Twice a year, Thornfield pitted the students against their own classes in a mock tournament. This determined ranking, and for the seniors, ranking was everything. The best-ranked Thorns in any class were almost always grafted to the king. On only the rarest of occasions was Hazerial known to give away his best potential Thorns.

Although the masters hammered the honor and pride of their order into the students’ heads night in and night out, it was well known that Royal Thorns gained the most fringe benefits. They had dozens of fellow Thorns to ease their workload and often received whole days off from guarding the king and royal family. While they were on guard, there were usually so many of them in one place that it wasn’t unheard of to spend days gambling and telling stories with only the occasional high-alert situation. Beautiful women from cities across the kingdom warmed their beds, and many Thorns enjoyed supplementary income from wealthy, off-the-record patronesses as well.

Private Thorns could expect to be grafted with two fellow Thorns at most, which severely cut down on—if not altogether eliminated—their recreation time. They also had the constant threat of their masters being charged with treason, heresy, or looking at the king the wrong way hanging over their heads. No Thorn could allow their master to walk into harm, which meant fighting to the death when the arrest was attempted.

As far as anyone knew, Saint Daven was the only Thorn who had survived his master’s death, and the messy rumors swirling around the incident were enough to keep any Thorn in his right mind from hoping to join that small fellowship.

So while Royal Thorns rarely lived long enough to be retired, they got enough enjoyment from their short stints at the palace and heard enough horror stories about their private counterparts that they weren’t complaining.

Thornfield’s mock tournaments were holidays for the students. All lectures and training were suspended for two weeks—“Extra lessons not included,” Grandmaster broke the news to the outraged Nine—while the students gathered around the bailey to watch the matches, cheering, shouting advice, and analyzing mistakes from the sidelines.

Even the masters got caught up in the festive atmosphere, forgetting that the game was essentially deciding which boys would live fast, luxurious, short lives and which would live potentially slow, torturous ones. The betting in the students’ quarters was nothing compared to the money changing hands between the masters.

First-years, as they were generally less skilled and less exciting than their older counterparts, fought their bracket out first, usually concluding in a short few days.

Twenty-six swept his initial matches, all against much larger opponents. Dirters were tall, but most of them had only half a year’s experience with steel weapons. They didn’t stand a chance against an Ocean Rover who had cut his teeth on a cutlass and swordbreaker.

Izak shocked everyone when he took all of his first matches as well. In truth, he had considered losing early on so he could relax and watch the rest of the proceedings, but it would have been too obvious. Losing to rustics twice his width and low street psychos half his height, all of whom had never held a sword before coming to Thornfield? Unconscionable.

Penuel-Denuel—better known to Izak now as Fifty-one—was the toughest opponent he faced in those early rounds. The bastard had been trained in the saber for years, idly at first, then more strenuously as it became glaringly apparent that he wouldn’t be made legal heir.

From the beginning of their match, it seemed clear to the spectators that Fifty-one would rout the former crown prince. He drove Four across the bailey with a series of perfectly placed slashes and aggressive footwork that had the prince struggling to keep up. The smart money was on the bastard of West Crag.

Then came a split second of hesitation. The crowd murmured. Had Fifty-one turned his ankle on a loose stone? Caught a bit of dust in his eyes?

The bastard lurched into motion again, but too late. Four sidestepped, deftly slipping his staff between the bastard’s calves. With a twist, he collapsed Fifty-one’s stance and dropping him to one knee on the sandy ground. Four whipped the sword end around and rested its blade across the back of Fifty-one’s neck.

Rumors began immediately that Fifty-one had lost intentionally to his prince, but the dumbfounded look on Fifty-one’s face was enough to tell Twenty-six and anyone else with half a brain that he’d been beaten outright.

When Four offered Fifty-one a hand up, the loser threw back his head and laughed. He grabbed the prince’s hand and was hauled to his feet. After the winner was declared, Fifty-one hung around with Four, laughing and bemoaning his loss alternately with his smug-looking conqueror.

Twenty-six had been trained from childhood to spot the nuances of a skirmish. He dismissed questions of turned ankles and vision impairments immediately; the bastard had suffered neither. There was a single glaring point that no one in the crowd around Twenty-six was mentioning—Four hadn’t used his swordstaff until the end of the match.

Four was unused to relying on weapons. Instead, the bastard’s hesitation must have come as a result of some blood magic treachery.

The masters had announced before the matches began that there were no rules for engagement except that the only blood magic allowed was what each fighter brought with them into combat—no theft from the spectators.

