I wrote it all down for you.
I flipped the book to the first post-it note, expecting to see a personal message. I skimmed over the scrawling diary entry from the book’s original owner. On his note, Corbin’s jagged writing noted some features of the belief magic story Clara told us. Nothing about bringing him back from the dead. I flipped to the next note. This marked an alchemical diagram – probably the arrangement of a ritual – that Corbin had redrawn with different letters at the cardinal points. I snapped a picture of the page on my phone and stuffed the note into my pocket, in case it was important.
On the third page, a towering pile of skulls grinned back at me. A demon danced on top of the pile, tossing a skull in the air like some fairground amusement. A crown of bones and horns circled his head.
The spell beneath was in Latin, but Corbin had translated it across three post-its.
A spell for entering the world of the dead.
My heart hammered against my chest.This is it. This is what he did.
Corbin, you sneaky, lying, glorious, beautiful bastard.
I grabbed the post-it notes, snapped a picture of the page, and slammed the book shut. The full weight of my discovery soared in my veins. If we could figure out the spell Corbin had performed, we could reverse it and bring him back, theway Maeve brought Aline back from the between-world in the painting.
I swivelled in the chair to look out the window behind the desk. Corbin had a sweet view from here over the grounds, from the topiary maze across to where Flynn’s workshop used to stand, right down the sloping lawn into the orchard. I jumped as a figure moved between the apple trees, spinning and lunging at an invisible foe.
Arthur.His sword caught the light as he moved through his wards. I couldn’t make out his face, but the set of his shoulders and ferocity of his movements betrayed his fury. I glanced away, feeling ashamed to be watching him, like I was intruding on something private.
Corbin could see down into the kitchen gardens.A delicious shiver ran up my spine as I looked down into my walled garden, which miraculously had survived the attack on the castle intact. Corbin could have watched me gardening from up here. If he wanted to see what was going on elsewhere in the castle, he had a tall window on the other side of the library looking in to the courtyard.
My eye caught a weird movement in the orchard. I searched the trees for Arthur. At first I couldn’t see him, but then I spotted him lying on the ground, his face to the sky. His sword lay a couple of feet from his body.
Cold fingers clenched my heart.
Even from this distance, I could see the blood pooling from his arm, spreading in a dark puddle across his shirt.
Not Arthur. Not him too.
I rose to my feet, my legs trembling. I used the edge of the desk to support me as I stumbled from the library and lurched toward the staircase. “Maeve? Flynn? Call an ambulance,” I gasped against the rising panic. “Arthur’s in the orchard and he’s bleeding real bad.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SEVENTEEN: MAEVE
My heart hammered against my chest. Rowan pressed a vial into my hand and sank against Flynn, who was on the phone with the ambulance. My fingers closed around the vial and I tore out of the castle, Blake hot on my heels.
No, no, no. I can’t lose another one.
I slammed into the orchard gate, the wood splintering as it crashed against the post. I tore down the row to the spot where the apples trees were spaced wide enough apart for swing a two-handed sword in a complete circle. Here, Arthur and I had practiced sword-fighting and spilled our secrets to each other. Here, he kissed me for the first time.
At first I didn’t see him, because he towered so tall and large in my mind that I wasn’t looking down, down in the dirt. He slumped across the roots of an apple tree, his head flopped against his shoulder and his arm crossing his chest. Blood saturated the front of his shirt and darkened the grass beneath him.
So much blood.
A long, even cut sliced down the centre of Arthur’s arm. Blood flowed freely from the wound, pouring out of him like water from a faucet. Bile rose in my throat, and my body surgedwith this tremendous sense that something was incorrect, inexact – a feeling usually reserved for looking over Kelly’s physics homework.
All that blood should be inside him. He can’t have much left.
Blake crouched over Arthur’s limp body, slapping his cheeks so his head bounced against the tree. “Hey Arnold, are you awake in there? Can you hear me?”
More blood poured from the cut. I cupped my hands over my mouth, trying to hold my stomach inside me.
Blake shook my arm. “Quick, Maeve. The medicine.”
My eyes watering, I fumbled in my pocket for the small vial Rowan had given me. He must’ve grabbed it from the kitchen on his way to us. My fingers slipped on the lid, and it slid from my fingers into the grass.
“Here.” Blake snatched it up and tipped out the paste onto his hand. Arthur’s skin was so slippery with blood it took Blake a couple of tries to hold up his arm and rub the paste around the wound. That done, Blake tore off his shirt, ripped it in half down the middle and wrapped the material around Arthur’s arm to hold the wound together. When he stepped back, his arms and chest were covered with dark blood.
