Page 94 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

“I don’t think we’re in a position to set off a second Great Retribution,” Stavros says dryly. “The point is to avoid one.”

I shake my head. “I know. But if we understand why the specific methods the All-Giver and the godlen used devastated the practice of that kind of magic for so long, there might be something we could use on a smaller scale.”

I shouldn’t have these letters at all, really. I found them lost behind a stack of dusty books in the temple library, and a quick glance at one told me how relevant they were to my search. But I knew if I admitted my discovery to the cleric, they’d probably want to hold on to such a rare resource.

So I hid them inside a much less valuable book they were happy to let me borrow and kept my mouth shut.

Ivy glances over at me with a quizzical arch of her eyebrow. “I thought the Great Retribution ‘devastated’ the scourge sorcerers just by burning them all up. Pretty hard to keep practicing illicit magic when you’re ashes.”

“I mean, that does seem to be part of it.” I turn the page to squint at the opposite side. “There was definitely quite a bit of fire involved. But the way the writer talks about it, it sounds like something about the situation made the sorcerers give up before that point. They faltered before the power of the gods so utterly…”

I fall silent and tap my fingers to brow, heart, and gut before spreading them over my sternum to honor all the divinities. Then I press my hand against the brand in the middle of my chest, sending up a prayer specifically to my patron godlen of wisdom for guidance.

Like the many times I’ve called on Estera before, no brilliant insight sparks to life in my head.

She clearly wants me to unravel this puzzle on my own. But time is running out, and our opportunities are dwindling.

At least another hundred more followers joined the Order of the Wild’s march late yesterday. According to Stavros’s observations, we must have left the Eppun border behind sometime this morning, without coming within sight of any soldiers we could signal a warning to.

Last night, Ivy broke a few of the wagons’ wheels and sent rot creeping into some of their food, but she was shaky after just those efforts. And the scourge sorcerers fixed the wagons with their own magic and as far as we know simply ate less.

Can we pick away at them enough to stall their progress before they’re within reach of the king—and without wearing Ivy down to her breaking point? How much can the five of us do against an army of several hundred?

We can’t defeat them in might, so we need something clever. Something they couldn’t be expecting.

Something I should be able to?—

The wind whips past us so violently I need to clutch at the pages in my hand. My heart lurches in the panicked moment when I think I might lose them—and then skips another beat at a sudden flap that’s appeared at one of the corners.

“Thanks be to Estera,” I mumble, and then clearer, to the others, “Hold a moment.”

The riders draw their mounts to a stop as I tuck most of the papers away in my pocket.

Stavros comes up beside me. “What is it?”

“There’s another page there. They were stuck together, so perfectly aligned I couldn’t tell. I thought the writer had just used different weights of paper, whatever they had on hand.”

With careful fingers, I peel the two pages apart inch by inch. A laugh that’s almost giddy tumbles out of me at the sight of the writing I’m revealing—a piece of the account I was missing up until now.

Gripping the papers in one hand, I tap the other down my chest in another gesture of the divinities, in case my verbal gratitude for whatever role Estera had in revealing this secret wasn’t enough. Then I sweep my gaze greedily over the uncovered prose.

The once disjointed account melds together into a much more coherent stream of thought as I translate each missing line. A smile stretches across my lips alongside a growing surge of exhilaration.

My excitement must be obvious. Ivy leans over on Toast’s back. “What does it say?”

I wet my lips. “The writer claims that when the flames rose up, the scourge sorcerers fell to their knees before the fire even reached them. They…” I frown at the next line with its awkward conjugation. “They pictured their death in the flames? ‘And there’s nothing the sorcerers who gain power through the dying of others fear more than their own mortality. They tried to set themselves among the immortal gods… and in seeing they’d failed… they lost spirit and gave up, letting the flames consume them.’”

Casimir’s eyes have widened. “It wasn’t just straightforward destruction, then. The fire defeated them before it touched them.”

Rheave scratches the back of his neck. “Are they really afraid of fire? The scourge sorcerers who made this body used it all the time. I’ve never seen them frightened of flames.”

Ivy nods. “They had big bonfires at their larger meetings near the college. They put it to their own purposes, burning up effigies and so on.”

I consider the apparent contradiction. “I suppose it’d be impossible for anyone to survive a single winter in these realms if they couldn’t stand to be around fire at all. I’d imagine it doesn’t affect them the same way when they’re in control. It would be when they feel it’s coming for them rather than aimed at their own purposes that they recognize they can’t escape death.”

Stavros peers over my shoulder at the pages, though I don’t imagine he can read a word of Bryfesh. The language component of military training is focused on Darium, since Dariu has been our only consistent opponent for ages. He might have picked up a little modern conversational vocabulary for encounters with our bordering countries, but that’d be the extent of it.

I’m the only one who could have uncovered this revelation.

---