“Anyway, I’m here because I was actually the first one he told about his idea for Raven Day. He called me one evening, I guess it would’ve been when he was fourteen, and he told me he’d had this dream about ravens fighting and battling. He said they were all different colours and sizes and shapes, and he was inside them, and they were, like, swirling around him.” She motioned around herself in a whirlwind; she had Noah’s hands, Noah’s elbows. “And he told me, ‘I think it would be a cool art project.’ And I told him, ‘I’ll bet if everybody at the school made one, I bet you’d have enough.’ ”
Gansey was aware that his arm hairs were standing up.
“So they’re swooping and careening and there’s nothing but ravens, nothing but dreams all around you,” Adele said, only Gansey wasn’t sure if she had actually said it, or if he’d heard her wrong and he was just half-remembering something she’d already said. “Anyway, I know he’d like what it is like nowadays. So, um, thanks for remembering one of his crazy dreams.”
She was walking off the stage; Adam was covering one of his eyes with a hand; there was the dutiful double clap that Aglionby students were asked to perform in lieu of unruly applause.
“Let’s go, ravens!” Child said.
This was Adam and Gansey’s cue to open the doors. Students poured out. Humidity and light poured in. Headmaster Child joined them in the doorway.
He shook Gansey’s hand, then Adam’s. “Thanks for your service, gentlemen. Mr Gansey, I didn’t think your mother could put together this fund-raiser and a guest list by this weekend, but we’re pretty much there. She has my vote for running the country.”
He and Gansey exchanged the sort of coMr adely smile that comes from having signed legal paperwork together. It would have been a fine moment if it had ended there, but Child lingered, making polite chitchat with Gansey and Adam – his best and his brightest, respectively. For seven excruciating minutes, they mined the weather, Thanksgiving break plans, and shared experiences in Colonial Williamsburg, and then, finally, exhausted, they parted ways as the juniors appeared with their raven warriors.
“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, panting a bit from the effort.
“I thought he would never leave,” Adam said. He touched the bottom of his left eyelid, squinting it shut, before looking past Gansey. “If – ah. I’ll be right back. I think I have something in my eye.”
He left Gansey; Gansey set himself free on Raven Day. He found himself at the foot of the stairs where students were receiving ravens. The flock was composed of paper and aluminium foil and wood and papier-maché and brass. Some birds floated with helium balloon bellies. Some glided. Some teetered on multiple supports, with separate rods to control flapping wings.
Noah had done this. Noah had dreamt this.
“I’m flipping you a bird,” said a junior, handing him a dull black raven made of newspaper tacked to a wooden frame.
Gansey stepped off into the crowd. Noah’s crowd. In a better world, Noah would have been giving that tenth-anniversary introduction.
At eye level, the landscape was all sticks and arms and white T-shirts, the mechanics and gears. But if one squinted into the too-bright sky, the sticks and the students vanished and the expanse was filled with ravens. They swooped and attacked, plunged and lifted, flapped and spun.
It was very hot.
Gansey felt time slip. Just a little. It was just that this sight was so oddly like something from his other life, his real life; these birds were cousins to Ronan’s dream things. It seemed unfair that Noah should have died and Gansey had not. Noah had been living when he was murdered. Gansey had been marking time.
“What are the rules of this battle again?” he asked over his shoulder.
“No rules in war except stay alive.”
Gansey turned; wings flapped past his face. He was hemmed in by shoulders and backs. He could not tell who had spoken, or even, now, without a face to look at, if someone had.
Time tugged at his soul.
The Aglionby orchestra began to play. The very first measure was a harmonious thicket of sound, but one of the brass instruments got the first note on the next phrase very wrong. At the same moment, an insect buzzed past Gansey’s face, close enough that he could feel it. Suddenly, everything went slanting sideways. The sun overhead burned white. Ravens flapped around Gansey as he turned, looking for Adam or Child or anything that wasn’t just a white shirt, a hand, a bird flapping. His eyes snagged on his own wrist. His watch said 6:21.
It had been hot when he died.
He was in a forest of wooden sticks, of birds. The brass instruments muttered; the flutes screamed. Wings buzzed and hummed and shivered around him. He could feel the hornets in his ears.
They aren’t there
But that big insect whirred by him again, circling.
It had been years since Malory had been forced to stop halfway through a hike to wait as Gansey fell to his knees, hands over his ears, shivering, dying.
He had worked hard to walk away from that.
They aren’t there. You are at Raven Day. You are going to eat sandwiches after this. You are going to jump-start the Camaro in the parking lot after school. You are going to drive to 300 Fox Way. You will tell Blue about your day you will