Winter had reached its full brutality much later at Thornfield than Izak was used to, and it also tripped into spring much earlier. The winds blew warmer if not softer, the rains poured with less resolve, and the waves stopped battering the beach in favor of a temperate crashing he could almost ignore. The students who had survived winter were kicked back out into the bailey for nightly training, and the belowstairs staff spent subsequent hours cleaning up the soup of sandy mud tracked across Thornfield’s floors, on which the layers of reeds had annoyingly little effect.

“Mud season,” Izak said, scraping a stubborn clod from his boot with the butt of his swordstaff. “How delightful.”

“It’s fixin’ to be flood season on the river,” Nine said wistfully from her bunk. “It’ll wash away all the trash done built up in the Closes, the water. Couple close-rats, too, if’n they don’t have nowhere to get up high. Pretty’s partial to flood season, though. Guess I can figure why. That ol’ river cleans the place up so much it like to make a whole new Close outta it.”

Twenty-six watched the ocean through the archer loop. “It is the end of storm season on the seas. Raiding season will begin soon.”

Nine hadn’t been paying attention to the reports the pirate brought back from the village of the war between the Ocean Rovers and the Kingdom of Night, but Izak had. He paid special attention to anything that might relate to the new crown prince joining the battles. Etian was Josean-blessed, after all. He wouldn’t be able to stay away for long.

Izak raised an eyebrow at his friend. “And what your people have been doing all winter to our ships and ports, that didn’t count as raiding?”

“That was one tribe, perhaps two, who must have been infected and unable to lay at rest with the others,” Twenty-six said.

He left it there, but Izak didn’t need the implications spelled out for him. One or two dying bands of pirates had been causing enough trouble to create an uproar along the coasts. What could the concentrated efforts of a whole pirate nation do?

***

The approaching spring mock tournament brought with it the excitement of the upcoming grafting. Every year just before the Festival of Springlight, the king came to observe the fourth-year matches and pick the Royal Thorns from among the best of the seniors.

And this year, rumor had it, His Majesty was bringing the queen with him, who required a new batch of guards herself.

Fervor spread throughout Thornfield like a late-spring contagion. Not only had most of the students not seen a woman since their enrollment, but Jadarah’s beauty and appetites were legendary. A gorgeous, young, insatiable queen with Teikru’s blessing? If there was a posting almost as enviable as Royal Thorn, it was as one of the queen’s Thorns.

“Ignoramuses,” Izak muttered to Fifty-one during their legal sciences lecture. “You’ve seen Jadarah, she’s foul. You’d have to be horny out of your mind to touch her. And her Thorns end up in pieces, scattered across half the royal residences between here and Siu Rial. The king may go through Thorns fast, but she’s just wasteful.”

“Sure, but what a way to be wasted,” Fifty-one replied. Even the Bastard of West Crag had caught the contagion, it seemed.

Twenty-six wouldn’t listen to Izak’s disgusted ranting about the queen at all. He was only interested in how close he might get to the king.

“Don’t chance it,” Izak warned him. “Even forgetting the fact that he’ll be surrounded by full Thorns and he can make a bloody pulp of you from magic alone, there’s still your Mark. He can sense you no matter where you are.”

“There must be a way.”

“There isn’t, but you’re welcome to kill yourself looking for one.”

Nine was getting more excited by the day, though not because of the royalty coming to visit or the approaching holiday from the lectures she could barely sit still through.

“If I win the first-year bracket, I get to stop them extra sword lessons cold!” She was too carried away with the fantasy to notice the dubious looks passing between Izak and Twenty-six. “First I’m gonna win, then I’m gonna spit in that old crow Saint Daven’s face and tell him to swill river water.”

***

The first-years’ overall level of skill had increased enough since the autumn tournament to make their spring bracket worth the watching. Fifty-one fell in an early upset to the longsword-wielding rustic Eighty-eight, whose dexterity was finally starting to catch up to his strength and stamina. The rustic made it two more rounds before he ran up against Nine and had his landslide of victories stopped by the tiny, disorienting terror.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Meanwhile, Twenty-six and Four sliced their way through the opposite side of the bracket. Their inevitable match was the most looked forward to pairing of the first-years, both among the upperclassmen and the staff.

Although his opponents had been sharpened by a year’s training, Twenty-six’s relentless pursuit of perfection kept him well ahead of the pack. Izak, on the other hand, had made just enough improvement to look competent with a swordstaff—and only on the off-chance that actually he had to use it.

Twenty-six was getting good at throwing off the blood magic illusions. Annoyingly good. So good that he might actually think he had a chance at surviving an attack on Hazerial.

