Your friendly neighborhood content warning for the day: Violence -- like, so much of it. Attempted SA and a whole heaping of retribution.

  If you don't want to see any of that, skip, and I'll see you in the next one!e

  Thirty was waiting at the door of the old tack shed around the corner. The ramshackle structure was in a blind spot against the keep’s eastern wall, hidden from nearly every vantage point Lathe could find.

  She scowled. “You couldn’t see me none from here. I coulda chopped this lyin’ fool’s head off and you never woulda knowed.”

  “Shows how dumb you are,” Scabs sneered.

  “I don’t need line of sight,” Thirty said. “I can see around corners with blood magic. Now get inside and get those clothes off.”

  She hocked up a wad and spat it on his shirt. “Get that off howabout.”

  Thirty grabbed her by her short hair. “You’re going to lick that off, you piece of trash.”

  “Might be trash, but I’m about to be trash who killt me a fat pudge and a betrayer.”

  She snagged Thirty by both cheeks, her nails digging in like cws. He gritted his teeth, struggling to pull his face out of her grasp and wrestle them both into the shed without screaming and attracting attention.

  Lathe smmed her knee into his crotch. His pink face turned red, and they stumbled sidelong into the door. Thirty’s fist smmed her head against the shed. Pain bloomed in her ear, setting the shell and lobe on fire, and slivers from the old wood stuck in her cheek.

  He yanked her back for another whack, but she dug her fingers deeper onto his doughy face. Soon they were locked in an impasse, both sets of arms shaking as Lathe strained to pull herself closer to Thirty, while Thirty tried to bash her skull ft on the shed door. She had been training with heavy swords for nearly two years and had arms like hammered steel wire, but he was bigger and naturally stronger.

  “Do it!” Thirty growled at his accomplice.

  Impulse yelled out loud and clear then, and Lathe listened. She threw out a hard kick to her blind side. Scabs’s knee folded sideways with a crunchy sound.

  The moment of distraction lost her the tug-of-war, but as her head bounced off the shed door again, Thirty leaned in too close. Lathe bit him on his fat nose. Meaty fists pummeled her head and shoulders, but she dug in like a snapping turtle waiting for thunder.

  Blood flowed through her teeth, and she drank it down, using the stolen medicine to fuel her strength. Her teeth met in the middle with a cck. The lump of gristle came off in her mouth.

  Thirty let out a wheezy scream. She spat the tip of his nose at his face.

  “You rabid whore!” His fists twisted in her shirt, ripping it to shreds, and he smmed her against the shed wall with enough force to snt the aging timbers.

  Lathe barely felt the impact through the medicine she’d taken from him. People-blood did a whole lot more than sipping energies or drinking rat blood. She cackled at the flush of power.

  Boosting her strength with the medicine, Lathe dragged the wheezing Thirty closer inch by inch, snapping her teeth at him. The fathead scrabbled at her face and chest, trying to hold her off, but he couldn’t stop her. She tore into his throat like a hungry dog. Blood dripped down her chin and soaked her shredded shirt and the girdle beneath.

  Thirty punched and pried and smmed her against the groaning shed, but he was losing strength fast and Lathe’s medicine was only growing with every gulp. Impulse said if she drank it down to the st drop she would have more power than she’d ever felt.

  Thirty’s strength was giving out. She was going to drink the nasty rd dry. Teach him to y a hand on her! He jerked, scraping Lathe along the leaning wall of the shed. Her torn shirt snagged on the splintery wood.

  Something stung her leg, and the limb buckled.

  Greedily, she hooked an arm around Thirty, unwilling to get pulled away from taking every st drop of medicine from her prey. But whatever it was that stung her kept doing it.

  Lathe snarled down at the affected leg.

  Scabs was on the ground with a dart in his fist, the same kind Thirty had shot into her at the tournament the year before. Over and over again, that betrayer stabbed the poisoned dart into her calf and thigh.

  Suddenly, Thirty’s dead weight pitched forward onto Lathe. One of his hands tangled in her girdle. She tried to lever him off, but with the poison creeping up her leg, it wasn’t working. They dropped to the dirt, Thirty’s mass pinning her numbing lower body.

  Scabs’s face went sck with relief.

  “You figure you got me?” Lathe said.

  She poured on the healing medicine, undoing the nasty stuff he’d stabbed her with. Giving a twist of her shoulders and a buck of her hips, she threw off Thirty’s bulk.

  Scabs scrambled back, still clutching the dart in one shaking fist. His eyes showed white all around.

  “Yeah, you best be scairt.” Lathe gave him a bloody grin as she climbed to her feet. “I’m the baddest medicine. I’m a fell miasma and a howlin’ wind and the moon hidin’ behind the ghost city. I’m the bad hurt when ain’t nobody comin’ to save you, you untrue, vile betrayer, and I hold everything you ever done to your account.”

