The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(84)

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 towards 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 Glynd?r 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 favour?”

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.