“We can’t just sit here staring at the ceiling today,” Four said, pacing the length of floor between the door and archer loop. “We have to go to the public house. We’ve got to drink to Forty-three’s memory.”

Twenty-six doubted the prince could have found Forty-three in a crowd before the dirters’ barbaric version of a funeral, but the idea of getting outside was appealing. Their room was equipped with a small iron grate about the size of a raed ship’s hanging coal stove. When they had returned from the rubbish pit, Twenty-six had made up the fire too high, overestimating how cold he was or perhaps underestimating how hot wood burned. Now the air in the room was sweltering and close. His face was burning, and his eyes felt gritty and hot. He couldn’t imagine trying to concentrate on defending Four’s attacks today.

Rather than argue that they’d been to Sandshells only two days earlier and that increasing frequency increased the risk of being caught, Twenty-six headed for the door.

The cold wind, icy water, and weak sunlight drove away the unbearable heat, but when Twenty-six walked out of the waves at the thornknife graveyard, he began shivering and couldn’t stop.

The public house always had a fire going at this time of year. Maybe the common room would be a more comfortable temperature than their room had been.

He changed hastily into dry clothes and sprinted after his roommate. His speed over long distances had improved significantly since coming to Thornfield, and most nights he could almost keep up with Four’s smoke step. As usual, he arrived a few steps behind the prince.

Unlike usual, however, just beyond the village, a fleet of half a dozen brightly colored wagons were visible from the doorstep of the public house. Twenty-six had become acquainted with the most common hauling crafts the dirters used. Blocky, unwieldy things wagons were, all made of aging, unoiled wood.

These wagons were nothing like that. Their vibrant paint and elaborate carvings reminded him of tribal greatships, and they were fully covered with dazzlingly patterned hoops of canvas. His fingertips itched to touch the flamboyant material, to test whether it felt like a ship’s sheets.

Children swaddled in brilliantly colored clothing darted around the red wheels and poked their heads out of flaps in the canvas, only to be shooed back in by adults in equally bright outfits cooking over driftwood fires or conversing with drab-looking villagers.

It had been so long since he had seen paint and fabric celebrating every color of the sea and sky. His heart stumbled, then clenched like a fist. The landsickness that had gradually disappeared returned in full force, sick for his people and his home.

These weren’t Ocean Rovers. Their hair was dark and their skin was pale, blushing in the noonday sun. The men wore wide-brimmed black hats, and their faces were clean-shaven. No earrings denoted their significance. They laughed or complained or wore shock on their faces for all the world to see. Their women’s faces were uncovered, their hair unbound, and they wore skirts with skin-tight buttoned shirts that left their bellies exposed to the open air.

Perhaps if one of his people could see him then, they would see no Ocean Rover, either. Just a foreigner in the clothing of dirters. Just a coward cut off from the sea.

Swallowing the bitter taste in his throat, Twenty-six pushed the door open and stepped into the public house.

The common room was full to bursting, villagers crammed into every seat and along the wall. More danced between the benches. Music reeled through the air from a rebec, a timbrel, and a set of pipes.

It had been so long since he’d heard music that he had to stop and compose his expression. He hadn’t even registered that it was missing, hadn’t once thought it strange that no one at Thornfield, young or old, ever whistled or hummed or sang. They were just dirters; so much ignorance and barbarism could be dismissed beneath that flag.

The music felt as if it were beating against his temples. Every hammer on the timbrel, every wail of the rebec, every scream of the pipes. The notes were beautiful, but they were so loud. All around him, people stomped and clapped and sang along with the bits of the song they’d picked up or yelled to each other over the noise.

Twenty-six found a place along the wall just wide enough to shoulder against. His head was pounding. With all these bodies and the smells and noise and heat, the common room was as torturous as the overheated room at Thornfield had been.

He would get his bearings, then tell Four he was leaving. He was close enough to the alley door that he wouldn’t have to fight his way back through the crowd to the front door.

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If he could find Four.

He spotted the prince in the midst of the whirl and chaos. Four seemed to have forgotten the publican’s daughters for once. He swung through the revelry with a young woman from the wagon people in his arms.

Sleek waves of black hair bounced as she twirled and laughed and sang along. Her flamboyant skirts jangled with sewn-on coins. Bangles clanked on her wrists. A gold chain dangled around her trim stomach, attached to a glittering piercing in her navel—thin, fine goldwork like the gold nose chain he’d given Mehet—swaying, sparkling, mesmerizing.

A bolt of lightning struck Twenty-six. Deadened nerves blazed to life.

He had to get out.

Staggering, he shoved his way through the crowd to the alley door. Minutes before, the portal had seemed close, but now it swayed away from him as if a storm tide was pulling it out to sea. Bodies crashed against him like breakers, and the music howled and clawed at his ears.

