Mister Impossible, Maggie Stiefvater [uplifting novels txt] 📗

“Oh, yes, Rhiannon is a dreamer,” Bryde said, standing. “Here in this stagnant valley. She is a very, very good dreamer.”

Rhiannon blushed. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

It was so peculiar to see a dreamer like her. All the others they’d saved so far had been a little like Ronan and Hennessy. Not exactly of the world. Living on the fringes in some way. Punky or funky or estranged or drifters. But Rhiannon seemed quite … not ordinary, but … content. Settled. Like a good mom.

Like the world wasn’t dismantling her.

“Take a look,” Bryde said, indicating the mirrors that covered the walls of the room. “That’s her work.”

Ronan and Hennessy each took a station at a different mirror. Ronan’s was about the size of a large envelope, just big enough to show his face. The frame was ornate, painted roughly with white paint so that the wood showed through in places.

He looked into it.

The Ronan in the mirror was older than he thought of himself as—somehow Ronan was always a little behind in his own estimation of his age. When he was in middle school, he saw himself as a little kid. In high school, he saw the awkward pimpled kid in puberty. After high school, he still perceived himself as the jagged rebel kid.

But the Ronan in the mirror was a young man. A little handsome, he saw, to his surprise, like his father had been at his age, and he could see that as he got older, he’d probably be a lot handsome. Normally he did not think his outside appearance at all reflected who he really was on the inside, but this mirror showed him an exterior Ronan just as complicated as the interior Ronan. The mirror presented a guarded bruiser, but one whose eyebrows gave away startling gentleness. There was a cruel and arrogant dismissiveness in this Ronan’s face, but also bravery. The line of his mouth held at once a crumple of depression and the shape of a grin. Anger simmered in his eyes, but so did an intense, savage humor.

To his shock, he found he liked the person in the mirror.

“They’re quite cunning, aren’t they?” Bryde said. “No one likes photographs of themselves. And the mirror has never had a reputation for kindness. But these do, don’t they, Rhiannon?”

Ronan joined Hennessy by her mirror, which had a fat gilt frame like an old painting. In it he saw the two of them, fast friends, a Ronan capable of trusting someone without his last name, a Hennessy capable of caring about someone without her face.

Hennessy muttered, “I look like Jordan.”

“What do they do?” Ronan growled.

“What do you think they do, Ronan?” Bryde asked.

He didn’t want to say it out loud. It felt too earnest. Was this reflection the truth? Or was it what he wanted to be true?

“How often do you dream one of these mirrors, Rhiannon?” Bryde asked.

She was still blustery and flattered. “Oh, I don’t know. It takes me quite a while. I have to get them together over a lot of dreams; it takes me a lot of concentration and if I’m busy with other things I put them down for quite a while. This is all that I’ve ever done except for one, and I’ve been dreaming them since I was a little girl. They take me five years, maybe? I don’t know. I don’t keep track, I just putter along on them. I’m glad you like them.”

Ronan considered the sort of person she must be that all she dreamt was mirrors that were kind to people. Not physically flattering, but truly kind. The invisible car felt a little stupid in comparison.

He put his fingers to his temple. He was beginning to feel hungry again. He didn’t know if it was real hunger, or if it was the same thing he had felt in the fast-food restaurant.

“And she does that here, with the ley line as it is,” Bryde said, as if he could tell what Ronan was thinking. Perhaps he could. What do you feel? “Probably she would put you to shame, kids, if she ever left this place.”

Rhiannon tucked her hair behind her ear over and over, her cheeks pinked. “Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s my little thing, is all. And as I told you in the dream, I can’t leave.”

“I understand,” Bryde said. “We are not all born to be wanderers. But the world is changing. You won’t be able to stay here for much longer, not in this strangled valley.”

It seemed unfair for Bryde to ask her to come with them. Bryde had warned them that leaving with him would break their worlds, and it had. But Ronan’s and Hennessy’s lives had already been in disarray. Rhiannon’s life seemed as tidy and comfortable as a tray of newly baked cookies.

Rhiannon said uncertainly, “My great-grandfather built this house on the ruins of a house my great-great-grandfather built. My dad had turkeys in that barn. My brother, too, until he died. I raised my kids here. And I can only dream the mirrors, nothing fancier.”

Bryde folded his hands behind his back as he peered into one of the mirrors (from this angle, Ronan could not see what he saw, only the top of his own head), and then he said, “There used to be a great house full of nobles who oversaw everything important and good. Because they oversaw everything important and good, everyone began to think of the men and women who lived in this great house, this mansion, this castle, this tower on the rock, as important and good, too. This has always been the way of it; those who take the credit get the credit because, as Ronan Lynch has discovered, when the world shouts, other people listen, whether or not they are right.

“These men and women in the great house were listened to in all things and no one who was not a member of this house could