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  Breakfast the next night was a solemn affair. Twenty-six wouldn’t speak, just gred up at the king seated at the masters’ table, and after dealing with a homicidal brother and a suicidal pirate for so many nights in a row, Izak was sick of carrying the conversation. If Lathe had been there, she would’ve filled the dour silence with her endless prattling.

  But she wasn’t.

  Master Saint Daven had barged in in the middle of the day and picked up Lathe’s extra pair of clothing. If Izak hadn’t demanded to know what was going on, he doubted the weapons master would have told them that Lathe had been found out. Scabs had got them in the end after all.

  “Were you sleeping with her?” Saint Daven had snarled.

  “Of course not!” Izak had replied, insulted.

  The master had turned his strange gold gre on the pirate. “What about you?”

  “I am not a dirter,” Twenty-six had growled in disgust. “I would not take advantage of someone who trusted me.”

  By the end of breakfast, word of what had become of Thirty and Scabs was all over Thornfield. Specution ran rampant about the fate of their killer, but Izak and Twenty-six refused to comment.

  From the seat of honor at the masters’ table, Hazerial noted the absence. “Grandmaster, we do not see the half-blind boy.”

  “The fault lies with me, Your Majesty. It was discovered te yesterday that Lathe was in fact a young woman masquerading as a boy. She’s being sent away. In apology for my failure, I will reimburse the crown for the time she spent at Thornfield under false pretenses.”

  Hazerial swirled his wine, staring out at his eldest son. Events began to take on a different color. Eketra nudged.

  “We wish to speak with her.”

  Grandmaster Heartless’s white brows knitted in confusion. “Your Majesty?”

  “Now, Grandmaster.”

  ***

  Lathe had seen fancy folk in their uphill finery, lords and dies riding in the decorated carriages of the Carnival of the Dead. A few, she and Pretty had seen too close, thanks to Scabs.

  But she’d never knelt before the real, sp-ya-dead King of Night.

  King Hazerial looked like Four, but there was something different in him. Lathe could lounge around a room with Four or hang on his shoulder or lean over him to snatch food off his pte.

  Lathe wouldn’t snatch food off the king’s pte. Not even if he swore to the Cormorant that she could.

  The king sat in Grandmaster’s chair as if it were a throne. He looked bigger than human, big enough to fill up the study.

  He was smiling, too, and that made a pair of dimples poke into his cheeks on either side of his mouth while another pair cut ssh marks into his cheekbones. Just like Four. Except Lathe couldn’t stop feeling like the dimples and the smile and even the skin stretched across the king’s bones was a mask. Like there was something underneath she ought to be running from.

  “Grandmaster Heartless tells us you’re quite the swordswoman,” the king said. “We saw the proof of it for ourselves in your championship victory. An impressive dispy.”

  “Your Majesty is very gracious,” Lathe said just as sweetly as if she’d been teaching courtly manners lectures longer than Master Fright.

  “It has also come to our attention that, until quite recently, you were lodged with our son. You know him as Four. The pirate, too.”

  Lathe swallowed. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Tell us, what is the nature of your retionship with these men?”

  She should lie—no question about that—but how much?

  “They figured I was a girl right away, Your Majesty, but I held ’em captive ’til they agreed not to tell nobody.”

  “And you performed favors for them?”

  “’Course I did. We’re brothers, us. We help each other. They helped me plenty, too.”

  Most folks were ready to believe Lathe was as dumb as a post the minute they heard her talk, but King Hazerial wasn’t swallowing none of it. He gazed down that nose that looked like Four’s nose until Lathe felt like she might scream.

  She fidgeted, trying to find a more comfortable position for her knees on the wood floor. She dug at one ear with a shaking finger.

  His cold, terrible eyes bored straight into her brain, telling her he knew that she knew what he’d really been asking.

  Lathe hung her head.

  “I never done none of those kinda favors for ’em,” she told the floor. “I never wanted to do the bad stuff with nobody, Your Majesty, and Four and Twenty-six never made me.”

  “Why did they remain silent when they learned that you were female?”

  “’Cuz we’re brothers, us.”

  “Grandmaster tells us that you would do anything for your brothers.”

  “’Course I would,” Lathe said. “Whatever they need, I’d do it. That’s what brothers is.”

  “Lathe, a young woman has never before been grafted as a Thorn.” Hazerial uncrossed his feet, then adjusted his robes to recover them. “Indeed, the effects could be ruinous.”

  Fire bzed up in Lathe’s bones. Her throat was suddenly dry. The words sounded like the king was preparing to send her away, but the tone of his voice sounded like something else.

  “However, we believe your brothers need you, Lathe. To separate the three of you would devastate them.”

  The king rose. Lathe bowed her head. A cold, long-fingered hand came to rest on her hair.

  “Will you be grafted?” he asked. “In spite of the dangers, in spite of the unknown, will you y down your soul for your brothers’ sake?”

  She choked back a shriek of joy, her whole body trembling with the effort to keep kneeling like she was supposed to.

  “Yes, Your Majesty, yes!”

  They were going to be Royal Thorns together, her, Four, and Twenty-six! They would get gold, and they would buy that uphill pcement for Pretty!

  Lathe kissed the hem of the king’s robe. “Thank you, Your Majesty!”

  ***

  “Surely you’re not going to let this happen?” Saint Daven’s demand was breathy from his sprint up the tower stairs, harsh from disbelief and anger and shock. He’d sought out Grandmaster the second he’d heard, pounding on the study door until the old man had finally opened it. “You can’t.”

  Heartless ushered him inside and shut the door. “The king gave a direct order. It cannot be denied.”

  “Everything about this is wrong. She’s a child!”

  “We graft scores of children here.” Grandmaster sank into the chair behind his desk. His usual wingback had been destroyed in Lathe’s tantrum the night before, so a wooden chair had been brought up from the kitchens. “You were one. I was one. If Lathe were a young man, her fate would be no different.”

  “Of course it would! You know the grafting works differently between a man and woman. The elements change. If Lathe were a young man being grafted to the king, you wouldn’t be sending her to that… that viotion.”

  “Yet when the queen grafts six young men to her service and they are all wasted on horrible deaths, forced against their will to lust after that awful creature, no one raises a protest.”

  Saint Daven felt the ground shift sickeningly beneath his feet. “Lord Paius was right.”

  “I daresay he was.” Heartless sighed. “I understand your frustration. Believe me, I do. You spent the better part of three years investing in Lathe, shoring up what could be shored up, teaching her to circumvent what couldn’t. You’ve watched her grow and improve. Perhaps you even see her as a stand-in for the daughter you lost. But this cannot be circumvented. The king has spoken. You must trust what you taught Lathe to carry her the rest of the way.”

  Saint Daven hated begging. Saint Galen hated him for doing it.

  “Grandmaster, you defied one king.” He gred down at the desk, unable to look up while he forced the words out. “Please, just one more time.”

  “Ikario I could defy. We were friends, in our own way, and my grafting required it of me to protect the man from himself.”

  “But now that you’re free, you won’t do the same to protect your student?”

  “My duty is to send every student who comes through Thornfield to their death, Master Saint Daven.” Heartless took out his thornknife and turned it over in his scarred, leathery hands. “I prepare them the best I can so that some few might live to be retired, but I am fully aware that most will have their thornknives pnted out there among the dunes. I tried to send her away—tried when we learned she was blind in one eye, tried again yesterday—but the strong gods don’t care for the will of men.”

  Grandmaster id the thornknife gently on the desktop.

  “For better or for worse, this is the course they have put Lathe on, and they will not be diverted.”