Next up for grafting: The Pirate!e

  Master Malice directed a handful of first-years to carry Lathe’s corpse to the rubbish pit. The rain picked up, spttering off the muddy ground and soaking the onlookers.

  Twenty-six stepped forward and knelt in the pce where Lathe had just died. She and Four were supposed to be his seconds, but Fifty-one stepped in to fill her pce. They tried to take his arms, but Twenty-six shook them off.

  “I am a man.” He gred into the eyes of the blood drinkers’ king as he whipped off his shirt and threw it aside. “I do not fear death or dirters.”

  The king’s face stretched into a grin. “As you like.”

  Grandmaster brought forth the thornknife and the bit of parchment with Twenty-six’s name written on it, handing them to the king.

  Hazerial gnced at the word on the parchment. He chuckled as if the name of the man who would destroy him were amusing.

  Twenty-six slowed his breathing, his pulse steadily thrumming out death. He had prepared the attack from his own blood. His hands were empty, but he was the weapon. He was the name on the scroll, the darkness of the ocean that would swallow the dirter king. From the day he had been dragged onto this cursed earth, with every step further into their filth, with each new concession to their evil, he had become this.

  Tonight, the blood debt would be redeemed.

  Instead of stepping closer and raising the thornknife, however, the dirter king retreated.

  Icy cold solidified in the pit of Twenty-six’s stomach.

  The king handed off the thornknife.

  No.

  The princess, Four’s sister, stepped forward with the wooden bde in her hand.

  Hazerial’s frozen-mud eyes sparkled.

  “No!” Twenty-six didn’t realize he’d spoken until he saw the cloud of steam in front of his face.

  He shot to his feet, the thorny magical bde bursting from the heel of his hand. The bailey became a haze as Twenty-six raced toward the only thing he could see clearly—the grinning face of the dirter king.

  The Mark seized him.

  The Mark had been the greatest obstacle in his and the prince’s training. When the intention to kill flowed through Twenty-six, the Mark stopped him, froze him where he stood. He and Four had searched for a way around it, but there was no clean way to evade its grasp.

  That was when Twenty-six had thrown away the st hope of ever being allowed to return to the God of the Waves. That was when he had become the abomination.

  In the bailey, under the dirters’ glowing ghost city, as the dirter king’s Mark tried to stop Twenty-six where he stood, he unleashed the monster of hatred and vengeance that he had been training in his own blood. The abomination sank its teeth into the Mark, ripped and tore. With cws of rage, the monster shredded the Mark’s hold on him.

  Royal Thorns—old and newly grafted—raced to kill him before he reached the king, but they were too slow. He ducked their bdes and parried with the conjured swordbreaker growing from his fist.

  Twenty-six lunged for the king’s throat.

  A sword crashed against his conjured swordbreaker. The steel swung with his parry, maintaining contact with the thorny bde. Its wielder couldn’t be thrown aside like the others; the man rolled effortlessly with Twenty-six’s attacks.

  Smoked lenses reflected the green light from the ghost city overhead. It was Four’s brother, the crown prince.

  A snarl formed in Twenty-six’s throat. He would kill whoever it took to get to the king.

  But the crown prince matched him blow for blow. With a cutss, perhaps, Twenty-six could have defeated him, but with nothing but a swordbreaker, he stood no chance. Twenty-six could see the skill and feel the power behind the crown prince’s attacks. Even in this dirter forging ground for swordsmen, the man was a leviathan among eels.

  Crity returned as the killing fog began to lift from Twenty-six’s mind. In his peripheral he saw the Royal Thorns forming a wall around the king, pushing the filthy monster away from danger. That precious moment of advantage he’d had evaporated.

  Men fell upon Twenty-six from behind. They dragged him to the ground in a crush of bodies.

  Wicked spikes like those covering the bailey’s thorn tree burst from Twenty-six’s flesh, tearing into their skin. The closest men to him grunted and tried to escape, but there were too many. They pressed each other down onto his thorns.

  The crown prince of the dirters stomped on Twenty-six’s wrist and sliced the thorny swordbreaker from his fist. The bde spshed to the ground, returning to the blood it had been conjured from.

  Twenty-six closed his eyes. His head dropped backward onto the cold, wet mud.

  He had failed. Again.

  ***

  While the Thorns and Etian wrestled Twenty-six to the ground, Izak snatched the crumpled scrap of parchment from the mud.

  Kelena’s eyes were wide with terror, her mouth hanging open in shock. The thornknife Hazerial had given her dangled forgotten in her hand.

  Izak grabbed his sister by the arm and pulled her aside.

  “Look at me, Kelena.” Light, she was shaking worse than he was. “Shove the thornknife into his heart with every ounce of strength you have. It’s got to go through the bone. Do it fast—in, out. Then draw the cross-mark you’ve seen Hazerial drawing all night, right here, on his forehead, and call him back. Don’t let Hazerial say a single word before you call the pirate’s name. Do you understand? Show me you understand.”

  Kelena took a shuddering breath, then nodded.

  “You can do this.” Izak squeezed her hands, then pressed the crushed scroll into her palm. “This is his name. Do it now, while they’re holding him. Hurry!”

