As soon as Master Fright and the stink pot were gone, Izak put housekeeping from his mind.

“Her draft is too deep!” Twenty-six’s voice scraped his parched throat. “Turn her!”

They were back to raving, it seemed.

A smart man would have begun preparing himself for the inevitable death of his friend. Izak was certain that was what Etian would have done in his place. Instead, Izak proved he was a fool by picking his mind apart, searching for some way to fix this.

Perhaps blood magic couldn’t boost the pirate’s health enough to fight off this sickness, but could royal blood magic create the defenses against illnesses of the Kingdom of Night, the components Prime had said Twenty-six lacked? Izak was immune to disease and illness. If he used his own blood, could he simply transfer those inborn defenses to his friend?

“You don’t mind if I borrow this, do you?” Izak pulled the swordbreaker from under Twenty-six’s pillow.

With a bit of thought, Izak sent the blood flowing to his wrist, then sliced open the veins there. Hot red flowed to the surface and ran down his elbow.

Before Izak could force his wrist into his friend’s mouth, Twenty-six caught Izak’s bloody arm in a grip of steel. His eyes opened, burning with fever, and locked onto the prince’s.

“Four, I remember. I couldn’t during the battle—or afterward—but I remember now.”

“That’s wonderful. I don’t suppose you’ll help me out by taking a quick drink of this?” Izak tried to lever his arm toward the pirate.

Cords stood out in the pirate’s arm and neck as he held Izak off. “Typhoon, hidden reef. I am spared by the God of the Waves. He alone knows why.”

“Let go of me so I don’t have to do something drastic. Unless this means you’re making a miraculous recovery?”

“My death poem.” Twenty-six sank back onto the bunk, his bloody fingers sliding off Izak’s wrist. “I couldn’t remember… didn’t think I would ever recognize beauty again. It is the lifeblood of my people, and it was gone from me. But you can see it, can’t you, Four? The beauty in this world. Even a dirter can see it.” His hoarse voice broke painfully when he asked, “How can you stand it?”

The uncharacteristic display of emotion from the stone-faced pirate made Izak feel sick and angry and not quite sure he wanted to be in his own skin just then. He shifted uncomfortably.

“Mostly by pretending it’s not as beautiful as it is and sullying it whenever I can.” Izak tried a laugh. “Generally squandering whatever I’ve been given by whatever god gives it. That’s how I get through the night. Isn’t that what we all do?”

Twenty-six hid his face in his hands, smearing blood on his skin. “I betrayed my wife. To look upon a dirter woman like that? What kind of monster am I?”

“If your wife is who I think she is, friend, she’s too dead to care.”

Twenty-six didn’t hear him. He had fallen silent again, eyes closed, hands twitching on his chest.

Izak took a deep breath, then wished he hadn’t. Their room stank like illness and burning hair and herbs.

Before Twenty-six could burst out in any other questions that forced one to consider one’s life, Izak shoved his bleeding wrist into his friend’s mouth.

The pirate coughed and thrashed, fighting to break free. Izak caught hold of the energies in Twenty-six’s blood, but they were too strong-willed to control.

While he and Twenty-six were practicing, Izak never chose what to show his friend, he let the pirate’s own preoccupations decide what he would see. There was something a little too Eketra about picking and choosing the best modes of torture for Izak’s taste.

But he could do it if he had to.

“I didn’t want to have to resort to this,” Izak muttered. “Know that.”

He clambered onto the bunk, kneeling on Twenty-six’s chest. While the pirate tried to shove and kick him off, Izak sifted through nightmares of death and fire and gore until he found the day on the beach.

Twenty-six froze. His eyes opened, stark with terror. Izak fought the urge to shrink back. It was Hazerial the pirate saw, Izak reminded himself. Hazerial forcing the blood down his throat. Hazerial crowing over his defeat.

If Twenty-six had managed to break free of the illusion in that moment, what he would have seen was a man who looked just like the King of Night. A little younger, maybe, a little softer around the edges, but just as ruthless as the monster who had destroyed his tribe and conquered him.

The pirate’s struggling stopped. He drank the blood.

Izak pulled his arm free.

Healing others wasn’t Izak’s specialty, but utilizing the royal blood magic was. And as it was his own blood he was using, it already wanted to obey him. He sent it seeping through thin membranes to course through the pirate’s veins.

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Twenty-six’s body attacked, attempting to destroy the unfamiliar blood, but illness had weakened his internal defenses. Izak overpowered the meager resistance with a surge of energies.

A familiar dark stain reared its ugly head—his father’s Mark was seared into Twenty-six’s flesh and bone.

Izak’s face twisted with disgust. His childhood training in the royal blood magic had included inflicting gruesome deaths on political prisoners who had Hazerial’s signature scored into them. They made a changeup from the usual bloodslaves he’d trained on, while providing the court with entertainment and not-so-subtle warnings.

This would be the first time he was actually helping someone Marked. If he didn’t know that Hazerial would have immediately destroyed him for it, Izak would’ve liked to see the look on the king’s face.

His attempt to replicate his immunities in Twenty-six failed miserably, so he shifted his efforts. Instead, he bound his blood to the pirate’s. It was a little makeshift, but it seemed to hold up well. Already, he could feel it bolstering his friend’s internal resistance. It marched through Twenty-six like an army, burning out the grippe’s strongholds and chasing it away.

Lucky that. The whole undertaking, and in the middle of the day no less, had cost Izak a severe amount of blood magic. If he couldn’t get Nine to steal him a skin of blood, he was going to have to sleep the rest of the day to recover, like some sort of peasant.

