Page 51 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
Blue ran her fingers over an exposed beech root next to her leg. Yes, she knew.
Artemus spread more roots for his story: “There were enough trees that could hold us in Wales. But as the years went by, Wales turned from a place of forests to a place of fires and plows and boats and houses; it became a place for all the things that trees could be except for alive.”
The roots were dug in; he began on the trunk. “The amae vias were failing. The tir e e’lintes can only exist in trees near them, but we feed the amae vias too. We are oce iteres. Like the sky, and the water. Mirrors.”
Despite the heat, Blue put her arms around herself, as chilled as she would have been by Noah’s presence.
Artemus looked wistfully at the beech tree, or at something past it, something older. “A forest of tir e e’lintes is something, indeed, mirrors pointed to mirrors pointed to mirrors, the amae vias churning up below us, dreams held between us.”
Blue asked, “What about one of them? What is one of them?”
He regarded his hands ruefully. “Tired.” He regarded hers. “Other.”
“And the demon?”
But this was skipping ahead. He shook his head, backed up.
“Owain was not like common men,” he said. “He could speak to the birds. He could speak to us. He wanted his country to be a wild place of magic, a place of dreams and songs, crossed by powerful amae vias. So we fought for him. We all lost everything. He lost everything.”
“All of his family died,” Blue said. “I heard.”
Artemus nodded. “It is dangerous to spill blood on an ama via. Even a little can plant dark things.”
Blue’s eyes widened. “A demon.”
His eyebrows tipped much further along toward the sad side of things. His face was a portrait called Worry. “Wales was unmade. We were unmade. The tir e e’lintes who were left were to hide Owain Glyndwr until a time when he could rise again. We were to hide him for a time. To slow him as we are slow in trees. But there were not enough places of power left on the Welsh amae vias after the demon’s work. And so we fled here; we died here. It is a hard journey.”
“How did you meet my mother?”
“She came to the spirit road intending to communicate with trees, and that is what she did.”
Blue started, then stopped, then started again. “Am I human?”
“Maura is human.” He did not say and so am I. He was not a wizard, a human who could be in trees. He was something else.
“Tell me,” Artemus whispered, “when you dream, do you dream of the stars?”
It was too much: the demon, Ronan’s grief, the fact of the trees. To her surprise, a tear welled in her eye and escaped; another was queued up behind it.
Artemus watched it fall from her chin, and then he said, “All of the tir e e’lintes are full of potential, always moving, always restless, always looking for possibilities to reach out and be somewhere else, be something else. This tree, that tree, that forest, that forest. But more than anything, we love the stars.” He cast his eyes up, as if he could see them during the day. “If only we could reach them, maybe we could be them. Any one of them could be our skin-house.”
Blue sighed.
Artemus looked at his own hands again; they always seemed to make him anxious. “This form is not the easiest for us. I long — I just want to go back to a forest on the spirit road. But the demon unmakes it.”
“How do we get rid of it?”
Very reluctantly, Artemus said, “Someone must willingly die on the corpse road.”
Darkness descended so rapidly on Blue’s thoughts that she reached to balance herself on the beech tree. She saw Gansey’s spirit walking the ley line in her mind. She remembered abruptly that Adam and Gansey were within earshot; she had completely forgotten that it was not just Artemus and her.
“Is there another way?” she asked.
Artemus’s voice was quieter still. “Willing death to pay for unwilling death. That’s the way.”
There was silence, and then more silence, and finally, Gansey asked, his voice raised from next to the house, “What about waking Glendower and using that favor?”
But Artemus did not reply. She had missed the moment of him going: He was in the tree and the puzzle box sat askew in the roots. Blue was left holding this terrible truth and nothing else, not even a scrap of heroism.
“Please come back!” she said.
But there was only the stirring of dried leaves overhead.
“Well,” Adam said, his voice as tired as Artemus’s. “That’s that.”
Night fell; that, at least, could still be relied upon.
Adam opened the driver’s-side door to the BMW. Ronan had not moved a bit since they had seen him last; he was still looking down the road, feet on the pedals, hands resting on the steering wheel. Ready to go. Waiting for Gansey. It was not grief; it was a safer, more vacant place beyond it. Adam told Ronan, “You can’t sleep here.”
“No,” Ronan agreed.
