By the time the first-year spring bracket had started, it was all over Thornfield that the king would arrive unaccompanied this year. There was a strange sense of mingled disappointment and relief that the queen wouldn’t be joining him. Most of the upperclassmen were still talking about seeing her the year before. And yet, since then, she had managed to kill both Striker and Twelve—their thornknives had been planted in the graveyard out past the walls and the announcements made in the dining hall during supper.

  The second-year bracket progressed as expected. Twenty-six, Izak, and Lathe tore through the rounds despite the increased skill of their opponents.

  Unlike tournaments before, Izak had become skilled enough with the swordstaff that he barely needed to use the royal blood magic until his match with the pirate. Just as the runt had said so long ago, there was no way Izak could beat Twenty-six fair and square. The pirate fought through a wall of fire and threw off the puppet-string urge to flay himself with his own blades. He even managed to heat Izak’s internal organs to a novice level before Izak cut off Twenty-six’s blood magic and hit upon the winning technique: filling his nose, mouth, throat, and lungs with clotted blood.

  It looked as if Lathe would face Izak for the championship, until Eighty-Eight beat the runt in the shocker of the penultimate round.

  The dual-blade wielding berserker had the match firmly in hand. She backed the huge rustic across the bailey, forcing the spectators to hurry out of the way. Eighty-eight stumbled in the roots of the thorn tree and thumped backward against the trunk, desperately flailing his longsword in an effort to delay the inevitable.

  Then, out of nowhere, Lathe’s right leg buckled.

  Eighty-eight’s awkward swing scraped down her blade and dug into her shoulder. She tried to bind the blade by wrapping her arm around it and raise her opposite sword to his throat, but a strange deadening wave washed through her muscles.

  With a final heave, the rustic’s sword came to rest along the inside of Lathe’s neck.

  “Winner: Eighty-eight—”

  Lathe screamed and tore into the crowd. Her target was the merchant’s son, Thirty.

  Luckily for Thirty, Master Fright had seen Lathe lose a sure win the year before and was ready for her outburst.

  As the master dragged her off Thirty, Lathe shrieked, “He cheated, him! He shot me with this here contraption all slicked up with bad medicine!”

  She threw down a crossbow small enough to fit in the palm of Thirty’s pudgy hand.

  “I’ve never seen that toy before in my life,” he said.

  “Liar!” Lathe tried to claw her way back to him but collapsed in the dirt, legs refusing to cooperate. “I swiped it outta his trousers, me!”

  Grandmaster Heartless stepped in before the inter-year conflict could escalate any further.

  “Four, drag Lathe over to Healer Prime to deal with that nerve-deadening agent. One assumes it is quite hard to counteract, and even harder to acquire for anyone whose father does not frequently ship less-than-docile bloodslaves to sacramentals.”

  Thirty and Lathe both started shouting arguments again; Lathe’s words were growing notably slurred.

  “Master Fright’s ruling on the match stands.” Grandmaster’s voice cracked across the bailey like a slap. “Lathe, you lost! Clear the ring!”

  Heartless raised a hand before she could protest, though by then the poison had incapacitated her completely. “In a real skirmish, there will always be unforeseen circumstances. If a Thorn cannot defeat his opponent in spite of interference, in spite of the worst odds and the greatest obstacles, then he is a dead man and his master with him.”

  ***

  As Four and Twenty-six carried their drugged roommate to the healer, Grandmaster Heartless raked his eyes across the crowd of students. Some gaped in outrage, others looked smug, the merchant’s son included.

  That was the danger of competition. Young men too easily forgot that what was truly on the line was an eventual fight for their masters’ lives.

  “Remember this,” Grandmaster told them. “This tournament does not exist to see who can win in a fair fight. You are not at Thornfield to learn courtly dueling rules with decorum and first bloods and ‘have mercies’. You are here to win. End of discussion.”

  ***

  Due to spring flooding, the roads between Siu Carinal and Thornfield had turned to swamp. The king and his entourage arrived a week later than expected, and not in the royal carriage, but on horseback, surrounded by likewise mounted Royal Thorns. The carriage remained where it had gotten stuck, with its footmen, a local stable owner, his sons, and a team of workhorses trying to dig and drag the vehicle out before the marshy ground swallowed it whole.

