Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)(4)
“You might change your mind,” Ronan said.
She shook her head even more.
“You know, your head’s going to fall right off and it’ll be only your fault.”
This made Opal’s heart run even farther away before she remembered that in animal world rules, her head could not fall right off.
“It’s only going to get more boring. We’re not always going to be around, especially by the end of the year,” Ronan added. “Don’t just stare at me. You know what, go outside and dig a hole or something. And stay out of the long barn.”
She was not going into the long barn. And she was not going to change her mind. And it was not always boring at the Barns.
In fact, there was one day where it was very not boring.
Ronan and Adam were both gone in Ronan’s car, and a lady who Opal had not seen before came to the house. She was dark-haired and pale-skinned with furious light blue eyes that Opal at first thought were all white except for the pupil. Ronan was not there to tell Opal it was all right for this visitor to see her, so Opal hid herself and watched the lady stalk through the mist to the back door. The lady tried the doorknob and the doorknob shook its head no, but then she opened her purse and did something else to the doorknob and the door said yes and opened for her.
The lady stepped inside and Opal hurried to follow her. She could not go as fast as she liked because hooves were noisy on the wood floor, so she had to drop to her hands and knees to crawl. To her surprise, once she was close, she could feel that this lady had dreamstuff in her. She was not all dreamstuff — in fact, she seemed to be very little dreamstuff. She was mostly animalness. This was the first person Opal had met beside Ronan who shared both.
The lady took her time journeying through the halls, looking at photographs on the walls and opening drawers. She lingered at the computer where Ronan had been doing much of his work those days when he was not driving his car in big muddy circles in the flat rear field. The lady clicked the mouse several times and then paged through the notebook filled with his handwriting that he used as a mouse pad. Opal did not know what it said because she had not learned to read and was not interested, but the lady seemed very interested. She took her time with it before moving to the next room.
Opal was filled with the anxiety that came from feeling she was meant to be preventing the lady from looking, but also with the anxiety that she was not meant to be seen. She wished Ronan and Adam would come back, but they did not come back. The lady went to Aurora’s room where Opal was not allowed to eat anything, and she opened all the drawers and looked in all the boxes. To Opal’s relief, the lady did not eat anything, but she did sit on the edge of the bed and look at the framed portrait of Ronan’s father and mother for a long time. Her face did not seem to have an expression on it, but eventually, she told the portrait, “Damn you.” That was a swear that Opal was also not supposed to say (but sometimes did, over and over again, to the sleeping cows, at a whisper, to see if the shock would wake them). Then the lady left the farmhouse and began to explore the garage and the other outbuildings.
As she got close to the long barn, Opal’s anxiety growled higher and higher. Ronan was not home to stop this lady from touching or taking or eating whatever he had made in the long barn, and even if Opal was strong enough to stop her, Opal was meant to be secret. The lady strode through the damp field grass to the long barn, humming with her own dreamstuff, and Opal fretfully pulled handfuls of grass from the ground, warring with herself. She whispered for Ronan or Adam to return, but neither did.
For the first time, Opal was furious to be in the animal world instead of the dream world. In dreams, Ronan was always getting into trouble, and even though he often died, equally as often Opal saved him because she was an excellent dreamthing and a psychopomp (which is the proper name for an excellent dreamthing). As a psychopomp, she could sometimes make the dream into something else, or convince Cabeswater to intervene on Ronan’s behalf. Even if the bad dream was too intense for Opal to change it, she could still often rescue Ronan from harm by making things in the dreams do things they wouldn’t have thought to do on their own. She could make a rock into a snake and throw it at a monster or she could make a sword out of some dirt or she could build Ronan’s sadness into a raft when he was drowning in quicksand. There were no rules in dreams so you could try anything.
But the animal world was full of rules, and all of them were rules that made things smaller and more expected. Opal had no power here.
The lady tried to convince the doorknob of the long barn to say yes to her, but it did not agree with her as easily as the farmhouse door. Ronan had designed a dream object on the other side of it to make the door say no to as many people as possible, no matter what they might have in their purse. But this lady was both dreamstuff and animalness, just like he was, and Opal didn’t know if that meant she might be able to get in eventually.
If only this were a dream, she could tug the edge of the field and shake it out like a blanket. She could scream the lady blind. She could clap her hands until a hole appeared for her to fall in.
But rules.
But wait.
With sudden inspiration, Opal realized she did have a way of shifting Ronan’s dreams in this animal world. She ran up into the woods and she fetched all of Ronan’s stags and does and badgers and foxes, all of them humming and singing like the ley line to Opal’s ears, and then she herded them down through the fields. They galloped and pranced and careened down to the long barn. They were not easy to steer. When they lost their path, Opal had to bite at the larger animals’ heels and kick at the foxes and rabbits. They all made a terrible commotion. The lady looked up in time to see that she was going to be killed — Opal did not mean to kill her, of course, although on the way she had realized that it was a possibility and if it did happen, she had already decided where to bury her so that wildflowers would cover the hole. With a stiff, unpracticed run, the lady vaulted back to the driveway and slammed the car door behind her just in time for the smaller animals to hurl themselves over her hood and disperse.