Izak arrived at the public house first, pushing his final smoke step to its limit, but Nine was only a few spans behind him. The little runt was faster than he’d expected.

The pirate stalked in almost late enough to miss Izak leading the eldest of the publican’s daughters, Danasi, up to the lodge rooms. Izak had tried engaging the younger daughter as well—her name escaped him—but she was too entertained by the dirty Nine claiming in his loudest Siu Carinal speak that he could drink any man or beast under the table. She brought the boy clay cup after clay cup of ale and giggled as he downed them.

“I was beginning to wonder if we’d lost you,” Izac said.

Twenty-six shook his head.

“Nine’s tracks were easy to follow,” he said, slightly winded.

Izak started to mention that running long distances must not be a popular pastime on pirate ships, but stopped when he noticed Twenty-six’s scowl coming to rest across on the pub girl laughing with Nine.

Protest though the pirate might about not stooping to prostitutes, it had to have been a long two months for him, too.

“Best of luck to you, friend,” Izak said, smirking as he passed. “You might be able to get her alone, but you’ll have to pry her away from the runt first.”

Twenty-six’s customary scowl deepened. “I do not want a dirter whore.”

“They’re not technically whores. This is a pub, not a whoring house.”

Danasi was pulling Izak toward the stairs. He went, but twisted his upper body to keep talking to the pirate.

“Keep an eye on Nine, will you? We’re burnt if he gets too drunk to function this evening.”

***

Dirters flowed in and out of the public house throughout the day, clothing sprinkled with rainwater and sweaty from a long night’s work. In late afternoon, the last drunk was set outside.

The dirter who ran the place wanted to kick out Nine and Twenty-six, too, but relented when his younger daughter Casia said they were waiting for their friend to return with her sister. Nine, very drunk by then, howled with laughter and started up a gratuitously disgusting song.

Twenty-six stared into the clay cup of small ale the dirter whore had brought him, not trusting it to be clean enough to drink.

He had made it this far, which he estimated at about seven miles from Thornfield as the dirters calculated distance.

Could he go as far as the dirter king’s refuge if he thought of nothing on his way?

Lack of information made that a worthless line of consideration. He had no idea where the royal mooring place was, what its defenses were, or where the king would be within it.

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What he did have was a prince who knew.

More persistent was the commonsense issue: if he were found absent, Thornfield would raise alarms and send messenger birds flying to the king. If the dirters used birds to carry messages; human messengers running or riding if they did not.

It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to assume that if the Mark could sense his intentions, then it could also lead the king to him wherever he fled.

However, there was one time a year that the king might come to him. Every spring, Twenty-six had learned, the king came to Thornfield to graft the best among the most senior class; the dregs went to dirter nobles who had ingratiated themselves with the crown the rest of the year.

No matter how Twenty-six studied his options, the grafting ceremony seemed like his only chance at killing the king and redeeming the blood debt.

From the courtly manners lectures they were forced to endure, Twenty-six had gathered that several Royal Thorns were always present with the king. The question, then, was whether Twenty-six was fast enough to kill the monster while an unknown number of men who had trained for years and been magically enhanced to stop assassins tried to kill him.

In their combat training, Twenty-six could best a fourth-year once out of three matches. But against either of the gold-eyed twins who served as Thornfield’s weapons masters and were as near as Twenty-six could fight to a full Thorn, zero out of three. Against a contingent of men like them, he would be dead before he raised his cutlass.

Would that be true if he attacked during his own grafting? From what he’d been taught of the ceremony, he would be asked to kneel, held in place by two classmates he named as his seconds, then the king would drive a wooden knife into his heart, enslaving him with unbreakable magical chains.

Twenty-six had seen the thornknives in the graveyard and on the belts of the masters who had been retired from service. They were daggerlike, shorter than his swordbreaker, less than two hands in length. The king would have to stand close to stab one into a man’s chest.

If Twenty-six struck the moment before the king did, he had a chance. If the Mark would allow him to strike, which logic said it would not.

Twenty-six shoved the dirty cup of small ale away and stood. “Nine, it is time to leave. Go get Four.”

The whore pouted. “But we were having so much fun!”

“Yeah, ya prite-rat scum!” Nine slurred. “Prirate. Prie… We’re havin’ fun, us. Leave’ss’lone er I’ll whup ya a dose of real bad medishine.”

Twenty-six dragged the runt off the bench. Nine promptly fell down.

One of them was going to have to carry him back.

Leaving the drunk child behind, Twenty-six jogged up the steps and hammered on two doors before Four finally answered the third. The prince was reluctant to leave, but he saw reason and dressed.

The publican stopped them at the door, a thick cudgel in hand.

Four grabbed Twenty-six by the shoulder and spun him away from the dirter for a conference.

“See if this will cover it,” he hissed, dropping a handful of jeweled rings and gold coins into Twenty-six’s hand. “It’s all I brought to Thornfield with me. If it’s not enough, you’ll have to tell him to apply to the treasury for reimbursement. They usually handle my outstanding notes.”

The publican’s jaw dropped when he saw the gold coin, but he recovered quickly and claimed that would just be enough to pay for his daughter’s virtue and all the ale they had swilled.

Twenty-six paid the dirter without haggling, then he and Four dragged Nine out into the downpour.

***

The trio made it back to Thornfield’s curtain wall under a squall of booming thunder and splattering sleet. Nine was passed out cold. Twenty-six had had to swim one-armed while using the other to keep the drunken boy on his back.

At the culvert, they shoved Nine under the grating, scraping the runt’s nose, but barely waking him long enough to choke on the water. Twenty-six checked that the coast was clear, then Izak piggy-backed Nine to their barracks.

The patrols—lazy on the final watch of the gloomy day and loath to go out in the pelting, icy rain that heralded the beginning of a stormy autumn—never saw a thing.

Master Smith saw it all from the door of the bathhouse after his habitual early wash, but he only snorted and murmured, “Boys will be boys.”