  “No.” Scabs shook his head. “Don’t!” He lurched back another scuttling hop, then his elbows gave out and he sprawled onto his back. “Don’t hold it to my account, Brat!”

  “Every close-rat you ever sold…” Lathe prowled forward, blood dripping from her chin as she pronounced judgment. “Every first-year you helped Thirty take after…”

  “I was hungry! I hadta eat! You done what you hadta do—we all done so! Don’t hold it to my account!” He remembered the dart in his fist and stuck it out between them like a knife. “Don’t you dare take another step! I’ll holler fit to wake the tempered dead.”

  “Not for long you won’t.” She licked the blood from her lips. “Account’s come due, betrayer.”

  Scabs whimpered, scrunching up his face.

  She grabbed Scabs and hauled him up by his hair.

  “Lathe? Seventeen? What’s going on here?”

  Impulse warned her there was no time to waste. She’d been found out; now she had to finish it before somebody stopped her.

  Lathe snapped Scabs’s neck and let his twitching body drop before turning to face the gold-eyed tecomer.

  “Just settlin’ with a betrayer,” she told Saint Daven. “The Cormorant’ll figure on his everstin’ punishment.”

  Saint Daven frowned, looking from her to the dead fools on the ground and back to her. His brows twitched downward in confusion.

  Betedly, it struck Lathe what the old crow was staring at. She snatched the tattered shirt closed over the torn, bloodstained girdle.

  “Don’t say nothing,” she said.

  The weapons master didn’t.

  “It ain’t what it looks like!”

  Silence.

  Fear trailed a cold finger up the back of her neck. It was all about to fall apart. She could feel it. No grafting. No gold. No way to get Pretty out of the Closes. It was all swirling away like dirty water after flood season.

  “I just made myself look like a gal ’cuz I knowed Thirty and Scabs been takin’ after first-years—”

  “Lathe.”

  “It ain’t real!” She stomped a foot. “Four learnt me how to do illusions, and I’m a fair study, me, so’s I made it look like—”

  “Two students are dead, and you’re… We’re going to talk to Grandmaster. Now.”

  Lathe skittered back a step and bumped up against the leaning shed. Nowhere to run.

  “I ain’t going nowhere to talk to nobody! You tell a tale on me, you old crow, and I’ll tell everybody at Thornfield about you!”

  Saint Daven stopped where he was.

  “That’s right, I know! You ain’t twins—” She stabbed a finger at the weapons master like she was lining up one of her swords. “—and if you don’t let me be, I’ll tell the whole pce!”

  His gold eyes narrowed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t give me none a’ that! I knowed it ever since I cut you with my basket hilt.” She tapped her chin, then pointed at his. “When I knocked you clean out, it cut you and left that little scar right there. If anybody else had half a brain, they coulda seen it, too.”

  A strip of muscle in the weapons master’s bony jaw twitched, but Lathe went on, heedless of the warning.

  “That scar’s on you and it’s on Master Saint Galen! Right there, in the same spot, ’cuz you ain’t two people! You’re just one crazy old crow!”

  For a heartbeat, the accusation hung in the air between them.

  Then the weapons master disappeared.

  Lathe did the same, throwing herself to the side.

  Too slow. A hand grabbed her by the throat and smmed her against the wall of the keep.

  A point of cold invisible steel pressed the meat below her good eye, and Lathe froze. She squeezed both shut, knowing it wouldn’t help if he rammed that bde in, but unable to fight the instinct to protect the sight she had left.

  “Don’t!” She tried to scream it at him, but his grip on her throat turned the word into a pleading croak. “Don’t poke it out!”

  Her boots kicked and scraped at the stone of the keep, shedding mud and sandy dirt clods, but finding no purchase. She cwed the air with one hand, fingers catching in the unseen material of a shirtsleeve. She dug her nails into the meat of the hand clutching her throat.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Saint Daven growled. “Gale’s not dead.”

  The fist tightened. Pressure built behind Lathe’s eyes. Her pulse pounded in her temples. She kicked and connected with a solid body, but his grip didn’t loosen.

  “I had to do it to save him. I had to!” He shook her like a rag, and a gasp of precious air slipped through. “You think they don’t already know?”

  “Think you’re crazier’n a dead temperer drinkin’ his own potion,” she choked out.

  Suddenly, the hand on her throat froze, holding her in pce. For long seconds neither the crow nor the close-rat moved.

  Saint Daven reappeared, his weird gold eyes gring into hers. Lathe gred back. It felt like her eyes were going to bust, but she didn’t blink. If she blinked, she was dead.

  His chest heaved, sucking in all that air she couldn’t get to. Her lungs bucked and screamed. Nothing mattered but not blinking.

  Finally, mercifully, his grip on her throat sckened.

  Lathe dropped to the ground, gulping down huge breaths. She twisted away and backed out of the crazy old crow’s reach, over the tack shed’s threshold and into the shadows.