And yet Four hadn’t resorted to the tactic immediately. He had waited until he’d nearly lost, either because the attack required time to prepare or specific placement to activate. He may even have gone into the match hoping to win without using blood magic, then realized he could not.

Whatever it was, when Twenty-six fought Four—and it looked certain that they would fight, the way the bracket was falling—he would have to finish Four quickly to avoid the unknown attack.

***

Nine did much better than anyone expected in the first-year bracket, tearing his way through foes much larger and more experienced than he was, much to his bloodthirsty fellow younger students’ delight.

The little berserker hacked and slashed and swung his twin swords like a whirlwind, taking all sorts of nonlethal damage while chopping through the best-laid of defenses. He was like a tiny blood-fevered bull that had to be hacked to pieces to be stopped. Then, when it was least expected, Nine would appear exactly where he needed to be, with swords to neck and spine, breastbone and gut, or groin and throat. No one saw how he got there. A trick of speed and chaos, the older students speculated, some misdirection in all that wild animal flailing.

When the boy finally lost to Four, in what would have been the finals of a real tournament, Master Saint Daven was the only one disappointed in Nine’s showing.

“He can stay on,” Grandmaster remarked, picking up the thread of their month-old conversation as if no time had passed. “He bested every comer but the prince. Results like that cannot be dismissed.”

Saint Daven wasn’t impressed. “He should’ve made it to the championship fight. He’ll have to continue the extra lessons.”

“I leave that to your discretion. Keep this up, and you might just make a Royal Thorn out of a half-blind child.” Grandmaster watched the boy animatedly reliving his fight with his friends. Rather than being hurt and embarrassed by the loss, Nine was talking the ear off of his roommate, the former crown prince, seemingly ecstatic at how handily he’d been beaten.

Unlike many of the younger Thornfield masters, Heartless never lost sight of the true goal in the festive air of the mock tournaments. He had returned dozens of his brothers’ thornknives during his service. He could never forget that the boys rehashing their wins and losses today would tomorrow be the thornknives filling the graveyard outside the walls.

He was raising these boys to die. A few might survive, as he had, as the masters of Thornfield had, but most wouldn’t.

There was a reason they called each year of prospective Thorns “crops.” They were there for a season and then cut down.

***

The first-year championship fight came down to Four and Twenty-six. By then all suggestion of the prince winning by deference to noble blood had run aground. The prince was capable of something the best fighters in their year could not defend against. That was the only explanation.

None of Four’s opponents would go so far as to describe his tactic for defeating them. Twenty-six rarely spoke to his fellow students unless required by necessity, but he heard others asking Four’s defeated foes what he’d done. Their answers were vague, embarrassed.

“But I would have won otherwise,” they invariably claimed, “Four told me so.”

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And Four always backed them up. “I’m nowhere near as talented at fighting as he is. I cheated. Simple as that.”

But Four never said how.

As they moved to the center of the bailey for the final match, Twenty-six kept an eye on his opponent. Prepared, but not tense; watchful, but not so eager that he rushed to counter every twitch. Four’s claims about cheating might in themselves be a distraction. A smart man with enough foresight and time could set such a thing into motion for the sake of intimidation or misdirection.

Master Fright raised a hand between them, the embroidered kerchief hooked in his fingers fluttering in the faint night breeze.

“Both parties ready?”

Four grinned and leveled his swordstaff. “I’d say, ‘may the best man win,’ but odds are I’m going to.”

“Talk is useless.” Twenty-six scraped the flat of his cutlass down the length of Four’s blade. Steel hissed against steel. “Speak with your weapon.”

He’d never fought against a spear before. The only spears on Ocean Rover ships were short, sturdy harpoons used for hunting sea creatures. Otherwise, the quarters were too tight for a long, thrusting weapon to be effective. From what he’d seen of Four’s bouts and training, however, the reach and momentum of the swordstaff were its strengths. Inside its arc, he could avoid the blade at the end and mitigate the momentum of the swing.

“Fight!” The kerchief snapped aside.

Twenty-six whipped his cutlass wide, smacking the staff out of the way. Four lurched onto his back foot and spun the staff, but Twenty-six was already too close for the stick to hit him with any force. The swordbreaker’s serrated edge naturally filled in where the cutlass had been, racing for the prince’s throat.

Four’s eyes widened in shock. Perhaps the prince had expected caution seeded by the duplicity he’d been heralding at every turn. Time must be the secret, then, to whatever blood magic Four needed to win.

The swordbreaker was a breath from Four’s throat, the cutlass swinging back to join it.