He stumbled and fell against the door. It swung open under his weight, spilling him out on his hands and knees into the muddy alley stinking of piss and ale. A startled drunk, relieving himself against a broken oak barrel, cursed at him, then stowed himself haphazardly as he staggered back inside, slamming the pub door closed.

Twenty-six remained on his hands and knees in the mud, shaking and shivering. He gulped down the icy winter wind like a drowning man finally breaking the surface of the waves. He curled his fists, and cold mud squelched between his fingers.

He felt.

He felt like he hadn’t in almost a year.

He felt desire.

The wagon woman was nothing to him, but her breasts heaving beneath the brightly colored fabric of her shirt, her smooth, flawless stomach hung with the gold chain, her long waving hair, her laughter, the music, the colors…

Mehet, I am sorry.

But to feel… to see… to hear… to yearn for beauty again…

He clenched burning eyes shut.

He was still a man. He could still want, still feel something beyond rage and emptiness.

It was unbearable.

How could he be rewarded like this after betraying his people and being cut off from his god? Why, when he was an abomination even worse than the blood drinkers?

If anything had the power to destroy him, it was this.

***

“We got trouble, us,” was the first thing Nine said when Izak slipped back into their room just before dusk, still swaying to a tune he’d heard at the pub.

“Save it for tomorrow, Nine, not now.” After the day of drunken gaiety and the exquisitely flexible vanner girl he’d spent the last few hours entwined with, Izak was floating on a cloud he never wanted to come down from. Of course, that could also be all the kisoe they’d smoked in her wagon.

“Gotta be sometime right quick,” Nine said, grabbing Izak’s arm and shoving him around to face their roommate’s bunk. “The pirate’s dying, him.”

Twenty-six writhed on his bunk, sweat soaking his hair and bedclothes. One dirt-caked fist clutched a wad of blanket like he was trying to stop it from escaping. The other hand opened and closed on his chest, fingers twitching into odd shapes, then digging into his skin, then falling limp.

Izak tried shaking him, but the pirate didn’t respond.

“Burn it, how long has he been like this?” Izak raked a hand through his hair. He hadn’t seen the pirate leave, but when he’d realized his roommate was gone, he’d made some joke to himself about how Twenty-six must have been annoyed by all the merriment and made an early exit. “When did he return?”

“He come dragging in a while ago, shucking clothes and talking ’bout he was too cold. I figure by the stink and the mud on him he didn’t even try to clean up after he went under the grating.”

“Why didn’t you get a healer?”

Nine flared up. “Where was I s’posed to say Four went? Off ta see the whores?”

“Well, I’m here now!” Four bellowed, shoving the runt toward the door. “Go!”

She gave him a kick in the leg before streaking out into the evening glow.

***

For the last twenty years, Healer Prime had spent most of his late winter and early spring treating young men for these seasonal illnesses. He knew the grippe the moment he saw it, and he knew that a foreigner who caught it rarely recovered.

“Can’t you just use blood magic?” Four asked.

“Blood magic can only enhance what’s already there,” the healer explained. “Twenty-six doesn’t have the necessary defenses to deal with the diseases of the Kingdom of Night, just as we wouldn’t have the necessary defenses to survive pirate diseases.”

“So he’s killt?” Nine picked at his ear, wide eyes locked on his doomed roommate. “It’s ’cuz Thornfield leaves the corpses right by the water. It makes a fell miasma, and the miasma done got the pirate.”

“Miasmas are folklore and nonsense!” Healer Prime snapped. He hadn’t slept more than an hour at a stretch in at least a week, and he was in no mood for nonsense. He heard entirely too much of that miasma garbage from students raised in the kingdom’s uneducated backwaters—and worse, from the occasional master. “I won’t have any more of that ignorance bandied about in my school!”

***

“What kinda healer don’t know miasmas?” Nine complained to Izak later, when the healer was safely out of earshot. “Ain’t no wonder so many folk took ill. Prime don’t even know his business, him.”

“Mehet,” Twenty-six moaned hoarsely from his bunk. “Can’t hear… What are you saying?”

The healers had long since given up trying to cram more sick into their shed. The incurable were being left to die in their rooms to make space for the curable. Twenty-six was staying where he lay.

The pirate’s moaning broke off, his hands twitching restlessly again, making strange signs and fruitless grabs at the air.

“How can a fever kill a man?” Izak shook his head. “It’s not an ax or a blade or a poison. How do commoners survive long enough to procreate if they can’t even live through a fever?”

Nine wasn’t listening. “I ain’t waiting around for no pirate to get dead, me. I know a miasma, and it ain’t easy to stop, but might be we gotta try anyhow. Brothers got to.”

“How can a fever defeat blood magic?” Izak wasn’t really listening either. He was trying to pour water down Twenty-six’s throat. Despite the pirate’s lips cracking and his voice breaking with thirst, all Twenty-six did was cough the precious liquid back up.