This time when Twenty-six’s gray-green eyes opened, lucidity shone in his gaze. He frowned up at Izak, who was still sitting on his chest.

“What are you doing?” With a weak lurch, he twisted his body and shoved, dumping the exhausted prince onto the floor.

“Saving your life.” Izak slumped in a heap. “You’re welcome, you ungrateful savage.”

***

The garish fever dreams were gone. No more of his father renouncing him as a ruined coward. Mehet no longer clung to him, trying to tell him something he couldn’t hear as blood bubbled and foamed from the red line encircling her throat. No more watching his friends and raedrs turn to sinew and meat and finally grinning skulls while he set fire to his own ship.

Twenty-six drifted in a becalmed ocean over the deepest part of the Deep Chasm. Alaan water, the color closest to the heart of every Ocean Rover, the color of Haelbringr’s sails, stretched to the horizon in every direction.

Mehet floated above him, whole again. She rubbed her thumb through the hair on his chin, smiling at the rasp of his whiskers. She cupped his face and bent down to kiss him. Her golden hair fell like a curtain around him, and the gold chain he’d given her tickled his cheek.

“If you will redeem our people, you will have to leave,” she said.

“I fear no death or dirters,” he told her. “I fear losing you. Losing this.”

“My raedr.” She laughed softly and pressed her forehead to his. “We are already gone.”

“I failed you all. If I give you up now, was I ever a man? Was I ever Raen?”

“Can even a Raen retrieve what the God of the Waves has taken to paradise? Is that your duty? To cling to your past and to ignore our people’s future?”

He knew she was right. She, his family, his tribe were lost to him, gone where he could not follow, and they would never return. The remaining tribes, however, were still fighting. On the sea, in the harbors, all along the coasts they fought. Meanwhile, a cursed former raed commander wallowed in petty personal sorrows.

He had been perfectly placed to destroy the monster who had started this war, if only he would lay aside his self-indulgent grief. That was the true duty of the Raen. To forget themselves to protect their people.

Twenty-six held his wife close while the sun rose over the Deep Chasm, knowing that when he woke, she would be gone.

But he also knew the name of the man he would have to become.

***

Nine dragged in late that afternoon, shedding gritty wet sand and dripping rainwater with every step. The second she saw the pirate scum’s fever had broken, she let out an ecstatic whoop, her fatigue forgotten.

“I done it, me! I worked the granny medicine!” On second thought, she patted the angrily awakened Four on the head. “I mean, we worked it. How’d you know ya hadta dump the ashes in the seawater and make him drink?”

“I didn’t do anything of the sort,” Four said, brushing at the sand her touch had left in his hair and eye socket. “I tossed out that garbage you were burning the second you left.”

“Musta been the smoke that cleared the miasma, then.” She would have to keep that in mind in case the new rubbish pit she had started digging wasn’t far enough from the water.

Neither one, Grandmaster nor Healer Prime, had seen sense when she explained how they were attracting a fell miasma. The sand trench had eroded and turned the former rubbish pit into a lagoon, so efforts to rebuild its seaside dam would be useless. Grandmaster had sentenced Nine to digging a new pit instead.

Nine had taken that to mean she could put it anywhere she wanted. She’d found a spot on Thornfield’s east side, betwixt some dunes that led to the thornknife graveyard. That was as far from the water as a body could get, directly in the middle of the narrow spit of land, so it would have to do.

***

Izak expected some measure of anger when Twenty-six found out that he’d been tricked into drinking blood. It didn’t have to be a violent outburst, but at the very least the response ought to contain some scathing sarcasm.

What he got was a long moment of consideration beneath the pirate’s cleared gray-green gaze.

“Why did you heal me?”

“So you wouldn’t die, you fool.”

“You know that is not what I am asking. For once in your life answer a question like a man. Speak the truth.”

“Well, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

As soon as his reply left his mouth, Izak wished he’d said something else. The pirate was back to his stern, stony mask after that momentary slip during his illness, but his blink was enough to show Izak that the mention of friendship had taken him off guard. Maybe he didn’t consider Izak a friend. How could Twenty-six think of Izak as anything but another enemy after all Hazerial had taken from him?

At least Nine wasn’t there to witness the first rejection of the former crown prince’s life. As usual, when she wasn’t at her extra sword lessons, the runt was busy making up for some non-scourging offense with the scullery staff. Probably talking to other students during lectures again.

Instead of telling Izak to shove his friendship in the latrine, Twenty-six asked, “Is that enough reason for a dirter?”

Izak laughed with relief. “You’ve got an awful narrow view of us dirters, pirate. I knew a dirter once who wouldn’t let anyone suffer if he could help them. Honor, loyalty, compassion… He embodied them all. It’s a fatal combination, unfortunately.”

If Ahixandro had forsaken just one of his principles, he might have lived. If he’d just denounced the Blasphemous One… If he’d turned Izak over to the Inquisitors as a worse heretic than he was… If he’d never taken pity on his disenchanted nephew in the first place and told him the truth—that he wasn’t alone in wondering whether the world was really meant to be nothing but blood and sex and power—everything might be different.

“I suppose your narrow view of us isn’t entirely unearned,” Izak admitted. “After all, that man was abandoned by his god, betrayed by his brother, and executed by his nephew while courtiers not worth the grime on the bottom of his boots laughed and drank to his place in hell." He plastered a carefree grin on his face. "The dirt in this kingdom produces some twisted family trees.”