The Kingdom of Kevin Malone Read Online Free Page A

water—hiding here for days, waiting for you to come.” He shut his eyes. “Beware, Prince!”
    Kevin looked at me, his face white. “Amy, do you have anything sharp on you? You could cut these cords!”
    â€œI don’t carry a knife, Kevin,” I said. It sounded awful, under the circumstances, all prissy and superior, although I certainly hadn’t meant it that way.
    â€œDying anyway,” Sebbian said. Tears leaked out under his bruised-looking eyelids. “Bone crown squeezed out all the music and the words from my poor head, except seeing your lady here, I know she’s in it, she’s in the prophecy. The rest is lost. Useless, should have died already—”
    I felt nauseous. My wobbly gaze fell on something odd-shaped lying under the open gate, trampled in the mud—a small harp that you could hold up in your arms to play. The strings, cut or broken, curled every which way.
    â€œRun, Lady Amy,” the dying man whispered, and I saw his eyes gleaming as he twisted his neck to stare up at me. “And take Prince Kavian with you. They’re coming, don’t you hear them? Ah, let me not fall into their terrible white hands again!”
    And then I heard a grinding, shifting sound and I felt vibrations in the earth under my feet. Pale as paper, Kevin looked back up the hill behind me and swallowed so that his Adam’s apple jumped. I turned.
    The flat, inlaid stones of the walkway we had come along were shifting slowly apart, and from under them drifted shimmery funnels of gray powder that wavered and solidified into figures—frights from Halloween, men made of bones and rusted metal, skeletons, armored and moving.
    â€œWhat?” I gulped. “Kevin, what? ”
    â€œIt’s the Bone Men,” he cried, pounding the ground with his clenched fist. “The Angry Ones that Dravud Bloodhand killed with the Hurling-Stones!”
    I guess I should have listened to all that fake history.
    Kevin leaped up and rushed with me through the gate, across the yard, and into the inn building itself. The stink of the place went off in my head like a hand grenade—old sweat, stale food and liquor, rotten garbage.
    â€œBut what about Sebbian?” I gasped.
    â€œHe’s dead,” Kevin said.
    Dead, I though with a lurch. Another death.
    Kevin heaved the gaping front door shut and slammed a thick timber down into the iron brackets on either side. Then he ran to the single window and banged the shutters closed—there weren’t any windowpanes—and barred them, too. The place got amazingly dark.
    I could still make out enough to know that this was definitely not the Dairy I knew. We were barricaded in a long, low-ceilinged room. The stone-flagged floor was scattered with a jumble of upended furniture all roughly made of heavy, scarred wood.
    I kept seeing Sebbian’s pale face, and his hand with a twist of bone lashed to his thin wrist. “We’re just going to leave him out there? The Bone Men—”
    Kevin grabbed my arms and shook me once, hard, so that my teeth clicked together.
    â€œThe Bone Men have already done all they can to poor Sebbian,” he said fiercely. “They’ll do worse to you if I let them. I’ve got to get you out of here.”
    Something hit one of the shutters a whack so sharp I thought the thick wood had split. I decided instantly that I agreed.

 
    Three
    Ash Wine
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    K EVIN HUSTLED ME THROUGH a low doorway into an adjoining room. Over by the back wall, which was taken up completely by a huge arched fireplace black with soot, he let me go and concentrated on undoing a knot in the corner of a lace-trimmed rag he fished out from his sweatshirt pocket. The rag looked as if it might have been a handkerchief once.
    He spilled a tiny pebble into his palm and closed his fist on it. Rays of white light squeezed out between his fingers.
    â€œA seedstone,” he said to me in