Page 37 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
And yet he’d used it. While waiting for Declan to be done with Ronan, Adam had gone to Boyd’s to get a few oil changes out of the way. He’d been there a few hours when Ronan had called. Then Ronan had texted Gansey and called Fox Way. He said the same thing to each of them: Come to the Barns, he’d said. We need to talk.
And because Ronan had never really asked them to do anything by phone, they all dropped everything to go.
By the time Adam got to the Barns, the others had already arrived — or at least the Camaro was there, and Adam assumed Gansey would have brought Blue, especially now that their secret was out. Ronan’s BMW was parked sideways with the wheels jacked in a way that suggested it had slid into its current position. And to Adam’s astonishment, Declan’s Volvo was also parked there, backed into a spot, already ready to leave.
Adam got out.
The Barns had a strange effect on Adam. He had not known how to diagnose this feeling the first few times he had visited, because he had not truly believed in the two things that the Barns was made of: magic and love. Now that he had at least a passing acquaintance with both of those things, it affected him in a different way. He used to wonder what he would have looked like if he had grown up in a place like this. Now he thought about how, if he wanted it, he could one day live in a place like this. He did not quite understand what had changed.
Inside, he found the others in various states of celebration. It took Adam a moment to realize that this was Ronan’s birthday: The grill smoked out back and there were store-bought cupcakes on the kitchen table and a few inflated balloons rolling around the corners of the room. Blue was sitting on the tiles tying strings onto balloons, her bad eye squinted shut, while Gansey and Declan stood by the counter, heads lowered, talking in low, serious voices that made them seem older than they were. Ronan and Matthew jostled into the kitchen from the backyard. They were noisy and brotherly, horsing around, impossibly physical. Was this what it was to have brothers?
Ronan looked up and caught Adam’s eye.
“Take your shoes off before you go wandering around, shithead,” Ronan said.
Adam checked himself and leaned to untie his shoe.
“Not you — I meant Matthew.” Ronan held Adam’s gaze a moment longer and then watched Matthew chuck off his shoes. As he closely attended to Matthew skidding into the dining room on sock feet, Adam understood: This celebration was for Matthew’s benefit.
Blue clambered to her feet to join Adam. In a low voice, she explained, “Matthew is going to stay with Declan. He’s moving from Aglionby.”
The picture grew clearer: This was a going-away celebration.
Slowly, over the next hour, the story came out in fits and starts, delivered in fragments by each of the people there. The upshot was this: The Barns was changing hands by way of a bloodless revolution, the crown passing from father to middle son as the eldest son abdicated. And if Declan was to be believed, rival states slavered just on the other side of the border.
This was both a good-bye party and a war council.
Adam could not quite believe it; he didn’t know if he’d ever seen Ronan and Declan in the same space together without a fight. But it was true that these were the brothers as he hadn’t seen them before. Declan, relieved and exhausted; Ronan, intense and powerful with purpose and joy; Matthew, unchanging and ebullient like the happy dream that he was.
Something about all of this made Adam feel off-balance. He didn’t quite understand it. He would catch a whiff of boxwood from the open window in the kitchen, and it would make him think of scrying in Ronan’s car. He would catch sight of Orphan Girl hiding with Chainsaw beneath the dining room table with a box of tinker toys and once again remember the shock of discovering that Ronan dreamt Cabeswater. He had wandered into Ronan Lynch’s dream; Ronan had remade everything in this kingdom in the shape of his imagination.
“Why isn’t it in here?” Ronan’s voice came from the kitchen, exasperated.
Matthew rumbled in reply.
A moment later, Ronan hooked his fingers on the doorway of the dining room, looking out. “Parrish. Parrish. Would you see if you could find a damn roll of aluminum foil somewhere? Maybe in Matthew’s room.”
Adam didn’t quite remember where Matthew’s room was, but he was glad for the excuse to wander. As conversation continued in the kitchen, he made his way through the hallways and up hidden stairways into other half-hallways and to other half-staircases. Downstairs, Ronan said something and Matthew let out a howl of laughter so unholy that it must have been terrible. To Adam’s surprise, he heard Ronan laugh, too, a real thing, unself-conscious, kind.
