By the time Izak and Vorino reached Thornfield’s thick curtain wall and its ghostly mirror above, a gentle shower had moved in from the sea, dampening both riders and their steeds. The stink of wet horsehair rose from the beast and insinuated itself into Izak’s clothing.

The walls were nearly thirty feet wide at a glance, dotted by archer loops, and outside, the sand had been dug out to steepen an approach on foot and discourage siegeworks. Although who would go to the trouble of bringing an army all the way out here to take this pile of sand and rubble, Izak couldn’t guess.

As they rode beneath the arched entry of a two-tower gatehouse, Izak glanced up and found a thick slot in the masonry with a recessed portcullis. Wordlessly, the guardsmen—one of whom looked younger than Izak—saluted them.

Dominating the bailey was a massive, thorny locust tree, its black bark drinking the ghostlight that filtered through the rain. After miles of patchy dune grass, Izak had assumed nothing else could grow on this sand bar, but that quilled monstrosity must have been two hundred years old if it was a day. Its trunk was covered in wicked thorns as long as Izak’s forearm.

He dragged his eyes away from the beast long enough to take in the rest of Thornfield. The keep was ugly, utilitarian. No plaster to soften its crude stonework. Additions from bygone eras hugged the sand around the rounded tower and squat hall. Minor outbuildings were scattered around the bailey as if they had been dropped in over the years whenever someone realized a new structure was needed, with no allusion to flow or design.

At the least cluttered end of the bailey, men and boys fought with sword and shield. On the wall, patrols stalked. Just around the corner of the keep, Izak spotted a wooden horse with a knight in full armor in the saddle. One at a time, trainees were attempting to take the knight down before he could maim them with his flanged mace.

A groom came running out. Vorino and Izak dismounted and handed off their bridles to the boy.

Izak stretched and twisted. His back answered with a chorus of pops. If there was one perk to having finally arrived in this hell, it was not having to ride another mile. Without blood magic to accelerate healing, his backside would likely have been permanently scarred from saddle sores.

A meaty thwack drew his attention back to the knight. Whoever was on the horse hadn’t pulled his mace swing. A boy was struggling back to his feet, arm hanging at a sickening angle. He received a few remarks from the knight, then limped off.

“You’re headed that way,” Vorino said, pointing the opposite direction.

A crowd had gathered beneath the massive thorn tree.

“Quite a turnout,” Izak said. There were upward of fifty young men waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

“Smaller crowd than I remember.” Vorino shrugged. “Go on. I doubt they’ll start without the prince.”

Izak was met halfway to the group by an aging master with thinning white hair plastered to his head by the rain. The man had the gracefully decaying build of a swordsman. Elderly Thorns were rarer than body fat on a Josean-blessed, but when the old man turned square to get a better look at Izak, the retired thornknife by his side confirmed it. The ceremonial wooden blade was well-oiled and obviously cared for.

“You must be here for the enrollment,” the old man said. “I am Grandmaster Heartless.”

“Izak of House Khinet.” Izak forced the royal smile onto his face. “King Hazerial and my brother Crown Prince Etianiel send their regards.”

A surprised twitch of the brow. Clearly, no one had bothered to inform the grandmaster of this last-minute prince exchange. However, having no doubt spent most of his service at court with one lord or other, the grandmaster recovered at speed.

“Of course. You are the last of this year’s crop to arrive. Please take your place among them.”

Izak nodded and stepped closer to the crowd, but not into it. The distinct smell of unwashed bodies overpowered the stink of wet horse rising from his clothes.

The group of new recruits had divided itself like oil and water and a third reeking liquid which the other two did not want to mix with. The scent he was attempting to avoid rose mostly from the central group, all of whom had the dirty, mean look of city low streets.

The corn-fed-looking rustics had taken the space on the far side of the ruffians from Izak. They were fairly clean, if one ignored the dirt under their nails and the mud caked on their boots or bare feet.

Representing the lavender water crowd a step closer to Izak’s level of society were a handful of young men whose well-made clothing set them further apart. The sons of merchants, wealthy landowners, and at least one almost-noble. Izak recognized the Duke of West Crag’s illegitimate son, Penuel or Denuel or something.

Interesting. Last Izak had heard, the duke had been trying to legitimize the bastard, since his only court-recognized offspring were a passel of daughters.

But, light, what daughters! Tender lips, soft curves, athletic tendencies—the fifth daughter was an especially fun riding companion. Though the horses never got much exercise when she and Izak went out together…

Just a step apart from the wealthy and near-wealthy stood a sinewy foreigner with sun-dark skin and sandy hair. His brightly colored clothing was stained with old blood, so perhaps not only a foreigner, but a murderer, too.

The crack of a whip jolted Izak from sizing up his fellow prospective Thorns. The lash was answered by the squeaky shriek of a young boy. A runt in rags was pushing his way back into the smelly low street crowd, sucking on a rapidly swelling weal on his hand.

Recoiling the whip with a practiced flick, a young master with eyes so pale brown that they appeared gold stalked to the head of the group. Izak measured the young master’s age against the oldest-looking of the new arrivals—not much margin there.

