Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

He should have been guarding his family, not the other way around. Instead he acted like a petulant kid. He made up the task of guarding the world, which meant nothing to him, instead of guarding his family, which meant everything to him.

The Fairy Market wasn’t his homeland. Declan was not Niall Lynch. Declan was nothing like his family. He was family-less.

(Matthew was dead. Dead for good. There would be no planning for school, no reason to make coffee in the morning, nothing stopping Declan from doing everything, nothing stopping Declan from doing nothing. Dead.)

What was the Fairy Market when you took away the courtly ritual and the art? It was just crime.

Of course there was violence around the Markets; any unregulated industry eventually gave way to violence, which is just another kind of order.

Before, one could go to the Market with, say, your ten-year-old son, if you were Niall Lynch, and pretend that it was simply a secret club for people who thought the legal world was a little stodgy.

He texted Jordan: you were the story I chose for myself

There was blood spattered on his hands and shoes. Not his.

He saw a figure holding a gun. He just had time to see that it was his mother, Mór Ó Corra. Then she shot him.

He needed to believe someone beyond him and Mór and the thing in the Forest had a plan, so that he didn’t have to have one.

“I want you to be happy. It makes me happy for you to be happy.”

“You really mean that, don’t you? You have so many feelings. Can I tell you something about me I’ve never told anyone else?” He kissed her cheek. Her eyes were wide open on him. “I don’t think I have any,” she said.

“No, truly, when you say that you’re happy for me, happy that I’m happy, you feel it, I can tell. You aren’t just saying that so I’ll do something for you; it really does something inside you.” Niall pushed himself up now, too. “I don’t understand, love—are you telling me you just say things because you think I want to hear you say them?” “Right, yes!” She seemed glad that he’d figured it out, rather than ashamed. “But you see, that’s what I thought you were doing, too, for a long time. I thought everyone was.

I’ve been pretending to be like others for a long time, but I don’t think I love things—I think I am interested in them.

“Let’s give the Forest what it wants,” she said, suddenly girlishly excited, “so it can give us what we want.” But now he didn’t even know if she was truly excited, or if she was being excited just for his benefit. He asked, “What do we want again?” “Everything,” she said. The Barns and Marie Lynch and Declan had been enough for Niall. But he could feel he was in danger of losing one of those things. He asked, “What does it want?” “Greywaren.” Why did it have a name already? Had it done this before? What did it mean if it had? He didn’t want to know any of the answers. But he loved her and he was afraid of losing her, so he said, “All right.”

“Good! She fucking should. ‘I was following orders’ isn’t many schools’ mottoes for a reason.”

Liliana said, “I am worried.” But what she meant was, I remember what it is like to be worried.

On a scale of one to reprehensible, just how bad is it to hope the situation will sort itself without us doing anything about it?”

Based upon everything Matthew had heard, he’d expected the first thing Bryde would want to do when freed from the assistance center was destroy some stuff, or steal some things, or maybe try some culty behavior on Matthew or at least some bystanders.

He and Matthew would be talking about something entirely different and then suddenly Bryde would break off and be all consciousness is a map to every place we have ever been and ever will be and yet no one here will consult it and thus is lost and Matthew would ask, “Have you ever read anything about clinical depression?”

“The whine in this place is unceasing—I wish I was dead. I wish I had never agreed to come.”

“Am I old or am I young? I don’t know if my memories are real, what real is anymore. Does it matter if I am not thousands of years old if I have been dreamt to be?” Matthew had pondered this, too, when he’d first found out he was dreamt, not that long ago. People liked him, they always had. Was that the way he was made? Or was it something he’d earned? In the end, did it matter? He told Bryde all this as Bryde made the tornado larger and larger on the scratch paper and the voice continued talking, and then Matthew finished, “Anyhow, loads of people have things that are just the way they are, like red hair and stuff, does that make sense?”

“You aren’t afraid of the voice. Of what it’s asking you to do?” “Is it asking me to do something?” “Yes.” “I didn’t get that at all.” Bryde said, “It will change you, if you let it. It will change you for good.”

Deep down, Farooq-Lane knew this was a spindly tree to bark up, but nonetheless, she could not stop moving, stop looking for an action item, stop searching for something to cross off a list or shoot in the face. If she didn’t, something terrible would happen inside her. She could feel it.

In a way, she thought, Ronan had been screaming since she’d met him. She just hadn’t been able to hear it, since she’d been screaming, too.

She had not been hugged as a child, unless the hug was being emotionally weaponized for later.

