The Raven Boys

He’d been in a small fixed-wing plane with Malory the first time that he’d seen the Uffington Horse, a three-hundred-foot horse scraped into the side of an English chalk hill. Like everything associated with the ley lines, the horse was not quite … ordinary. The horse was stretched and stylized, an elegant, eerie silhouette that was more suggestion of a horse than actual horse.

"Tell her about Nazca," murmured Adam.

"Oh, right," Gansey said. Even though Blue had read much of the journal, there was a lot that wasn’t in it, and unlike Ronan and Adam and Noah, she hadn’t lived this life for the past year. It was suddenly difficult not to be excited by the idea of explaining it all to her. The story always sounded more plausible when he laid all of the facts out at once.

He continued, "In Peru, there are hundreds of lines cut into the ground in the shapes of things like birds and monkeys and men and imaginary creatures. Thousands of years old, but they only make sense from the air. From an airplane. They’re too big to see from the ground. When you’re standing next to them, they just look like scraped footpaths."

"You’ve seen them in person," Blue said.

When Gansey had seen the Nazca Lines for himself, massive and strange and symmetrical, he’d known that he wouldn’t be able to give up until he found Glendower. The scale of the lines was what had struck him first — hundreds upon hundreds of feet of curious drawings in the middle of the desert. He’d been stunned by the precision. The drawings were mathematical in their perfection, faultless in their symmetry. And the last thing to hit him, right in his gut, was the emotional impact, a mysterious, raw ache that wouldn’t go away. Gansey felt like he couldn’t survive not knowing if the lines meant something.

That was the only part of his hunt for Glendower that he could never seem to explain to people.

"Gansey," Adam said. "What’s that, there?"

The helicopter slowed as all four passengers craned their necks. By now, they were deep into the mountains, and the ground had risen to meet them. All around them were rippling flanks of mysterious green forests, a rolling dark sea from above. Among the slopes and gullies, however, was a slanting, green-carpeted field marked by a pale fracture of lines.

"Does it make a shape?" he asked. "Helen, stop. Stop!"

"Do you think this is a bicycle?" demanded Helen, but the helicopter’s forward progress stopped.

"Look," Adam said. "There’s a wing, there. And there, a beak. A bird?"

"No," Ronan said, voice cold and even. "Not just a bird. It’s a raven."

Slowly the form became clear to Gansey, emerging from the overgrown grass: a bird, yes, neck twisted backward and wings pressed as if in a book. Tail feathers splayed and claws simplified.

Ronan was right. Even stylized, the dome of the head, the generous curve of the beak, and the ruffle of feathers on its neck made the bird unmistakably a raven.

His skin prickled.

"Put the helicopter down," Gansey said immediately.

Helen replied, "I can’t land on private property."

He cast an entreating gaze at his sister. He needed to write down the GPS coordinates. He needed to take a photo for his records. He needed to sketch the shape of it in his journal. More than anything, he needed to touch the lines of the bird and make it real in his head. "Helen, two seconds."

Her return look was knowing; it was the sort of condescending look that might have caused arguments when he was younger and more easily riled. "If the landowner discovers me there and decides to press charges, I could lose my license."

"Two seconds. You saw. There’s no one around here for miles and miles, no houses."

Helen’s gaze was very level. "I’m supposed to be at Mom and Dad’s in two hours."

"Two seconds."

Finally, she rolled her eyes and sat back in her seat. Shaking her head, she turned back toward the controls.

"Thank you, Helen," Adam said.

"Two seconds," she repeated grimly. "If you aren’t done by then, I’m taking off without you."

The helicopter landed fifteen feet away from the strange raven’s heart.

Chapter 23

As soon as the helicopter had touched down, Gansey leapt from the cabin and strode into the thigh-high grass as if he owned the place, Ronan by his side. Through the open door of the helo, Blue heard him say Noah’s name to the phone before repeating the GPS coordinates for the field. He was energized and powerful, a king in his castle.

Blue, on the other hand, was a little slower. For a multitude of reasons, her legs felt a little gelled after flying. She wasn’t sure if not telling Gansey the entire truth about St. Mark’s Eve was the right decision, and she was worried about Ronan trying to speak to her again.

It smelled wonderful in the middle of this field, though — all grass and trees and, somewhere, water, and lots of it. Blue thought she might live here quite happily. Beside her, Adam shielded his eyes. He looked at home here, his hair the same colorless brown as the tips of old grass, and he looked more handsome than Blue remembered. She thought about how Adam had taken her hand earlier, and considered how much she’d like for him to do it again.

With some surprise, Adam said, "Those lines are pretty invisible from here." He was right, of course. Though Blue had just seen the raven as they touched down beside it, whatever geographical feature had made the shape was now completely hidden. "I still hate flying. Sorry about Ronan."

"The flying part wasn’t bad," Blue said. Actually, aside from Ronan, she had kind of liked it — the sense of floating in a very noisy bubble where all directions were possible. "I thought it would be worse. You sort of have to give up control, don’t you, and then it’s okay. Now, Ronan …"

"He’s a pit bull," Adam said.

"I know some really nice pit bulls." One of the dogs Blue walked each week was a cow-printed pit bull with as nice a smile as you could hope for in a canine.

"He’s the kind of pit that makes the evening news. Gansey’s trying to retrain him."

"How noble."

"It makes him feel better about being Gansey."

Blue didn’t doubt it. "Sometimes he’s very condescending."

Adam looked at the ground. "He doesn’t mean to be. It’s all that blue blood in his veins."

He was about to say something else when a shout interrupted him.