Page 93 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

“For a second, I felt the spell you put on us fading,” he says under his breath. “I didn’t want them to see us—I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

My bicep feels a bit tender where his arm smacked into me, but nothing all that bad. Nothing I can blame him for.

Curse it all, what’s wrong with me? I nearly burned up a guy who’s nearly a kid, and I started to lose focus.

“It was a little too much,” I mumble. “I tried to do more than I should have.”

If that’s all it took for my concentration to falter, then camp-wide destruction is definitely off the table.

We hustle back into the woods. As I pull the rest of my magic back into my chest, a sigh rushes out of me. But my stomach knots tighter with each step we take back to the others.

Sulla warned me that I hadn’t practiced enough. What if I can’t control my power even well enough to protect us now that I’ve insisted that we continue on this dangerous course?

When we reach our own little camp, the other three men are standing tensed around the faint glow of the fire, strips of dried meat heating on a makeshift rack of sticks. Alek looks more exhilarated than worried, though.

“Did you try it?” he asks. “Was that Rheave’s magic we heard?”

I nod, managing a weary smile. “We threw a couple of ‘lightning bolts’ out of the sky at the march’s supplies. They don’t have quite as much food to keep them going as they did before. But I couldn’t stay focused for long enough to do more.”

Casimir pulls me into his arms. “You’ve been incredible this entire time, Kindness. There’s nothing wrong with pacing yourself.”

I sink into his embrace, not wanting to explain exactly how wrong things could have gone.

Alek grins and waves the book he brought back from the temple he visited—with the corners of several aged envelopes poking from between the pages. “You might not have to worry about stretching yourself thin for much longer. I think the answer we need is right here.”

Twenty-Seven

Alek

It’s hard to be careful with my little treasure while we’re walking. The fragile paper crinkles as I ever so carefully unfold the pages of the letter.

But I can only study the faded ink by daylight, and whenever there’s daylight, we need to be on the move to keep up with the scourge sorcerers’ march.

I roll some of the stiffness out of my shoulders and study the scrawl of archaic Bryfesh that slants across the page. At least I’m not quite as tired as I was two days ago, thanks to the steeds we’ve added to our party since then.

Toast turned up in the middle of the night, snuffling at Ivy’s hair where it poked out from under the layers of blankets we huddle under together to sleep. The following night, she stole another stallion the scourge sorcerers had let wander close to the nearby woods.

The plan is to keep picking off one here and there until we all have a mount. We suspected that taking four at once would alert the march to our presence.

The horses didn’t come with saddles, so Ivy is riding Toast bareback at the moment, frowning at the rolling grassy hills in front of us as she keeps us hidden behind a barrier of magic. When I glance up at her, the furrow on her brow sets off a jab of guilt in my abdomen.

If I could have pieced together the information I’ve been trying to decipher sooner, she wouldn’t have needed to look like that at all. We might already have set the Order of the Wild’s makeshift army into irreparable disarray.

Casimir is riding on the other stallion at the moment, having recently swapped off with Stavros. We each take our turns riding for an hour to rest our legs.

Ivy only swaps with Rheave, when she insists that she’ll feel better if she stretches her legs for a while. For whatever reason, her irritable stallion won’t tolerate anyone riding him except her and the daimon.

I suppose it makes a certain sort of sense. Daimon are spirit creatures in essence, which puts them on another level of existence from us. The “creature” part probably makes him seem more a kindred spirit to the horse than the average person does.

Or else Toast just enjoys being as divisive as possible. I could believe that too.

I tip the page to the sunlight and squint at the faintest patch of words. My comprehension of Bryfesh is far from perfect. I’ve spent much more time reading ancient sources in old Silanian, Veldunian, and Darium, which are the three most common languages in Silana’s archives. Even my Woudish is stronger thanks to a set of journals I wanted to peruse years ago.

My head is starting to ache from contemplating the various meanings of the message I think I’m reading—and all the alternative possibilities if I’ve misidentified one or another bit of the messy handwriting.

Casimir gives his steed a gentle tap to bring it trotting up next to me—on the side that won’t block my sun, because the courtesan is always considerate. “Any more luck with those letters?”

I shrug with a regretful twist of my mouth. “It’s difficult to tell how much the writer is using metaphor and how much they mean literally. And some parts seem to contradict others. But this was a direct witness to the Great Retribution in Bryfeen, telling another cleric what they saw. Including how it affected the scourge sorcerers.”

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