“I could flay you alive. The strong gods would favor me for it.”

“Eketra would be especially pleased,” Vorino agreed.

“If you fall asleep, I’ll pin your limbs to the ground, piss in your face, and take to the smoke.”

“That’s one for Teikru, probably.”

Light burn the man. They had been riding for nights, and Izak had yet to get a rise.

“Are you a bastard?” he asked as their horses plodded down the rutted highway. “Lords send their bastards to Thornfield to make use of them, don’t they?”

“Several do.” Vorino nodded. “Lords, merchants, vintners, and anyone else with money. Of course, they also send along the odd criminal or rakehell or the offspring of their dissidents to ensure loyalty. Got to keep up with the body tax.”

The body tax was the pet name thrown around court for the yearly levy of soldiers required from each of the kingdom’s landowners. The majority of the young men sent went straight to the northern front, had a pike thrust in their hands, and were run out in front of the enemy for as long as they survived.

Rarely long against the vicious Helat.

The small number of young men with a spark of blood magic in their veins, however, went to Thornfield.

“Be that as it may,” Izak conceded, “you strike me as a bastard.”

Nights passed in the saddle and with most of the conversation supplied by the prince. Days, Izak demanded they spend in taverns and public houses with company besides one another. Vorino didn’t object.

Despite the Thorn’s mulish disposition, Izak noted on their stops that Vorino rarely spent a day alone. He certainly wasn’t what Izak would consider handsome, but something about the man drew women almost as handily as Izak’s Teikru-blessed charm. Even with a drink in his hand, Vorino gave off the resting intensity of a rapier through a still-beating heart. It was the nature of Thorns.

Apparently these rural slatterns liked that sort of thing.

In all, Vorino wasn’t such a terrible traveling companion. He didn’t object to Izak drinking as much as he wanted, and he never tried to steal a woman from him. The only time the Thorn directly opposed Izak was when the prince was still entangled in a lovely pair of arms past Vorino’s unreasonably early departure time of sunset. For some unfathomable reason, the swordsman refused to let Izak turn up late for Thornfield’s enrollment.

“Correct me if I’m wrong about the thornknife ceremony,” Izak ventured as they traveled southward through yet another night, “but Thorns get to choose their names when they’re grafted, yes?”

“Before. The proper name must be used to recall them from death, so their master has to be informed of it before the knife falls. Most students decide on a name a year or two ahead of their grafting.”

“And you chose the name Vorino. No one made you take it. You decided of your own free will that because you were going to be a Thorn until you died again, calling yourself ‘Thorn’ in Old Khinesian was excitement enough for you?”

“I suppose I thought it was honor enough to have a name I had earned, one that could never be taken away from me in front of a hundred nobles at a feast.” Vorino shrugged. “Or on the street or in a barn. Wherever.”

Izak went from stunned silence to whooping with laughter.

“You sting as bitterly as a scratch from your namesake, Sir Thorn.” He beamed at the older man. “I didn’t realize you had a personality. Perhaps if you’d shown some when I began shirking my sword practice, I would have given your lessons more attention.”

“It wasn’t your attention lacking. Prince Ahixandro’s shadow was a hard one to fill. In your eyes, no man could measure up to your uncle.”

The Thorn had found dangerous territory. Perhaps that was a part of his training—to get an opponent on unstable footing. But if he expected Izak to pull back to safer ground, he was about to be disappointed.

“All heretics measure the same height in the end,” Izak said with a carefree grin. “About a head shorter than the rest of us.”

***

The landscape shifted the farther south they rode. The hills flattened into featureless plains like endless tables, showing glowing ghost cities hanging over their unseen earthly counterparts deceptively far away.

Eventually the plains dampened into swampland. Sprawling, twisted trees hunched like old crones over treasures hidden by the tattered draperies of moss that hung from their knotted branches.

The highway became rutted and muddy. They passed fewer vintners and farmers and more merchant caravans, carts piled with imports and foreign bloodslaves from ships that had made it through the treacherous pirate-infested waters. The wealthiest of these were escorted by career mercenaries, and the humblest by common sellswords.

The reason for this became apparent when highwaymen attacked Izak and Vorino at a narrow point in the road between muddy, sucking sloughs. The oafs should have spotted the sharp stare and catlike carelessness with which Vorino lounged on his horse. Perhaps they had noticed it and simply believed that a single swordsman and his wealthy patron against a dozen armed brigands would be an easy take.

Vorino leapt from his mount and killed five of them before Izak could shout a warning. Blood pattered onto the muddy road like a gentle rainfall.

The next wave of brigands was smart enough to hang back and get the measure of their prey before blundering in. They must’ve had a little more skill than their dead comrades; it was taking Vorino longer to put them down. Unless the Thorn just enjoyed playing with his food.

