Izak was going insane. “I swim now, and the whole school looks out the gatehouse when they hear about swimmers, masters included. Let’s slip out the back this afternoon, while everyone’s asleep.”

  Twenty-six assessed the whitecaps through the archer loop. “ week.”

  “I ’t wait a week! It’s been two months since I st saw a woman.”

  “She will be the st woman you ever see if you swim this afternoon. The tides and the weather will turhe moon ges. That is week.”

  Izak paced. Teikru’s blessing was killing him. He could hardly think about anything else. It was like an endless high-pitched whistle or a stant ringing in his ears. Even when he fell into bed exhausted from training, he tossed and turned and woke the evening even more desperate.

  “The pirate’s right,” Nine said. “Better not tempt the moon. She’s good medie ’til you do her foul.”

  “You’re scared to even touch water. There’s no way you’ll be able to swim out with us, so you don’t have a say iter.”

  Nine fred up like a tinder bundle. “You said we three’d go! We’re brothers, us, and we’re going together! That was the deal!”

  “How?” Izak demanded. It felt perversely good to spread his bad mood around. “You ’t swim. You don’t even bathe.”

  “There ain’t no reason to off when you’re just fixing to get dirty again!”

  “What if you drown? I thought water was bad medie.”

  “The pirate scum’ll swim me on his back.”

  “No, I won’t. I am not going.”

  Izak rounded oy-six, mouth agape. “What do you mean you’re not going?”

  “I ot leave the grounds.”

  “The sea’s not Thornfield grounds, and you swam around in that,” Izak argued. “We both did. We’ve been pnning this outing for a month. Didn’t you ohink that you should mention you weren’t going?”

  “My iions are none of your .”

  “They are when they interfere with something this vital! Is this about being too good for whores again? Because I promise you, you’re not.”

  But the pirate wouldn’t budge, and he wouldn’t expin.

  Izak tried a different tactic. “You’ve got to at least swim out as far as the thornknife graveyard. Even Grandmaster siders that part of the grounds. What if you don’t, and I get a cramp and drown?”

  “What if we get a cramp and drowned,” Nine corrected him.

  Izak wasn’t proud—he couldn’t afford to be after this long. He seized the opportunity Nine presented.

  “Exactly. If Nine drowns because he ’t swim and I ’t carry him, you’ll be at fault. You admitted as much when you took the sc for not stoppi time. Do you want our deaths on your shoulders?”

  “Dirter deaths do not me.”

  “But fault does, and so does honor.”

  Twenty-six looked out at the waves again.

  Clearly not seeing the knife-edge their roommate was teetering on, Nine opened his mouth.

  Izak held up a hand to silehe runt. Which of the pirate’s worst traits would win—honor or obstinacy?

  It was a hard-fought battle.

  “I will go with you as far as I am capable of going,” Twenty-six ceded at st.

  Izak grabbed the pirate by the shoulders and shook him. “I could kiss you!”

  “Don’t.”

  ***

  The swimming lessons had not been for Four’s be alone. Unbeknownst to the prind their sy shadow, Twenty-six had been using the time ier to test the Mark. He could swim as far out as Four dared go—as long as he was swimming for the sake of teag or simply for exercise. When his iions shifted to escape, the corruption in his veins turo a stone fist, holding him in pce.

  Four had noticed him sink once, but had assumed the pirate was just going uo show off that he could dive without holding his nose, which Four still could not aplish without sn water. It had takey-six until he hit sandy sea floor before he could reorder his thinking and kick safely to the surface.

  Distance was not his prison, iion was.

  A, strangely enough, fantasies of repaying the dirter king’s blood debt did not cause him any ill effects. He could crash and parry through a sparring match, imagining he was hag off the king’s limbs, without faltering. He could plot and train with the iion of one day using it all against the king and never feel that stone fist close.

  Was it because he had no iion of killing the boys and men he fought? Could the Mark perceive that honor would not allow him to cut down someone who was n to kill him? That even now, surrounded by dirters and separated from the God of the Waves forever, he couldn’t bring himself to murder senselessly?

