Page 1 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

One

Ivy

I’m not sure I fully believe that the palace is under attack until I see the gate.

Or rather, what’s left of the gate.

With a lurch of my heart, I jar to a stop in the cobblestone lane between the royal college and the king’s primary residence. My hand clenches around the knife I’ve drawn.

The heavy wooden doors in the high stone wall normally loom nearly twice my admittedly unimpressive height. Now, they look as if they’ve been blasted off their hinges.

Dark streaks lash across the fallen slabs, blackening both the wood and the bands of steel that reinforce it. Even the stones that frame the doorway look scorched.

My ghostly passenger’s arch voice resonates through my head with an air of shock. Did someone decide to roast the doorway?

The three men who raced over from the college with me have halted around me at the same moment. Alek flicks an unsteady hand down his front—forehead, heart, gut, and back up to his sternum—in the gesture of the divinities.

The scholar’s voice comes out faint. “What in the realms…?”

A bang and a flurry of shouts reverberate from beyond the walls. Stavros launches his massive frame forward with impressive speed, his sword in his hand and the combat prosthetic he hastily donned flashing on his other wrist. “I have to protect the royal family.”

Out of the four of us, the former general is the only one who has any direct mandate to defend our rulers. It’s hard to say how much good a thief-playing-noble, a scholar, and a courtesan can do in this apparent disaster.

But the rest of us hustle after him just as we rushed the whole way from the college.

We’re the only four people in the kingdom who have any real idea what exactly is going on here. Well, other than the villains who orchestrated this attack, and I’d be overjoyed to stop them before they cause any more mayhem.

We dash through the courtyard to the main palace building, past fallen guards who are burnt or bloody or both. Casimir’s gorgeous face blanches beneath the tawny waves of his hair.

The courtesan is trained to see beauty in all things, but I doubt he can find anything to admire in this scene.

“He was right,” he says in a low, strained voice that holds none of his usual calm. “How many captured daimon could the scourge sorcerers have gathered?”

I don’t need to wonder who Casimir means by ‘he.’ Less than ten minutes ago, a guard who’d badgered me a few times around the campus turned up at Stavros’s quarters to plead for my help. Why he picked me in particular, I didn’t have time to find out.

We thought we’d defeated the psychopathic sorcerers and their cultish Order of the Wild last night. I watched the man we believed to be their leader die in a bonfire; a squadron of soldiers rounded up a couple dozen followers.

But the guard, Rheave, claimed that the conspirators have accomplished more with their magic than we realized. He said he is a daimon, one of the spirit creatures that flit through our world, trapped in a body made of clay that scourge sorcery brought to life.

And he told us that there are many more like him, all of whom were called to the palace by some still-living figure of authority within the Order—who instructed them to murder every member of the royal family.

As we sprint up the palace steps to the even grander door that’s cracked right down the middle with more of those slashes of black, Casimir’s question echoes through my head.

Have the scourge sorcerers built an entire army of captured daimon?

Inside the front hall, more guards sprawl across the marble floors. Blood soaks the lavish rugs and splatters the fine paintings hung on the walls. Cries ring out from up ahead.

My mouth tightens. “There must be a lot of the clay beings. But who the fuck is directing the daimon now?”

A very good question, Julita mutters faintly.

There’s no way Ster. Torstem, the law professor we believed was leading the conspiracy, could have survived his burning alive. I saw him crumple in the flames. Stavros said the soldiers found the remains of his body.

Unless the scourge sorcerers have managed to twist their sick magic to defy death itself.

The thought makes me want to vomit, but I race on after Stavros toward the sounds of the fighting.

Through the haze of panicked adrenaline, I notice bodies that aren’t in the sapphire blue uniforms of the palace guards and royal soldiers. A few wear fine formal shirts and trousers that would befit the palace’s domestic staff, and I spot a couple of court nobles who were wandering the entry rooms unluckily early this morning.

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