Two of the brigands skirted the whirlwind of blood and death, beelining for what they took to be the helpless lordling separated from his guard.

“Stay back!” Izak raised a hand. They wouldn’t feel it, but he’d caught hold of the blood in their veins. “If you don’t, you’ll wish you had.”

“Oh, look at me shaking.” The jester was lean and ragged, with a hungry coyote smirk on his face. His bigger, uglier friend chuckled, his round gut jumping with the sound.

Izak’s horse stamped and sidled, ears flicking. The beast must sense his rider’s hammering heart.

The prince swallowed. Don’t make me do this.

The brigands must have smelled his hesitation. They lunged.

Izak boiled the blood in their veins.

The eyes of the jester burst in a spray of red, dead in an instant. His big, ugly companion screamed for considerably longer, writhing in the wheel ruts, steam rising from his blistering flesh and grease running from his pores as the fat beneath melted.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

The shrieks bored into Izak’s brain. One more tortured scream in a thousand, and yet the listening never got easier. If he had been blessed by Eketra, Izak might have been able to enjoy the drawn-out spectacle of agony. As it was, it just made him sick.

Vorino appeared at the edge of his vision, longsword flashing. The crunch of blade through an eye socket and into a roasting brain ended the second highwayman’s torture.

Izak twisted the reins around his fingers to hide the trembling. He was out of practice. That should have been over with much faster. He swallowed the sour taste of bile and looked down his nose at Vorino.

“Bit lax, weren’t you?” Izak managed a passable bored drawl.

With a whip of his sword, the Thorn scattered the blood clinging to his blade, then wiped it clean on the dead man’s dirty sleeve.

“I stopped ten of them,” Vorino said.

“How many would it have taken to kill me?” With a disdainful nudge of his knees, Izak urged his horse to step over the bodies. Still twitching with its rider’s nervous energy, the beast pranced free of the human detritus.

The Thorn mounted up and followed. “They were nowhere near you. I would’ve gotten to them before they got to you.”

Izak shook his head and sighed. “Letting two slip through your fingers? I thought Thorns were better than that.”

Vorino didn’t speak to him again for the rest of the night.

***

The cities on the delta were much more to Izak’s liking than the piddly rural villages. Whoring houses aplenty, many with their own in-house gambling and hours flexible enough to allow even him a semblance of respectability.

He especially looked forward to Siu Carinal. Poised at the mouth of the Salt River delta and bursting with decadence, it was his favorite city in the kingdom. Court frequently spent winters at the sumptuous Mistfen Palace to take advantage of the milder southern climate, and Izak always made the most of his time on the river’s mouth.

“They never close in Siu Carinal, Vorino!” He had to shout to be heard over the fat drops of falling rain. “Imagine if whores everywhere were available all night long as well as all day. My complexion would be as porcelain as Kelena’s.”

The Thorn looked doubtful.

Izak grinned up at the downpour. “See if they don’t change your mind. It’s not called the Jewel of the Delta for nothing. If we stretch our visit long enough, we might even manage a few nights of Carnival of the Dead. That’s around this time of year, isn’t it?”

Vorino said something that got lost in the rain.

“What was that, Sir Thorn?”

“I said enjoy the dream while you can.”

Izak laughed. “Why bother dreaming when the reality will be so much more fun?”

The answer became apparent when, just as they came into view of Siu Carinal, they turned westward, leaving the glow of the sprawling ghost city and the king’s highway in favor of a two-rut track trudging through ugly, endless swamp. For the next two days, they didn’t see another public house, inn, or village, let alone get to revel in the debauchery, howling music, and gluttonous feasts of the delta. The most thrill Izak got was swatting clouds of mosquitos and glaring at the occasional tumbledown shack on stilts.

The inhabitants of the shacks were inhospitable, verging on hostile. Half of them still thought Ikario was king, and the other half wouldn’t put up a weary traveler for the day even if Izak’s long-dead grandfather did walk in and demand a meal.

“If Hazerial were here,” Izak muttered, “he would make them peel the skin from their own bones. Then he would sleep in their bed, eat their food, and burn their shack down when he left.”

Vorino raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you plan to do any of that?”

Cursing, Izak urged his horse on.

They spent the day like beggars beneath the swaying hairy moss of a sprawling oak on what Izak assumed was the highest point within a hundred miles. His only consolation was that Vorino tossed and turned every time the dappled shade shifted. Good. Hopefully, he would get a scorcher of a sun blister.

Izak lay cold, damp, and awake, squinting up at the brilliant blue sky between branches. His skin itched from mosquito and chigger bites, lack of bath, lack of liquor, and lack of feminine company.

He wished he was a good enough man to find consolation in the knowledge that his sacrifice had kept his siblings in comfort and safety. As safe as anyone could be in their family.

Could Etian protect Kelena from her mother?

