Page 58 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

I’ve got much more practice at subterfuge than any of my men, though. I have to keep them safe—both here and on a broader scale.

If we can’t find a way to clear our names and prove ourselves to King Konram, they’ll spend the rest of their lives like I’ve spent most of mine, just a couple of steps shy of the gallows. All because they’ve stood by me.

Julita alerts me to our arrival with a strained noise. There’s the house. You can see the roof over the top of that rise.

I slow Toast to a walk and peer into the distance. She’s right—just over the top of the rolling fields ahead of us, I make out a few peaks of a tiled roof.

“That’s your family’s manor house?” I ask her in a low voice.

Yes. I suppose we should approach more cautiously from here. Once you reach the top of the next slope, you’ll be able to see the whole estate and the city of Pima to the left.

I pass her suggestion on to the men and dismount. We leave the horses grazing lower down the rise and sneak to the higher ground on foot.

As soon as the house below comes into clearer view, I drop lower to the ground, setting my gloved hands in the frosty grass. The men follow suit. Our breaths puff out of us like smoke in the chilly winter air.

The building Julita grew up in is much broader and more sprawling than the noble homes I’m familiar with from Florian. Which makes sense, given that the nobles in the capital are restrained by being packed together in the city’s inner wards.

The house below me looks as if it might have started as something more compact. The central structure around the main doors is symmetrical enough, looming three stories to a stout tower. But over the centuries various counts and countesses built the sides and back out with additional rooms until it became a bit of a mishmash of stone-block forms.

Julita lets out a ragged sigh without adding any words. It’s been months since she was last home.

Now she’ll never really be able to enter that building again, not as herself at least. I can’t imagine how that feels.

I might have left my own family home, but there was nothing for me there anymore. And I could return if I really wanted to.

Julita lost the choice.

My gaze veers to the stretch of smaller rooftops to the left. A handful of tall structures—a few temples, what might be the city’s main hall—jut up amid single and two-story buildings.

Compared to Florian, it’s hard to call that habitation a city. It can’t be more than a tenth of the size of the capital.

Julita did tell me once that all of Nikodi had maybe a quarter of the citizens Florian can boast.

Casimir makes a soft sound in his throat that draws my attention. I jerk my gaze back to the estate.

A couple of men have emerged from the orchard around the back of the property and are walking next to the low wall that surrounds the grounds. As I watch, another figure—a woman dressed in a simple jacket and trousers under her cloak like the men—walks out of the house toward the front gate.

They don’t look like nobles even of Julita’s backwater level. But they move with a menacing assurance I’m not used to seeing from household staff.

We usually only had one man on watch, Julita murmurs. And he’d have been wearing a proper uniform. The nervousness in her voice has grown.

I glance toward my companions. “Julita says her estate normally wouldn’t have had so many people patrolling. Those could be people associated with the Order of the Wild.”

Rheave is staring intently at the figures. His expression darkens with a frown. “They’re all daimon.”

Even though I was already assuming they weren’t regular staff, my stomach drops. “All three of them?”

He gives a subtle nod. “In the conjured bodies.”

Julita’s presence shivers in the back of my head. The scourge sorcerers have taken over my home.

“We’ll figure it out,” I say in the quieter tone I use so the men know I’m talking to her rather than them. Then I raise my voice slightly to include Casimir and Rheave as well. “They could have her parents and members of the actual staff imprisoned inside, under watch. Or have driven them out. Or there’s a chance the household is collaborating, whether truly willingly or only under duress.”

Casimir is frowning too. “I suppose we can hardly go over and ask.”

Julita sucks in a breath. I hope they’re all right. We might not have seen eye to eye on everything, but… they tried. They gave me opportunities even though Borys was the main heir.

She was hoping to inherit the estate as countess at some point after she finished her education at the college. With her older brother going missing a few years back and presumed dead, it should have been possible.

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