That was frustrating, because Izak had hoped he could pretend to have his backside handed to him and laze around for the remainder of this tournament. Now it looked more likely that he was going to have to cut the pirate’s legs out from under him just to prove a point.

They faced off in the round before what would have been the championship match of a real tournament. They took their places at the center of the bailey, surrounded by shouting onlookers, Master Fright between them, his embroidered handkerchief fluttering.

“Both parties ready?”

Twenty-six raised his heavy cutlass and swordbreaker.

Izak readied his staff and grinned in spite of the shiver that ran down his spine. There was something truly terrifying about standing on this end of the pirate’s blades, even in this artificial setting. It was his eyes. They became gray-green seas of fury that saw no friend or foe, only dead men.

Light burn it all. Izak was going to have to win this one, too.

“Fight!”

Twenty-six was on Izak before the kerchief had finished snapping out of the way. The cutlass bit into the wooden staff, the impact sending a jolt through Izak’s bones.

He whipped the staff around, forcing the blade to the side and catching the sneaking swordbreaker, then he threw the first illusion. The cutlass hacking into Hazerial’s neck while the serrated blade of the swordbreaker carved upward through his guts and plunged into his black heart. Gore spraying. The look of shock and outrage on the king’s face.

Twenty-six tore through it without a second’s hesitation. The air screamed around his cutlass. Izak circled, but not as fast as he should have. If not for smoke step, the blade would have caught him on the hip and the swordbreaker would have taken him through the throat.

Before he resolidified, Izak threw the next illusion. A new arrival—a guilty, sweaty dream of a mouthwatering vanner girl with a delicate gold chain hanging from her navel piercing. She looked vaguely familiar to Izak, but when you’d ploughed half a dozen of the caravan girls at varying stops around the kingdom, they all started to look the same.

But Twenty-six was waiting for him. Izak barely managed to fend off the pirate’s weapons. He backpedaled, circled, retreated some more. The heels of his hands throbbed harder with every deflected chop. It felt as if his arms were going to snap off at the shoulder. Twenty-six didn’t give him a moment’s breath to think about going on the offensive.

“Very good,” Izak panted. “You’ve made a little progress after all. Now do you want to see what real royal blood magic can do?”

The bailey turned black around them. The ghost city overhead disappeared. A storm raged out of the formerly clear night sky. A sizzling lightning bolt struck the great thorn tree, and it burst into splinters.

Twenty-six’s brows twitched down in confusion, but he kept fighting.

Izak let out a dark chuckle. “Feel that?”

Pinpricks opened all over Twenty-six, weeping blood. The pirate gritted his teeth and swung the cutlass.

Izak smoke stepped.

Twenty-six left a trail of blood as he tried to follow. Tiny black needle tips poked through his bleeding skin. He had to feel the full length of the locust thorns growing out of his bones, tunneling through his flesh toward the night air.

“Not so fast now, are you?” This time Izak didn’t bother to smoke step. He had plenty of time to simply walk out of the way of the pirate’s swing.

Twenty-six stumbled. The locust thorns tore through his skin, bristling with barbed sideshoots and dripping blood, shredding muscle with every motion, every twitch. In Izak’s experience, most people were usually howling in anguish by that point. The pirate remained silent.

But he did drop to his knees. Hatred blazed in his eyes.

Until thorns grew through those glaring orbs. Blood and humors oozed down the pirate’s face like miscolored tears. His skull cracked as the thorns forced their way out through the bone.

Still no screaming. The courtiers watching the execution would’ve booed and hissed.

Moving at a leisurely pace, Izak put the blade of his swordstaff to Twenty-six’s throat.

“Winner: Four!” Fright declared.

There was a moment of stunned silence, then the cheering washed in from around the bailey. The black cloud and storm disappeared, and the returned ghost city seemed that much brighter by comparison. Untouched, the thorny locust tree loomed behind the kneeling, glaring Twenty-six.

No thorns stuck out of the pirate’s body, but the bloody holes were still there. Everywhere but the eyes and brain. Izak had never tried to keep a victim alive after that little trick and hadn’t wanted to accidentally, permanently destroy any functions Twenty-six might need in the future.

Izak offered his friend a hand up.

“Losses are more informative than wins, right?” he said cheerfully.

After a moment, Twenty-six nodded, a jerky, uncoordinated movement of ill-treated muscle and joint. He ignored Izak’s outstretched hand and shoved himself onto his shaking legs.

Then he collapsed in the sandy mud. Because his body had been torn to pieces from the inside out, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

Izak sighed. “You really are one stubborn savage.”