Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)(8)

It was maybe this, along with the humming of the dream things, that made her whisper, “Ori! Si ori!”

She had not spoken the dream language and expected an answer for a very long time.

But the dream in the box responded. The thunder muttered and the rain hissed, and the entire rain shower lifted from the box. It rained into the box from one foot above it, then two, then four. Then Opal lifted her hands and didn’t say anything more in the dream language, just seized the rain and balled it up because she thought it would work.

It did; the rain wadded up like it was sticky, collecting into a dark clump that looked like a thunderhead.

She laughed and tossed it up in the air and caught it. When the clump bounced against the ceiling, it belched a burst of lightning that never left the cloud. She caught it with a little bump of happiness and sadness, and then she dropped it back into the bin. After a pause, she ripped off a tiny bit of the feathery wad and tucked it away in her sweater. It was okay to steal a little, she thought, because most of it was still left, and no one would know because she was not going to tell anyone she had broken the rule of coming in here. She was not going to smash the things in here. She was going to leave it like she found it.

“Be rain, okay?” she whispered to it. The cloud dissolved back into Ronan’s happy and sad rain, and she slapped the lid back on it. It had been so long since she had toyed with any dreamthings.

Opal clapped her hands and spun around, hooves scuffing in the dirt, and then she called out to the other dreamthings in the long barn.

Paper flapped to her like birds and she pinched their wings until they caught fire and then she pinched the fire until it became paper again. She smashed lightbulbs onto the ground and swept the shards into loaves of bread and then she tore the loaves open and pulled unbroken lightbulbs out of the middle. She floated on books and sang until dreamthings sang back to her. She played and she played with all of these dreamthings, knowing how to make them all do strange things, because she was an excellent dreamthing herself, and she had forgotten how wonderful a dream with nothing bad in it was.

Later Adam found her sitting at the edge of the forest. Above them the sun had slipped down behind trees and left behind knife-pink clouds. He sat beside her and together they looked out over the Barns. The fields were dotted with Ronan’s father’s sleeping cattle and Ronan’s wakeful ones. The metal roofs sparkled with newness, all of them replaced by Ronan’s new industry.

“Do you think you’re ready to tell me where all the dishes are now?” he asked.

She had handfuls of grass in each palm, but no matter what she did to them, they stayed grass. This was what it meant to be in the animal world. Rules were rules. She felt pretty wobbly, like all of the fear that she hadn’t felt in the long barn while she was playing had caught up to her.

“I’m coming back,” he said.

She tore up some more grass, but she felt a little less wobbly having heard him say it.

“I don’t want to go, but I do — does that make sense?” he asked her. It did, especially if she thought about how some of her dreamthing’s happy-sadness might have rubbed off on him because they were sitting so close. “It’s just that it’s finally starting. You know. Life.”

She leaned against him and he leaned against her, and he said, “God, what a year.” He said it with such human feeling that Opal’s love for him overwhelmed her, and so she finally gave in and took him to where she’d buried all the dishes.

“This is a big hole,” he said, as they gazed into it. It was. It was big enough to bury a trespasser or a dinnerware set for twelve. “You know, I used to think you were going to get bigger. But I think you’re full grown, aren’t you? This is the way you are.”

“Yes,” Opal said, in English.

“Sometimes the way you are is a real pain,” he added, but she could tell he said it fondly.

It felt like it was going to be okay.



But it was not okay.

The first thing that went wrong was the cloud lady.

Opal had not been to the bench in several days because Adam and Ronan had both been home and she didn’t want to waste any minutes when they were home. But then Adam went to I can’t believe he can’t just do the job himself fine I’ll be back and Ronan started working on the computer in a boring way so Opal went roaming.

It was the wrong time of day for the cloud lady, far too late, but Opal went there anyway, because she missed watching her. By the time she thrashed through the trees to the bench, the air was dim and the creek was all-black, no-white, and it sounded louder than it did during the day. The grass all looked gray and black and the moss also looked gray and black and the bench also looked gray and black. The only thing that was not gray and black was beside the bench on the ground. It was white and cloudy.

When Opal realized that it was the cloud lady, she cried out in the dream language before she could help herself. It was just that the image in front of her was so wrong that it felt like a nightmare.

But it was not a nightmare, it was the animal world.

Opal hesitated on the other side of the bank for several long minutes, waiting to see if the cloud lady would stop being a white blob beside the bench, reminding herself that she was a secret and had to remain a secret.

But the cloud lady remained a white blob. Opal stomped her hooves and then growled a little and finally leapt over the creek. She crept slowly to the cloud lady but she knew right away that she did not have to worry about being quiet. There was no animalness to the cloud lady anymore. There was only a little bit of a bad smell and a box of crackers collapsed beside her. Opal checked it for crackers, but they had all been eaten, though she didn’t know if the cloud lady had eaten them or squirrels had.