The swimming lessons took place on the opposite side of Thornfield from the culvert they intended to use, directly in front of the gatehouse.

The first time the pirate crossed the beach and stepped into the surf, the patrols raised the alarm. Never mind that the former crown prince accompanied him and their scrawny roommate lounged on the beach, winging shells at them. The foreigner was doing something strange; the masters had to be notified.

“The keep at the Lake Onicas Hunting Lodge is half underwater in the flood season and a quarter underwater out of it,” Izak supplied smoothly when they were dragged before the grandmaster. “I’ve never learned to swim, because I never thought I’d be the one defending it. Recent events, however, make it clear that it would benefit me and my future master if I take an interest.”

The lessons were allowed to continue.

As always, Izak was a fast learner, and given the urgency of this particular focus, he was even more dedicated to Twenty-six’s lessons than he was to most subjects.

The same could not be said for Izak’s nightly training. He showed the same apathy for sword work at Thornfield that he’d shown growing up. Vorino had allowed him to give up the art entirely, since he couldn’t force Izak to make an effort and since it had been assumed that the elder prince would never need to handle a blade unless he wanted to.

Thornfield’s weapons masters had no intention of allowing him to give up, however. The twins watched Four’s lazy bladework night in and night out. When backed into a corner, the prince could defend himself, but he never put forth more effort than he absolutely had to to avoid injury.

Saint Daven and Saint Galen switched Four from falchion to rapier to saber to longsword to bastard sword, searching for something that would get his blood pumping. The prince’s lackadaisical attitude only worsened. He was skilled enough to get by with any sword, but he had no interest in honing that mediocrity into something more.

The first-years had been at Thornfield for a little over a month when Fifteen, a rustic from the Sharsena Hills, was run through by Forty-three, a wild-eyed low street boy.

Saint Galen heard the cry and looked up from helping a senior with a complicated parry. Across the bailey, a double-edged shortsword wobbled in Fifteen’s gut. The low street boy shrieked and stepped on his practice partner’s chest, trying to yank the sword out.

The weapons master darted through the crowd of swinging swords. “Nine, go get Healer Prime!”

At the urgency in Saint Galen’s voice, the runt bolted toward the healer’s shed like a loosed arrow.

“Stop that!” Four, who had been sparring nearby, dropped his rapier and shoved Forty-three away from the impaled rustic. “You’re making it worse.”

Saint Galen skidded to a stop beside Fifteen. Cursing, he crouched and inspecting the injury. A hole in the gut that big would most likely prove beyond the help of blood magic. Smelled as if it had pierced the bowel, probably from Forty-three jerking the blade all over the place in his panic.

The prince was still standing over them, holding the wild-eyed low street boy back. Four’s face was nearly as gray and bloodless as the dying man’s.

“Over here!” Nine rushed back in, nearly bowling the other two over.

“Stand aside!” Healer Prime bellowed. A pair of underlings placed a stretcher in the dirt beside the farm boy.

With swift efficiency, Fifteen was whisked away to the healer’s shed, where he would be given a series of drinks to hold the pain at bay while Prime decided whether he could be healed. If not, he would be mercifully put out of his misery to spare him the slow, suffering death of a gut wound.

“It’s over,” Saint Galen told the shocked crowd of students. In his opinion, the only thing to do when disaster struck was to keep moving before you realized how much it hurt. “Get back to your training. Move!”

Fifteen was given the coup de grace the following evening.

The tragedy brought unintended enlightenment, however. Saint Galen had seen a crack in the prince’s bored, lazy veneer.

To test his theory, Saint Galen tried a new tactic with Izak that night.

He paired off the rest of the students, keeping the experience level sufficiently widened in the early drills to make sure the older and more experienced students could teach their younger counterparts.

Except for Four, who he took aside to work with alone.

Using a longsword to match the one the prince was practicing with that night, Saint Galen pushed and bullied the prince around the bailey, not giving him an inch. Four’s cool boredom with the training was gone, replaced by a twisted expression somewhere between constipation and disquiet.

