The blood dried, the wounds healed, and the fever began. Bone-deep fire. Araam shivered uncontrollably as he burned alive.

Father. Mother. The Raen tribal greatship. Uelaat and Ceolr and all the raedrs. Haelbringr.

Mehet. Those beautiful eyes glittering in the flames of their burning wedding vessel. No, glittering in light from the whale oil lamp in their cabin. Glittering beneath him. Soft hair the color of sunshine, still slightly damp from the waves, tangled around his fingers. Golden skin and the taste of salt. The smile that was only for him, hidden from the rest of the world by sweet-smelling silks. Those clever weaver’s fingers.

Do your duty by me, husband.

When Araam surfaced from the fever dreams, he remembered that he was in one of the land-going crafts the dirters called a cart. Ugly and violent, it sailed as if it were constantly running aground. Crude planks beneath him banged and lurched endlessly. At times, he crawled to the cart’s waist to retch over the side. At others, he found no strength to move, and bile pooled on the boards beneath his cheek.

Was any of this real? How could it be? How could he have given in to cowardice so easily, sold his soul for his manhood? Wrecked, mutilated, ruined manhood that it was.

Half a man. Son of no one. Of no tribe. Disgrace to the people and the ocean that had birthed him.

He hadn’t fought hard enough. He should have died rather than given in.

Why couldn’t he have died fighting? Died with his cutlass in hand, as Uelaat and Ruell and his crew had.

Or with swordbreaker in hand, as Mehet had.

Beautiful eyes like sparkling teal gems, Mehet stood on the deck of the Haelbringr. All around her, flames consumed her wedding vessel.

It is lost. Do your duty by me, husband. I will not be taken by this dirter filth to be raped and enslaved. I am Raen as much as you are. I will die free.

Only minutes his wife and already she had had the courage of a fully proved raedr. He’d been sick with love and pride and pain as she pulled back her silken veil and guided his cutlass to her throat.

But he had failed in that, too.

Someone shouted from the bow of the dirter’s cart. They were sitting at anchor now, that sickening lack of motion making nausea bloom in Araam’s gut. He was too weak just then to crawl to the side. Too disoriented to tell which way the side was. He choked on the acid taste of the bile, coughed it onto the planks.

“Think he’s dying?”

“Nah, the king gave him some blood. He should be healing.”

“But he’s a foreigner.”

“It can work for foreigners. I seen it done when I was on the northern front. When they want to keep a prisoner alive long enough to question ’em, they work the blood magic. In a couple days, they’re good as new.”

“Don’t look like it’s working.”

A pause. “Sometimes there’s rejection.” Another pause. “But it’s the king’s blood we’re talking about here.”

Their voices were like screaming gulls. Araam curled in on himself trying to block out their noise and ease the sickness in his stomach.

“Anyhow, we’re close now. Once we dump him off, he’ll be Thornfield’s problem.”

“Better be. I’m not wanting to square accounts with the king if he croaks along the way.”

“What do you think about those? Think they’ll be missed?”

“I never saw any gold.”

Pulling, then tearing, along the top of his ear. Araam tried to push their filthy dirter hands away, but he was too weak. Fresh blood trickled into his ear canal and hair.

They stole my earrings.

I didn’t deserve them. A coward doesn’t deserve significance.

Lurching, jolting motion returned an unknown time later. A ship driven over reefs by an unskilled hand. Araam’s head bounced. The pain in his torn ear flared as it bumped against the planks.

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Mehet, forgive me. I was not worthy to be your husband.

Her glittering, fearless eyes. The cutlass at her throat. The final duty of every Ocean Rover whose wife accompanied him into battle against the dirter savages.

He had to spare her from being taken captive.

Do your duty by me.

But Araam had hesitated. Selfishly, he had prayed to the God of the Waves for last-minute, impossible salvation.

Then a burst of pain at the base of his skull.

When he had opened his eyes, he was facedown on the deck. Mehet lay just feet from him, legs rigid and shaking, heels thumping against the planks. The swordbreaker he’d given her was still clutched in her delicate hand, slinging dirter blood as it struck erratically into empty air. Her head lay an arm’s reach from her body in a spreading pool of red.

A dirter had stood over her headless corpse, swearing and inspecting the gash she had scored in his forearm.

A filthy dirter had cut off his wife’s head. Araam had failed her, left her at the mercy of those monsters. Like her father, who had not stopped fighting when he was beaten to the ground, Mehet had attacked and kept attacking.

“I am Raen as much as you are.”

Moreso, Mehet. You were more Raen than I deserved to be. You fought to the end and past. In my place, you would have died. You would never have disgraced yourself or your people.

