Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(21)
Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it.
7:45 A.M.: THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY.
8: 00 A.M.: FEED ANIMALS.
9: 30 A.M.: REPAIR BARNS OR HOUSE.
12: 00 P.M.: LUNCH @ THAT WEIRD GAS STATION.
1: 30 P.M.: RONAN LYNCH’S MARVELOUS DREAM EMPORIUM.
What does this one mean, Ronan?
It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don’t succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game.
I don’t ask what you do at work, Declan.
6: 00 P.M.: DRIVE AROUND.
7:15 P.M.: NUKE SOME DINNER, YO.
7:30 P.M.: MOVIE TIME.
11:00 P.M.: TEXT PARRISH.
Adam’s most recent text said simply: $4200.
It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs.
*11:30 P.M.: GO TO BED.
*SATURDAY/SUNDAY: CHURCH/DC.
*MONDAY: LAUNDRY & GROCERY.
*TUESDAY: TEXT OR CALL GANSEY.
These last items on the list were in Declan’s handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how each week was the same, the routine announced. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything.
Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed.
Ronan texted back: why
He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-red wood shavings.
Gansey texted back: don’t make me get on a plane I’m currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon
With a sigh, Ronan took a photo of his elbow bent to make it look like a butt, texted it over, and got up. This late in the year, the mornings were dim, but he didn’t bother turning on the lights as he made himself breakfast and got his work supplies. He could navigate the farmhouse in pitch-black. His fingers knew the shape of the walls and his feet knew the creak of the floorboards and his nose knew the woodsmoke or long-ago lemon scents of the rooms, all of it memorized like a tune on an instrument. The house contained most of his childhood memories, which might have made it a miserable place for others. But for Ronan, the Barns had always felt like one of his few surviving family members.
If he was imprisoned by circumstance, he thought, at least there were worse places than the Barns.
Outside, the mist lay thick and sluggish across the burnished fields. Long purple shadows fell behind the multiple outbuildings, but the sun-sides of them were lit so bright he had to blink away. As he walked across the slanted fields, dew soaking his legs, he felt his mood lifting. Funny, Ronan thought, how sad an empty house felt and how preferable an empty landscape was.
As he picked his way, creatures that defied existence crept through the tall grass behind him, some more worrisome in proportion than others. He loved his odd menagerie: his stags and his fireflies, his morning monsters and his shadow birds, his pale mice and small furred dragons. Ethically, he wasn’t sure if they were allowed. If you could dream a life out of nothing, should you? On weekdays, he gave in to the impulse of adding to his strange herds. On weekends, he spent Mass regretfully apologizing to God for his hubris.
That morning, he was making his way to someone else’s dream creatures, however. His father’s handsomely colored cattle were permanent residents of the Barns, dew-covered mounds of chocolate, dun, black, gold, bone, chestnut, granite. Like all living dream things, they couldn’t stay awake without their dreamer, and so they had been sleeping since Niall died. It was a fate Ronan had to accept would eventually befall all his own creatures, too.
Suddenly, Ronan was enveloped in a rank-smelling charcoal cloud. Muscles coiled and shot him in the air before he realized what it was.
“Gasoline,” he snapped, angrier than he might have been because he knew he’d looked stupid, “you better not go far.”
Gasoline was a dream creature that was cooler in theory than in practice—an enormous, minivan-sized boar, with small, intelligent eyes and wiry, metallic hair. If it galloped on hard surfaces, sparks came up from its hooves. If it was surprised, it dissipated into a cloud of smoke. When it cried out, it sounded like a bird. It also had no genitalia. This didn’t seem like a memorable livestock feature, but once you noticed its absence, you couldn’t stop.
The foul-smelling smoke let out a distinctly avian trill before dissipating.
Ronan waved the rest of it away as he knelt beside one of his father’s sleeping cows, a delicate speckled gray speciman with one crooked horn. He patted her smooth, warm shoulder. “I’ve booked your flight. You get a window and an aisle.”
He unfolded a dream object he’d brought from the house—a blanket that appeared to be knit out of fall leaves, as large as a tablecloth—and spread it across her shoulders, standing on his toes to toss it over. He searched the edge until he found the hidden drawstring he remembered from the dream it had come from. It was tucked underneath in a way that hurt his logical mind to think about too hard, so he didn’t think. He just tugged it out and down, and watched the blanket tighten until he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore because its movement made no logical sense. It was best not to look straight at some of the dreamfuckery. There were a lot of folktales about wizards and seers going mad from magic, and it was true that some of the dreams felt more brain-breaking than others. The leaf blanket was one of them.