  Despite the lack of a beautiful queen accompanying him, the king’s arrival was still awe-inspiring for most of the population of Thornfield. Young men and boys cheered and jostled with each other for a better view of the Chosen of the Strong Gods, whom, one day, they might serve.

  The arrival had come in the midst of supper, but not a soul among them was disappointed at what they had left their meals to see. Even through the mud, Hazerial’s clothing was regal, dark purples and blues and golds. The distinctive House Khinet features that made his son so admired by the fairer sex made the king impossible to ignore. He radiated such power and authority that even the hired post nag he rode looked like a beast bred for the royal stables. One could easily believe the stories of the king felling an entire pirate tribe singlehanded.

  Next to that, Grandmaster Heartless, the legend of their brotherhood and ruler of their tiny spit of sand, seemed faded and small, and that in itself was a shock of perspective to most of the students.

  To Izak, the contrast was an indication that the man who deserved respect was not always the man who looked as if he should command respect.

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  Luck—whether good or bad remained to be seen—had placed him and Twenty-six much closer to the sovereign this year than they had been the year previous. The pirate watched the king pass by, a mere arm’s length away, with the same chilling glare the prince had seen when standing opposite the point of his cutlass.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” Izak said under his breath.

  “A shark attacks when it is hungry,” Twenty-six replied, watching the king follow Grandmaster inside. “A leviathan attacks when it is ready.”

  ***

  Because of the late hour of his arrival, the king did not send for Grandmaster Heartless until the following sundown. Heartless gave the king the list and the accompanying report on the fourth-years ready for grafting, this time with three names from among the third-years to fill the required gaps in the ranks. It was less than he had stolen from the previous third-year class, but not by much.

  “A bare score and ten,” Hazerial mused. He raised his dark eyes from the parchment. “You have no others you would consider candidates for grafting this year?”

  “These thirty are the best from among the senior classes and the most prepared for service tonight. Your Majesty, may I speak freely?”

  “You have our permission. Speak your mind.”

  Heartless had no intention of doing that. The younger generation of Thorns might think him fearless, and his old friends certainly believed he was brutally honest to a fault, but Heartless was no fool. He would attempt to get his point across in the closest approximation that the required reverence for a sovereign allowed.

  “As Your Majesty has no doubt already noticed, the number of Thorns produced by Thornfield has been on the decline. Our recruiters search diligently throughout the holdings, scouring for a drop of blood magic. I admit boys now who would have been turned away when I was coming up through the ranks, and it is because none with stronger blood can be found. Our latest arriving crop had two shy of the number you hold in your hand. A mere twenty-eight students.”

  Hazerial fixed him with a stern expression. “Your emphasis is understood, Grandmaster. Stop belaboring the details and get to the point.”

  “The blood magic is dying out. The men who have it are not passing it on to the next generation, because most do not live long enough to sire children. We pluck the few boys that are born with it out of the gutters, put a sword in their hands, and they’re killed before they can reproduce. There will come a night when no user of blood magic can be found at all.”

  “You speak as if the blood magic is a matter of parentage rather than the blessing of the strong gods,” Hazerial said.

  “I don’t seek to undermine their supremacy, Your Majesty. But could it be that the strong gods have chosen to retake their blessing from us?”

  “Tell us about the pirate,” Hazerial said.

  Grandmaster blinked. That was not the response he had been expecting, but a sudden pivot was not unusual with the king. Heartless flowed with the change of subject.

  “Twenty-six is the best swordsman in his year, Your Majesty, though he ranks second overall to Prince Izak. He cannot overcome the prince’s blood magic.”

  Hazerial received the mention of his son’s superiority with an indifferent grunt. “In our last conference, you said that the pirate could see as well as the average Child of Night in the dark, though he retained his day vision.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “How does he heal?”

  “Exceptionally. He has been scourged, and he’s come off worse for the wear in bouts that would have killed weaker men, yet he has never approached Healer Prime of his own accord for anything but wound salve.”

  “And how is he doing it, Grandmaster?”

  Heartless frowned. “Either by the blood magic or by some magic the pirates have that we don’t yet know of.”

