He’d left Gansey still sleeping – his phone clutched in a hand and his wireframes folded in slumber a few inches away on the mattress – and crept down the stairs with his raven pressed against his chest to keep her quiet. Outside, overgrown grass lapped dew on Ronan’s boots, and mist curled around the tyres of the charcoal BMW. The sky over Monmouth Manufacturing was the colour of a muddy lake. It was cold, but Ronan’s gasoline heart was firing. He settled into the car, letting it become his skin. The night air was still coiled beneath the seats and lurking in the door pockets; he shivered as he tethered his raven to the seat belt fastener in the passenger seat. Not the fanciest setup, but effective for keeping a corvid from flapping around one’s sports car. Chainsaw bit him, but not as hard as the early morning cold.
“Hand me my jacket, turd?” he told the bird. She just pecked experimentally at the window controls, so he got it himself. His Aglionby jacket was back there, too, hopelessly crumpled beneath the language puzzle box, a dream object that translated several languages, including an imaginary one, into English. When was he going to school again? Ever? He thought he might officially quit tomorrow. This week. Next week. What was stopping him? Gansey. Declan. His father’s memory.
It was a twenty-five-minute drive to Singer’s Falls even at this hour of the morning, but it was still well before dawn when he passed through the nonexistent town and finally arrived at the Barns. Briars and branches and trees closed around the car as it tunneled down the half-mile drive. Carved out of wooded foothills, accessible only by the winding drive through the tangled forest, the property was alive with the sounds of the surrounding messy Virginia woods: oak leaves stuttering against each other, coyotes or deer crunching through the undergrowth, dry grass whispering, owls querying owls, everything breathing and shifting out of sight. It was too cold for fireflies, but a multitude of them glistened in and out of being above the fields nonetheless.
Those were his. Fanciful, purposeless, but lovely.
Ronan Lynch loved to dream about light.
There had been a time when the Barns was Ronan’s entire ecosystem. The Lynches rarely left it when he was young, because they didn’t need to, because it was a lot of work, because Niall Lynch didn’t trust many people to take care of it in their absence.
It was better to meet friends at their houses, their mother, Aurora, explained, because Dad had a lot of breakable things around the farm.
One of the breakable things: Aurora Lynch. Golden-haired Aurora was the obvious queen of a place like the Barns, a gentle and joyous ruler of a peaceful and secret country. She was a patron of her sons’ fanciful arts (although Declan, the eldest, was rarely fanciful), and she was a tireless playmate in her sons’ games of make-believe (although Declan, the eldest, was rarely playful). She loved Niall, of course – everyone loved larger-than-life Niall, the braggart poet, the musician king – but unlike everyone else, she preferred him in his silent moods. She loved the truth, and it was difficult to love both the truth and Niall Lynch when the latter was speaking.
She was the only person who he could not dazzle, and he loved her for it.
It was not until many years later that Ronan learned that the king had dreamt up his queen. But in retrospect, it made sense. His father loved to dream of light, too.
Inside the farmhouse, Ronan switched on a few lamps to push the darkness outside. A few minutes’ search turned up a bucket of alphabet blocks, which he overturned for Chainsaw to sort through. Then he put on one of his father’s Bothy Band records, and as the fiddle and pipes crackled and fuzzed through the narrow hallways, he wiped dust off the shelves and repaired a broken cabinet hinge in the kitchen. As the morning sun finally spilled golden into the protected glen, he continued the process of restaining the worn wood staircase up to his parents’ old room.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
He forgot how to exhale when he wasn’t at home.
Time kept its own clock here. A day at Aglionby was a smash-cut slideshow of images that didn’t matter and conversations that didn’t stick. But the same day, spent at the Barns, proceeded with lazy aplomb, full of four times as many things. Reading in the window seat, old movies in the living room, lazy repairing of a slamming barn door. Hours took as long as they needed.
Slowly his memories of before – everything this place had been to him when it had held the entire Lynch family – were being overlapped with memories and hopes of after – every minute that the Barns had been his, all of the time he’d spent here alone or with Adam, dreaming and scheming.
Home, home, home.
It was time to sleep. To dream. Ronan had a specific object he was trying to create, and he wasn’t stupid enough to think he’d be able to get it on the first try.
Rules for dreams, intoned Jonah Milo.
Ronan was in English class. Milo, the English teacher, stood before a glowing Smart Board, dressed in plaid. His fingers were a metronome on the board, clicking with his words: Rules for dreamers. Rules for the dreamt.
Cabeswater? Ronan asked the classroom. Hatred glazed his thoughts. He would never forget the smell of this place: rubber and industrial cleaner, mildew and cafeteria teriyaki.
Mr Lynch, do you have something you want to share?
Sure: I’m not staying in this goddamn class a second longer —
No one’s keeping you here, Mr Lynch. Aglionby is a choice. Milo looked disappointed. Let’s focus. Rules for dreams. Read it out loud, Mr Lynch.