“Why are you telling me this now?” Ronan asked finally.
“I got word that something big is about to go down here in Henrietta,” Declan said.
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Where did this word come from?”
Declan looked at him heavily.
“How did they know to call you?”
Declan replied, “Did you really think Dad kept track of this stuff on his own?”
Ronan had, but he didn’t say anything.
“Why do you even think I was in D.C.?”
Ronan had thought Declan was there to get into politics, but that was so clearly not the correct answer that he kept his mouth shut.
“Matthew, put your earbuds in,” Declan said.
“I don’t have them with me.”
“Pretend you have your earbuds in,” Ronan said. He turned on the radio for a little background cover.
“I want you to give me a straight answer,” Declan said. “Are you even thinking about going to college?”
“No.” It was satisfying and terrible to say it out loud, a trigger pulled, the explosion over within a second. Ronan looked around for bodies.
Declan swayed; the bullet had clearly at least grazed him near a vital organ. With effort, he got the arterial spray under control. “Yeah. I figured. So the endgame is making this a career for you, isn’t it?”
This was not, in fact, what Ronan wanted. Although he wanted to be free to dream, and free to live at the Barns, he did not want to dream in order to be able to live at the Barns. He wanted to be left alone to repair all of the buildings, to raise his father’s cattle from their supernatural sleep, to populate the fields with new animals to be eaten and sold, and to turn the very rearmost field into a giant mudslick suitable for driving cars around in circles. This, to Ronan, represented a romantic ideal that he would do much to achieve. He wasn’t sure how to tell his brother this in a persuasive, unembarrassing way, though, so he said, in an unfriendly way, “I was actually thinkin’ of being a farmer.”
“Ronan, for fuck’s sake,” Declan said. “Can we have a serious conversation for once?”
Ronan flipped him the bird with swift proficiency.
“Whatever,” Declan said. “So it might not feel like Henrietta’s hot now, but that’s only because I’ve been working my ass off to keep them out of town. I’ve been handling Dad’s sales for a while, so I told everyone I was handling them from D.C.”
“If Dad wasn’t dreaming you new stuff, what were you selling?”
“You’ve seen the Barns. It’s just a question of parceling out the old stuff slowly enough that it seems like I’m getting it from other sources instead of just going into the backyard. That’s why Dad travelled all the time, to keep up the ruse that it came from all over.”
“If Dad wasn’t dreaming you new stuff, why were you selling?”
Declan ran his hand around the steering wheel. “Dad dug us all a grave. He promised people stuff he hadn’t even dreamt yet. He made deals with people who didn’t always care about paying and who knew where we lived. He pretended he’d found this artefact – the Greywaren – that let people take shit out of dreams. Yeah. Sound familiar? When people came to him to buy it, he foisted something else on them instead. It became legendary. Then, of course he had to play them off each other and tease that psychopath Greenmantle and end up dead. So here we are.”
Earlier this year, this sort of statement would’ve been enough to instigate a fight, but now the bitter misery in Declan’s voice outweighed the anger. Ronan could step back to weigh these statements against what he knew of his father. He could weigh it against what he knew of Declan.
He didn’t like it. He believed it, but he didn’t like it. It had been easier to merely fight with Declan.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
Declan closed his eyes. “I tried.”
“The hell you did.”
“I tried to tell you he wasn’t who you thought.”
But that wasn’t exactly true. Niall Lynch was exactly what Ronan had thought, but he was also this thing Declan had known. The two versions were not mutually exclusive. “I meant, why didn’t you tell me you were up against all these people?”
Declan opened his eyes. They were brilliantly blue, same as all the Lynch brothers’. “I was trying to protect you, you little pissant.”
“Well, it would’ve been a fuckton easier if I’d known more,” Ronan snapped back. “Instead Adam and I had to run Greenmantle out on our own, while you played cloak and daggers.”
His brother eyed him appraisingly. “That was you? How – oh.”
Ronan enjoyed a full minute of his brother’s appreciation.