Page 38 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
It was a long moment before Ronan opened his eyes, and when he did, his expression was complicated. He stood up. He was still looking at Adam, and Adam was looking back, but neither said anything. Probably Ronan wanted something from him, but Adam didn’t know what to say. He was a magician, Persephone had said, and his magic was making connections between disparate things. Only now he was too full of white, fuzzy light to make any sort of logical connections. He knew that of all the options in the world, Ronan Lynch was the most difficult version of any of them. He knew that Ronan was not a thing to be experimented with. He knew his mouth still felt warm. He knew he had started his entire time at Aglionby certain that all he wanted to do was get as far away from this state and everything in it as possible.
He was pretty sure he had just been Ronan’s first kiss.
“I’m gonna go downstairs,” Ronan said.
There was a story Niall had once told Ronan that he couldn’t quite remember but always liked. It was something about a boy — who sounded an awful lot like Ronan, as the boys often did in Niall’s stories — and about an old man — who sounded an awful lot like Niall, as the men often did in Niall’s stories. The old man might have been a wizard, actually, and the boy might have been his apprentice, though Ronan may have conflated it with a movie he’d seen once. In the story, there’d been a magical salmon who would confer happiness on the person who ate it. Or perhaps it was wisdom, not happiness. In any case, the old man had been too lazy or busy or on a business trip to spend the time trying to catch the salmon, and so he had set the boy on catching it for him. When the boy caught it, he was to cook it and bring it to the old man. The boy did as he was told, since he was just as clever as the old wizard, but as he’d cooked up the salmon, he’d burned himself. Before he thought about it, he put his burned finger in his mouth and thus got the salmon’s magic for himself.
Ronan felt that he had caught happiness without meaning to.
He could do anything.
“Ronan, bro, what are you doing up there?” Declan called. “Dinner’s done!”
Ronan was on the roof of one of the small equipment sheds. It was as high as he could get on short notice without wings. He didn’t lower his arms. Fireflies and baubles and his dream flower were glowing and swirling all around him, and they kept sweeping by his vision as he gazed up at the pink-streaked sky.
After a moment, the roof groaned, and Declan groaned, and then his older brother pulled himself up beside Ronan. He stood looking not at the sky but at the things floating around his younger brother.
He sighed. “You sure have done a lot with the place.” He reached out to catch one of the fireflies. “Jesus Mary, Ronan, there’s not even any bug here.”
Ronan lowered his arms and looked at the light Declan had snagged. He shrugged.
Declan released the light back into the air. It floated right in front of him, illuminating the sharp Lynch features, the knot of worry between his eyebrows, the press of disappointment to his mouth.
“It wants to go with you,” Ronan said.
“I can’t take a glowing ball with me.”
“Here,” Ronan said. “Wait.”
He shifted his weight to remove something from his pocket and proffered it to Declan in the palm of his hand. It looked like a crude heavy-duty metal washer, about an inch and a half across, a steampunk paperweight from a strange machine.
“You’re right, that’s much less likely to stick out,” Declan said wryly.
Ronan delivered a sharp tap to the object, and a small cloud of fiery orbs sprayed up with a sparkling hiss.
“Jesus, Ronan!” Declan jerked his chin away.
“Please. Did you think I’d blow your face off?”
He demonstrated it again, that quick tap, that burst of brilliant orbs. He tipped it into Declan’s hand, and before Declan could say anything, jabbed it to activate it once more.
Orbs gasped up into the air. For a moment, he saw how his brother was caught inside them, watching them soar furiously around his face, each gold sun firing gold and white, and when he saw the spacious longing in Declan’s face, he realized how much Declan had missed by growing up neither dreamer nor dreamt. This had never been his home. The Lynches had never tried to make it Declan’s home.
“Declan?” Ronan asked.
Declan’s face cleared. “This is the most useful thing you’ve ever dreamt. You should name it.”
“I have. ORBMASTER. All caps.”
“Technically you’re the orbmaster, though, right? And that’s just an orb.”
“Anyone who holds it becomes an ORBMASTER. You’re an ORBMASTER right now. There, keep it, put it in your pocket. D.C. ORBMASTER.”
Declan reached out and scuffed Ronan’s shaved head. “You’re such a little asshole.”
The last time they’d stood on this roof together, their parents had both been alive, and the cattle in these fields had been slowly grazing, and the world had been a smaller place. That time was gone, but for once, it was all right.
The brothers both looked back over the place that had made them, and then they climbed down from the roof together.
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Neeve Mullen.
Neeve had the sort of career that most psychics longed to have. Part of this was because she had a very easily monetized variety of clairvoyance: She was good with specific numbers, specific letters, pulling telephone numbers out of people’s wallets, birthdays out of people’s heads, accurately pinpointing the times of future events. And part of this was because she was single-mindedly ambitious. Nothing was ever enough. Her career was a glass that never seemed to ge
t full. She started with a phone line, and then published some books, landed herself a television gig that came on very early in the morning. She had respect within the community.
But.
Outside of the community, she was always going to be just a psychic. These days, this century, even the very best psychic had the nose-wrinkled stigma of a witch and none of the awe.
Neeve could put her hands on the future and the past and other worlds, and nobody cared. And so she’d done the spells and dreamt the dreams and asked her spirit guides for a path. Tell me how to become powerful in a way people can’t ignore.
Henrietta, whispered one of her guides. Her television screen stuck on weather maps of Virginia. She dreamt of the ley line. Her half sister called. “Come to Henrietta and help me!” Mirrors showed her a future with all eyes on her. The universe was pointing the way.
And here she was in a blackened forest with Piper Greenmantle and a demon.
Neeve should have guessed that her fixation with power would bring her to an opportunity to bargain with a demon, but she hadn’t. She wasn’t 100 percent on ethics, but she was no idiot: She knew there was no happy ending to such a bargain. So this was a dead end. Probably literally.
Morale was low.
Piper, on the other hand, remained enthusiastic. She had replaced her tattered rags with a perfect sky-blue dress with pumps to match; she was a shock of color in an increasingly colorless landscape. She told Neeve, “No one wants to buy a luxury item from a hobo.”
“What are you selling?” Neeve asked.
“The demon,” Piper replied.
Neeve wasn’t sure if it was a failure of imagination or psychic perception on her part, but she hadn’t anticipated this either. A rush of bad feeling accompanied Piper’s answer. Neeve attempted to articulate it. “It seems to me that the demon is tied in with this geographical location and exists for a specific purpose, i.e., in this case unmaking all energy artifacts associated with this place, and so it seems unlikely to me that you would be able to move it without considerable har—”