There was a strange sort of magic to being a person holding another person after not being held by someone for a long time. There was another strange sort of magic to understanding you’d been using words and silence the wrong way for a long time.

He looked once more like the dreamer she’d met, the one she’d thought might have all the answers. Her first true friend who didn’t share a face with her. She asked, “If I told you I was going to help you get out of this, Ronan Lynch, would you believe me?” “You’re one of the very few people I would.”

The Forest explained that their dreaming was like a request to the other place, the place where the Forest had its roots. That was where the ability to take dreams into the waking world came from.

And so they dreamt, the three of them all together—Mór, Niall, and the thing in the Forest. What did they dream? Greywaren. Like forest, it was just a name for something beyond understanding. It looked like a child, just a little younger than Declan.

Except that they were too bright, too precise, these eyes. They reminded Niall of the night before, when Mór had said she didn’t feel feelings the same way as anyone else. That seemed like a terrible idea, to give the thing in the Forest a shape that wouldn’t feel bad if its family died. So Niall’s contribution was feelings. Feelings, feelings, so many feelings, as many as he could think of, and all the ways one could possibly show them. He poured feelings into the kid in the dream, as big as he could think of, love and hate and fear and excitement.

This was a terrifying experience for all involved. All three of them felt sure this was the only time this had ever been done before. None of them thought for a moment they were part of a pattern, a cycle, of longing and manifesting and destruction, longing and manifesting and destruction. None of them wondered why the word Greywaren already existed before that night.

Inside this body was the thing that used to be the thing in the Forest. It seemed very, very important that it feel human. “No,” Niall corrected her, holding it tightly despite everything. Warmly, despite everything. It seemed very, very important that it feel loved, too. “Ronan.

Declan Lynch was alive. He was alive, but resenting it. He hurt in every way imaginable.

Someone had situated him on a striped sofa with a pillow and blanket, as if he had caught a cold, not a bullet.

“Hey, boyo, how are you feeling?” a soft voice said. Declan knew it so well, this voice, the cadence of it, the accent, the nickname. It provoked a different sort of pain.

The new Fenian said, “You should appreciate your mother did a fine job of shooting you. All soft tissue, not a bit of guts or stomach or liver, the things you really don’t want messed with. And the blood loss wasn’t bad, considering the size of the hole.

Normally, after a setback, he would have come up with another strategy, another coping mechanism, another life restructure that was just a little shittier than the one before.

He could not sit; he did not really want to. He wanted to go back into nothingness and never return.

The last time Declan had seen the new Fenian was while tracking down Mór Ó Corra, trying to find out if she felt any more like family than his actual family had.

It was quite something to watch you fire through the hotel. I did not think you were that sort of person.” “Is that why you saved me?” “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why I did. I am very interested in all of you. You. Your brothers. You are like a show I can’t stop watching.”

Mór said, “If they find out I have disobeyed, then it will be very painful for me. They’ll make me kill you again, for real, and take my time with it, if I want to keep the new Fenian. And of course you know who I’d choose between the two of you.” He looked at her to see if she’d meant for this statement to be hurtful. It did not seem so. It was just fact: You are not important to me. He is. Of course you know who I’d choose between the two of you. Declan refused to let this sting; it wasn’t new information. She’d been choosing a life without him for years.

“Are you upset about it? About how things are between us? You and me?” He hadn’t expected her to simply ask. Of course he was upset about it. He would never stop being upset about it. Why? Why? Why? He had been just a child. Mothers were meant to love unconditionally. Fathers were meant to know best. He’d been denied both.

He felt very ordinary and human in this world of dreams and dreamers.

“I don’t even know if I care enough to ask why.” “Ah, Declan,” the new Fenian said. “Telling yourself that won’t make caring hurt less.”

In the weeks and months after, both Niall and Mór did their best to keep calling the uncanny child by name, because the situation did not seem survivable if they could not begin to think of him as human.

That night, Mór whispered to Niall, “We should kill it before it’s too late.” “You’ll lose the power you have now,” he replied. “The power’s not worth it,” she said. “What we had before was enough.” Niall was filled with such a rush of relief.

Ronan was not just a manifestation of an ancient thing that used to be a forest. Ronan could also be either a weapon or a weapon-wielder.

Love had changed the situation. Niall didn’t yet love the strange, dangerous child, but he loved Declan, and Declan loved Ronan. So Ronan lived.

Mór loved Declan. But she could never love Ronan. She could never see Ronan as a boy. He was always it: the Greywaren.