With the southern coast’s mild temperature swings, the fires had to be lit in Thornfield’s grates much later in the year than Izak was used to. The cold never quite reached the severity it did farther north, but winter storms coming in off the ocean dumped chilly, stinging rain almost nightly.

Just before the turn of the new year—too late for most of the students’ tastes—training moved inside. The first-years quickly realized why the masters had been so loath to bring them in out of the cold. The only space large enough for the full school to practice was the dining hall, and even that was hardly sufficient. No night went by without someone unintentionally bloodied by a stray blade.

The masters maintained that the cramped quarters and obstacles made by tables and benches were a good lesson in indoor fighting, where most of their future grafting would be spent. At mealtimes, however, even they cursed the lingering smell of too many men and boys sweating in an enclosed area.

The public house at Sandshells did peak business during the winter. Most of the residents from the little village came in daily to stave off the chill with some drink and idle talk. Sometimes Izak had to wait for Casia or Danasi to be free, which infuriated the Teikru-blessed prince. It was the first time he’d ever had to jostle for a woman’s attention.

Worse yet were the nights when Nine would get to the pub first, outpacing Izak’s smoke step, and claim one of the girls before he could. The runt had finally conceded that water wasn’t entirely bad medicine, but she wasn’t stupid enough to try her luck at Thornfield’s bathhouse. Instead, she took to bathing with Casia and Danasi. For their part, the girls delighted in knowing Nine’s secret, flaunting their dalliances with what looked to be just a scrawny boy in his awkward years, and making up wild tales about Nine to stoke the jealousy of their village beaus.

Both Twenty-six and Izak preferred a clean roommate to the formerly dirty one, but when Nine’s washing at the pub edged out Izak’s chance to be with either of the publican’s daughters, the prince couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive the little brat. It was a happy day for Izak when Nine was finally dragged back to the extra lessons.

***

Unlike Four’s whoring and Nine’s drinking—which hadn’t slowed down in spite of what she still considered a brush with death caused by too much wine—Twenty-six went to the public house in Sandshells for information.

While Four wasted time and gold in the upper rooms, Twenty-six listened to the local dirters. After getting no response from the Ocean Rover the first few times he appeared in their pub, the regular customers dismissed the foreigner as not worth the effort and went on with their accustomed town gossip. Ignored, Twenty-six could listen to every conversation as if he weren’t there.

On one winter trip to the village:

“He took out a whole fleet of ’em singlehanded, the king did.”

“Get your story straight, it was him and his lords’ armies that fed the pirates to the sharks. All except their pirate prince—he came licking the king’s boots, begging for quarter.”

“You’re thinking of the first attack. I’m talking about last month, up toward Cove. Sango said a shipload of dead pirates run aground, bursting with blood plague. That’s Hazerial’s doings.”

“Blood plague’s nasty stuff.”

“Don’t ever doubt it. The fishermen found another three ships floating offshore, all still as death.”

“They climb aboard and see if anybody was still alive?”

“With the blood plague raging, you clod? They burned what washed up and let the scavengers take the rest.”

Or when a traveling pot-mender stopped through:

“The pirate plague’s old news, friends. Nowadays, everybody’s talking about the fires.”

“Fires?”

“One at Big Harbor on the south of Siu Carinal. Two more up the coast, and just before I got here, I heard they just had a big one up Siu Jinial way. There was a high wind, and it burnt up every inch of dock, the shipyard, and half the port buildings besides.”

“What in the name of Khinet?”

Twenty-six knew before the pot-mender answered.

“Pirates! They’ve been taking our merchant ships and setting them on fire, then running them into the harbors. They don’t even give the slaves and crew a chance to swim for their lives. When they got the blazer at Big Harbor put out, they found a score of dead sailors and slaves below the waterline, half burnt, the other half boiled in bilge water. Not the way I’d want to go, I’ll tell you that.”

Twenty-six had guessed that as well. A raed commander didn’t take captives; it was inhumane. An enemy who died in battle could retain his honor—if he’d had any honor to begin with.

The plague-stricken ships had been unusually close to land. Had they been sailing for a dirter haven to spread the deadly disease, but died before they reached their target? What tribe had the plague ships belonged to? Were they greatships or smallships? What about the ships that had towed the burning dirter vessels into the harbors?

These dirters wouldn’t know even if he asked. All he could do was speculate.

Could it be the Waeld carrying out the attacks in the Raen’s absence? The Third Tribe of the Ocean Rovers crafted superior weapons, suppose they had taken to employing them as well? Or could it be the Hael, led by the avenging father who had once killed a leviathan with nothing but a sword?

