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Tybalt took up the book, skin crawling from the contact, though. . .
The thing had been chained anew and cast aside, and though he had unearthed it from a watery, muddy grave alongside a shallow waterway, as Tybalt broke the chains and wiped the mud away, he found its aged cover and yellowed pages were in no worse condition than when he had seen Mirabelle’s magician poring over it. Battered and scarred and aged, to be sure, but dry and whole.
That realisation made more than his skin crawl, but he thought of his purpose and didn’t let the creeping sensation stop him, bringing the thing home and dismissing the solemn-faced maid when she stepped up to offer assistance at the door. He went through to Juliette’s solar, currently dark and gloomy - he had ordered heavy black hangings pulled over every expansive window, hiding the walls.
Hangings like them swathed the walls and mirrors in the rest of the house as well, heavier curtains hung ready to shroud the windows and thick swags over every door.
The household was in deep mourning for the lady of the house, as Tybalt was, and so would remain. . .
Tybalt clasped the book, fighting a cringe. So that grief would remain - unless Tybalt could turn the world on its head and bring her back.
He pulled the cover open.
The pages ruffled on their own, and Tybalt stiffened, eyes widening and gorge rising, as they fluttered, turning in a smooth, rippling arc to splay open at a place of their own choosing.
Tybalt remembered the magician - dead now, for the magic he’d called, and Tybalt would be lying if he claimed he didn’t wonder, fear, that his own quest would demand the same - bent over the book, studying its pages and their cramped lines and complex diagrams. Remembered Mirabelle - a general or a lord in another life, he’d always thought, that woman; soft-spoken she might be when she spoke at all, but fierce and commanding like no one he’d ever met - choosing the course she wanted and seeking the book and never flinching.
Remembered the glazed, absent look in his best friend’s usually bold, fiery eyes as the magic took hold of him; the grief of his sister as Léon seemed to forget her; the fury in Devereaux’s-
Tybalt swallowed against the heavy weight settling in his mind and his stomach, and he cringed, but reached for the book again, leaning forward to the pages it had chosen for him, the writing stark and clear despite its age and the conditions it had endured.
It wasn’t that Tybalt was blind to the possibility of a heavy cost; to be sure he had seen that.
He thought of his sister, pale and still and cold, resting in her own bed, but lifeless, sprawled as though thrown aside, broken-
Whatever the cost, Tybalt thought, heart aching, if he could undo that - if he could bring her back, a single moment with her back in his arms. . .
Anything.