Ronan woke angry and empty-handed. He abandoned the couch to slam some cabinets around in the kitchen. The milk in the fridge had gone bad, and Matthew had eaten all of the hot dogs the last time he’d come along. Ronan raged into the thin morning light in the screen porch and tore a strange fruit off a potted tree that grew packs of chocolate-covered peanuts. As he paced fitfully, Chainsaw skittered and flapped behind him, stabbing at dark spots that she hoped were dropped peanuts.

Rules for dreamers: DreamMilo had asked him where his dream companion was. Good question. Orphan Girl had haunted his sleep for as long as he could remember, a forlorn little creature with a white skullcap pulled over her white-blond pixie cut. He thought she’d been older once, but maybe he had been younger. She’d helped him hide during nightmares. Now she more often hid behind Ronan, but she still helped him keep his mind on task. It was weird that she hadn’t shown up when Milo mentioned her. The whole dream had been weird.

Don’t you even know what you are?

Ronan didn’t, exactly, but he had thought he was getting better about living with the unfolding mystery of himself. His dream could screw itself.

“Brek,” said Chainsaw.

Throwing a peanut at her, Ronan stalked back into the house to search for inspiration. Sometimes putting his hands on something real helped him when he was having a hard time dreaming. To successfully bring back a dream object, he had to know the way it felt and smelled, the way it stretched and bent, the way gravity worked on it or didn’t, the things that made it physical instead of ephemeral.

In Matthew’s bedroom, a silky pouch of magnetic rocks caught Ronan’s eye. As he studied the fabric, Chainsaw waddled blandly between his legs, making a low growling noise. He never understood why she chose to walk and hop so often. If he had wings, all he’d ever do was fly.

“He’s not in here,” Ronan told her as she stretched her neck long in an attempt to see on top of the bed. Grunting in response, Chainsaw unsucessfully searched for entertainment. Matthew was a loud, joyful kid, but his room was orderly and spare. Ronan used to think that this was because Matthew kept all his clutter inside his curly-haired head. But now he suspected it was because Ronan had not had enough imagination to dream a fully formed human. Three-year-old Ronan had wanted a brother whose love was complete and uncomplicated. Three-year-old Ronan had dreamt Matthew, the opposite of Declan in every way. Was he human? Dream-Adam/Declan didn’t seem to think so, but Dream-Adam/Declan was also clearly a liar.

Rules for dreamers.

Dreamers are to be classified as weapons.

Ronan already knew he was a weapon; but he was trying to make up for it. Today’s goal was to dream something to keep Gansey safe in the case that he was stung again. Ronan had dreamt antidotes before, of course, EpiPens and cures, but the problem was that he wouldn’t know if those worked until it was too late if they didn’t.

So now, better plan: a sheer armoured skin. Something that would protect Gansey before he ever got hurt.

Ronan couldn’t shake the idea that he was running out of time.

It was gonna work. It was gonna be great.

At lunchtime, Ronan abandoned his bed after two more failures to produce a successful armour. He pulled on muck boots and an already grubby hoodie and went outside.

The Barns was a conglomerate of outbuildings and sheds and big cattle barns; Ronan stopped at one to fill feed buckets and to heave a salt block on top of the pellets, a variation of his childhood routine. Then he set off towards the high pasture, passing the silent lumps of his father’s dream-cattle stubbornly sleeping in the fields on either side. On the way, he detoured to one of the big equipment barns. Standing on his toes, he felt around the top of the doorjamb until he found the tiny dream flower he’d left there. When he tossed it, the flower hovered just above his head, throwing out a continuous little yellow glow sufficient to illuminate his immediate path through the windowless barn. He made his dusty way past the broken machinery and unbroken machinery until he found his albino night horror curled on the hood of a rusted old car, all white ragged menace and closed eyes. Its pale and savage claws had scratched the hood down to bare metal; the night horror had spent more than a few hours here already. The creature opened a pinkened eye to regard him.

“Do you need anything, you little bastard?” Ronan asked it.

It closed its eye again.

Ronan left it and continued on his way with the feed buckets rattling productively, letting the dream flower follow him although he didn’t need it in the daylight. By the time he passed the largest cattle barn, he was no longer alone. The grass scuffled on either side of him. Groundhogs and rats and creatures that didn’t exist pattered out of the field grass to scamper in his footprints, and in front of him, deer emerged from the wood’s edge, their dusky hides invisible until they moved.

Some of the animals were real. Most of the deer were ordinary Virginia whitetails, fed and tamed by Ronan for no purpose other than delight. Their domestication had been aided by the presence of a dreamt buckling that lived among them. He was pale and lovely, with long, tremulous eyelashes and foxy red ears. Now, he was the first to accept Ronan’s offering of the salt block as he rolled it into the field, and he allowed Ronan to stroke the short, coarse fur of his withers and worry some burrs out of the soft hair behind his ears. One of the wild deer nibbled pellets from Ronan’s cupped palms, and the rest stood patiently as he poured it into the grass. Probably it was illegal to feed them. Ronan could never remember what was legal to feed or shoot in Virginia.

The smaller animals crept closer, some pawing at his boots, some alighting on the grass near him, others spooking the deer. He scattered pellets for them, too, and inspected them for wounds and ticks.

He breathed in. He breathed out.

He thought about what he wanted the skin armour to look like. Maybe it didn’t have to be invisible. Maybe it could be silver. Maybe it could have lights.

Ronan grinned at the thought, feeling suddenly silly and lazy and foolish. He stood, letting the day’s failure roll off his shoulders and fall to the ground. As he stretched, the white buckling lifted his head to observe him keenly. The others noted the buckling’s attention and likewise focused their gaze. They were beautiful in a way that Ronan’s dreams could be, the way Cabeswater could be, only now he was awake. Somehow, without Ronan marking the moment, the schism between his waking life and dreaming life had begun to narrow. Although half of this strange herd would fall asleep if Ronan died, so long as he was here, so long as he breathed in and breathed out, he was a king.