Who was carrying out the attacks was of little consequence. What mattered was that the tribes were still alive, still fighting. Even in the storm season, they were fighting.

His people who were no longer his people—who wouldn’t want to be his people if they knew him now. Hearing of their strength was like listening to the poets recite the old legends.

He wished he could tell them about Mehet, Daughter of the Hael, Wife of the Raen, Terror of the Blood Drinkers, Unstoppable Even in Death. She would have been the heroine of every Ocean Rover on the waves.

Let all memory of her coward husband sink forgotten to the depths.

***

On most days, when lectures had ended and supper was over and the icy wind howled brutally past the archer loop, Four taught Twenty-six how to defend against his illusory blood magic.

“But if ya teach the pirate scum how to beat ya, you’ll lose the next tournament,” Nine pointed out. She was supposed to be on her way back to the dining hall for her daily lesson with her nemesis, but as usual, she was dragging around their room, delaying.

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“To have more skilled opponents is always beneficial,” Twenty-six said. “Four will be forced to improve his swordstaff skill until he can defeat me with a blade alone.”

Nine scratched her nose. “Nah, Four cain’t beat you without cheating.”

“That’s the true benefit of this strategy,” Four said. “I’ll be knocked out of the bracket sooner, then I can simply sit on the sidelines and enjoy a holiday without lectures or training.”

“I’ll beat you, me,” the runt told Twenty-six. “Last time, they ended the tournament afore we even got to scrap. You never woulda got to the last match if you’da had to face me.”

“Go to your lesson,” the pirate said.

Twenty-six preferred not to practice defending against the mental attacks in front of an audience. Based on Four’s matches during the autumn tournament, he knew that no one else could see or hear what was being presented, but it made the Ocean Rover supremely uncomfortable that he had no idea what his outward reactions were during the attacks. It was bad enough that his roommate could watch the worst and best moments of his life playing out again. What if he shamed himself by showing some uncontained emotion?

“I think I saw you blink once,” Four joked. “But it seems more likely that I blinked myself and just assumed it was you.”

Twenty-six rarely found the dirter prince funny.

He also made very little progress. Day after day, Four launched traps stolen from Twenty-six’s most painful and private thoughts and memories. Twenty-six built walls deeper and wider than Thornfield’s, but over and over again he found himself trapped in illusion, unable to fight back in reality.

As if Twenty-six didn’t realize how badly he was run aground, the prince thought it would be helpful to emphasize how powerful the king of the blood drinkers was.

“He’s Eketra-blessed. That means that conniving shrew of a strong goddess—praise be to her glorious name and so on—favored Hazerial with her skill at causing physical and mental anguish. If what I do has the ability to upset you, then my father will destroy you.”

“That will not matter,” Twenty-six said. In most ways an Ocean Rover could be, he had already been destroyed. “I only have to hold off the illusions long enough to kill him. What happens to me during or after is of no consequence.”

“Sure, but if you could escape with your life, why wouldn’t you?” Four kicked his swordstaff up and tossed it idly from hand to hand. “Perhaps you could find another sun-kissed beauty to make a shipful of pirate offspring with?”

Twenty-six’s glare warned Four to steer clear of those reefs.

“Don’t you want to survive?” the prince demanded.

What point would there be to continued existence once the blood debt was repaid? He was cursed, a coward who deserved no future. Death would be a relief, even if he could never join his family and his tribe in paradise.

“I do not fear death.”

“But to go chasing after it seems foolhardy.” Four shrugged. “Well, one way or another, if you want to defend against this attack, then you’re going to have to let go of the dead woman.”

No matter how often Four repeated that advice, Twenty-six couldn’t do it. Mehet meant more to him than he could explain. She was the spirit of his people, a gleaming gem of memory, proof that there had once been something more to him than rage and emptiness and self-loathing. He knew the world used to contain beauty, but she was the only bit of it he could remember.

He would just have to find another way to get around Four’s illusions.

***

The usual illnesses brought on by bad weather and large groups crammed into small spaces went around Thornfield. Most were merely annoying, hardly worth the hoarse cursing expended by those who caught them. But in amongst the harmless sicknesses, things like pneumonia and the croup made the rounds, laying out even the strongest residents.

The healer’s shed filled up with students and staff alike, while the healers worked from dusk ’til dusk again, tending to the sick and trying to jam in more beds. The kitchen was the first to lose a member, the older cook from whom Nine had learned about Grandmaster’s “vestment.” The number of masters unaffected by illness dwindled until the ancient Master of Archives was teaching every lecture himself, grouping all levels together in one room. Those who could learn would learn what they could.

