Iwas a witch.
“I’m the fifth,” I whispered, trying to hold my trembling hands in my lap. “I’m the fifth you’ve been looking for.”
“You are more than that, Maeve,” Arthur said, his kind eyes boring into mine. “You are our High Priestess.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CORBIN
Maeve took the letter and went to her room, slamming the door behind her. I cringed as the sound echoed around the castle.
Arthur probably shouldn’t have said the High Priestess thing.
One by one, the guys all disappeared off to their various activities – Arthur to practice his sword fighting, Flynn to bang around in his workshop, and Rowan to pick herbs in the garden.
I stayed hunched over the desk, the Briarwood coven’sgrimoireopen in front of me. But every time I tried to focus on the scrawled words and vivid drawings, the ink blurred in front of my eyes. My thoughts wouldn’t focus on anything but the horrible, twisted expression on Maeve’s face when she found out her adoptive parents had been murdered.
Murdered…and I hadn’t been able to save them. I’d been so distracted by seeing Maeve on her twenty-first birthday and knowing that soon she’d be coming into her power. I thought we’d made it – twenty-one years without the fae finding her and trying to kill her. When Kalen grabbed hold of her, I didn’t take the time to think, to assess the situation. I acted on impulse, and my impulse got Maeve’s parents killed.
More innocent lives I couldn’t protect.
I buried my face in my hands. Across the room, the grandfather clock ticked down the seconds. If I didn’t figure out what spell the fae were trying to pull off, I’d soon be adding a lot more innocent lives to my already impressive tally.
“Corbin.”
I jerked my head up.
Maeve stood in the doorway, her hip jutting out in a confident stance. She wore a simple black sundress covered in a pattern of cherry blossoms. The swoop of the skirt drew my eye to her long legs and those incredible hips. She crossed her arms and stared at me with an expression that was half rage, half curiosity.
I gulped, rubbing my eyes. Had I been asleep? I’d barely managed a couple of hours the last few nights. This was a particularly bad bout of insomnia. I’d been so distracted with the books, I hadn’t even noticed before how tired I felt, how my head throbbed under the strain of the dim lamp that lit my desk. The light from the windows had faded, and I had to squint to make out Maeve’s features from across the room.
Books and languages always had that effect on me. Time stood still while I patiently caressed them into giving up their secrets.
“You didn’t come down for dinner,” Maeve said. She held up a plate. “Flynn was showing off his face. It’s nearly healed, which is pretty amazing. For not-doctors, you guys sure have the magic touch.”
“We do our best.” I rubbed the spot on my shoulder where the fae’s claws and blade cut me. Even though the wounds had healed, the skin still itched a little.
Maeve waited for me to elaborate, but I didn’t. Ireallydidn’t think Maeve was in a place yet where she could deal with the idea of healing spells, especially not since I’d already used one on her.
“I called and called for you,” she said. “You didn’t answer, so I brought you up some leftovers. It’s this weird pie that’s filled with meat, which makes no sense to me but it was delicious, so what do I know?”
“I… I didn’t hear you.” I glanced at the clock – it was half eight.How is it half eight already? I only sat down a few moments ago.
“I know. I’ve been watching you for ages.” Maeve sashayed across the room, placing the plate on the corner of the desk. “You look exhausted. What are you doing?”
I’m still trying to figure out what spell the fae are trying to perform,” I explained, pointing to the pictures in the book. “It’s hard because their magic is very different from ours. I’m hunting for references to spells they performed in the past. This is our coven’sgrimoire. Or rather, one of them – we’ve filled up a few volumes over the centuries. The fae have made magical assaults on our realm before, and the coven managed to hold them back. I figure if they’ve tried anything like this in the past, our ancestors would’ve explained how to defeat it.”
“Grimoire?”
“It’s a spell book passed down through the generations. Each coven writes down their own studies, magical workings, incantations…” I turned a page, and showed her an entry written in my own chicken scratch. “Each coven appoints one member to act as historian. I wasn’t going to trust Flynn to do it for us.”
Maeve bent over the page, staring at the boxes and branches I’d drawn across the page. “This is some kind of family tree?”
“Sort of. It’s tracing the lineage of the coven, and helps us figure out which descendants might carry particular magical genes.” I pointed to the boxes. “Here’s me and my parents, and my other siblings. My mum is an Earth witch, and Dad’s an Air witch – so we have a range of different elements. Arthur’smother is Fire, which is a dominant gene, so I always knew he’d have the fire ability. That’s why I started searching for him first.”
“Who are these people?” Maeve pointed at five other names written alongside our parents’. I noticed she didn’t mention the big blank space next to her mother’s image.
“Other members of the last Briarwood coven. I was trying to trace them all, find out if they had children who exhibited elemental powers. The last coven was quite large – fifteen members at its height – but many of them were killed in the last battle with the fae. Those who were left either couldn’t or didn’t want to perform magic again, so they all lost touch.”