A retired Thorn in his early twenties. Martial prodigy or massive failure?

“Thievery will not be tolerated in Thornfield,” he said, his gold eyes narrow. “While you’re here, everything you have belongs to Thornfield. Theft from your fellow recruit is theft from Thornfield, and you will receive ten lashes for each item missing.”

From there, the young master launched into a litany of offenses punishable by scourging. There was the theft, of course, then there was taking a single step past the memorial Garden of Knives at the edge of the grounds, disrespecting a master, defiance of a master’s order, fighting with a naked blade outside sanctioned training, misuse of equipment… It was a wonder that any Thorn left with his hide intact.

Of course, the way they’d been training to assault a knight suggested that Thornfield employed excellent healers. Or perhaps they had enough young men clamoring for Thorn-ship to be generous with their lives.

As the intimidation speech went on, Izak’s attention wandered. The grandmaster stood to the side, watching the new recruits. Sharp blue eyes took the measure of each prospective Thorn. When they lit on Izak and found the prince staring back, the grandmaster’s lips lifted in a smile.

Smiling because he’d been caught looking or smiling because he was about to make an example of Izak for not listening to the whipmaster’s endless rambling? Given the length of that punitive list, inattention was probably another scourging offense.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

But the blue eyes roved onward to assess the next recruit, Penuel-Denuel the bastard of West Crag, without comment.

What did the grandmaster think of this latest crop of recruits? Izak wondered. Certainly, they ran toward the low class. The most common clothing ranged from threadbare to barely fit for rags. How many of these boys and young men had been lured into joining with the promise of steady food?

And how many had agreed to escape the noose? He eyed the foreigner’s bloodstained clothing more closely. Though inches shorter than the prince, the foreigner must be close to Izak’s age. Already he had a poorly advised patch of sandy hair covering his upper lip and chin.

Izak had put facial hair out of fashion at court. When the crown prince could only grow pathetic wisps, no one else was allowed to flaunt beards or mustaches free of ridicule.

The list of crimes and punishments wasn’t infinite after all. The grandmaster took the young whipmaster’s place.

“You see the locust tree behind me,” the elderly swordsman said. He didn’t shout to be heard over the rain; more like the rain quieted down to hear him speak. “Its towering crown. Its broad trunk and far-reaching branches. You hear it creak and groan in the wind. You watch it drink the water from the ground all around its roots. You fear its untimely collapse and its ability to pull down lightning from the sky.

“Its weight, its power, its significance—any one of these could crush us.

“This tree is the king of Thornfield. Great and powerful, and yet there are any number of threats to its life. Creatures large and small who would tear and gnaw and chop it apart if only they could get at it. Creatures who would home in its branches for the protection it provides and unknowingly or knowingly bleed it dry. What protects this king of trees from those puny cowards who would do him harm?”

The old man rasped his wooden thornknife over the covering of wicked spines protruding from the trunk.

“His thorns.”

***

“Perhaps you came into Thornfield with a name and a past.” The old dirter, who had introduced himself to Araam as Grandmaster Heartless, slipped the useless wooden knife back into his belt. “Are you proud of it? Ashamed?”

A few voices answered at first, but as the questions continued, all but the dullest among them realized that they were not meant to reply. Araam remained silent throughout, his eyes on the strange, glowing reflection in the dark sky overhead. It was an exact reflection of the structure they were standing in but projected in eerie green light.

“Do you fear what you left behind?” the grandmaster asked. “Do you wish to cling to it? Was it stolen from you, or did you escape it?”

Araam clasped his hands behind his back to stop them from balling into fists. He would not display his emotions for all the world to see like these blood drinkers did.

He might be able to see at night better than he ever had before, he might be able to smell blood almost before a cut was opened. But he was not one of them.

Take my Mark upon you, boy…

Cursed, corrupted, and even disgraced as he was, he was not one of them.

“Anyone who enters through that gatehouse becomes a new man,” Grandmaster Heartless said. “You have no name, no past. You bring nothing with you into your new life. The slate is clean. When you leave four years from now, you will take only your grafting to your new master, the weapon with which you will defend their life, and a new name.

“This name will not be handed to you at your mother’s breast like your first was. You will wrestle it from every drop of blood you spill, every tear you cry, every scream of anguish and failure and victory while you are here. You will earn your name, and no man, not even the king himself, can take it from you.”

When a young Ocean Rover returned to his tribe’s greatship from a successful proving, he was rewarded with a new name of his choosing. A man’s name.

Araam was a boy’s name—a play on words, meaning both Son of My Strength and Strength of the Sun—and he deserved not even that. He had not made it back to the deck of the Raen greatship. He had not kneeled before his father and mother and presented his wife or spoken his adult name to them. Like Mehet and Haelbringr and the life he had expected to live, that name was lost to wave and depth. May a more deserving raedr take it someday.

“If we ain’t got names, what’re we supposed call each other?” a broad-shouldered dirter asked in an unhurried drawl.

“You will be assigned a number,” Grandmaster Heartless said. “Over the years, the system has gotten a bit snarled by those who died before their thornknife ceremony. Those numbers are returned to the pool to be assigned to the next crop. By the same token, the numbers of the men who have taken names and been grafted are returned as well.”