A second-year student came down with an ague and was dead within a week. Then Master Risk caught the same ague, and lectures were suspended until he or another knowledgeable master could take over once more. Pneumonia carried off a handful of students, and a wave of fever followed, taking to the grave more who had been weakened by the previous ailment.

Nine got out of extra lessons for two days in a row while Masters Saint Daven and Saint Galen got through the worst of their croup, both on the same days. She was ecstatic and demanded she and her roommates go to the village to celebrate.

“That’s how twins is,” she told Four and Twenty-six on their run for Sandshells. She paused to emphasize this bit of wisdom with a long snort and spit. The runt had had a perpetually runny nose since winter began, but nothing worse yet. “They think the same, and they take sick the same.”

Unfortunately, at least to Nine’s way of thinking, neither twin died. Combat training, which had been taken over by Grandmaster for those two days, was returned to the Saints as soon as they could leave their beds under their own power again, and the extra sword lessons resumed.

“So you lived, didja?” Nine muttered the day Saint Daven returned.

“Disappointed?” The master saw Nine apathetically prying at the cracks between the flagstones with one twin sword. “What are you sitting around for? You know how these lessons begin. Get up and go through your—” He broke off in a coughing fit. It was a long minute before he could croak out the rest of the order. “Go through your positions. If you want me dead, you’ll have to kill me yourself. And you won’t do it with that kind of posture. Stand up straight.”

In all, the staff agreed this was the worst year for ailments that any of them could remember.

***

On the harsh, rainy evening that the first-year class buried Forty-three, the crazy-eyed low street boy Nine claimed to have busted out of the gaol with, Izak finally got to see the legendary mass grave where Thornfield dumped prospective Thorns who didn’t survive to be grafted.

Located at the farthest end of the spit of sand, the pit sat between Thornfield’s westernmost wall and the ocean. Izak counted five archer loops between the rubbish pit and their room, which explained the smells that occasionally wafted in. Broken pottery, glass, split wineskins, and rotting scraps of food that even the pigs refused to eat. As only two brood sows and a boar had been kept for the winter and the rest butchered, there was rather more of the rotting food than in the warmer seasons.

A flock of gulls flapped away from the pit when they arrived, angrily calling over their shoulders. Their contribution to the refuse stood out in stark white splatters and streaks.

“It’s just a rubbish pit,” Fifty-one, Bastard of West Crag and still dedicated stater of the obvious said.

“Speaks to our value, doesn’t it?” Izak muttered darkly. He didn’t see any obvious human remains below. There were some bones, but those looked to come from sheep and fowl. Perhaps that larger rib there had once been a human’s. But it could just as easily have belonged to a pig.

Having been born with the royal blood magic, illness had never troubled Izak. He’d been immune to sickness his entire life. The grafting, however, was violent enough to kill any man, and then into the rubbish pit with him.

Funny how often he’d thought he deserved to be dumped out with the refuse, and yet he’d never really considered what it would look like to end up there.

Nine elbowed him. He smacked her bony arm off.

“When does the dead temperer come get ya?”

“There aren’t any dead temperers outside Siu Carinal,” Izak told her.

A gull got tired of waiting for them to leave and dove back down for a slushy bite of blackened squash end.

Nine grunted. “They oughta put this somewheres away from the water. A fell miasma’s gonna collect, then we’re all killt.”

At the far end of the pit, Master Malice and Forty-three’s roommates rolled the dead boy down the slope into the trash. The closest bystanders helped shovel enough dirt and sand down to hide the body from the gulls. One of Forty-three’s roommates wept while he said some words that the wind carried away. Another roommate sobbed from a combination of grief and the croup that had carried Forty-three off, and the third scrubbed at his eyes with a dirty rag.

What were the odds anybody would be weeping at Izak’s burial?

What was there to mourn, anyway?

He turned to the pirate. Twenty-six watched them dump sand onto the corpse with a darker than usual scowl.

“Contemplating the future?” Izak joked.

“Don’t let them put me in the dirt.” Twenty-six’s gray-green eyes shone strangely bright in the evening gloom and light from the ghost city. “If I die here, give me back to the ocean.”

Izak tried to laugh, but curtailed it as the dead boy’s grieving roommates passed.

“You’re not going to die here,” he hissed. “Stop talking nonsense.”

But was it really nonsense? If they survived until their grafting, they would all die here, every one of them with a thornknife in his heart. Some would come back when their new masters called.

Most? Izak couldn’t remember ever hearing the odds of survival, but he hoped most came back.

The rest would tumble down this slope and have sand kicked down after.