After leaving Lilicent’s hovel, Saint Daven went looking for Derig. The commander of the men-at-arms wasn’t in the split-rail corral with the House Mattius men who had yet to swear for the king or in the guarded section of tents with the men who had already knelt. Mosole and his commanders and officers had taken over the houses in Hotsprings, forcing their presence upon the villagers who hadn’t run or died resisting, but Derig wasn’t with them either.

  On the eastern edge of the village, near the stream, Saint Daven found a dozing guard leaning on his halberd outside the door of a smokehouse. Through the cracks, he saw Commander Derig sitting in the cold ashes of seasons past. The smokehouse was too small for the man to lie down or even stretch out his legs, so he slept leaned against the wall, with his knees drawn up to his chest and his shackled arms hanging off either side of them.

  Saint Daven slid an invisible arm around the guard’s throat and squeezed. The man struggled and tried to call for help, but with the blood magic Saint Daven hid and silenced them. When he stopped fighting and went limp, Saint Daven laid him out behind the closest house, halberd in hand.

  Derig started at the smokehouse door opening on no one.

  “Who’s there?” the commander muttered.

  “Someone loyal to House Mattius.” The commander wouldn’t remember his name. Wraith had handled all the coordination between their forces. Saint Daven had been too busy running messages and staying hidden to spend time getting to know the garrison. “Why did Lord Clarencio order you to kneel and take their oaths if he was just going to set you free from them?”

  Derig’s salt-and-pepper brows furrowed as he leaned out in attempt to look around the door of the smokehouse. “I don’t treat with cowards hiding in the shadows.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Show yourself.”

  Scowling, Saint Daven dropped the invisibility. The commander flinched at his sudden appearance. Then he saw Saint Daven’s gold eyes.

  “I know you, boy. The Thorn who killed Mosole’s nephew.”

  Maybe taking a Thorn into custody for killing of one of his lord’s houseguests had made an impression on the garrison’s commander after all.

  “He deserved it,” Saint Daven said.

  “What are you doing here?” Derig demanded.

  “Looking for Clarencio. Where has he gone, and why did he leave instructions with the garrison to surrender?”

  Derig blew out a lip-flapping gust. “Folks say Lord Clarencio heard an oracle from the strong gods, but seems to me he just planned for all the eventualities before he left Blazing Prairie. Made sense strategically, Mosole’s men attacking now. His lordship said he intended to be gone for a long time on business from the crown.”

  The chain of his shackles clinked softly as he rubbed his baggy eyes. “Josean knows the man’s seen enough bloodshed for one lifetime. He wanted to save as many of us as possible, but some of these young bucks have skulls thicker than a hundred-year oak. Think they’re serving House Mattius better by dying than by doing what he asked.

  “I can tell you this, the crown would be the last to find out if he did turn his cloak. His lordship got his father’s strength of will, but he got a double portion of his mother’s cunning, and I always said, ‘Don’t mess with Lady Caralota. All you’ll see is that sweet smile, right up until you bleed out.’”

  A rustle and groan from the direction of the unconscious guard. Saint Daven’s stolen time had run out. He stood to go.

  “You know, lad,” Derig said. “There was another man here before the attack came. Called himself Chancellor Lindro. He was looking for a former Thorn with gold eyes. Wanted to know about anybody that Thorn had spoken to, as well. Way he talked, he knew you were going to be through Hotsprings looking for his lordship. He claimed to be a chancellor, but I never saw a chancellor with such a strong sword arm and killing look about him.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” With the blood magic, Saint Daven disappeared again.

  By the back of the house, the guard was scrambling to his feet, looking around bewilderedly for his attacker. Saint Daven stole some energies from the man so he could maintain his invisibility.

  “We haven’t seen anyone around the houses but officers and Mosole,” Saint Galen addressed the defeated commander before they could leave. “Where are they keeping the women and children?”

  Derig’s mouth twisted. He turned his head and didn’t quite look at the twins.