Adam stood in the dark street, shivering in the cold, stepping from foot to foot, looking for any evidence that Ronan might budge. It was late. Adam had called Boyd an hour ago to tell him that he would not be getting to the Chevelle with the exhaust leak he’d promised he would look at. Even if he could have forced himself awake — Adam could nearly always accomplish this — he wouldn’t have been able to stand working in the garage knowing that Cabeswater was under attack, Laumonier was conspiring, and Ronan was mourning.
“Are you going to come inside and at least eat something?”
“No,” Ronan said.
He was impossible and terrible.
Adam shut the door and lightly pounded his fist three times on the roof. Then he went to the other side of the car, opened the door, made sure Noah wasn’t in there, and climbed in.
As Ronan watched him, he fumbled around with the seat controls until he found the one that made it recline all the way, and then he clawed for Ronan’s Aglionby jacket. Both it and the Orphan Girl were hopelessly balled up among the other things in the backseat — the Orphan Girl snuffled and pushed the jacket toward his hand. He wadded it beneath his neck as a pillow, draping the sleeve over his eyes to block out the streetlight.
“Wake me up if you have to,” he said, and closed his eyes.
Inside 300 Fox Way, Blue watched Gansey let himself be convinced to stay there instead of returning to Monmouth for the night. Even though there were now plenty of empty beds in the house, he took the couch, accepting just a quilt and a pillow with a light pink pillowcase. His eyes weren’t closed by the time she went upstairs and put herself to bed in her own room. Everything felt too quiet inside the house, with everyone gone, and too loud outside the house, with everything menacing.
She did not sleep. She thought of her father becoming one with a tree, and she thought about Gansey sitting in the Camaro with his head ducked, and she thought about the whispered voice of the dark sleeper she’d encountered in the cave. Things felt like they were spooling to the end.
Sleep, she told herself.
Gansey slept in a room a dozen feet below her. It should not have mattered — it did not matter. But she could not stop thinking of the nearness of him, the impossibility of him. The promise of his death.
She was dreaming. It was dark. Her eyes didn’t get used to it; her heart did. There was no light to speak of. It was so completely dark that eyes were unimportant. Now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she had eyes. This was a strange idea. What did she have?
Cool damp at her feet. No. Her roots. Stars pressing down above her, so close that they could surely be reachable if only she grew a few more inches. A warm, vital skin of bark.
This was the shape of her soul. This was what she had been missing. This was how she felt in her human skin, tree-shaped feelings in a human body. What a slow, stretching joy.
Jane?
Gansey was there. He must have been there all along, because now that she thought about it, she couldn’
t stop sensing him there. She was something more; he was still human. He was a king stolen away into this tree by the tir e e’lint that was Blue. She was all around him. The joy from her previous revelation overlapped slowly onto this joy. He was still alive, she had him with her, she was as close to him as she could possibly be.
Where are we?
We’re a tree. I’m a tree. You’re — haha I can’t say that. It would be filthy.
Are you laughing?
Yes, because I’m happy.
Slowly, her joy tapered, though, as she felt his rapid pulse against her. He was afraid.
What are you afraid of?
I don’t want to die.
This felt true, but it was hard to put together thoughts with any speed. This tree was just as ill-fitted to her essential Blueness as her human body. She remained half one, half the other.
Can you see if Ronan has come in from the car?
I can try. I don’t really have eyes.
She stretched out with all of the senses available to her. They were ever so much better than her human ones, but they were interested in very different things. It was exceptionally difficult to focus on the affairs of the humans around the base of the trunk. She had not properly appreciated how much effort it had taken the trees to attend to their needs before now.
I don’t know. She held him tightly, loving him and keeping him. We could just stay here.
I love you, Blue, but I know what I have to do. I don’t want to. But I know what I have to do.
All of the sounds and smells of Fox Way were magnified after dark, when all of its human occupants were quiet. All of the fragrant teas and candles and spices became more distinct, each declaring their origin, when in daytime they mingled into something Gansey had only previously identified as Fox Way. Now it struck him as something both powerful and homey, secret and knowing. This house was a place of magic, same as Cabeswater, but one had to listen harder for it. Gansey lay on the couch with a quilt over him, his eyes closed against the dark, and listened to the rattle of air or breath through a vent somewhere, to the scratch of leaves or nails against a window somewhere, to the thump of popping wood or footsteps from the other room.
