The Raven Boys

"ARE YOU LISTENING, GLENDOWER? I AM COMING TO FIND YOU!" Gansey’s voice, ebullient and ringing, echoed off the tree-covered slopes around the field. Adam and Blue found him standing in the middle of a clear, pale path, his arms stretched out and his head tilted back as he shouted into the air. Adam’s mouth made the soundless shape of a laugh.

Gansey grinned at them both. He was hard to resist in this form: glowing with rows and rows of white teeth, a college brochure in the making.

"Oyster shells," he said, leaning to pick up one of the pale objects that made up the path. The fragment was pure white, the edges blunt and worn. "That’s what makes up the raven. Like they use for roads down in the tidewater area. Oyster shells on bare rock. What do you think of that?"

"I think that’s a lot of oyster shells to bring from the coast," Adam replied. "I also think Glendower would’ve come from the coast, too."

Gansey pointed at Adam by way of a reply.

Blue put her hands on her hips. "So you think they put Glendower’s body on a boat in Wales, sailed over to Virginia, then brought him up to the mountains. Why?"

"Energy," Gansey replied. Rummaging in his bag, he removed a small black box that looked a lot like a very small car battery.

Blue asked, "What’s that? It looks expensive."

He twiddled with switches on the side as he explained, "An electromagnetic-frequency meter. It monitors energy levels. Some people use them for ghost hunting. It’s supposed to have a high reading when you’re near a spirit. But it’s also supposed to read high when you’re near an energy source. Like a ley line."

She scowled at the gadget. A box to register magic seemed to insult both the box holder and magic. "And of course you have an electromagnorific button thing. Everyone has one of them."

Gansey held the meter above his head as if he were calling aliens. "You find it not normal?"

She could tell that he very much wanted her to say that he wasn’t normal, so she replied, "Oh, I’m sure it’s quite normal in some circles."

He looked a little hurt, but most of his attention was on the meter, which showed two faint red lights. He remarked, "I’d like to be in those circles. So, like I said, energy. One of the other names for the ley line is corpse —"

"Corpse road," Blue interrupted. "I know."

He looked pleased and magnanimous, as if she were a prize pupil. "So school me. You probably know better than I."

As before, his accent was the broad, glorious old Virginia accent, and Blue’s words felt clumsy beside him.

"I just know that the dead travel in straight lines," she said. "That they used to carry corpses in straight lines to churches to bury them. Along what you call the ley line. It was supposed to be really bad to take them any other route than the way they’d choose to travel as a spirit."

"Right," he said. "So it stands to reason there’s something about the line that fortifies or protects a corpse. The soul. The … animus. The quiddity of it."

"Gansey, seriously," Adam interrupted, to Blue’s relief. "Nobody knows what quiddity is."

"The whatness, Adam. Whatever it is that makes a person what they are. If they removed Glendower from the corpse road, I think the magic that keeps him asleep would be disrupted."

She said, "Basically, you mean he would die for good if he was removed from the line."

"Yes," Gansey said. The blinking lights on his machine had begun to flash more heavily, leading them over the raven’s beak and toward the tree line where Ronan already stood. Blue lifted her arms up so the heads of the grass wouldn’t hit the backs of her hands; it was up to her waist in some places.

She asked, "And why not just leave him in Wales? Isn’t that where they want him to wake up and be a hero?"

"It was an uprising, and he was a traitor to the English crown," Gansey said. The easy way that he began the story, at once striding through grass and eyeing the EMF reader, let Blue know that he had told it many times before. "Glendower fought the English for years, and it was ugly, all struggle between noble families with mixed allegiances. The Welsh resistance failed. Glendower disappeared. If the English had known where he was, dead or alive, there’s no way they’d treat his body the way the Welsh wanted it treated. Haven’t you heard of being hung, drawn, and quartered?"

Blue asked, "Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?"

Gansey cast a glance over to Ronan, who was a small, indistinct form by the trees. Adam audibly swallowed a laugh.

"Depends on if Ronan is sober," Gansey answered.

Adam asked, "What is he doing, anyway?"

"Peeing."

"Trust Lynch to deface a place like this five minutes after getting here."

"Deface? Marking his territory."

"He must own more of Virginia than your father, then."

"I don’t think he’s ever used an indoor toilet, now that I consider it."

This all seemed very manly and Aglionby to Blue, this calling of one another by last names and bantering about outdoor urinary habits. It also seemed like it could go on for a long time, so she interrupted, changing the subject back to Glendower. "They’d really go to all this trouble to hide his body?"

Gansey said, "Well, Ned Kelly."

He delivered the nonsensical statement so matter-of-factly that Blue felt abruptly stupid, as if maybe the public school system really was lacking.

Then Adam said, with a glance toward Blue, "Nobody knows who Ned Kelly is, either, Gansey."

"Really?" Gansey asked, so innocently startled by this that it was clear that Adam had been right before — he hadn’t meant to be condescending. "He was an Australian outlaw. When the British caught him, they did awful things with his body. I think the chief of police used his head as a paperweight for a while. Just think what Glendower’s enemies would do to him! If the Welsh wanted a shot at Glendower being resurrected, they would’ve wanted his body unmolested."

"Why the mountains, then?" Blue insisted. "Why isn’t he right on the shore?"

This seemed to remind Gansey of something, because instead of replying to her, he turned to Adam. "I called Malory about that ritual, to see if he’d tried it. He said he didn’t think it could be performed just anywhere on the ley line. He guessed it had to be done on the ‘heart’ of it, where the most energy is. I’m thinking that someplace like that is also where they’d want Glendower."