Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy #1)

by Maggie Stiefvater

This is going to be a story about the Lynch brothers. There were three of them, and if you didn’t like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste. The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another. They were handsome devils, down to the last one. They looked after themselves. Their mother, Aurora, had died the way some dreams did, gruesomely, blamelessly, unexpectedly. Their father, Niall, had been killed or murdered, depending on how human you considered him. Were there other Lynches? It seemed unlikely. Lynches appeared to be very good at dying.

Because the Lynch brothers had been in danger for so much of their lives, they’d each developed methods of mitigating threats. Declan, the eldest, courted safety by being as dull as possible. He was very good at it. In all things—school, extracurriculars, dating—he invariably chose the dullest option. He had a real gift for it; some forms of boring suggest that the wearer, deep down inside, might actually be a person of whimsy and nuance, but Declan made certain to practice a form of boring that suggested that, deep down inside, there was an even more boring version of him. Declan was not invisible, because invisible had its own charm, its own mystery. He was simply dull. Technically he was a college student, a political intern, a twenty-one-year-old with his whole life ahead of him, but it was hard to remember that. It was hard to remember him at all.

Matthew, the youngest, floated in safety by being as kind as possible. He was sweet humored, pliable, and gentle. He liked things, and not in an ironic way. He laughed at puns. He swore like a greeting card. He looked kindly, too, growing from a cherubic, golden-haired child to an Adonic, golden-haired seventeen-year-old. All of this treacly, tousled goodness might have been insufferable had not Matthew also been an excruciatingly messy eat...

Ronan, the middle brother, defended his safety by being as frightening as possible. Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team. He dressed in funereal black and had a raven as a pet. He shaved his hair close to his skull and his back was inked with a clawed and toothed tattoo. He wore an acidic expression and said little. What words he did unsheathe turned out to be knives, glinting and edged and unpleasant to have stuck into you. He had blue eyes. People generally think blue eyes are pretty, but his were not. They were not cornflower,...

He’d dropped out of high school, which he didn’t regret, not exactly, and his friends had graduated. Two of them, Gansey and Blue, had invited him on their gap year cross-country road trip, but he hadn’t wanted to go anywhere then.

Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? Adam had asked the day he left.

Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.

He could feel his pulse thudding in his jaw. He could hear it in his ears. It sounded like everyone else’s heartbeat, he thought. Just like Adam’s heart when his head was resting on his chest. Ronan wasn’t that different. Well, he could seem not that different. He could move to follow the guy he loved, like anyone else. He could live in a city, like anyone else. It could work.

Magic. It’s a cheap word now. Put a quarter in the slot and get a magic trick for you and your friends. Most people don’t remember what it is. It is not cutting a person in half and pulling a rabbit out. It is not sliding a card from your sleeve. It’s not are you watching closely? If you’ve ever looked into a fire and been unable to look away, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the mountains and found you’re not breathing, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the moon and felt tears in your eyes, it’s that. It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning. It fucking hates us.

You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.

Ronan had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III’s bright orange ’73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn’t hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning, Ronan, sure that he wouldn’t find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons.

Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.

Ronan knew all the Harvard statistics. After Adam had been accepted, he’d spent evening after evening at the Barns pulling apart every detail and fact he could find about the school. Ronan had spent weeks with two Adams: one certain he had earned his place at an Ivy and one certain the school would soon discover how worthless he truly was. Ronan endured it with as much grace as he could manage. Who else did Adam have to crow to, after all? His mother was a disconnected wraith and if his father had gotten his way, Adam might have been dead before he’d graduated high school. So Ronan absorbed the data and the anxiety and the anticipation and tried not to think about how he and Adam were stepping onto differing paths. He tried not to think about all the shining, educated, straightforward faces in the brochures that Adam Parrish might fall in love with instead of him. Sometimes Ronan thought about what might have happened if he’d finished high school and gone off to college this fall, too. But that was as impossible as imagining an Adam who had dropped out of high school and stayed in Henrietta. They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.

Friends were serious business for Ronan Lynch. He was slow to acquire them, slower to lose them. The list was small, both because secrets made relationships complicated and because friends, for Ronan, were time-consuming. They got all of him. You could not, Ronan thought, give all of yourself away to many people, or there would be nothing left. So there was burnished Gansey, who might not have saved Ronan’s life in high school, but at the very least kept it mostly out of Ronan’s reach so that he could not take it down and break it. There was pocket-sized Blue Sargent, the psychic’s daughter, with her ferocious sense of right and wrong; they’d learned each other so slowly, peeling back layers and only truly figuring each other out just in time for high school to end. There was Adam, and there were Ronan’s brothers. That was it. Ronan could have had more casual friends, but he didn’t see the point.

The Adam he knew was a silent observer. A cataloguer of the human experience. A look don’t touch. The idea of him being something else, something Ronan didn’t know, felt as unsettling as realizing that Adam’s new friends weren’t awful. He and Adam had been making the same memories for so long that he’d forgotten that it didn’t always have to be like that. Adam was here having a new life, becoming a new person, growing from something beaten down into whoever he was meant to be. And Ronan was … Ronan. Still hidden away in the foothills of Virginia. Dropped out of school. Living in the place he’d been born. Keeping his head down so he could stay alive. Making the same memories he’d been making for months. Adam was changing. Ronan couldn’t.

Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had punched Adam Parrish’s father in front of the Parrish trailer. Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had been there when Adam Parrish’s father had beaten the hearing out of his left ear for good. Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had helped move Adam Parrish’s stuff into a shitty rented room so that he wouldn’t have to live with his parents ever again. Ronan felt as if he was blinking around in a dream. Everything subtly incorrect.

And like that, the fight was over. It had never been a fight between them, anyway. For Adam, it was what it always was: a fight between Adam and himself, between Adam and the world. For Ronan, it was what it always was, too: a fight between truth and compromise, between the black and white he saw and the reality everyone else experienced.

The heart was so foolish, she thought. Her head knew so much better.

She had changed since she’d left in the car. Her kinky hair was now pulled up in a ragged black topknot. She wore tinted glasses, a rabbit fur coat, a lace bralette white against her dark skin, and leather leggings that exposed a fish-scale tattoo on her lower calf. More pastel tattoos covered her knuckles, which were also smeared with paint. He still couldn’t tell how old she was. She could be twenty-five. She could be seventeen.

At first he walked nowhere, just one foot in front of the other, eyes on boots, boots on leaves, leaves from foreign trees that didn’t know him and didn’t care to.

“I’ll pay for it,” Ronan said. His father had left him some money, and he never touched it. What would he spend money on when he could dream anything he needed? Everything except a life here.

“This won’t work, Ronan,” Adam said. Ronan already knew this. He knew this because he knew it was late enough that he was supposed to be seeing one of the apartments and Declan hadn’t called him again. He knew that meant Declan had canceled the appointments. He knew it was over because Adam had signed a piece of paper saying Ronan wouldn’t visit him on campus. He knew that meant Ronan would return to waiting at the Barns for him. It felt like sadness was like radiation, like the amount of time between exposures was irrelevant, like you got a badge that eventually got filled up from a lifetime of it, and then it just killed you.

Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? No.

On weekdays, he gave in to the impulse of adding to his strange herds. On weekends, he spent Mass regretfully apologizing to God for his hubris.

Declan had been afraid of the idea of a Ronan who moved to Cambridge. Now he was afraid of a Ronan who couldn’t. There were, Declan thought, so many damn things to be afraid of.

“Ink on your skin means you’re hiding things,” he told Ronan. “That’s what breathing means,” Ronan replied.

“The will is in the cedar box in our bedroom closet,” she said into his hair. Declan closed his eyes. He whispered, “I hate him.” “My dauntless Declan,” Aurora said, and then she slid softly to the floor. The orphans Lynch.

The subject of the painting was a woman with golden hair pinned to bob around her chin and a particular, puerile way of standing, head and neck jutted forward, hands defiant on hips. She wore a diaphanous periwinkle-blue dress and had a man’s suit jacket across her shoulders, as if it had been offered against a chill. Her head was turned to stare at the viewer, but the meaning of her expression was difficult to discern because the hollows of her eyes were cast in deep, almost skull-like shadow. Every color in the painting was black or blue or brown or gray. The entire image was subtly imbued with desire in a way observers probably thought was good art but Declan understood was part of the dream object’s magic. It was signed in familiar handwriting. Niall Lynch.

We gave the world to them back before we knew any better. Already they were telling stories about us and we were believing them. The story was this: The trade-off for being a dreamer was emotional infirmity. We could dream, but we couldn’t stand being awake. We could dream, but we couldn’t smile. We could dream, but we were meant to die young. How they loved us still, despite our weaknesses, our unsuitedness to all things practical. And we believed them. A benevolent, wicked fairy tale, and we believed it. We couldn’t run the world. We couldn’t even run ourselves. We handed them the keys to the goddamn car.

“Thank God,” Declan said, retrieving his car keys. “You can if you like,” Matthew said. “But I dressed myself.” He shot a look at Ronan to make sure his joke had been funny.

On long car trips, Ronan and Matthew sometimes invented new geasa to pass the time. A hero who had to pet every dog he saw. Clap his hands every time he entered a church. Say exactly what he was thinking as he said it. Wear a gray suit every day.

It had been over a year since either had sat in a Latin class, but it lingered as their private language. It had been one of the languages spoken in Ronan’s dreams for a very long time, and so Latin had been one of the few classes Ronan had thrown himself into when they were at school. Adam couldn’t stand not to be the best at whichever class he was in, so he’d had to throw himself into it with just as much fervor. It was possible that no two students at Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of Latin (or, possibly, of each other).

Sorry, man, bluster’s all I got because I’m scared shitless and dying. Sad violins

“Those are from nightmares.” She had to lean to look. Crazed white scars traveled up his forearms, carved by a sizeable weapon. “Night horrors,” he said. “Claws like this.” He formed his fingers into talons, and then mimed them ripping him open, fingers skipping over the top of the leather bracelets that hid the worst of it and right up to his elbow. “Two days in the hospital.” He didn’t add anything sentimental like We’ll beat this thing or I’ve been there, you can trust me. He just withdrew his arms and smashed the whipped-cream smile on his waffles with the back of his fork. He said, “They all thought it was something easy as razor blades. And they couldn’t fucking understand even that.”

“You remind me,” Jordan said, “of a dog.” He tapped away at his phone. He had a peculiar way of texting—he used his thumb on one hand, his index finger on the other. Odd. Charming. Without looking up, he murmured, “Thank you very much. Right at the next light.”

walking. Hennessy saw only that the contact was labeled MANAGEMENT. “Who’s that?” “Adam,” Ronan said.

“Dangerous things can protect themselves,” Ronan said.

She had gone far away to someplace that was for either dreamers or dreams, not for someone like Declan.