“Come on, you chicken gizzard,” Saint Galen snarled, thwacking Four’s pitiful blocks aside. “Hit me like you mean it. What are you, afraid of me? Hit me like I’ll leave you alone if you lay me open. Stick a sword in my gut, and I’ll let you have the rest of the night off.”

Four winced, his face turning ashen again.

Saint Galen had to back the prince up against a wall before he would do any convincing fighting, and even then the strikes seemed to be intended to hold the older man off rather than actually make contact.

Having seen all he’d needed to, the weapons master cracked the back of Izak’s hand with the pommel of his sword, snapping a few bones and knocking the prince’s blade to the dirt.

“Heal that up and practice with your off-hand for the rest of the night.” A broken bone would be the work of only a day or two for someone born with the royal blood magic.

“Four’s scared he’s going to hurt someone,” Saint Galen told his twin late that day. “And as lazy as he is about training, he probably will at some point. He’s got just enough skill get by for now, but the rest of his class is going to leave him behind by the end of the year.”

“He needs a weapon he doesn’t already think he knows,” Saint Daven said. “Even better if it puts distance between him and his opponent, makes it feel less deadly.”

The next night, Saint Galen showed up to the bailey with a swordstaff.

“Four, get over here.” The weapons master held out the staff, displaying the long, spearlike wooden shaft and thick, two-edged blade attached to the end. “Ever used one of these before?”

The blade was pitted with age everywhere except for the edges, which Master Smith had whetted just before sunup for him. Swordstaves had fallen out of fashion along with their less deadly cousins, the quarterstaves. There might be a shepherd or two out in the far-flung reaches of the kingdom who still kept a good long stick with a blade on the end for dyre and bears, but it had been a while since the weapon had seen any use at Thornfield.

“Is it some sort of harvesting tool?” Four guessed.

“With that haft?”

The prince smirked, clearly annoyed that he didn’t already know the answer. “I’ve seen farmer’s scythes with handles twice that long. Halberd?”

“Swordstaff.” Saint Galen handed over the weapon. “Should keep you from getting blood on your skirts.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

With the butt on the dirt, the shaft came up to Four’s cheek, the blade topping out a few inches over his head. It would extend his reach by an entire body length at its farthest, which was nothing to laugh at considering the prince was already taller, with greater reach, than most of the students at Thornfield.

It was also a weapon Izak had never trained with before and which none of his skills translated to. He would have to learn an entirely different style of fighting to wield the staff. The switch would require all his attention just to keep up with the rest of his class, who already had a month’s practice with their blades.

In just a few weeks, Four’s progress with the swordstaff proved the impulse was the right one. He trained harder than he ever had before, put forth more effort.

He never said it, but Saint Galen could see that the prince felt right with the staff in his hands. He wielded it like a part of his body that he’d only just discovered. The way Gale wielded a whip or Dav wielded a hatchet sword.

Perhaps staves would come back into fashion.

***

Hazing was a major portion of life for Thornfield’s first-years. Everything from being beaten by older students to being tripped during the meal service or being thrown into the pig wallow out back of the stables.

Izak laughed off most of the abuse, believing his tormenters would grow bored with him if he treated their attacks as nothing more than a good joke. Bruises and split lips healed fast enough with blood magic, and though he absolutely hated getting dirty, he gave it his best effort never to let that show, knowing that would only spur the upperclassmen’s pranks to more disgusting depths.

It was in Nine that the upperclassmen found an unexpected ally. The scrawny boy joined in on the hazing with bloodthirsty enthusiasm, thrashing other first-years along with the older students and cackling at the multitude of embarrassments visited upon them. Nine even offered suggestions when fourth-years too mature for or indifferent to the traditional hazing would have let off a potential victim off without incident. The little brat was eerily good at knowing what would most discomfit a person.

“Dunk his face in the muck barrow!” Nine hooted gleefully. “Four hates getting dirty!”

