swimming hole and drop themselves in again and again.

He intended for this forest to tell him how to exist in the future as a dreamer. He intended for this forest to be able to survive without him. He intended for this forest to want him. (It was about Adam, of course.)

Magic is about intention. So are conversations.

Neither Ronan nor Adam had been trained in the difficult and nuanced art of having a future. They had only ever learned the art of surviving the past.

favorite line

You are made of dreams, he thought, and this world is not for you. The Barns’s stark fields already looked like winter. Paradise, paradise, why would he ever leave?

occupants of this world, seething and destroying, taking and dying, leaving everything just a little shittier in their wake.

The fire had to go out. It could not devour the rest of the world, it could not churn over the surface, ending everything, no matter how miserable Ronan was over Adam’s ruined, empty body;

The ones who had never reached through the sweetmetal sea to manifest on the other side, the ones who had only wistfully looked out through the sweetmetals and felt homesick for a place they’d never been. Greywaren snarled to them, “Don’t you want them to live?” A handful of onlookers rushed forward to help him carry the fire.

“I thought—” Jordan began. “Shh,” Hennessy interrupted, pulling back. “Shit’s about to get real touching and I worked too hard to not get the satisfaction of seeing it go down.”

Slowly, Ronan Lynch sputtered to movement, trying to sit up even before his body was fully willing, scrambling, his voice disbelieving: “Adam?” Adam, who had been sitting quietly all this time beside Ronan, grinned weakly as Ronan seized him around the neck in a crushing, desperate hug.

Hennessy and Jordan watched the two of them kneeling in the grass, just clinging to each other. It was an enormous, extraordinary moment, surrounded by mundane, ordinary things.

There was a time when it would have made Hennessy feel bad to see how gratefully Ronan’s face was pressed into Adam’s neck. To see how Adam’s face just wore a raw relief, a peace, as he held on to Ronan, his eyes open and gazing up into the blue sky. To see Ronan finally say something into his ear and Adam close his eyes and sigh.

Now she said, “When I look at moments like this, two men in love, reunited against all odds, their feelings so pure, their commitment so deep that they’ll literally cross space-time for each other, all I can really think is: I can’t believe how these two blokes will owe Jordan Hennessy for the rest of their fucking lives.”

For a moment, Hennessy hadn’t known if she’d managed to recover enough of Adam for him to be … right. But then he’d woozily come to and immediately looked for Ronan, so she’d known she’d pulled it off.

He stood, reaching a hand out to help Adam up. “I got more than I thought I would. It’s going to have to be enough.”

When he finally woke up for good, he realized he had been happy here, before everything went wrong.

He’d told himself his father was hateful, his mother invisible, the Barns dreadful, the dreaming frightful. It had been the only way to bear losing it all. Declan Lynch had become such a liar.

The door opened again to reveal first Adam, and then Jordan. “Pozzi,” she said, and Declan smiled at her with all his teeth, with all his body, hiding his grin from no one.

He sat down directly in the middle of the drive with his hand tenderly over his wounded side and, for the first time since Niall had died, he cried. Jordan sat next to him and said nothing so he did not have to cry alone.

After a space, a host of strange animals came out of the woods and sobbed with him, to keep him company. When he was finally done crying, Ronan drove to the end of the driveway to collect Declan’s spent body and take him and Jordan back to the farmhouse. “I miss them, too,” Ronan said.

In walked the youngest Lynch, nearly unrecognizable. His hair was cut short and uneven, and his cheeks were gaunt. His clothing and shoes were very dirty. “I walked,” he said simply. His brothers fell upon him.

On the seventh day, the Lynch brothers discovered they were friends once more.

Richard Campbell Gansey III, Ronan’s oldest friend, was in the country for the wedding, and so was Blue Sargent. They had just graduated from the same sociology program with two very different concentrations. Both of them were very excited to talk about what they had studied to anyone who would listen, but no one except for each other was very excited to hear about it. Something something trenches something something artifacts something something secret doors something something trees something something primary sources.

Henry Cheng and his mother, Seondeok, were there.

The last feud had involved two continents, seven countries, and a crate with contents too valuable for insurance, and had required international courts, a tense game of polo, and a divorce to bring it to a close.

Calla, Maura, and Gwenllian, the psychics of 300 Fox Way, who had helped guide Ronan through high school, were there. They had been made to swear left and right not to bring business to the proceedings and to keep any premonitions to themselves, but this demand had only made them insufferable. They kept pointing at people, whispering to each other, and getting fits of the giggles. Calla had been asked to officiate the wedding, as she was the only one responsible enough to have gotten the paperwork filed in time, but even she gave in with a mighty snort-laugh during the ceremony in the pasture behind the house.

Matthew was there, of course, although he’d had to postpone leaving for his summer internship for it. He had an unpaid internship on a sweet potato farm in North Carolina. It was unclear what he was supposed to be learning there, but h...

Jordan had refused to get married until she sold a painting for five figures, and she said it didn’t count if it was Declan’s name on the check.

He traveled so much for it that neither he nor Ronan kept a permanent address, but rather continuously rejoined here and there. Ronan had a way of having doors opened to him (usually with dreamers on the other side of them), and Adam had a way of getting those doors paid for on the corporate credit card. And they always had the Barns, of course; it would always be there in the end.

Ronan and his friend Gansey stood on the back porch, leaning on the railing, watching the psychics giggling as they placed the flowers for the ceremony. Every so often, Ronan threw a cheese cube stolen from a snack tray at Chainsaw, whose claw marks scarred the railing.

“You want one of these?” Gansey asked. He gestured with his chin to indicate it. The all of it. The wedding. “Yeah,” said Ronan. “I think so.” “Well, that’s a relief,” Gansey said. “How do you figure?” “I asked Adam and he said the same thing.”

I will never recover from this

They watched Matthew and Henry struggle with a table holding refreshments. Why they were carrying it was hard to say, but they seemed intent.

After a moment, Gansey nodded to himself, and then he reached over to fist-bump Ronan. It felt like a language of a faraway country. “Let’s go celebrate your brother not marrying an Ashley. Oh!”

He pointed; a hawk swooped down low from the sky, talons spread. It was a gorgeous creature, shaggy and fierce. Something about it gave the impression of age. Ronan stretched out his hand as if to call it down to him as he would Chainsaw, but the hawk tilted upward sharply. In only a moment, it was just a speck in the clouds, and then it was gone.

Neither Jordan nor Declan were amused by Ronan’s and Hennessy’s gifts to them: two matching swords, one with the words vexed to nightmare on the hilt and the other with the words from chaos.

“Something old, something new, something borrowed, something that can cut through walls,” Hennessy said.

And finally, after nearly everyone had gone to bed, Ronan and Adam lay on their backs on one of the roofs and watched the stars get brighter. Without taking his eyes off the sky, Ronan reached out his hand to Adam to offer him something. It was a ring. Without taking his eyes off the sky, Adam took it and put it on. They sighed. The stars moved overhead. The world felt enormous, both past and future, with their slender present hovering in the middle. It was all very good.