“My husband.” Mehet pressed a hand to his cheek, her forehead to his. Her teal eyes glittered like gems. “My raedr.”

The cutlass and swordbreaker crashed against wood.

“Light burn me, who is she?” Four whipped his swordstaff, throwing off the heavy steel weapons. “Tell me you’ll introduce us, Twenty-six.”

Twenty-six spun around the thrust of the staff. His cutlass hissed through the place where Four stood and hit nothing.

“Araam?” Mehet’s arms slipped around him and pulled him closer. She smelled like saltwater and perfumed oils, and she was soft, so soft. She moaned. The sound made his throat go dry and his heart pound like a storm surf on hidden rocks. “My Araam.”

Four whistled from nearby. “She’s gorgeous. For Teikru’s sake, what are you waiting for?”

Araam—no, he was Araam no longer—Twenty-six crashed into Four.

Except Four was already gone again. Or maybe he’d never been there.

Twenty-six was in Haelbringr’s cabin, tangled in silken sheets and warm furs and the arms of his laughing, beautiful wife…

No. Mehet was dead, gone to the depths with her burning wedding vessel. He was in the Thornfield bailey. Fighting.

Fighting who?

“Kill me and my Mark will lift,” the blood drinker king purred. “Kill me and return to your precious pirates victorious.”

Araam—Twenty-six—someone drove the swordbreaker into the dirter’s heart.

No. There is no dirter king here, no Mehet. I am fighting Four.

“You were fighting Four.” The king’s face shifted, narrowed. His hair darkened, his eyes lost their fathomless frozen-mud sheen, and two sets of dimples appeared in a smiling face. “Now you’ve lost to Four, I’m afraid.”

Twenty-six lay sprawled in the sand. The prince stood over him with the blade of the swordstaff resting on his sternum. Around the bailey, men and boys cheered. The sudden clearing of his head was nearly as disorienting as the illusions had been.

Four spun the staff up and set its butt in the dirt, then reached out a hand to offer Twenty-six help up.

The cutlass had been smacked away or dropped, and blood poured from a stab wound in Twenty-six’s palm that would no doubt match Four’s blade, but the swordbreaker was still clutched in his opposite hand. The urge to grab Four by the arm and yank him down onto its serrated blade roared inside Twenty-six. His muscles shook with the desire to kill.

It was the Mark that stopped him, that fist of stone locking him in place.

Twenty-six forced the hatred and rage down into that boiling maelstrom in his chest. When he could move again, he stood, ignoring Four’s offer of help.

“I told you.” Four let his hand drop and shrugged. “I cheat.”

“Losses are more informative than victories,” Twenty-six said, looking into the dark eyes of his roommate, the son of the monster.

***

Despite Nine’s complaints, the weapons master wouldn’t allow the runt to skip out on his extra sword lessons, so when the festivities were finished for the night and the crowd broke up, Izak returned to their room alone.

Twenty-six made it back to the room hours later, when the sun had already begun its climb up the eastern side of the sky. Ignoring Izak, the pirate went straight to the archer loop and stared out at the lightening surf.

“She really was gorgeous.” Izak sat up on his bed and leaned against the stone wall. “I’d give both my eyes for a day in the arms of a beauty like that. Take my ears while you’re at it. Who is she?”

The pirate’s shoulders and arms twitched, then froze. He stood in silence for several long minutes.

Most of Izak’s opponents had laughed off his attack because their fantasies were too embarrassing or too predictable. Nine’s had been outrageous, on level with the larger-than-life stories he loved to spin. Getting to watch the ridiculously one-sided battle unfold before his single working eye and getting to run his grubby hands through imagined piles of gold had tickled the runt to no end.

Twenty-six wasn’t laughing. After what Izak had seen, the prince hadn’t expected him to be.

“Can you not tell?” Twenty-six’s voice was strained, either holding back fury or forcing the words past it.

“I saw the girl’s mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear what she said,” Izak admitted. “I’m not a true mind reader. That little trick just vomits back at you what’s most often on the surface of your mind.”

“Are there true mind readers among your people?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me.”

Twenty-six went silent.

Was he considering whether the trade was worthwhile? Better throw the pirate some treasure up front.

“There must be true mind readers somewhere,” Izak said. “I’ve read about them, and I don’t believe they’re entirely fictitious. If I can use blood magic to scrape your mind for its fondest imaginings, then someone must be able to hear or read the thoughts in there.”

After another stretch of silence, Twenty-six said, “The woman was a heroine among our people. Someday her epics will be sung across every wave in the ocean.”

