Declan paused then, sighing, as if the weight of the story was a tangible thing, and he needed to take a moment to regain his strength. It was true that the memory of the ritual was heavy enough. Ronan was all tangled up in half-formed images of his father sitting on the end of Matthew’s bed, the brothers tumbled together at its head, his mother perched on that tatty desk chair no one else would sit at. She loved these stories, too, especially the ones about her.
A sound like fingernails tapping pattered on the roof of the car, and a second later, a flock of dried leaves skittered across the windshield. It reminded Ronan of the night horror’s claws; he wondered if it had returned to the Barns yet.
Declan went on. “Once the spear was uncovered, it wouldn’t matter if the hero’s truest love or family was in the room with him; the spear would kill them anyway. Killing was what it was good at, and so killing was what it did.”
In the backseat, Matthew gasped dramatically to lighten the mood. Like Chainsaw, he could not bear to see Ronan distressed.
“It was a fine weapon, shaped for fighting and for nothing else,” Declan said. “The hero, defender of the island, tried to use the spear for good. But it cut through enemies and friends, villains and lovers, and the hero saw that the single-minded spear was meant to be kept apart.”
Ronan picked angrily at his leather wristbands. He was reminded precisely of the dream he’d had only days before. “I thought you said this story was about me.”
“The spear, Dad told me, was him.” Declan looked at Ronan. “He told me to make sure Ronan was the name of the hero, and not the name of just another spear.”
He let the words linger.
On the outside, the three Lynch brothers appeared remarkably dissimilar: Declan, a butter-smooth politician; Ronan, a bull in a china-shop world; Matthew, a sunlit child.
On the inside, the Lynch brothers were remarkably similar: They all loved cars, themselves, and each other.
“I know you’re a dreamer like him,” Declan said in a low voice. “I know you’re good at it. I know it’s pointless to ask you to stop. But Dad didn’t want you to be alone like he was. Like he made himself.”
Ronan twisted the leather bands tighter and tighter.
“Oh, I get it,” Matthew said finally. He laughed gently at himself. “Duh.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” Ronan asked finally.
“I got word that something big is about to go down here in Henrietta,” Declan said.
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Where did this word come from?”
Declan looked at him heavily.
“How did they know to call you?”
Declan replied, “Did you really think Dad kept track of this stuff on his own?”
Ronan had, but he didn’t say anything.
“Why do you even think I was in D.C.?”
Ronan had thought Declan was there to get into politics, but that was so clearly not the correct answer that he kept his mouth shut.
“Matthew, put your earbuds in,” Declan said.
“I don’t have them with me.”
“Pretend you have your earbuds in,” Ronan said. He turned on the radio for a little background cover.
“I want you to give me a straight answer,” Declan said. “Are you even thinking about going to college?”
“No.” It was satisfying and terrible to say it out loud, a trigger pulled, the explosion over within a second. Ronan looked around for bodies.
Declan swayed; the bullet had clearly at least grazed him near a vital organ. With effort, he got the arterial spray under control. “Yeah. I figured. So the endgame is making this a career for you, isn’t it?”
This was not, in fact, what Ronan wanted. Although he wanted to be free to dream, and free to live at the Barns, he did not want to dream in order to be able to live at the Barns. He wanted to be left alone to repair all of the buildings, to raise his father’s cattle from their supernatural sleep, to populate the fields with new animals to be eaten and sold, and to turn the very rearmost field into a giant mudslick suitable for driving cars around in circles. This, to Ronan, represented a romantic ideal that he would do much to achieve. He wasn’t sure how to tell his brother this in a persuasive, unembarrassing way, though, so he said, in an unfriendly way, “I was actually thinkin’ of being a farmer.”
“Ronan, for fuck’s sake,” Declan said. “Can we have a serious conversation for once?”
Ronan flipped him the bird with swift proficiency.
“Whatever,” Declan said. “So it might not feel like Henrietta’s hot now, but that’s only because I’ve been working my ass off to keep them out of town. I’ve been handling Dad’s sales for a while, so I told everyone I was handling them from D.C.”
“If Dad wasn’t dreaming you new stuff, what were you selling?”
“You’ve seen the Barns. It’s just a question of parceling out the old stuff slowly enough that it seems like I’m getting it from other sources instead of just going into the backyard. That’s why Dad traveled all the time, to keep up the ruse that it came from all over.”
“If Dad wasn’t dreaming you new stuff, why were you selling?”
Declan ran his hand around the steering wheel. “Dad dug us all a grave. He promised people stuff he hadn’t even dreamt yet. He made deals with people who didn’t always care about paying and who knew where we lived. He pretended he’d found this artifact — the Greywaren — that let people take shit out of dreams. Yeah. Sound familiar? When people came to him to buy it, he foisted something else on them instead. It became legendary. Then, of course he had to play them off each other and tease that psychopath Greenmantle and end up dead. So here we are.”
Earlier this year, this sort of statement would’ve been enough to instigate a fight, but now the bitter misery in Declan’s voice outweighed the anger. Ronan could step back to weigh these statements against what he knew of his father. He could weigh it against what he knew of Declan.
He didn’t like it. He believed it, but he didn’t like it. It had been easier to merely fight with Declan.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
Declan closed his eyes. “I tried.”
“The hell you did.”
“I tried to tell you he wasn’t who you thought.”
But that wasn’t exactly true. Niall Lynch was exactly what Ronan had thought, but he was also this thing Declan had known. The two versions were not mutually exclusive. “I meant, why didn’t you tell me you were up against all these people?”
Declan opened his eyes. They were brilliantly blue, same as all the Lynch brothers’. “I was trying to protect you, you little pissant.”
“Well, it would’ve been a fuckton easier if I’d known more,” Ronan snapped back. “Instead Adam and I had to run Greenmantle out on our own, while you played cloak and daggers.”
His brother eyed him appraisingly. “That was you? How — oh.”
Ronan enjoyed a full minute of his brother’s appreciation.
“Parrish always was a creepily clever little fuck,” Declan observed, sounding a little like their father despite himself. “Look, here’s the thing. This buyer called me this morning and told me someone’s offering to sell something big here, like I said. People are gonna come from all over to look at it, whatever it is. It’s not going to take much effort to find you and Matthew and the Barns and that forest here.”
“Who is this person selling something?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. It hardly even matters. Don’t you see? Even after that deal is over, they’re gonna show up because Henrietta’s a giant supernatural beacon. And because who knows what of Dad’s business I haven’t cleaned up yet. And if they find out you can dream — God help you, because it’ll be over. I’m just —” Declan stopped speaking and closed his eyes; when he did, Ronan could see the brother he’d grown up with instead of the brother he’d grown away from. “I’m tired, Ronan.”
The car was very quiet.
“Please —” Declan began. “Just come with me, okay? You can quit Aglionby and Matthew can transfer to a school in D.C., and I’ll pour gasoline on everything Dad built and we can just leave the Barns behind. Let’s just go.”
It was not at all what Ronan had expected him to say, and he found he had no response. Quit Aglionby; leave Henrietta; quit Adam; leave Gansey.
Once, when Ronan was quite young, young enough that he had attended Sunday school, he had woken holding an actual flaming sword. His pajamas, which adhered to rigorous safety codes that had to that point seemed academic in interest, had melted and saved him, but his blankets and the better part of his curtains had been entirely destroyed in a small inferno. Declan had been the one who had dragged Ronan from his room and woken their parents; he had never said anything about it, and Ronan had never thanked him.
When it came to it, it wasn’t like there was an option. The Lynches would always save one another’s lives, if they had to.
“Take Matthew,” Ronan said.
“What?”