Etianiel, rather. Crown Prince of Night, Chosen, etc., etc.

When they were small, both of Izak’s younger siblings had looked to him to shield them from Jadarah. The mad queen had realized early on that she couldn’t bully him as she did them. She had done an augury to find out why Izak didn’t fear her, and she had uncovered heresy within the royal family itself.

Six years later, the memory of Jadarah’s utter glee when the king’s Thorns dragged Uncle Ahixandro away in chains still had the power to scorch Izak’s internal organs with fury.

I know a secret, Izakiel, she had cooed in his ear.

He’d thought she would skip immediately to the king, singing Izak’s heresy for the whole palace to hear—We have not one heretic in the family, but two!—and cackle while the chief interrogators wrung it out of him bit by broken bit.

But Jadarah hadn’t. She had kept it close, cosseted it like a beloved kitten, until Izak had been forced to stamp it out himself.

If he were thrown to the interrogators today, they would find no trace of that belief left in him. The Blasphemous One was a lie; he knew that now. Ahixandro had died for nothing.

Perhaps that had been her game all along, to force Izak into that realization.

If Izak was lucky, one day he might get to kill her in return for destroying his uncle. He would be grafted to Etian, after all, and the mad queen was mother to neither of them. She would not count as part of his brother’s bloodline, and so there would be no compulsion to protect her from harm.

Another dream he should enjoy while he could, as Vorino had put it.

Light, what he wouldn’t give for a woman to occupy his attention.

“Will we ride through any other villages?” Izak asked, suspecting he already knew the answer.

Vorino surprised him. “One more, close to Thornfield.”

Of course. A fortress that large would create a small economy around its needs. Weaponsmiths, healers, farmers, bloodslaves, recreation for restless Thorns-to-be.

“Not that you’ll be allowed to visit it,” Vorino added as an afterthought.

Izak scowled. “I’m the—I was the crown prince, and I am about to become the captain of the future king’s guard. I go where I like.”

“Don’t expect that to get you special treatment at Thornfield. If you’re found outside the walls before your third year, they’ll scourge you bloody before the whole school, to make certain everyone learns from your example.”

“I suppose belowstairs wenches will do in a pinch.” In fact, he’d known several comely and enthusiastic sculleries, washerwomen, and chambermaids in the palace who were just as much fun as, if not more so than, their painted counterparts in the common sector.

“There aren’t any,” Vorino said.

“Any what?”

“Women. They aren’t allowed in Thornfield. You won’t find a single skirt within the walls.”

Izak’s skin prickled all over. “You’re lying.”

The Thorn rode on in smug silence.

“You’re not serious,” Izak insisted. “I can’t go without a woman for four years!” Deprivation like that didn’t bear thinking about.

Vorino smirked. “I thought you Teikru-blessed didn’t care whether you were with a man or woman.”

“I care! I’ll kill myself within a week.”

“You’ll be too busy training to—”

Izak burst into a cloud of smoke. The curling black mist was highly visible in the daylight, and under the sun the spell required loads more blood magic than in darkness, but let his reserves deplete. He wasn’t going to that night-forsaken hell.

He reappeared a hundred yards away, but Vorino was faster than he looked, only a step behind. Izak threw himself into another smoke step—more of a desperate smoke leap.

But Vorino had guessed his direction and was waiting for Izak when he resolidified. With his longsword, the Thorn hacked through the tendon at the back of the prince’s ankle.

Izak nearly went down. “You son of a poxy whore!” He raised a hand, catching hold of the Thorn’s blood. “I’ll crawl inside your mind and make you set yourself on fire!”

A Thorn’s blood was much more powerful than the beaten-down slaves and political prisoners Izak had practiced on as a child. Stronger even than the wild defiance of the two brigands he had killed. A surge of determination threw off his hold.

Vorino advanced on him.

Izak hopped backward on his one good foot. He couldn’t smoke step one-legged. He could grab hold of the Thorn again, this time with the fury of every heir of House Khinet back to the founder of the Kingdom of Night himself.

He should.

“I’ll walk you naked and flayed into the nearest swamp so the sawteeth and alligators can have you!”

Not even a flicker of fear showed in Vorino’s face.

“Children talk,” the Thorn said. “Men do.”

Izak’s hand shook.

“I’m not cut out for killing,” he pleaded. That sick-sour taste pushed up the back of his throat at the memory of the brigands, his uncle, scores of Hazerial’s political enemies, a thousand bloodslaves. If Izak got his way and went free, his sister would join that procession of bloody recall, not killed by him, but certainly dead because of him. And yet still his disgusting, traitorous, selfish heart flapped against his ribs like a trapped bird, desperate for any chance to break free. “Let me go, Vorino.”

Ruthlessly, the Thorn advanced.

Izak cursed and dropped his hand.

Vorino sliced through Izak’s other heel tendon to keep him from running.