Passing only steps away from said barrow, just outside the stables, Izak’s easy grin froze solid.

“Nine, I swear to the strong gods—”

“Get it on his hands, too!” Nine advised. “He gets all sortsa riled when his hands is filthed up!”

“I know where you sleep, you little parasite!”

Izak ended up covered in manure to the elbow, but, thankfully, the students doing the dunking didn’t have the guts to shove the son of the king in head-first.

After Nine let Izak’s secret disgust for getting dirty slip, the word passed around the school, and the prince found himself regularly splattered with handfuls of dung, mud, and rotten food. When one only had two pairs of clothing to alternate between laundering days, getting dirty was infuriating.

Thus he found himself on the beach, washing dung from his shirt in the surf while he waited for Twenty-six to show for the daily swim lesson.

“Let me sleep in your bunk and I’ll tell ’em you never did care about no dirt,” Nine said.

“I would rather take a mule kick to my nethers.” Izak scrubbed at the greenish-brown stain. He’d seen washerwomen doing this before and always thought it looked quaint and peaceful. It wasn’t, especially not when the cause of one’s toil kept pestering one. “The damage is done anyway. First foundation laid remains.”

Nine stopped hucking starfish and shells into the ocean. “Remains what?”

“Forever. It’s a proverb. It means people believe the first thing they hear about you and won’t listen to anything else, even if it’s true.”

“What’s a foundation?”

“The base you build everything else on top of, like the initial piece of construction for a palace or guild hall.”

Nine considered that for nearly a full second, which, from what Izak had seen, was a long time for the kid to think about any one thing.

He shrugged bony shoulders. “So you just make ’em into closes.”

“What?”

“Closes. You know closes! When they build a new city on top a’ the old streets and close ’em all in?” He demonstrated by stacking a sand dollar on a shell on another shell. “That’s what you do with old foundations. Make ’em into closes.”

It wasn’t bad advice; it just came from a bad advisor.

Izak wrung out his shirt. “And how exactly do I do that?”

Twenty-six came through the open gatehouse to join them. He had escaped the dung-throwers in the bailey but had an impressive goose egg growing over his left brow. Attempts at hazing on the pirate usually devolved into beatings, however they began.

The patrols on the gatehouse watched him cross the beach, still alert for treachery despite the fact that it had been over a month since their first lesson.

“We tell ’em Twenty-six here hates gettin’ his drawers dropped in front a’ folks,” the runt suggested cheerfully. “Them big lads’ll forget all about how prissy you are and take to botherin’ him instead.”

“How well do you breathe underwater, Nine?” Twenty-six asked without looking away from the ocean.

“He does have a knack for finding that one nerve and striking it with all his might, doesn’t he?” Izak assessed his work. The stain wasn’t coming out. Whichever horse, mule, or pig had made it must have eaten a troughful of dye. “Do you know what loyalty is, Nine?”

“’Course I do!” Nine thumped a fist on his narrow chest. “I got loyalty to the marrow, me. Once thirty-nine sheriffs laid a trap for me and dragged me into their torture chamber—” Thirty-nine was the boy’s new highest number; he was having trouble mastering forty. “—but no matter how they agonized me, I never did tell ’em my sister Pretty was the one who laughed at that fancy lady in the street. All us close-rats got gobs of loyalty.”

“That must be nice. There wasn’t much loyalty where I came from.” Izak laid his shirt out to dry on a log of driftwood, then began stripping down to his smallclothes. “I tried to show some to my siblings, but I’m not sure whether it did any good. I hope it did.” Of course, hoping was about as useful as praying to the Blasphemous One. “But the former captain of the Royal Thorns told me once that loyalty was the most important part of his job. Loyalty to his king and to his brothers-in-arms.”

“Whose arms was his brothers in?”

“‘Brothers-in-arms’ means the men he fought alongside, the other Thorns grafted to the king. The point is he would never have betrayed his brothers to the enemy. Just like you didn’t betray your sister.”

