Page 2 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

Amid them are bodies that barely look like bodies at all: reddish-brown figures of fired clay, sculpted into human form.

Some have remained whole other than a blade jabbed through a chest. Others lie in broken but still identifiable pieces.

Alek has taken them in too. His bright brown eyes widen in the holes of his leather mask.

“Gods help us all,” he mumbles.

Stavros slams past a door with a heave of his shoulder, and the four of us barge into another opulent palace hall.

This one is filled with total chaos. Several guards are swinging their swords to defend a cluster of nobles who are cringing at the far end of the vast room. The soldiers’ expressions show as much confusion as they do protective furor.

Because the attackers they’re fending off don’t look like villains at all. A few of them sport the exact same rich blue uniforms as the defenders—guards like Rheave who were constructed for the scourge sorcerers’ purposes? And the others…

From their simple clothing, most of the figures in the onslaught look like ordinary middle-ward citizens. A couple of grubbier ones might have come all the way from Florian’s fringes.

Are they actual people caught up in the conspiracy, or more clay-captured daimon bound by the sorcerers’ magic?

Stavros doesn’t appear to think it important to stick around and find out. It’s King Konram and his family he’s most concerned about protecting, not the lesser nobles.

He hurtles toward a side door, waving for us to follow him.

As we dash after him, one of the attackers gives chase. A woman in a woolen dress that I’d expect on a shopkeeper or a craftswoman lunges at us with the dagger she’s raised.

My years of street-honed instincts kick in. As she slashes at Alek, I spin around and stab out with my knife.

I’d prefer to simply disable her. I don’t have much stomach for killing, not when any death I deal out reminds me of my very first and most regretted kill.

But the woman simply lurches away from my blow to her shoulder, heedless of the blood coursing through the bodice of her dress, and snatches Alek’s slim wrist. There’s determination and then there’s being ludicrously single-minded, and she’s clearly crossed that line.

The scholar wrenches backward with a hasty kick that doesn’t quite land. Julita yelps in my head.

The woman rams her dagger toward Alek’s neck, and every nerve in my body screams in denial.

I will not watch one of the men I love slump in a pool of blood. None of his brilliance or tenderness can save him from a blade.

But I can.

My magic flares in my chest. I’m moving before it has a chance to rattle my insides for freedom.

I plunge my knife into the woman’s throat the instant before she can land her blow.

I only have a second for a jolt of guilt to shoot through me before her form hardens to clay. She thumps onto the floor and fractures across her torso and legs.

Julita’s presence shivers. Nicely done, Ivy.

Alek sputters a ragged breath and swipes his messy black hair back from the top of his mask. “Thank you.”

I snatch up the dagger the woman dropped—the only part of her that was real—and press its hilt into his hand with a tight clasp of my fingers. The warmth of his bronze-brown skin brings a lump into my throat.

He’s all right. He’s still all right—and I want him to stay that way.

I squeeze his hand. “If anyone else comes at you, just jab them as well as you can.”

I should have given him one of my knives earlier. We had no idea what we’d be facing here—just how true Rheave’s mad story would turn out to be.

Alek nods with a grateful if pained smile. The worry shining in his eyes is for me as much as himself.

Despite my horror at the riot around us, the knowledge that we’re facing it together steadies me. I’m no longer on my own.

---