The Raven Boy

"A very old custom, you see," Bran explains, as he drives Will down the dark roads towards Tywyn, "all the men singing in Christmas morning. Twenty years ago, or thereabouts, the tradition was beginning to fade, and there were not enough people in all the churches and the chapels. So the churches came together, and everyone began meeting at St Cadfan's instead of spreading out. Now it is becoming fashionable again, among the younger people, and in a few years now we may all have to go off to our separate churches."

Bran collected Jane at the Tywyn station a few hours ago, just before dinner. Afterwards, Bran, Cordelia, Jane and Margaret are holding pleasant, quiet conversations in the parlor and waiting for Will to arrive in his rented car.

Bran Davies was not expecting to come to Milliways today, but it is as good a place to study organic chemistry as any. He is sitting in one of the quieter booths, reading a textbook and taking notes in two languages in a black-and-white notebook.

While Margaret takes Cordelia upstairs, to see to her room, Bran makes a phone call from the kitchen.

At 7:30 in the evening in Wales, it is 7:30 the following morning in New Zealand. Will should be awake by now.

Bran dials the international calling card number, first, and then another number. "Mr Stantz?" he says, when the phone picks up. Better to be safe; he has no way to tell who else might be about.

Not long ago, the Circle of the Light took to a room in the west wing of the castle; night and day, in rotating shifts, the Old Ones focus on holding the damaged spells that guard the Summer Country. Half of the Circle, including Merriman and Will, is currently on duty, and the other half sleeps. Bran looked in on the Circle this afternoon, but there was nothing for him to see or do in that room; there were only Old Ones, hands linked in a closed chain, staring blankly into the air.

Bran has no other duties, for the moment, and he can hardly focus for the weight of the power pushing on his mind. He would seek out Moiraine, except that she has gone to Milliways. Instead, he crosses the castle courtyard to walk to his mother's chambers.

I don't know much about what canons are extant in the Age of Sail period; can someone else supply information there?

Texts that have been established as extant, canonically or millicanonically, in the DiRverse:

Shakespeare – all works
Dickens – all works
Geoffrey of Monmouth – all works
Chrétien de Troyes – all works
Sir Thomas Malory, Morte D’Arthur
The Mabinogion and associated texts
All poetry traditionally ascribed to Taliesin (written by Gwion!)
All classical literature and philosophy
All Christmas carols known in our universe

Robert Graves – all works (including, most importantly, The White Goddess)
Wordsworth – all works
A E Housman – all works
Yeats – all works
Dylan Thomas – all works
R S Thomas – all works (although in 1978, Thomas was still writing)
Charles Williams – Taliessin through Logres; The Voyage of the Summer Stars

Monty Python – all works produced by 1978

Texts that cannot exist in DiRverse:

Dorothy Sayers, the Peter Wimsey novels
Lois McMaster Bujold, the Vorkosigan books

Texts that may or may not exist in DiRverse – but if they do, Bran hasn’t seen them:

L M Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables and series
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time
Ellis Peters, the Cadfael Chronicles


Texts I don’t believe exist in the DiRverse, but I’m not sure:

C S Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia

None of the Dark is Rising characters have ever been canon-punctured. That is, they don’t know they are described in an accurate twentieth-century narrative in another universe. Folklore about Old Ones exists in the DiRverse and is known to John Rowlands, among others. Arthur, Guinevere and Merlin, of course, appear in all the stories, even though Merriman Lyon will be the first to tell you how inaccurate the stories are.

Bran is standing before Arthur Pendragon's writing desk, touching the things his father left on it. He can hardly read Arthur's handwriting, he realises. The king's notes, scratched into the wax on an ivory tablet and written in ink on pages of vellum, are in Latin that is heavy with abbreviations and does not even have spaces between the words. The rounded script, incomprehensible as it is, does remind him of something, and he can't remember what.

Bran's head is pounding, as it has been since he arrived. Yesterday? He thinks they came yesterday.

Bran Davies, Moiraine Sedai, and Will Stanton are spending the evening sharing a pot of tea and a pleasant conversation.

Classes, schoolwork, chapel, classes, schoolwork, chapel: in the weeks since he met Kim Ford, Bran Davies has built his life around a neat, regimented system. He learned strategies for coping with the incomprehensible at his da's knee, after all.

Bran cannot keep the pattern forever, though. He has responsibilities at Milliways, and he is not sure that he will know when he is needed. Opening the bar door tonight, Bran scans the room for certain people.