Chapter 1
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.
Amid them are bodies that barely look like bodies at all: reddish-brown figures of fired clay, sculpted into human form.
Some have remained whole other than a blade jabbed through a chest. Others lie in broken but still identifiable pieces.
Alek has taken them in too. His bright brown eyes widen in the holes of his leather mask.
“Gods help us all,” he mumbles.
Stavros slams past a door with a heave of his shoulder, and the four of us barge into another opulent palace hall.
This one is filled with total chaos. Several guards are swinging their swords to defend a cluster of nobles who are cringing at the far end of the vast room. The soldiers’ expressions show as much confusion as they do protective furor.
Because the attackers they’re fending off don’t look like villains at all. A few of them sport the exact same rich blue uniforms as the defenders—guards like Rheave who were constructed for the scourge sorcerers’ purposes? And the others…
From their simple clothing, most of the figures in the onslaught look like ordinary middle-ward citizens. A couple of grubbier ones might have come all the way from Florian’s fringes.
Are they actual people caught up in the conspiracy, or more clay-captured daimon bound by the sorcerers’ magic?
Stavros doesn’t appear to think it important to stick around and find out. It’s King Konram and his family he’s most concerned about protecting, not the lesser nobles.
He hurtles toward a side door, waving for us to follow him.
As we dash after him, one of the attackers gives chase. A woman in a woolen dress that I’d expect on a shopkeeper or a craftswoman lunges at us with the dagger she’s raised.
My years of street-honed instincts kick in. As she slashes at Alek, I spin around and stab out with my knife.
I’d prefer to simply disable her. I don’t have much stomach for killing, not when any death I deal out reminds me of my very first and most regretted kill.
But the woman simply lurches away from my blow to her shoulder, heedless of the blood coursing through the bodice of her dress, and snatches Alek’s slim wrist. There’s determination and then there’s being ludicrously single-minded, and she’s clearly crossed that line.
The scholar wrenches backward with a hasty kick that doesn’t quite land. Julita yelps in my head.
The woman rams her dagger toward Alek’s neck, and every nerve in my body screams in denial.
I will not watch one of the men I love slump in a pool of blood. None of his brilliance or tenderness can save him from a blade.
But I can.
My magic flares in my chest. I’m moving before it has a chance to rattle my insides for freedom.
I plunge my knife into the woman’s throat the instant before she can land her blow.
I only have a second for a jolt of guilt to shoot through me before her form hardens to clay. She thumps onto the floor and fractures across her torso and legs.
Julita’s presence shivers. Nicely done, Ivy.
Alek sputters a ragged breath and swipes his messy black hair back from the top of his mask. “Thank you.”
I snatch up the dagger the woman dropped—the only part of her that was real—and press its hilt into his hand with a tight clasp of my fingers. The warmth of his bronze-brown skin brings a lump into my throat.
He’s all right. He’s still all right—and I want him to stay that way.
I squeeze his hand. “If anyone else comes at you, just jab them as well as you can.”
I should have given him one of my knives earlier. We had no idea what we’d be facing here—just how true Rheave’s mad story would turn out to be.
Alek nods with a grateful if pained smile. The worry shining in his eyes is for me as much as himself.
Despite my horror at the riot around us, the knowledge that we’re facing it together steadies me. I’m no longer on my own.
Side by side, we run the rest of the way to the door Stavros has already pushed through. Casimir ushers us onward, touching my arm in a brief but reassuring caress.
Stavros lopes onward, barely sounding winded.
His military training has clearly held up well.
“There are doubly fortified rooms in the basement that the royal family can descend to in an emergency—and a secret escape passage if the situation gets dire. With luck, they’ve already removed themselves—”
He cuts himself off with a hiss of breath as we come upon two more dead guards slumped outside a stairwell.
Stavros bends, the fall of his dark red hair across his tan forehead an unnervingly similar hue to the congealing splatters of blood. He hauls one of the murdered soldiers out of the way and heaves open the door.
Shouts and the clang of metal carry from below the stairs.
“Curse them all,” the former general growls, leaping down the steps.
My stomach clenches at the sound of fighting ahead. A thin voice shrieks—is that one of the royal children?
Princess Klaudia and Prince Jacos are only sixteen and fourteen. I can’t imagine they’ve ever seen violence on this level before, let alone directed at them and their parents.
My magic squirms inside my chest, tugging at my ribs for me to let it out.
It could hurl the villains back to wherever they came from. It could smash through them all.
But as always, I have no idea what else it might destroy to balance out the power I release. All magic requires sacrifice.
Until I know exactly what we’re dealing with, we’re all safer sticking with tools we can hold.