Nine’s eyes were huge. “That’s bad medicine, betrayin’. It heaps up on whoever does it.”

“It’s disloyalty,” Izak agreed. “Like what you did, telling those fourth-years that I didn’t like getting muddy.”

“You lyin’, rotten fish guts!” Nine roared. “I ain’t never betrayed nobody, me!”

“Then what do you call it? You betrayed information to our enemy. Light, Nine, you even suggested we both betray Twenty-six, and you’re not under torture from anyone! We’re brothers, Nine—you, me, and Twenty-six—brother Thorns, brothers-in-arms, brother roommates—and you betrayed us.”

Tears of fury and shame streaked the younger boy’s red face. A sudden wail erupted from Nine, making Twenty-six shift uncomfortably and turn away to finish stripping down to his smallclothes.

Izak cringed. He hadn’t expected the bloodthirsty little runt to take the indictment that hard.

“I never meant to be a betrayer, me!” Nine threw his bony arms around Izak’s neck, smearing snot and tears on his chest. “Don’t hold it to my account, Four! Swear you won’t!”

Before Izak could promise and pry the boy off him, Twenty-six broke in.

“What will it profit him to make an oath if you’re only going to betray him again?”

“I never will, may the Cormorant strike me dead in the street if I’m a-lying! Now you swear, Four!”

“You’re forgiven,” Izak said, finally breaking the boy’s armlock around his throat and shoving the oozing runt onto his backside in the sand. “For Teikru’s sake, Nine.”

“Swear you don’t hold it to my account!”

“I swear I don’t hold it to your account.”

Nine sniffled. “May the Cormorant strike you dead in the street if you’re a-lying?”

“All that and more,” Izak said. Then he smacked Nine on the back of the head. “Just stop blubbering. Light.”

***

Nine had never had brothers before.

A sister was good, and you couldn’t get a better one than Pretty, but she took a lot of taking care of. Just look at how long it was going to take to become a Thorn and get gold and buy an uphill placement to get her out of the Closes.

Brothers like Four and Twenty-six were good medicine as far as Nine was concerned. Sometimes they were plumb fools, but mostly they took care of themselves.

The number nine was good medicine, too. You only had to hear it to know that.

Nine, Four, Twenty-six, and Pretty. Taking care of a sister would be a lot easier between three brothers.

***

“How did you know that bilge rat would care about loyalty and betrayal?” Twenty-six asked as he and Izak waded through the waves to the deeper water.

Izak shrugged. “I didn’t. He’s always hanging around us, though, trying to do what we do. He must see us as something besides shields from a beating when the older students come around.”

“It was a wise course of action. He will do anything you say now.”

Something squirmed in Izak’s gut. “I didn’t mean it as mercenary as all that.”

“But you do not believe in the worth of honor, so you can’t believe in the worth of loyalty.”

“Of course I do.” Izak slapped at the wave buffeting his stomach. “I wasn’t lying to Nine or manipulating him.” Burn it all, why should he have to explain himself? Any direct descendant of Khinet was assumed to be a grand puppet master—and yet, that was something Izak had never aspired to. “A brother owes loyalty to his siblings.” He made the effort and was able to laugh. “A man who would murder his brother is beneath contempt.”

Twenty-six had stopped moving forward. “Murder?”

Well. How was that for a slip of the tongue?

“It’s a short step from betrayal to murder.” Izak turned back to survey the walls and change the subject. The patrol on the gatehouse watched them as if they would be capable of intervening if Izak and Twenty-six suddenly turned tail and swam out to sea. “Do you think our lessons are accepted enough yet to try a day out?”

Twenty-six shook his head. “You are still not skilled or strong enough to swim as far as the dunes around the thornknife graveyard.”

“And I suppose the only cure for that is practice and exertion.” Izak sighed with exaggerated sadness, thinking again of the soft skin waiting for him on the opposite end of the spit of sand. Miles away, and yet it might as well be on the other side of the world. “Well then, let’s get to it.”