Izak was going insane. “I can swim now, and the whole school looks out the gatehouse when they hear about swimmers, masters included. Let’s slip out the back this afternoon, while everyone’s asleep.”
Twenty-six assessed the whitecaps through the archer loop. “Next week.”
“I can’t wait a week! It’s been two months since I last saw a woman.”
“She will be the last woman you ever see if you swim this afternoon. The tides and the weather will turn when the moon changes. That is next week.”
Izak paced. Teikru’s blessing was killing him. He could hardly think about anything else. It was like an endless high-pitched whistle or a constant ringing in his ears. Even when he fell into bed exhausted from training, he tossed and turned and woke the next evening even more desperate.
“The pirate’s right,” Nine said. “Better not tempt the moon. She’s good medicine ’til you do her foul.”
“You’re scared to even touch water. There’s no way you’ll be able to swim out with us, so you don’t have a say in the matter.”
Nine flared up like a tinder bundle. “You said we three’d go! We’re brothers, us, and we’re going together! That was the deal!”
“How?” Izak demanded. It felt perversely good to spread his bad mood around. “You can’t swim. You don’t even bathe.”
“There ain’t no reason to clean off when you’re just fixing to get dirty again!”
“What if you drown? I thought water was bad medicine.”
“The pirate scum’ll swim me on his back.”
“No, I won’t. I am not going.”
Izak rounded on Twenty-six, mouth agape. “What do you mean you’re not going?”
“I cannot leave the grounds.”
“The sea’s not Thornfield grounds, and you swam around in that,” Izak argued. “We both did. We’ve been planning this outing for a month. Didn’t you once think that you should mention you weren’t going?”
“My intentions are none of your concern.”
“They are when they interfere with something this vital! Is this about being too good for whores again? Because I can promise you, you’re not.”
But the pirate wouldn’t budge, and he wouldn’t explain.
Izak tried a different tactic. “You’ve got to at least swim out as far as the thornknife graveyard. Even Grandmaster considers that part of the grounds. What if you don’t, and I get a cramp and drown?”
“What if we get a cramp and drowned,” Nine corrected him.
Izak wasn’t proud—he couldn’t afford to be after this long. He seized the opportunity Nine presented.
“Exactly. If Nine drowns because he can’t swim and I can’t carry him, you’ll be at fault. You admitted as much when you took the scourging for not stopping me last time. Do you want our deaths on your shoulders?”
“Dirter deaths do not concern me.”
“But fault does, and so does honor.”
Twenty-six looked out at the waves again.
Clearly not seeing the knife-edge their roommate was teetering on, Nine opened his mouth.
Izak held up a hand to silence the runt. Which of the pirate’s worst traits would win—honor or obstinacy?
It was a hard-fought battle.
“I will go with you as far as I am capable of going,” Twenty-six conceded at last.
Izak grabbed the pirate by the shoulders and shook him. “I could kiss you!”
“Don’t.”
***
The swimming lessons had not been for Four’s benefit alone. Unbeknownst to the prince and their scrawny shadow, Twenty-six had been using the time in the water to test the Mark. He could swim as far out as Four dared go—as long as he was swimming for the sake of teaching or simply for exercise. When his intentions shifted to escape, the corruption in his veins turned to a stone fist, holding him in place.
Four had noticed him sink once, but had assumed the pirate was just going under to show off that he could dive without holding his nose, which Four still could not accomplish without snorting water. It had taken Twenty-six until he hit sandy sea floor before he could reorder his thinking and kick safely to the surface.
Distance was not his prison, intention was.
And yet, strangely enough, fantasies of repaying the dirter king’s blood debt did not cause him any ill effects. He could crash and parry through a sparring match, imagining he was hacking off the king’s limbs, without faltering. He could plot and train with the intention of one day using it all against the king and never feel that stone fist close.
Was it because he had no intention of killing the boys and men he fought? Could the Mark perceive that honor would not allow him to cut down someone who was not trying to kill him? That even now, surrounded by dirters and separated from the God of the Waves forever, he couldn’t bring himself to murder senselessly?