  At his st barked directive, the princess spun around, sliding a little in the soupy mud, then crossed the few paces to the struggling mass of arms, legs, and heads.

  Izak’s longer stride pulling ahead of hers. He yanked a mud-covered body out of the way, uncovering Twenty-six’s trapped animal snarl. Izak leaned a knee on his friend’s throat, caught a filing fist, and stretched out, pinning the appendage in the slippery mud.

  “Now, Kelena!”

  She lunged, the thornknife clenched in her fist.

  The pirate’s breastbone cracked like thunder. Kelena fell onto his chest, driving the thornknife to the hilt.

  Twenty-six went limp beneath Izak’s grasp.

  Slowly, the mud-covered Thorns began to realize that the pirate was no longer struggling. One and two at a time, they climbed off the dead man.

  A moan of panic escaped Kelena. She was pulling, but she couldn’t get the thornknife out.

  Izak took his knee off his friend’s corpse, but didn’t get up. Should he help Kelena? Would assisting in the thornknife ritual kill the man being grafted? What if she wasn’t strong enough?

  Giving a final shout of effort, Kelena gritted her teeth and gave a vicious yank. The wooden bde squelched free. She traced a hasty cross on Twenty-six’s forehead in blood.

  “Aan!” Kelena’s shout rang out across the bailey, strong despite the sickly pallor of her face. “I command your service!”

  The corpse spasmed.

  Izak’s heart crashed against the back of his throat.

  Overhead, the ghost city disappeared. Bckness bnketed the bailey.

  This wasn’t darkness as Izak had seen it during the other grafting ceremonies. This was a chasm that went on forever, the infinite bck of a lightless midnight reflected by an endless depth of ocean, a void of bck water smothering all else.

  “Aan, return to your master.” Though Kelena was right beside Izak, her voice echoed with distance, as if she were calling from the bottom of a well. “I command your soul to take residence where it cannot be driven out.”

  The thornknife in her fist glowed like a moonbeam. The bckness tried to smother the light, but only managed to push back its rays.

  A ragged gasp echoed through the bckness. The dead man’s chest shuddered beneath Izak’s hand.

  Eerie green ghostlight flooded the bailey once more.

  Mud gurgled and sucked as the pirate got up. Thorns prepared themselves to tackle the savage again, but when he was perched on one knee, the pirate stopped. He scowled down at the closing hole in his chest.

  His gray-green eyes rose to Kelena.

  The princess took a quick step back, losing her precarious bance in the churned mud. Izak lurched to his feet and caught her arm to stabilize her.

  “He’s…” Kelena stammered. “Izakiel, he’s…”

  “You’re almost there,” Izak whispered. “You’ve been commanding him like the Queen of Night so far, don’t stop yet.” He nudged her hand. “The thornknife.”

  Shaking, Kelena held out the wooden bde, slick with the pirate’s blood.

  “Aan, your soul resides within this thornknife until such a time as you die again or I release you from my service.”

  The pirate’s teeth bared in a silent grimace. His head lowered an inch at a time as if it were being forced onto an executioner’s block by an unseen hand. The cords in his neck stood out as he fought and lost the battle to resist.

  “I am yours,” he growled.

  Silence.

  Masters and students alike stood in shock.

  “Master Smith,” Grandmaster prompted softly.

  The smith started as if he’d been awoken from a dream. He hurried forward and gave Kelena a cutss and swordbreaker of glowering bck steel.

  “I’ve seen pirate steel of te coming into the markets.” Master Smith looked nervously at the snarling new Thorn, speaking more to him than to the princess. “Think I did a fair job of replicating the process.”

  Kelena bent, holding the bdes out to the pirate.

  Twenty-six—Aan, now—hefted the heavy curve of the cutss, lifted the wickedly serrated swordbreaker.

  “It’s customary to name them,” Izak told his friend.

  For a moment, the pirate studied the teeth of the swordbreaker, his expression as dark as the steel it was forged from. Slowly, he raised his gray-green eyes to the king.

  “This is Mehet, Heroine of the Sea, Eater of Abominations.” Then he raised the cutss. “And this is Haelbringr, her wedding vessel. They never rest. They never tire. They fight beyond life, beyond death, beyond defeat. Their sheath is the heart of a king!” he spat. “Their sharpening stone is his bones! Their oil is his blood!”

  By the end of his tirade, Aan had to shout to be heard over the dissenting rage of the students and Thorns and the chuckling of the king he must know he could no longer touch.

  As the chaos carried on, Etian came to Izak’s side. “I admire your friend’s determination.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say it.” Izak gnced sidelong at his brother. “Why didn’t you let him kill Hazerial? He probably wouldn’t have managed it, but you could have swept in and finished the job.”

  “Poor timing is the same as wasted effort,” Etian said. “Why were you in such a hurry for him to be grafted?”

  Izak watched the pirate climb out of the muck.

  “Kelena just took control of the strongest Thorn ever to come through Thornfield.” Not Etian, not Hazerial, not the mad queen or some sycophant lord. The pirate was Kelena’s alone to command. “Nothing can touch her ever again.”