  “Grandmaster knows,” she realized. “When I asked him if the twins had run off on him, he said what twins?”

  Saint Daven bent to stick his dagger back in his boot. He was starting to look halfway sane again.

  “And he always calls you the wrong name.” Lathe rubbed the pain in her throat. “No matter which one of you he says—”

  “This isn’t about us. You can’t stay here, Lathe. You can’t become a Thorn.”

  “If fake twins can, I can!” Yelling hurt.

  Saint Daven stripped off his jacket. “Put this on. We’re going to talk to Grandmaster.”

  Lathe ignored the garment. “I can do the disappearin’ trick, and I done proved I can beat everybody here. I can be a Thorn—I can be the best Thorn!”

  Saint Daven wrapped the jacket around her. “You don’t understand what the grafting does. No girl should be grafted to a man—not even a good man. Your master can make you do anything, and you can’t refuse him. You won’t want to refuse him. You’ve heard everything Jadarah does with her Thorns.”

  “Then I won’t tell nobody I’m a gal. I’ll stay a boy.”

  “That’s now how grafting works. Your master will know what you are immediately. You can’t become a Thorn.”

  “But I gotta get grafted.” Hot tears cut paths in the blood drying on her cheeks. “I gotta get money.”

  “This isn’t the way to do it.”

  “Please, please, leave it be.”

  “I can’t.” Saint Daven took her by the shoulders and turned her toward the keep. “Come on.”

  ***

  With his report completed, Grandmaster Heartless returned to his study. He hoped to have the few short hours before sundown to think over the conversation with the king, but he found his weapons master and Lathe waiting for him.

  The boy was covered in blood, wearing a too-rge jacket over torn Thornfield clothing and looking as if he’d just been sentenced to execution.

  Grandmaster stopped in the doorway. “What happened?”

  “Thirty and Seventeen are in the bailey by the old tack shed,” Saint Daven said. “I sent healers to move them, but they’re dead.”

  “They took after me,” Lathe said, but his defense cked its customary heat. The boy gred sullenly at the floor. “I had to kill ’em or they woulda done the bad stuff.”

  “That’s not the only reason we’re here,” Saint Daven said. “Lathe is a girl.”

  “Nobody woulda knowed if you’da kept your mouth shut! See—Grandmaster didn’t know, he’s surprised as anybody, him! If you’re all too stupid to see it, I oughta get to stay.”

  “I already told him—” The weapons master stopped and corrected himself. “I already told her she can’t become a Thorn. I expined about the grafting—”

  “Who’s caring about the grafting?” Lathe snapped. “I’m talkin’ about I can teach here at Thornfield. Masters make money, don’t they? I’m faster’n anybody, and I got blood magic fit to choke a mule. I’ll teach students how to mirror stuff, me. Let me stay a boy and teach. Ain’t a student that’ll figure it out. None did so far.”

  “Except Seventeen and Thirty,” Saint Daven said.

  “Scabs knowed me afore I come to Thornfield, and Thirty only knowed ’cuz Scabs told him.”

  The weapons master gestured toward the bailey. “And look what happened.”

  “’Cuz they was bad medicine! Ain’t everybody like that. Four and Twenty-six never took after me, and they knowed since first year.”

  Wearily, Heartless closed his eyes and rubbed them. He crossed the room and lowered himself into the chair at his desk, wincing at the protests in his joints.

  “We should have sent you away the day we learned you were blind,” Heartless said.

  “Grandmaster, you gotta—”

  “Master Saint Daven, please retrieve Lathe’s belongings from the barracks.”

  “Yes, Grandmaster.” The door closed behind him.

  “Kick me out and I’ll curse you somethin’ awful! I know granny medicine!”

  “Lathe, you can sleep here today.” Heartless indicated the cot he kept in the corner for the nights when work kept him in the study from dusk to dusk again. “At sundown, I’ll have the kitchens bring you breakfast. When you’ve eaten, one of the masters will escort you to the closest vilge. I’ll give you enough coin to get a decent set of dy’s garments and take you anywhere you need in the kingdom. If you want work, I can give you a letter of recommendation that will get you a job in the kitchens at any one of dozens of reputable estates.”

  “I ain’t scourin’ no more pots, me!”

  Grandmaster spped a hand ft on his desk, and Lathe jumped.

  “You’ve been an amusing student, but don’t confuse that with privilege. I send scores of boys to their deaths every year. Duty demands it. But I won’t have the death of a young woman on my conscience.”

  Lathe’s mouth worked. She shook her head, her chest heaving.

  “End of discussion.” Grandmaster stood up. “Get some rest. You’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

  As soon as the door shut behind him, gss shattered against it. Most likely the mp from his desk. Another crash might have been the stool beside the cot.

  He grabbed the key from the top of the doorframe and turned it in the lock.