Page 158 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

Stavros turns back to Hessild and her escort. “We’ll come.”

“Excellent.” She guides her horse around and sets off toward the road without expecting us to quite join her. That consideration seems promising too.

We ride at a brisk walk that doesn’t jostle my healing cut like a trot would, the five of us keeping a few horse-lengths back from Hessild out of additional caution. But with each minute that passes in peaceful travel along the road, my nerves settle more.

“How far is it to Regica from here?” I ask Stavros quietly.

“About an hour at this point and at this pace.” He eyes me pensively. “Is your wound hurting you?”

“Only a little. I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll get a medic to heal it properly once we?—”

His voice cuts off as Hessild shudders in her saddle ahead of us. She lets out a strangled sound and slumps over, sliding right off her horse.

The soldiers on either side of her jerk around, only to get caught up in spasms of their own.

As they collapse from their mounts, Stavros reins in his stallion and leaps down. “What the fuck?”

The other men scramble after him. As they race to Hessild’s crumpled form, I shift my weight to follow suit, but a sudden swell of magic rushes over me.

My own body seizes up, but not to go limp. My spine stiffens, and my hands tighten around the reins.

My heels tap Toast’s sides of their own accord.

The horse gives a puzzled snort but moves the way I’m directing him, off the road. I wrench at my limbs with all the strength I have in me, but it’s as if I’ve become a puppet on a set of strings.

Not like when Julita took over. Then I could tell I’d been pushed to the background, the world around me gone vaguer.

Now, I’m looking out of my eyes, hearing with my ears with full clarity, and yet locked inside a body that’s taken on a mind of its own.

Panic jolts through my nerves. I reach instinctively toward my own magic…

But I can’t grasp hold of it either. My chest remains clamped around the power, barely a wriggle of it passing through my senses.

Gods help me, what in the realms?—

Alek glances up and notices my new course. He spins around. “Ivy, what are you?—”

A strange laugh like nothing I’ve ever emitted before propels from my lungs. “I got what I needed, and now we’re done. Did you really think I cared about you? You’re ridiculous, all of you.”

A silent wail rises up inside me through the next bark of a laugh that lurches out of me. Then my body is wheeling Toast around and jamming my heels against his sides so he breaks into a full-out gallop.

No, no, I can’t let this happen.

I put all my will into yanking on the reins, but my arms refuse to budge other than a slight adjustment to Toast’s course that wasn’t my idea.

We hurtle across the countryside, my side throbbing with each thump of the stallion’s hooves. I think I feel blood trickling from beneath the bandage.

I try to close my eyes as if that might do some good, but apparently my puppet master controls even my eyelids. They blink but spring open again.

Toast veers a little to the left and then farther. We crash through a stretch of forest, forced to ease up but still pushing onward as fast as the horse will go.

The second we’re free of the underbrush, my legs kick Toast back to a gallop.

I don’t hear any sounds of pursuit behind me. Is there other magic covering my tracks?

Will my men even want to come to my rescue when I made it sound as if I launched the attack on Hessild and her escort? When I insulted them and laughed in their faces?

---