Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater Page A

called it, what I had and other faeries didn’t. It was the beginning of a long list.
    I threw down the rest of the grass. “Can I even ask why you bother coming out here every night? Don’t you have some sort of, you know, self-shrine you can be building in this time instead?”
    James grunted. Very distantly, I heard the first few notes of the song begin. He closed his eyes as if the sound itself caused him physical pain. His voice was barely above a whisper and was deeply sarcastic. “I find the daring of sneaking out every night physically thrilling. I am seriously titillated right now. Feel my nipples. Hard as rocks.”
    I winced. “As long as it’s good for you.”
    “Oh baby.” His eyes were on the horizon, waiting for the antlered head to appear.
    “You do know this isn’t safe , right?” I asked. “You remember when I said there was worse than me about? This is one of the worse things I was talking about. Are you dumber than a dog pile?”
    James didn’t answer, but I knew the danger was part of the appeal.
    I saw the massive dark spread of thorns a second before James did, and I grabbed him, pulling him down farther into the grass until both of us were huddled, concealed. We were curled into small balls beside each other, knees tucked up to chin, my arm against his arm, my head against his head. I felt him shivering again and again with my strangeness, his strange seer’s body warning him of my presence, but he didn’t move.
    I whispered in his ear, my mouth right against it, “Cernunnos. Gwyn ap Nudd. Hades. Hermes. King of the dead.”
    The song was loud, now, wailing, keening, and I felt James fighting against the pull of it. He whispered to me, not even audible, maybe realizing finally that I read his thoughts as much as his words, “What is he singing?”
    I translated—voice quiet, for his ears only:
    I keep the dead and the dead keep me.
    We are cold and dark, we are one and we are many,
    we wait and we wait, so sing the dead.
    So sing I: grow, rise, follow.
    So sing I: those not of heaven, those not of hell,
    grow, rise, follow.
    Unbaptized and unblessed, come to me from where you flutter in the branches of the oaks.
    Wretched half-demons who lay curled in the dirt,
    trapped by my power, rise up and follow.
    Your day is coming.
    Hear my voice. Prepare to feast .
    James shivered, hard, drawing his head down, covering it with his hands. He stayed that way, knuckles white on the back of his head, until the thorn king’s song had died and the sun had disappeared, leaving us in blackness. He slowly sat up, and the way he looked at me made me realize that something had changed between us, but for once, I didn’t know what.
    “Do you ever get the feeling something awful might happen?” James asked me, but it wasn’t really a question.
    I sat up. “I’m the awful thing that happens.”
    James pulled up his hood and stood up. Then—small miracles—he held out his hand to help me up, as if I was a human. His voice was rough. “Like you said. Something worse than you.”

James
    Washington, D.C. was one thousand miles away from Thornking-Ash. Okay, not really. But it felt that way. It felt as if the bus that we’d rode in to get to the Marion Theater was a spaceship that had taken us from a remote planet covered in fall leaves to a concrete-covered moon punctuated by purposeful decorative trees and populated entirely by aliens in business suits.
    Paul sat in the seat beside me, by the window so he wouldn’t puke, while I took pens apart and balanced the pieces on a notebook on my lap. Somewhere, in the front of the bus, was Deirdre. Most of my brain was up there with her.
    Outside the window, afternoon light slanted between the tall buildings of D.C., snaking a stripe of sun in here and there where it could manage. Where it kissed the tops of the buildings, it glowed blood-red. There were hundreds of people on the sidewalk—tourists, businessmen, poor people whose eyes seemed to look into