Page 7 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

The breath jolts out of me alongside a shaky laugh. The rolling thunder of hooves behind me tells me Alek and Rheave have both managed to follow.

Stavros only races onward for another minute or two. He draws his stallion to a sudden halt in a small square where a few merchants peer at us from their shop windows.

We gather close together, my gaze darting over the buildings around us.

Alek swipes at the back of his neck and speaks before I can. “Where are we going?”

Stavros considers our surroundings, his expression tense. “We got a good lead, but we’ve made a lot of racket. It won’t be hard for the Crown’s Watch or the army themselves to track us.”

Casimir’s face has flushed from the ride, but his peachy skin pales again at those words. “You think King Konram will go that far in pursuing Ivy?”

“There are few things more important to him than stamping out the riven. He sees her existence as an affront to the gods—and sparing her as a betrayal of them.” The former general cuts his gaze toward me. “It wouldn’t have been a bad time for your divine guardian to throw in his sign of support.”

I grimace back at him. “Kosmel makes his own rules. For all I know, he’s enjoying this mess as long as I survive it.”

The godlen of luck and trickery isn’t exactly the predictable sort. All I’m absolutely sure of is that he’d like me to stay alive.

“Ivy knows how to hide in the city,” Alek suggests.

Julita’s tone perks up. Yes, you’re the expert on this part of Florian.

My stomach sinks despite her optimism. “I know how to hide myself. All of us will be a little harder, especially with horses in tow.”

I can’t quite picture my sophisticated men scrambling up the side of the cloth factory building into my secret attic hideout.

“Our situation is particularly precarious while we’re in the capital,” Stavros says. “We could leave the city, find a place to regroup where we won’t draw attention, and then work out how we’re going to convince the king Ivy can be trusted.”

He pauses, his head swiveling as he takes stock of our location, and points. “The nearest gate is that way. If we cut straight through the outer wards?—”

A flash of light whips over the rooftops in the direction he indicated, and his voice dies in his throat.

Rheave tracks the same phenomenon from the edge of our group. “That was magic.”

Stavros’s voice darkens. “Yes. The palace is sending a message to the gates. No doubt ordering the guards to close them until we’ve been apprehended.”

My ghostly passenger goes still in my head. Curse it all.

I swallow thickly. “They can’t lock down the city for too long, can they?”

“For a threat as great as one of the riven?” Stavros shoots me an apologetic glance, his mouth slanted at a pained angle. We both remember all too well how badly he took the initial revelation of my magic, and he knew me far better than King Konram does.

Alek shifts in his saddle. “There’s no way we can leave, then. We’ll have to hide ourselves here.”

While the king sends every available soldier sweeping through the city in search—and the scourge sorcerers do gods know what else in the meantime? My skin crawls with the impression of the walls closing in on me.

I turn to Rheave. “Are the people who made you going to send more daimon after the king?”

The daimon-man frowns. “Everyone in the city was called to the palace. If you freed them all, they won’t cause any harm.”

Stavros studies him warily. “Everyone in the city, you say. What about outside the city?”

“There are many. I’m not sure of the exact number or what they might be doing at the moment on our creators’ orders.”

“Then the real threat is out there for now,” I say.

Alek studies Rheave with his piercing gaze. “If he knows what he’s talking about and he’s not leading us astray.”

The daimon-man cocks his head with a look of genuine puzzlement. “Why would I want to make trouble for you?”

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