He found himself in what must have been Niall and Aurora’s room. The light through the window splashed over the white bedspread, tender and drowsy. Come away o human child said a framed quote beside the bed. There was a framed photo above the dresser: Aurora, mouth open in a wide, surprised, guileless laugh, looking like Matthew. Niall grabbing her, smiling, sharp and handsome, his chin-length dark hair tucked behind his ears. His face was Ronan’s.
Adam stood looking at the photo for a long time, unsure of why it held him. It could have been surprise, he reasoned, because he had just assumed Aurora was a blank palette, mild and quiet as she was in Cabeswater. It should have occurred to him that she was capable of happiness and dynamism, for Ronan to have believed for so long that she was real, not a dream.
What was real?
But it was possible that what kept him was Niall Lynch, that older version of Ronan. The likeness was not perfect, of course, but it was close enough to see Ronan’s mannerisms in it. This ferocious, wild father; this wild, happy mother. Something inside Adam hurt.
He didn’t understand anything.
He found Ronan’s room. He knew it was Ronan’s room by its clutter and its whimsy; it was a brighter cousin to his room at Monmouth. Strange little objects were tucked into all of the corners and stuffed under the bed: a younger Ronan’s dreams, or maybe a father’s gifts. There were ordinary things as well — a skateboard, a tattered roller-board suitcase, a complicated-looking instrument that must have been bagpipes lying dustily in an open case. Adam lifted a shiny model car from the shelf and it began to play an eerie, lovely tune.
Adam had to sit.
He sat on the edge of the downy white bedspread, a square of pure white light splashed across his knees. He felt drunk. Everything in this house felt so certain of its identity, so sure of its place. So certain it was wanted. He still held the model car balanced on his knees, although it had fallen silent. It was not any particular sort of car — it was every-muscle-car-ever dreamt into a form that was no-muscle-car-ever — but it reminded Adam of the first thing he had ever bought himself. It was a hateful memory, the sort of memory he would sometimes skirt the edges of by accident as he was falling asleep, his thoughts rolling close to it and then recoiling, burned. He couldn’t remember how old he had been; his grandmother had sent him a card with ten dollars in it, back when his grandmother still sent cards. He had bought a model car with it, about this size, a Pontiac. He didn’t remember anything about where he had bought the model, or why that model, or even what the occasion for the card had been. All he remembered was lying on the floor of his bedroom, driving tire tracks into the carpet, and hearing his father say from the other room —
Adam’s thoughts rolled close to the memory and jerked back.
But he touched the hood of the dream model and remembered the moment anyway. The fearsome anticipation of recalling the memory was worse than the memory itself, because it would go on for as long as Adam resisted it. Sometimes it was better to just give in at once.
I regret the minute I squirted him into you, Adam’s father had said. He didn’t shout it. He wasn’t angry. It was just a fact.
Adam remembered the moment he realized him was Adam. He didn’t remember exactly what his mother had said afterward, only the sentiment of her reply — something like I didn’t imagine it this way, either or This isn’t what
I wanted. The only thing he remembered with precision was that car, and the word squirted.
Adam sighed. It was impossible how some memories never decayed. In the old days — maybe even a few months before — Adam would have recalled that memory again, and again, it playing on a miserable, obsessive loop in his head. Once he had given in, he wouldn’t have known how to stop. But now, at least, he could merely feel its sting once and then put it away for some other day. He was ever so slowly moving himself out of that trailer.
A floorboard cracked; knuckles tapped once on the open door. Adam looked up to see Niall Lynch standing in the doorway. No, it was Ronan, face lit bright on one side, in stark shadow on the other, looking powerful and at ease with his thumbs tucked in the pockets of his jeans, leather bracelets looped over his wrist, feet bare.
He wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress. When he held out his hand, Adam put the model into it.
“This old thing,” Ronan said. He turned the front tire, and again the music played out of it. They sat like that for a few minutes, as Ronan examined the car and turned each wheel to play a different tune. Adam watched how intently Ronan studied the seams, his eyelashes low over his light eyes. Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam.
Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain traveling across the vast dry field toward him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him.
That was this kiss.
They kissed again. Adam felt it in more than his lips.
Ronan sat back, his eyes closed, swallowing. Adam watched his chest rise and fall, his eyebrows furrow. He felt as bright and dreamy and imaginary as the light through the window.
He did not understand anything.
