The Raven King (The Raven Boys #4)(95)

“Tell me to ask RoboBee to find your king,” Henry replied immediately.

But Gansey had only ever been in the business of ordering magic and never in the business of ordering people. It was not the Gansey way to command anyone to do anything. They asked, and hoped. Did unto others and silently hoped that they would do unto them.

They’d come here for him. They’d come here for him.

They’d come here for him.

“Please,” Gansey said. “Please help me.”

Henry tossed the bee into the air. “I thought you’d never ask.”





Gansey wasn’t sure how long they’d been walking when he finally found it.

In the end, this was how it looked: a raven-carved stone door and a dreamt bee crawling over the ivy. The tunnel behind them had led out of a house from Gansey’s unmagical youth, not a forest from Gansey’s extraordinary present. It was nothing as he had daydreamed it might look.

It felt exactly right.

He stood before the carving, feeling time slipping around him, him motionless in the rushing pool of it.

“Do you feel it?” he asked the others. Or is it only me?

Blue said, “Come closer with the torch.”

Henry had been hanging back, a newcomer to this search, waiting politely. Instead of crowding them, he handed her the torch. Blue held it close to the stone, illuminating the fine details. Unlike the previous tomb they’d found, which was carved with a likeness of a knight, this one was carved with ravens upon ravens. Ronan had kicked in the previous tomb they had discovered, but he touched this one carefully. Adam just looked at it in a distant way, his hands clasped together as if they were cold. Gansey reached for his phone to take the usual photo to document the search, remembered his phone was dead, and then wondered if there was any point to it if this was indeed Glendower’s tomb.

No. This moment was for him, not the general public.

He put his hand on the door, flat, fingers splayed, experimental. The easy rocking of it indicated that it would open easily.

“There’s no chance this guy is evil, is there?” Henry asked. “I’m really too young to die. Really, really too young.”

Gansey had been given enough time in seven years to contemplate every possible option for the king behind this door. He had read the accounts of Glendower’s life enough to know that Glendower could be either a hero or a villain depending on where you regarded him from. He had pulled Glendower’s daughter from her tomb and found that it had driven her mad. He had read legends that promised favours and legends that promised death. Some stories had Glendower alone; some stories had him surrounded by dozens of sleeping knights who woke with him.

Some stories – their story – had a demon in them.

“You can wait outside if you’re worried, Cheng,” Ronan said, but his bravado was thin as a spiderweb, and Henry brushed it away as easily as one.

Gansey said, “I can’t guarantee anything about what’s on the other side of this. We’re all in agreement that the favour is to kill the demon, right?”

They were.

Gansey pressed his hands to the death-cold stone. It shifted easily beneath the weight of him, some clever mechanism allowing the heavy stone to turn. Or perhaps no mechanism at all, Gansey thought. Perhaps some dreamstuff, some fanciful creation that didn’t have to follow the rules of physics.

The torch illuminated the interior of the tomb.

Gansey stepped inside.

The walls of Gwenllian’s tomb had been richly painted, birds upon birds chasing more birds, in reds and blues unfaded by light. Armour and swords hung on the walls, waiting for the sleeper to be woken. The coffin had been elevated and covered with an intricately carved lid featuring an effigy of Glendower. The entire tomb had been befitting royalty.

This tomb, on the other hand, was simply a room.

The ceiling was low and hewn into the rock: Gansey had to duck his head a little; Ronan had to duck his head a lot. The walls were bare rock. The torch beam found a broad, dark bowl sitting on the floor; there was a darker circle in the bottom of it. Gansey knew enough by now to recognize a scrying bowl. Blue swept the torch further. A square slab sat in the middle of the room; a knight in armour lay on top of it, uncovered and unburied. There was a sword by his left hand, a cup by his right.

It was Glendower.

Gansey had seen this moment.

Time slid more generously around him. He could feel it eddying around his ankles, weighting his legs. There was no noise. There was nothing to make noise, except for the five watchful teens in the room.

He did not feel particularly real.

“Gansey,” whispered Adam. The room swallowed the sound.

Blue’s torch pointed past the armoured figure to the floor beyond. It was a second body. They all exchanged a dark look before beginning to creep slowly towards it. Gansey was hyper-aware of the dry scrape of his footsteps, and as one, they all paused and looked back at the tomb door. In a normal world, it would be a simple thing to talk themselves out of the fear of the door slamming shut. But they hadn’t lived in a normal world for a long time.

Blue continued to illuminate the body with the torch. It was boots and bones and some sort of disintegrating garment of indeterminate colour. It was sprawled partially against the wall, skull propped up as if gazing at its own feet.

What am I doing? Gansey thought.