Izak grinned. “I wish more Kingdom of Night epics were about beautiful women with that perfect, all-over glow. Not a hint of white on her. Do your women bask naked in the sun to brown like that? Better yet, do your men get to watch while they do?”

Again that strained, frozen posture.

“Aha,” Izak said. “More than just a famous story for pirate boys to put themselves to sleep with, isn’t she?”

“If I could kill you, you would be thrice dead by now,” Twenty-six finally forced out.

“Who is she really?”

“Can your king create illusions as you can?”

“Another trade of information, you say? That’s fair. I don’t know if the king can do that particular trick. I can only do it to people I’ve been around a while. There’s a certain level of foreknowledge required. Just enough that I can probe around in your head, which takes less intimacy than one might guess. Minds are surprisingly defenseless. Of course, it’s worthless against an enemy I’ve just met. I imagine King Hazerial has something much more effective up his sleeve.”

When the pirate made no move to fulfill his side of the trade, Izak prompted him with, “And the golden beauty of the waves was…?”

Twenty-six was shaking now, a tremor so faint that it would have been imperceptible if not for the slight movement of his sandy hair, which in the past several months since their arrival at Thornfield had grown longer than fashion dictated.

“Come on, Twenty-six,” Izak cajoled. “How are you going to get enough information to murder the king unless you uphold your end of the bargain?”

The frozen posture disappeared. The pirate whirled to face Izak, suspicion narrowing his gray-green eyes.

Izak nodded. “I saw him, too, and I can add sums as well as the next man. Better, usually. Who was she?”

“Why do you care?”

“Call it an idle fancy, call it rubbing salt in the wound. Whatever it is, I’m not giving you anything else until I know.”

The stubbornness reared its ugly head. “I need nothing from you.”

“I beg to differ. You want Hazerial dead, but you don’t know how to kill him. I may only have known you for half a year, but even I know that when a pirate sees an opening, he attacks. Instead, you hesitated. You were scared.”

“I fear no death or dirters.”

“My father is both, and you should certainly fear him.” No flicker of surprise there, so the pirate had already guessed or been told who Izak was. “Who was the girl?”

“Woman.”

“Woman, then. Who was she?”

“Tell me how one kills such an abomination as your king.”

“I don’t know. If that were common knowledge, do you think I would be languishing here at the wrong end of the world?”

That gave the pirate pause.

“You would have killed your own father?”

“Of course not! Do I strike you as suicidal? But I certainly would’ve milked the knowledge for all it was worth so I could stay in Siu Rial.” Izak frowned. “Though he probably would’ve killed me for that.” He shrugged. “Well, one way or another, if I knew how to murder the Chosen of the Strong Gods, I would already be dust. So you see, I’m worthless to you, just like she is.”

Twenty-six started to protest, but Izak bulled ahead. “She stopped you from winning today. Let go of her, and maybe I won’t be able to use her against you next time.”

Izak expected more of that frozen rage, but it didn’t rear its head again. Twenty-six glared for a long, long minute. Then something shifted behind those gray-green eyes.

“Your people murdered her,” the pirate said. “But she fought to the death and beyond. She is a heroine, worthy of her place in paradise.”

More or less as Izak had guessed, then. “And you—her lover? admirer? unrequited lovesick devotee?—where were you?”

“I failed her and my tribe. That is all that matters.”

“So you’ve got a dead woman, a thirst for revenge, a king neither of us knows how to kill, and his shiftless disgrace of a son sleeping across the room from you. What’s your next move?”

“You said minds are defenseless, but you require time and knowledge of your victim to use their thoughts against them.”

“I wouldn’t call them victims—”

“So there must be some defense that holds up against your attack.”

“I’ve seen a well-made wall or two.” His uncle’s had been impenetrable. A full-scale inquest had been required to break that down. “I may have even learned to make a few in my day. What will you give me in exchange for teaching you how they work?”

“I gave you a way to the village.”

Izak grinned. “That’s not how we negotiate on dry ground. You didn’t think to barter back then; that’s your loss.”

Twenty-six’s ever-present scowl deepened. “What do you want?”

A beautiful woman to hold. A fast horse back to the hedonistic life he’d left behind. A certain mad queen’s head on a pike. The better man to succeed his father, and as fast as possible. Younger siblings who understood loyalty the way Nine did or honor the way Twenty-six claimed it worked. Proof his uncle hadn’t died for nothing.

“To tell the truth, I don’t know,” Izak said at last. “But I’ve got a hunch you’re the pirate to get it for me.”