The trip to the village down Thornfield’s key would be the test, both of his distance hypothesis and of his ability to reef his sails until the wind was right.
He glanced out at the gray, gloomy day and pounding surf. He’d done the calculations a hundred times by the sun and the waves. There were a handful of days before the storm season took full hold; in that transitional stretch, rain would fall but the currents would not pose too great a threat.
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This was the time for greatships to return to Cryst’holm. Time for the reunion of raedrs with their young families, the greeting of old friends, feasting, celebration, and trade.
How many tribes had made it back already? How many had been destroyed by the blood drinkers’ unnatural black cloud? What if Twenty-six and the women, children, and elderly who had remained in the floating oceanic city through the raiding season were the only Ocean Rovers left in this world?
What if, somehow, the dirter king had found that safe haven? What if Twenty-six was the only one of his people left?
“The second or third day of next week,” Twenty-six promised his roommate. “That is the day for our expedition.”
***
“We can’t all go to the bathhouse at the same time,” Izak argued on the day in question. “And everyone will be suspicious if they see Nine going where he never dared go before.”
“I dare anything, me. Just not fool stuff. ’Sides, it’s heaps more suspicious if I don’t go with.”
“What in the name of Khinet makes you think that?”
Nine shrugged. “’Cuz I’ll just tell everybody.”
Dealing with the boy made Izak feel as if he were working out a riddle. You have a sack of grain, a hen, and a fox on one side of a creek. You can only carry two to the other side at a time. In what order do you carry them so that nothing eats anything else?
The dirty little runt had become Izak and Twenty-six’s staunchest defender against hazing, turning aside any senior students with suggestions to snatch up other first-years or, failing that, threats to whup ’em blind if they laid a finger on his brothers. Yet Nine saw nothing wrong with tattling on those same so-called brothers to the masters.
Trick question. The grain’s actually an enchanted monster—it eats both your hen and fox, then gobbles you up when you get back.
In the end, they sent Nine to the bathhouse first to wait, so he could be certain he wasn’t being ditched.
“If’n somebody sees me, I’ll say I’m lookin’ for somebody to whup,” Nine promised. “Everybody’ll believe that.”
Izak went next, a little later than his regular bathing hour, but not suspiciously so. He hung around gossiping and supposedly relaxing in the bath until the last of his fellow bathers left for the night.
The coals had burnt down by the time Twenty-six arrived, and the water had taken a turn for the cool. While Izak climbed out and spent forever drying off and dressing and making up excuses not to leave yet, the pirate went about his work: letting the dirty water drain, rinsing the bath, then scooping spent ashes from its coal banks, rebuilding the fire, and refilling the trough.
The rain the pirate had predicted was clattering on the thin slate roof, but no errant gusts blew through the open door to suggest they would face a dangerous storm. No surprise bathers blew in either. Thornfield—excluding its hunched, soaked patrols on the wall and Nine, who sat outside just beneath the shelter of the bathhouse’s tiny portico—had gone to sleep for the day.
The pirate and the prince stepped outside and waited for a fourth-year on patrol to pass over the closest portion of the wall. As the dripping fourth-year headed toward the gatehouse, the trio crept around the corner to the culvert.
“Last chance to stay behind,” Izak told Nine, bundling his Thornfield-issue clothing. He jammed the wad of fabric through the grate onto the sandy, silty shore that had grown up along the side. “You won’t have to walk miles in the rain or suffer the water’s bad medicine if you stay here.”
Nine grinned. “Oh, I ain’t going in the water.”
“Then how are you planning to get to the other side of the wall without being seen? Walk through?”
“Nah, like this.” The runt slipped an arm through the grate, wiggled his head through, and followed with one shoulder, then the other. There was a moment of concern when his backside caught—on three square meals a day and with all the scraps he could steal, the close-rat was starting to fill out—but with a little grunting and shimmying, he fell out the other side.
Nine stood up and gave them a smug grin.
“I’ll be burnt,” Izak muttered.
Twenty-six’s silent frown agreed. Both young men had been too large for too long to have considered the grating as a viable exit above-water.
“If we get caught, we’ll bargain with information,” Izak said, struck by inspiration. “The secret way to defeat Thornfield in return for a scourging deferred. An army of children can get through here. Or dwarves.”