  King Hazerial sat back in his chair and looked down his nose at the grandmaster. “I will tell you something I have not told another soul, Heartless.”

  Though the royal we had disappeared, Grandmaster felt more certain than ever that he stood in the presence of a divinely appointed king. How the legends of Heartless the Great Defier would change if only the tellers knew that, in the face of such power, Heartless felt like an ant in the shadow of the royal boot.

  “That pirate was gifted to me by the strong gods,” the king said. “Through this gift, I will destroy our ancient enemy once and for all.”

  ***

  The fourth-year bracket, which had been postponed for His Majesty’s arrival, took place over the following two nights, and the grafting the night after. No one died during the ritual that year. The king’s hand was too practiced to botch the thornknife ceremony, and Grandmaster had warned each of the chosen third-years not to choose a name if they weren’t certain of it. The lack of dead made the celebratory feast even more festive.

  Izak left early, and it took very little convincing to get Twenty-six to do the same. All the prince had to do was ask the pirate if he would rather practice than sit there not eating his food and staring at the king.

  “I was not staring at him. I was assessing his guard.”

  “Well, if you noticed anything interesting, don’t tell me. He might ask about it when he sends for me.”

  But no summons came. The king and his new crop of Royal Thorns rode out without a glance at the former crown prince.

  “I can’t decide whether that’s a good sign or a bad one,” Izak told Twenty-six while they practiced the next day.

  “Interpreting signs is the work of a wife.” Twenty-six shifted his feet, prepared to begin their next blood magic duel. “A man puts his muscle into the fight and leaves the rest to the God of the Waves.” He gestured with his swordbreaker for Izak to reset his own stance. “Let us begin again.”

  Izak grimaced. “If you want to keep going, let me heal your broken shoulder. It’s making me sick hanging like that.”

  If the king had asked about Twenty-six’s use of blood magic that year, one of the first things Izak had been prepared to tell him was that the pirate was hopeless at the most basic of spells—healing himself. That wasn’t necessarily a lie. While Twenty-six’s body healed quickly, his conscious efforts to speed healing were negligible compared to allowing the blood magic to take its course naturally.

  For the sake of time, Twenty-six agreed.

  Izak laid his hands on the break, catching hold of the hot blood pooling in the muscle around the injury. Concentrating, he poured energy into speeding the repair, drawing the pieces back together, aligning the break, knitting the bone, and strengthening the fissure so it wouldn’t immediately break again.

  Where Twenty-six was making little progress at healing—due to lack of interest, Izak suspected, considering that in a few short months the pirate had learned attacks most nobles couldn’t even pull off—Izak himself was becoming quite the skilled healer. He no longer needed the other person to drink the same blood as he had to mend the damage, and he could speed the repair of all but catastrophic wounds.

  Funny. He’d spent a childhood learning to torture and destroy, but all it had taken to acquire the knack for restoration was a friend with a death wish.

  If his future as captain of Etian’s Royal Thorns weren’t set in stone, Izak would have considered asking for a position at Thornfield under Healer Prime. The man was often overheard lamenting the fact that so few men with blood magic were interested in the art of healing.

  Izak could see why Prime so enjoyed the task. To take an injured person and return him to health called to something deep within Izak. Every successful repair, even minor ones, felt as if they threw a shovelful of purpose into the ragged hole in his soul.

  He could almost imagine his Uncle Ahixandro approving of such a pursuit. A lifetime of repairing rather than destroying. Building up rather than breaking down.

  But imagining a lifetime as a healer was as much a waste of time as calling upon the Blasphemous One. Just as Izak’s name would never change, his future wouldn’t either. He would grow old protecting his brother from malicious and violent deaths by inflicting violent and malicious deaths on the attackers and making sure that those deaths were horrific enough to frighten away anyone else considering the same. His rewards would be watching over his eventual nephews and nieces until they grew up to replace him and Etian, and fiery dalliances with the most beautiful and enthusiastic whores a Royal Thorn’s salary could buy.

  At least he would get to use his healing skills on occasion. Probably not for Etian. If his brother needed healing, it would be because Izak had badly failed at his job. But certainly to heal the fencing partners who didn’t realize how dangerous it was to spar with the second coming of Josean after he’d received the Blood of the Strong Gods.