  “The pretty girls are warming the officers’ beds. The rest are doing their cooking and washing for them, and the children are being held in the stable at the end of town against the men’s good behavior. That was one thing his lordship didn’t plan for, may our wives and daughters forgive his oversight if they can. But what else can you expect when men kneel?”

  ***

  “Your lordship! Your lordship!”

  The frantic cry startled Mosole from a fitful sleep. The feather tick in the rundown public house was lumpy and musty, and filled seemingly with nothing but sharpened goose quills. Better to call it a torture device than a bed. But it was better than what he’d seen in the smaller shacks. Straw and rope beds where there were beds, flea-ridden pallets on dirt floors where there weren’t.

  “Your lordship!” A fist battered the thin planks of the bedchamber door.

  Grunting, Mosole rose and staggered to the chamber pot. The fire in the hearth had burnt down, and it was barely first dark out the upper window. His piss steamed in the cool air.

  “Please, your lordship!” More thumping. “It’s urgent!”

  “It had better be,” Mosole replied, his tongue thick and sour. He needed to find another flagon of something drinkable to wash away the taste and clear his head.

  He’d slept in his clothes to avoid the unquestionable fleas and lice that must infest this place, but when he finished emptying his bladder, he donned the scalemail he’d had commissioned for this conquest.

  Mosole grabbed the bar over his door and levered it aside. “Now, what in the strong gods’ hells is it you want?”

  He’d expected one of his knights or officials, perhaps there to tell him that the last of his peasants had rallied in the day and escaped or been cut down, but the boy who stood there was just a squire. Mosole couldn’t remember his name. Some distant cousin’s son. He thought the boy served Sir Niko or maybe Sir Frenick. One of the nicks.

  “Your lordship, they’re all dead.” The boy’s face was pale with shock and wet with tears. “Sir Niko, Sir Hensor, Commander Vanche—all the sirs, all your knights and commanders, every man quartered in the village, and the guards standing watch on the children. A ghost cut their throats in the day.”

  Mosole let out a humorless chuckle. “We’ll see how many ghosts we have when we start killing their women. They’ll confess before the second head rolls. Ready my—”

  His voice turned to a gurgling wheeze as the blade opened his throat. Cold stung the bared nerves and severed vocal cords. He pressed his hands to the gaping wound, but he couldn’t stop the blood as it poured down the copper scales of his new mail shirt.

  ***

  “It’s just a gravestone,” Saint Galen said.

  Saint Daven picked at the blood under his thumbnail. He’d washed his hands and his knife in the basin at the public house. Not because he was worried about being seen with the lord’s blood on his hands, but because he had more sense than Mosole’s executioner and didn’t want dried blood on his blade if he needed it again.

  “With this being a lord’s hallowed ground, I thought maybe there would be gold markers or something,” Gale said.

  “More than Thorns get.”

  Gale snorted. “Any burial is more than Thorns get. We’re the refuse swordsmen, remember? Chuck ’em in the trash pit and get a new one.”

  Lilicent had been right, Mitchi’s grave felt warmer than the land in Hotsprings. Frost was settling in the grass and puddles around the hallowed ground, but none grew inside the short iron fence. Saint Daven could almost feel the heat rising through the soles of his boots.

  It was strangely comforting. Mitchi and the baby had warm place to sleep.

  In the thornknife graveyard, visitors sometimes left coins or shells or trinkets for the dead. After he’d been released from the Castle Sangemere dungeons, Saint Daven had left his broken thornknife lying on the sand beside Wraith’s and Cutter’s.

  On Mitchi’s grave, he left the dagger he’d been given in the dungeons. A professional courtesy left anonymously by one of his brothers in the royal guard. Insurance he and Gale wouldn’t have to stay locked up down there forever.

  For a second, Saint Daven almost said something to her. He almost told her he was going to find her brother and protect him from Hazerial, no matter how much he and Clarencio despised one another. For her. For Lord Paius. For the baby girl Clarencio had saved from the priests of the strong gods, only to have to bury her with her mother.

  But he stopped himself. One ghost was enough.