“An army of men can slip beneath the grating,” Twenty-six said. “They do not all have to be malnourished like Nine.”
“Stand around jawin’ your jokes. Meanwhilst, I’m halfway to the whores, me.”
Instead of waiting for them to make it to the other side, Nine snatched up the men’s bundled clothing and sprinted away from the muddy culvert toward the dunes that surrounded the thornknife graveyard. The mounds of sand were hulking shadows in the distance, half obscured by the rain.
Izak cursed. This went completely against their plan for the pirate to carry the runt through the inlet on his back. Nine was endangering the entire operation simply to avoid the water.
“If that runt gets us caught,” Izak growled.
“He is far enough ahead that if he draws attention, we can slip back through the culvert before the patrols realize we are out,” Twenty-six said.
“He took our clothes.”
The pirate cursed. “Then we are committed.”
But no cries of alarm went up. In a trice, Nine disappeared behind the dunes.
Izak and Twenty-six slipped under the slimy half-grating. On the other side, they sank to their chins in the surf and felt their way out into deeper water, the rain plinking across the surface.
They dove beneath the rain-pocked waves, pushing along underwater. Izak’s lungs gave out about the same time as fear that he’d gone off course and lost Twenty-six forced him to the surface.
He popped up, snatched a breath and glanced around as they’d practiced, then dove beneath again. Thankfully he hadn’t veered far off course at all. Twenty-six was lengths ahead of him but slowing down to compensate. With a few hard kicks, Izak caught up.
Couldn’t leave Thornfield, indeed. What a crock of pirate rot.
***
Twenty-six’s every thought was focused on getting his roommates to the village. Nothing but getting the dirter prince to his dirter whores. He wouldn’t allow himself to waver even enough to think of this as the test of the Mark.
They reached the dunes at the graveyard, swam another hundred yards, then stopped to wash the stench from the culvert away with the soap he had brought from the bathhouse.
Twenty-six checked the distant walls for patrols looking in their direction, then nodded to Four. The two of them hustled ashore, ducking unseen between dunes.
“You ugly fishies must be lookin’ for these,” Nine said, holding out their clothing bundles in the falling rain. “I kept ’em dry, me. Now ain’t you glad you brung your brother?”
Four snatched his clothes away and flicked the boy’s ear. “That’s for not telling us you were going to steal off and leave us stark naked.”
“You’re the only silt brain that ain’t dressed!” Nine rubbed his ear. “Even the pirate scum’s got enough sense to keep his unders on, in case a shark come along lookin’ to bite off a dangler.”
From the look on Four’s face, sharks were a prospect he hadn’t considered.
“Perhaps in the future, it would be best to wear something on the swim,” he admitted. “Wet smallclothes could be shed in the graveyard. But there’s the larger question of how we access dry clothing once Nine gets too fat to squeeze through the grating and carry our things.”
“He will not fit through the bars much longer,” Twenty-six agreed as he dressed.
Nine cursed them both, but the fact remained that unless he outgrew his fear of water, he would soon be too large to sneak out of Thornfield.
There was an ancient stone relic box about ten rows away, stuck in amongst the older, cruder thornknives. Twenty-six knelt beside it and pried it open.
A rib cage, a talisman, and a few moldered scrolls. More than enough room for two changes of clothing.
“Brilliant. We’ll bring an extra set apiece next time,” Four declared, looking over Twenty-six’s shoulder. “We can wear the same clothes for a few days, then acquire replacements on the day we do the washing for the upperclassmen. Students are always coming up short of bits and pieces after laundry day.”
“That is a good strategy,” Twenty-six said, surprised. The prince could be a fairly intelligent problem-solver when he wanted to. Especially when that problem stood between him and the dirter whores he never stopped talking about.
“Try not to sound so shocked. It’s insulting.” Squinting into the rain, Four gauged the shade of the stormy gray sky. “We’ve only got so many hours until sunset, men, and I don’t mean to waste them on your company. Paradise awaits.”
With that, Four burst into a cloud of smoke and reappeared a hundred yards down the beach.