  The trip to the vilge down Thornfield’s key would be the test, both of his distance hypothesis and of his ability to reef his sails until the wind was right.

  He gnced out at the gray, gloomy day and pounding surf. He’d dohe calcutions a huimes by the sun and the waves. There were a handful of days before the storm season took full hold; in that transitional stretch, rain would fall but the currents would not pose too great a threat.

  This was the time freatships to return to Cryst’holm. Time for the reunion of raedrs with their young families, the greeting of old friends, feasting, celebration, and trade.

  How many tribes had made it back already? How many had beeroyed by the blood drinkers’ unnatural bck cloud? What if Twenty-six and the women, children, and elderly who had remained in the floating oic city through the raiding seasohe only O Rovers left in this world?

  What if, somehow, the dirter king had found that safe haven? What if Twenty-six was the only one of his people left?

  “The sed or third day of week,” Twenty-six promised his roommate. “That is the day for our expedition.”

  ***

  “We ’t all go to the bathhouse at the same time,” Izak argued on the day iion. “And everyone will be suspicious if they see Nine going where he never dared go before.”

  “I dare anything, me. Just not fool stuff. ’Sides, it’s heaps more suspicious if I don’t go with.”

  “What in the name of Khi makes you think that?”

  Nine shrugged. “’Cuz I’ll just tell everybody.”

  Dealing with the boy made Izak feel as if he were w out a riddle. You have a sack of grain, a hen, and a fox on one side of a creek. You only carry two to the other side at a time. In what order do you carry them so that nothis anything else?

  The dirty little runt had bee Izak and Twenty-six’s stau defender against hazing, turning aside any senior students with suggestions to snatch up other first-years or, failing that, threats to whup ’em blind if they id a finger on his brothers. Yet Nine saw nothing wrong with tattling on those same so-called brothers to the masters.

  Trick question. The grain’s actually an ented mo eats both your hen and fox, then gobbles you up when you get back.

  In the end, they sent o the bathhouse first to wait, so he could be certain he wasn’t being ditched.

  “If’n somebody sees me, I’ll say I’m lookin’ for somebody to whup,” Nine promised. “Everybody’ll believe that.”

  Izak we, a little ter than his regur bathing hour, but not suspiciously so. He hung around gossiping and supposedly rexing ih until the st of his fellow bathers left for the night.

  The coals had burnt down by the time Twenty-six arrived, and the water had taken a turn for the cool. While Izak climbed out and spent forever drying off and dressing and making up excuses not to leave yet, the pirate went about his work: letting the dirty water drain, rinsing the bath, then scooping spent ashes from its coal banks, rebuilding the fire, and refilling the trough.

  The rain the pirate had predicted was cttering ohin ste roof, but no errant gusts blew through the open door to suggest they would face a dangerous storm. No surprise bathers blew iher. Thornfield—excluding its hunched, soaked patrols on the wall and Nine, who sat outside just beh the shelter of the bathhouse’s tiny portico—had goo sleep for the day.

  The pirate and the priepped outside and waited for a fourth-year on patrol to pass over the closest portion of the wall. As the dripping fourth-year headed toward the gatehouse, the trio crept around the er to the culvert.

  “Last ce to stay behind,” Izak told Nine, bundling his Thornfield-issue clothing. He jammed the wad of fabric through the grate onto the sandy, silty shore that had grown up along the side. “You won’t have to walk miles in the rain or suffer the water’s bad medie if you stay here.”

  Nine grinned. “Oh, I ain’t going ier.”

  “Then how are you pnning to get to the other side of the wall without being seen? Walk through?”

  “Nah, like this.” The runt slipped an arm through the grate, wiggled his head through, and followed with one shoulder, theher. There was a moment of when his backside caught—on three square meals a day and with all the scraps he could steal, the close-rat was starting to fill out—but with a little grunting and shimmying, he fell out the other side.

  ood up and gave them a smug grin.

  “I’ll be burnt,” Izak muttered.

  Twenty-six’s silent frown agreed. Both young men had been te for too long to have sidered the grating as a viable exit above-water.

