Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)(2)

Ronan also sounded a little like dreamstuff, but it was not exactly the same as that of the dream creatures. He had an animalness to him, like Adam and the UPS man and the ladies who came and ate bread at the dining room table while pushing tarot cards around in circles and the man who once drove halfway down the driveway while Adam and Ronan were gone but then backed out and went away. Ronan was the only person Opal had ever known who had both animalness and the dreamstuff-fuzzy-noise. At first she thought this was just because she hadn’t met very many people, but later she realized this was part of the reason why Ronan was also a little bit of a secret. Opal would have thought the sound of his dreamstuff would have tipped people off, but no one except for Opal and Adam seemed to be able to hear it. Adam was all animalness, no dreamstuff, but he seemed nonetheless tuned in to it.

“I can feel the ley line still,” Adam had explained to the ladies with the bread when they had come over one night. Opal was playing a game called hide-her-hooves and she was winning it by standing in an empty flour crock that was positioned by the kitchen doorway. “I didn’t think I’d be able to, now that I’m not tied to the line anymore.”

“I was never tied to it,” one of the ladies had replied, “and I’ve always felt it.”

“But you’re a psychic.”

“Exactly.”

Adam had laid out his words as carefully as they’d put down their cards on the table. “Am I?”

“Of course,” one of the other ladies had said. “Did you think you’d lost everything when Cabeswater died?”

“Yes,” Adam had whispered, and Opal had felt a rush of love for him. She loved him the best when he was very sad or very serious or very happy. Something about his voice breaking filled her with feeling, and something about the vacancy of his expression when he was thinking hard felt like she was looking at a dream with nothing bad in it, and something about when Ronan made him laugh so hard that he couldn’t stop made her love him so hard that she felt sad because one day he would get old and die because that was what things with animalness did.

Sometimes Adam would come with her when she was picking through the barns and sheds, and together they would sort through garden rakes and rusted motors and ancient bags of cow feed. Opal was looking for treasures that were good to eat or good to look at, but Adam was looking for dreamstuff. Opal was at once fascinated and terrified of these hunts. She could not stop herself from poking through piles of junk, knowing she might encounter a dreamthing by accident. When she did, she reared back with a delicious thrill of fear motoring her heart. It was not that these things were dangerous, although sometimes they were — she had found a small, ever-smoldering fire underneath an old tractor in one of the barns, and had discovered the hard way that it was hot enough to burn if you squeezed it very tight. It was that that dreamy humming was too right. Too much like herself, somehow, too truthful, too big. It reminded her of both the dreams she had come from and the nightmares that had nearly killed Ronan. It reminded her of being nearly unmade, black unmaking dribbling from her ears.

But it called for her. The things in the long barn, especially, where Ronan made new dreamstuff. The humming of these projects called to her more persuasively than any of the things that his father had dreamt. She did not care for this double-edged fear-desire. Most of her wanted nothing to do with dreams, and she resented that other, much smaller part of her, the part that remembered where it came from and seemed to want everything to do with dreams.

Ronan had told her what he was working on in the long barn. He was making a new dreamplace like Cabeswater, like where she had come from, did she remember? Yes, she remembered the trees, the fearful trees, and she remembered the night horrors, and she remembered the black, bleeding ground.

“Not like it was at the end,” he had said crossly, as if it had been any better before its dying moments. He had always been dying in his dreams, or getting small pieces cut off him, or being pitted against faceless gunmen. Nuclear bombs exploded in his hands and fish broke through windows to ruin sofas and myriad bodies showed up in myriad driveways. Not all of his dreams were terrible, but that made them collectively worse, not better. Opal was never prepared for when things would go wrong. She just had to be afraid all the time.

Ronan said, “Oh, don’t make that face, runt. I’m not going to make you live there. Anyway, you might like it.”

She would not like it. She was not going to go there.

Ronan and Adam spent more time than she liked discussing this new Cabeswater. It was hard to be a dreamer without it, it seemed, because the old Cabeswater had focused Ronan’s dreams and had improved the control and power of the ley line, making sure that he dreamt what he meant to dream instead of something he called pointless nighttime navel-gazing. The ley line was the part that Adam was most interested in, causing him to use words that had edges to them like conduits and efficiency and analogs. Ronan was more interested in making it rain. He was very concerned with the concept of having an area in the new Cabeswater where it would always have that sort of rain that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time and also he was interested in having an area that did not suck. He seemed to regard this as his primary job, to dream of not sucking. Even though Opal thought Ronan was good at dreaming — after all, he had dreamt her, and she was excellent — he complained a lot about this.

“I can’t hold it all in my head at the same time,” he’d said once. “What I want it to be. I can’t make a new one without the old one to help me focus. What’s the phrase for that?”