Page 2 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
Maura and Calla had known him before Blue had been born and both were thinking that Artemus was ever so much less than he had been then. Well, Maura thought ever so much less. Calla merely thought less, as she hadn’t had a very high opinion of him to begin with. But then, lanky men who appeared out of mystical groves had never been her type.
Jimi poured the whiskey.
Orla closed the doors to the reading room.
The women sat.
“What a cluster,” Calla said, by way of opening (she was not wrong).
“He can’t be saved, can he?” Jimi asked. She meant Gansey. She was a little misty-eyed. It was not that she was intensely fond of Gansey, but she was a very sentimental person, and the idea of any young man being cut down in his youth troubled her.
“Mm,” said Maura.
The women all took a drink. Artemus did not. He shot a nervous look at Gwenllian. Gwenllian, always imposing with a nest of towering hair full of pencils and flowers, glared back at him. The heat in her expression should have ignited any alcohol remaining in her shot glass.
Maura asked, “Do we need to stop it, then?”
Orla, the youngest and loudest in the room, laughed in a youthful and loud way. “How exactly would you stop him?”
“I said it, not him,” Maura replied, rather snottily. “I would not pretend to imagine I have any power to stop that boy from searching Virginia for his own grave. But the others.”
Calla put her glass down with force. “Oh, I could stop him. But that’s not the point. It’s everything already in place.”
(Everything already in place: the retired hit man currently sleeping with Maura; his supernatural-obsessed ex-boss currently sleeping in Boston; the creepy entity buried in rocks beneath the ley line; the unfamiliar creatures crawling out of a cave mouth behind an abandoned farmhouse; the ley line’s growing power; the magical sentient forest on the ley line; one boy’s bargain with the magical forest; one boy’s ability to dream things to life; one dead boy who refused to be laid to rest; one girl who supernaturally amplified 90 percent of the aforementioned list.)
The women took another drink.
“Should they keep going to that crazy forest?” Orla asked. She did not care for Cabeswater. She had gone with the group once before and had come close enough to the forest to … feel it. Her sort of clairvoyance was best over telephone lines or email; faces only got in the way of the truth. Cabeswater had no face, and the ley line was basically the world’s best telephone line. She had been able to feel it asking her for things. She couldn’t tell what they were, exactly. And she didn’t necessarily think they were bad things. She could just sense the enormity of its requests, the weight of its promises. Life-changing. Orla was just fine with her life, thanks very much, so she’d tipped her hat and gotten out of there.
“The forest is fine,” Artemus said.
All of the women looked at him.
“Describe ‘fine,’ ” Maura said.
“Cabeswater loves them.” Artemus folded his enormous hands in his lap and pointed his enormous nose at them. His gaze kept jerking back to Gwenllian, as if he feared she might leap at him. Gwenllian meaningfully snuffed one of the candles with her shot glass; the reading room got one tiny fire darker.
“Care to elaborate?” Calla asked.
Artemus did not.
Maura said, “We’ll take that opinion under advisement.”
The women took a drink.
“Is any of us in this room going to die?” Jimi asked. “Did anyone else we know appear at the church watch?”
“Doesn’t apply to any of us,” Maura said. The church watch generally only predicted the deaths of those who had been born in the town or directly on the spirit road (or, in Gansey’s case, reborn), and everyone currently at the table was an import.
“Applies to Blue, though,” Orla pointed out.
Maura aggressively stacked and restacked her cards. “But it’s not a guarantee of safety. There are fates worse than death.”
“Let’s shuffle, then,” said Jimi.
Each woman held her tarot deck to her heart, shuffled, and then selected a single card at random. They placed the cards faceup on the table.
Tarot is a very personal thing, and as such, the art on each deck reflected the woman who owned it. Maura’s was all dark lines and simple colors, at once perfunctory and childlike. Calla’s was lush and oversaturated, the cards overflowing with detail. Every card in Orla’s deck featured a couple kissing or making love, whether or not the card’s meaning was about kissing or making love. Gwenllian had fashioned her own by scratching dark, frantic symbols on a deck of ordinary playing cards. Jimi stuck by the Sacred Cats and Holy Women deck that she’d found in a thrift store in 1992.
All of the women had turned over five different versions of the Tower. Calla’s version of the Tower perhaps best depicted the card’s meaning: A castle labeled STABILITY was in the process of being struck by lightning, burning down, and being attacked by what looked like garter snakes. A woman in a window was experiencing the full effects of th
e lightning bolt. At the top of the tower, a man had been thrown from the ramparts — or possibly he had jumped. In any case, he was on fire as well, and a snake flew after him.
“So we’re all going to die unless we do something,” Calla said.
Gwenllian sang, “Owynus dei gratia Princeps Waliae, ha la la, Princeps Waliae, ha la la—”
With a whimper, Artemus made as if to stand. Maura placed a steadying hand on his.
“We’re all going to die,” Maura said. “At some point. Let’s not panic.”
Calla’s eyes were on Artemus. “Only one of us is panicking.”
Jimi passed around the whiskey bottle. “Time to find some solutions, darlings. How are we looking for them?”
All of the women looked at the dark scrying bowl. There was nothing inherently remarkable about it: it was an $11 glass display bowl from one of those stores full of cat food, mulch, and discount electronics. The cran-grape juice that filled it had no mystical powers. But still, there was something ominous about it, about how the fluid seemed a little restless. It reflected only the dark ceiling, but it looked like it wanted to show more. The scrying bowl contemplated possibilities, not all of them good.
(One of the possibilities: using the reflection to separate your soul from your body and ending up dead.)
Although Maura was the one who had brought the bowl out, she pushed it away now.
“Let’s do a whole-life reading,” Orla said. She popped her gum.
“Ugh, no,” Calla said.
“For all of us?” Maura asked, as if Calla hadn’t protested. “Our life as a group?”
Orla waved an arm to indicate all of the decks; her enormous wooden bangles clicked against each other with satisfaction.
“I like it,” Maura said. Calla and Jimi sighed.
Ordinarily, a reading used only a portion of the seventy-eight cards in a deck. Three, or ten. Maybe one or two more, if clarification was needed. Each card’s position asked a question: What is the state of your unconscious? What are you afraid of? What do you need? Each card placed in that position provided the answer.
Seventy-eight cards was a lot of Q&A.
Especially times five.
Calla and Jimi sighed again, but began to shuffle. Because it was true: They had a lot of questions. And they needed a lot of answers.