The grandmaster looked at the gold-eyed dirter at his side. “Master Saint Daven, if you would?”

The whipmaster cleared his throat.

“Master Saint Galen, rather,” Grandmaster Heartless said. “Excuse me.”

One by one, the gold-eyed dirter went through them, giving out numbers.

“Nine?” One scrawny boy cackled when it came to him. “I never heard tell of such a number, me! You’re pulling my leg!”

“I assure you, Nine, Master Saint Galen does not pull anyone’s leg,” Grandmaster Heartless said, chuckling at the dirter child’s ecstatic disrespect. “Not without completely tearing it off.”

The loud, filth-encrusted child had never heard of seventeen, forty-three, or eleven, either. Blood drinkers were not just heathens and monsters, it seemed, but ignorant, too.

“All concepts you’ll be introduced to over time,” the grandmaster promised of the numbers.

The whipmaster stopped in front of Araam, scowling as if he wanted to spit in Araam’s face.

Araam’s muscles coiled. If the filthy dirter tried it, he would join the tally of blood drinkers Araam had delivered to the sharks, the first payment on the dirter king’s blood debt.

A sudden hold seized Araam. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even twitch. Every muscle had turned to stone from the veins out.

The Mark. The blood drinker king’s corruption was holding him in place like a giant fist.

Ignorant of the averted danger, the whipmaster growled out, “Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six!” crowed the loudmouthed little boy when he heard Araam’s number. “Fortee-aleventy-nine!”

The whipmaster moved on to assign more numbers.

Still immobile, Araam forced down the rage, clamping it into a hot ball of fury at the base of his throat. Then he tested the strength of the Mark. Bit by bit, he probed at its edges, searching for weaknesses or holes in its grip.

Nothing.

But the change to methodical focus allowed the fury to ebb. The Mark released him.

He looked at the beardless dirter to his left. Considered cutting him down in cold blood.

No resurgence of stone clamped down on his veins. How sentient was this Mark? Could it tell he had been out of control for a moment facing that whipmaster, but only testing its boundaries with the second dirter?

If the dirter king were standing before him now, arms open and heart ready to sheath a swordbreaker, could Araam run him through? Or would he be locked in place by that corruption, nothing more than impotent stone?

I chose this. I chose these chains when I chose to take his Mark.

That was a thought Araam could not stand to pursue for long. It replaced the burning fury with a shame that curdled his gut and looped ropes of dark seaweed around him, pulling him down, down, down.

Let Araam go. Let him sink. He was weak; he proved that much on the beach.

Twenty-six, the dirter whipmaster had called him.

It was no name, but then he was no man deserving of a name.

Could Twenty-six survive this? Could Twenty-six stay sane under the weight of shame and defeat and the chains he’d grabbed for in his cowardice?

Until he knew the name of the man he would have to become to avenge his tribe, Twenty-six would work.

Twenty-six, Cursed of the Ocean, Half a Man, Blood Redeemer of the Tribe of Raen that was once First Among the Ocean Rovers.

***

The young master giving out numbers stopped before Izak.

“Four?” Izak guessed. The sacred number of the Kingdom of Night—three strong gods and their chosen divine ruler on Earth, the number of yearly festivals, the number of mass sacrifices each year…

“Four,” the young master gritted out in agreement, hand resting on his whip handle.

Izak sighed and nodded. Being told not to expect special treatment, then finding that they had reserved the number “Four” for the son of the king so no one could mistake him for a commoner. It was all so tedious and predictable.

When the last of the numbers had been assigned, the grandmaster stepped forward again and drew their attention by slipping the sword hanging at his side from its sheath. Unlike the thornknife, this was no ceremonial display piece. Izak was no student of arms, but even he could tell a well-made weapon when he saw one. It had an older style branched knuckle guard rather than the currently popular basket hilt, but its long blade was narrow and falchioned, a design said to have originated at the Thornfield forge in the last half-century.

The grandmaster held the sword with the familiarity of a longtime lover, gazing at it with a mélange of bittersweet tenderness, the pain of old scars, fondness, aversion, and a dozen other nuances Izak couldn’t read.

“While you are earning your new name, you are forging a weapon. And while you are forging that weapon within yourself, another weapon will be forged for you.” His blue gaze swept over them. “The life of a Thorn is one of bondage—brutal, violent, and ofttimes short. The thornknife that will send you to the grave and recall you from thence? That bit of fancy woodwork will be given to your master, whether that be His Majesty or a nobleman who has gained the king’s favor. It is a feather in your master’s cap, a symbol of importance, and for many, a way to flaunt status. A mere trinket. All he must do to receive it is avoid botching the thornknife ritual so badly that you cannot be resurrected.

“But this—your weapon—” The grandmaster turned the falchion so that its fuller caught the meager glow of moonlight through the rain. “—this will be given to you alone. A reward for all that you overcome here, recompense for all that you will endure in the service of your master. It will be given to you on the day you are grafted.

“And all you will have to do to receive it is die.”