  “If we get caught, we’ll bargain with information,” Izak said, struck by inspiration. “The secret way to defeat Thornfield iurn for a sc deferred. An army of children get through here. Or dwarves.”

  “An army of men slip beh the grating,” Twenty-six said. “They do not all have to be malnourished like Nine.”

  “Stand around jawin’ your jokes. Meanwhilst, I’m halfway to the whores, me.”

  Instead of waiting for them to make it to the other side, Nine snatched up the men’s bundled clothing and sprinted away from the muddy culvert toward the duhat surrouhe thornknife graveyard. The mounds of sand were hulking shadows in the distance, half obscured by the rain.

  Izak cursed. This went pletely against their pn for the pirate to carry the runt through the i on his baine was endangering the entire operation simply to avoid the water.

  “If that rus us caught,” Izak growled.

  “He is far enough ahead that if he draws attention, we slip back through the culvert before the patrols realize we are out,” Twenty-six said.

  “He took our clothes.”

  The pirate cursed. “Then we are itted.”

  But no cries of arm went up. In a triine disappeared behind the dunes.

  Izak and Twenty-six slipped uhe slimy half-grating. Oher side, they sank to their s in the surf aheir way out into deeper water, the rain plinking across the surface.

  They dove beh the rain-pocked waves, pushing along uer. Izak’s lungs gave out about the same time as fear that he’d gone off course and lost Twenty-six forced him to the surface.

  He popped up, snatched a breath and gnced around as they’d practiced, then dove beh again. Thankfully he hadn’t veered far off course at all. Twenty-six was lengths ahead of him but slowing down to pensate. With a few hard kicks, Izak caught up.

  Couldn’t leave Thornfield, indeed. What a crock of pirate rot.

  ***

  Twenty-six’s every thought was focused oing his roommates to the vilge. Nothing but getting the dirter prio his dirter whores. He wouldn’t allow himself to waver even enough to think of this as the test of the Mark.

  They reached the du the graveyard, swam another hundred yards, then stopped to wash the stench from the culvert away with the soap he had brought from the bathhouse.

  Twenty-six checked the distant walls for patrols looking in their dire, then o Four. The two of them hustled ashore, dug unseeween dunes.

  “You ugly fishies must be lookin’ for these,” Nine said, holding out their clothing bundles in the falling rain. “I kept ’em dry, me. Now ain’t you gd y your brother?”

  Four snatched his clothes away and flicked the boy’s ear. “That’s for not telling us you were going to steal off and leave us stark naked.”

  “You’re the only silt brain that ain’t dressed!” Nine rubbed his ear. “Even the pirate scum’s got enough seo keep his unders on, in case a shark e along lookin’ to bite off a dangler.”

  From the look on Four’s face, sharks were a prospect he hadn’t sidered.

  “Perhaps iure, it would be best to wear something on the swim,” he admitted. “Wet smallclothes could be shed in the graveyard. But there’s the rger question of how we access dry clothing onioo fat to squeeze through the grating and carry our things.”

  “He will not fit through the bars much longer,” Twenty-six agreed as he dressed.

  Nine cursed them both, but the fact remaihat unless he outgrew his fear of water, he would sooe to sneak out of Thornfield.

  There was an a stone relic box about ten rows away, stu amongst the older, cruder thornkwenty-six k beside it and pried it open.

  A rib cage, a talisman, and a few moldered scrolls. More than enough room for two ges of clothing.

  “Brilliant. We’ll bring ara set apieext time,” Four decred, looking over Twenty-six’s shoulder. “We wear the same clothes for a few days, then acquire repts on the day we do the washing for the uppercssmen. Students are always ing up short of bits and pieces after undry day.”

  “That is a good strategy,” Twenty-six said, surprised. The prince could be a fairly intelligent problem-solver when he wao. Especially when that problem stood between him and the dirter whores he opped talking about.

  “Try not to sound so shocked. It’s insulting.” Squinting into the rain, Fauged the shade of the stray sky. “We’ve only got so many hours until su, men, and I don’t mean to waste them on your pany. Paradise awaits.”

  With that, Four burst into a cloud of smoke and reappeared a hundred yards down the beach.