The music plinked overhead. The beanbag hugged Hennessy. She drank some of her hot chocolate. The reviews Liliana had read on the way over were right. It really was good hot chocolate. It would be a good last meal.
Liliana looked at Farooq-Lane, her expression sympathetic and soft.
Farooq-Lane looked at Hennessy, her expression sympathetic and hard. Then she reached behind her to lay from chaos, in its scabbard, in front of Hennessy and her beanbag.
“Then explain this,” she said.
Ronan hadn’t meant to dream Matthew.
It had been Christmastime. Short days. Long nights. He always got restless that time of year. Anticipation built in him as the days got smaller, until around the end of December, the feeling eventually burst and left him feeling more ordinary again.
He knew now that it had been a surge of the ley line. But back then, as a child, as a dreamer who was not permitted to give words to the dreaming, he hadn’t known anything but that restlessness. It was a feeling that was only shored up by Declan’s behavior. If Ronan became more alive as they crept toward winter solstice, Declan became less so. His eyes developed bags. His moods got short. The brothers did not fight then like they did when they were older, but the seeds were already sleeping in the cold soil.
That particular winter had been unseasonably warm, and a few days before Christmas, Aurora sent the boys outside to kick a ball around. To Ronan’s delight, the brothers discovered that the dun-colored fields around the farmhouse were lousy with starlings. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. When the birds first saw the brothers emerge from the house, they lifted up in a great swath of dark dots in the sky, like music notes on a page, but they quickly landed again just a few yards farther away.
This was much better than kickball. For quite a while they instead played a game of who can get closer to the flock.
Ronan won. This was partially because he was shorter than Declan and thus more clandestine, but it was also because he wanted it more. He was fascinated by this flock of flyers, this many-headed entity that was not tied to the ground. The birds were individuals, but when they lifted off, it was together, in something even more magnificent than they could ever be on their own. Ronan didn’t have words for how they made him feel, but he loved them. He wished he knew how to explain it to Declan.
“I’d like a bird army,” he said.
Declan’s lip curled. “I don’t think that would be very interesting.”
“You’re never into anything. You’re the most boring person I know.”
Declan retrieved the ball. The game was clearly over.
Without warning, Ronan ran directly into the flock. There was a brief moment of stillness and then they all took off at once, surrounding him.
It was so much like a dream. Wings upon wings upon wings. Too many birds to count. Too many voices to pick out individual sounds. He raised his arms. Ground and air seethed with birds, hiding both so thoroughly that it didn’t seem entirely impossible that he had left the ground with them.
Imagine flying, he thought. Imagine flying while awake. Imagine dreaming while awake—
Then the birds had gone and he was just a boy standing on the ground. He was not flying. Being awake was nothing like dreaming. His older brother was a few feet away, the ball tucked under his arm, looking at him with an expression of vague irritation.
Ronan had never known such agony, and he didn’t even have words for it.
A few nights later, on the shortest night of the year, Ronan dreamt of the birds, only now they were ravens, not starlings, and there were fewer of them. They were gathered in the field in a purposeful way, studying something in the grass. They were muttering to themselves: make way, make way, make way.
When Ronan approached to investigate, they scattered. In the grass where they’d been, he found a blond-headed baby.
In the dream, Ronan knew without being told that this was a new brother.
The baby smiled at Ronan. His hands were already outstretched for Ronan to pick him up. He was so, so happy to see him.
Ronan knew without being told that this brother would always be happy to see him.
“Hello,” he told the baby.
The baby laughed.
Ronan laughed, too, and the awful feeling that had been inside him since that game of kickball dissipated. He scooped this new brother out of the grass.
And then he woke up. When he did, Matthew Lynch was still there, squalling and brand-new, in the hallway outside his closed bedroom door.
But the thing was—Ronan hadn’t known. He hadn’t known Matthew was dreamt. That Matthew was his dream. He couldn’t remember how he’d explained it to himself at the time, but it must have been good and thorough, because all he remembered of that time was his delight at having a new baby brother. He hadn’t remembered the circumstances around it until Declan had cornered him during a particularly destructive time in high school and given him the story. Niall Lynch had given Ronan stories, too, but they were always rewards. This was a punishment. A warning.
“You dreamt Matthew,” Declan said. “Don’t you get it? If you get yourself killed, you’re ending his life, too.”
“I don’t think I did,” Ronan said, but he knew he had. He’d just been pushing the memory away as hard as he could. It had been made easier by the fact that Matthew hadn’t appeared right next to Ronan when he woke. Instead, like Ronan’s dreamt forest, he’d appeared some distance away.
It had also been made easier because Ronan didn’t have words, back then, to talk about what had happened. He wasn’t allowed to.
“I was there,” Declan said. “I know what happened. Saying it didn’t happen doesn’t make it real. You’ve got to keep this under control. His life relies on you.”
Ronan had lived with