He should have suffered the emasculation, then killed himself honorably. If he killed himself now, disgraced, would he go to the hell he deserved?

It was a coward’s thought. Mehet’s determination had driven her headless body to keep stabbing at her killer until the lifeblood drained from her. His mother had fought until the mainmast of the Raen greatship fell. His father had fought until his back was broken and he could move no longer.

His wife, his parents, his tribe. A sea of blood debt closed over his head.

Hell or paradise, Araam’s soul could never rest. How could any Ocean Rover—even cursed, even half a man—lie down and die when a blood debt that huge hung over him?

You will serve me.

No, he would not serve, and he would not die. Not before he had repaid the king of the dirters for the Ocean Rover blood he had spilt.

***

Thornfield lay at the end of a miles-long stretch of sand, separated from the mainland by a wide inlet. The far shore was visible, but just barely. The only road on the sandbar passed through a village halfway down.

Perhaps because Vorino felt bad at having to temporarily lame Izak to get him this far, or perhaps because a full skin of blood had been required for Izak to heal the slices, the Thorn took a small measure of pity on the prince and let him spend his final day of freedom in the public house. He didn’t even burst in on Izak and the pub girls the moment the sun set.

Vorino’s patience wasn’t limitless, however. After midnight, he was done waiting.

“Your time is up,” he growled through the door. “The enrollment is tonight, and we have miles left to ride. Get your clothes on and get on a horse.”

Izak slipped from between soft, warm bodies and considered the jump from the window.

“If you try to run again, I’ll ride straight back to Siu Rial and inform the king,” the Thorn called.

“Light, Vorino, can’t you tell a defeated man when you chop his feet off?”

“Stop being dramatic, I barely nicked—”

“I’m coming, I’m coming! The horse is dead, man, stop beating it.”

They rode in silence along the moon-bright stretch of sand. Tufts of dune grass hissed in the breeze. In the distance, Izak’s prison loomed closer. The village they had just left was too small to have its own ghost city, but Thornfield was mirrored on the dark sky in pale, watery green.

“I can’t survive this, can I?” he muttered.

“A little celibacy won’t kill you.” Apparently Vorino was finally in a joking mood. “Besides, the rumors about Thorns are true—you’ll have no shortage of women lining up after you’re recalled from the grave.”

Izak’s lip curled in disgust. He had never run short on female admirers nor the desire for more of them.

Funny how Teikru’s blessing looked more like a curse with every passing second.

“I mean the thornknife ceremony.” Rumor had it that there was an open pit where they tossed the bodies of the men who failed. “Etian—Etianiel, rather—has been training for this since he could hold a sword.”

The dunes pulled back from either side of the path, revealing the graveyard from which Thornfield had taken its name. Wooden thornknife hilts cast shadows on the moonlit sand. The oldest were little more than ugly stakes snapped from the closest thorn tree. Those must have hurt like blazes going in. Probably left enough splinters in the wound to grow a new branch.

The passage of centuries became obvious as they drew closer to the recent blades. With every generation, the thornknives were refined. They went from ugly stakes to handsome, tapered blades so thin and deadly that they could slip between a pair of ribs with ease.

Of course, ‘ease’ must necessarily be defined by the owner of said ribs.

Coins, baubles, and shells glinted around certain blades, left behind by visitors paying homage to the dead men whose souls had once resided within.

Was his uncle’s thornknife stuck there in the sand among those many thousands bleaching in the sea breeze? Did heretics get memorialized or had that magical blade been hacked into mulch and cast into some stinking privy hole to add insult to execution?

“I don’t have my brother’s sense of duty, his dedication, or his skill,” Izak said. “And I certainly don’t have his…” Etian wasn’t bloodthirsty, but he could be cold when he had to. Izak was certain that his younger brother could kill a brigand and not spend the next week reliving it. If Etian believed action was necessary, he would move immediately and without a second thought. “…his Josean-blessed disposition. Can I survive the grafting?”

Vorino sighed. “Do you think a rustic caught up in the body tax has sixteen years to prepare before he’s shipped off to Thornfield? And the criminals dragged from the gaols—do you think they’re born with the expectation that one day they’ll be tied by ancient magics they can barely comprehend to a lord whose life they would suddenly give anything to protect?” The Thorn’s long face turned away as if he were counting the knives in the field. “You will survive, you will serve, and you will be a better man for it.”

Izak searched the rows, remembering a better man. All the noble hopes that better man had held for his eager, bright-eyed nephew. Right up until the ax fell.

The corners of Izak’s mouth twitched in a bitter grin. “How could I be worse?”