Kelena awoke to someone shaking her violently. She tensed, her head and neck aching from the whipping motion, raising her hands to cover her face.

  The shaking stopped and the rough hands released her. She opened her eyes to furious gray-green eyes. Alaan knelt over her, chest heaving as if he’d just been sprinting.

  “Strong gods’ hells, Kelena.” Izak was on her other side. He pressed a hand to her forehead, then cheek. She felt the royal blood magic flowing from his fingertips, searching out damage or illness. “Are you all right?”

  “I-I think so.” She sat up and pulled the rugs around herself. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. You were just lying there asleep, and then Alaan scared the piss out of me, reacting like that. I thought he was losing it again.”

  Kelena’s cheeks burned. She didn’t even know what she’d done. All she remembered was listening to them talk… and then nothing.

  The grafting pulsed with subsiding panic. Alaan rose from the pallet, still scowling.

  His face gave no outward sign of doubt, but she felt him questioning himself. He didn’t trust what he was seeing, or what he had felt. He could not tell whether this was reality or whether Izak was right and he had imagined it all.

  Hesitantly, Kelena sent reassurance through the grafting. The pirate’s narrowed gaze fell on her, but there was no outburst of fury like the last time she had tried to communicate with him in that way.

  “I didn’t mean to create an uproar over nothing,” Kelena said, filling her voice with cheerful carelessness and hoping it would convince her brother. “I’m such a silly goose sometimes.”

  Izak sat back on his heels, assessing her. She wished she could sense his feelings like she could Alaan’s. Most of the time, her brother’s face was open and readable, but in that moment, it was a door closed to her.

  “Don’t fret at me like the grumpy big brother. You know that I can’t be unwell, Izak, I’ve got the royal blood magic the same as you do.” She laughed, then eyed the dried mud his boots were shedding on her top blanket. “I am grateful for your concern, but you do know you’re getting dirt all over my bed? At least, I hope it’s just mud. You do spend a lot of time around the horses these days.”

  Izak smiled, but the second set of dimples that he shared with their father, the ever-present ones high on his cheeks, made him look drawn and tired.

  “When did you learn to deflect, Kelen?” It used to make her so angry when he called her the male version of her name, but there was no teasing in her brother’s voice now. “You and Etian outgrew me while I was at Thornfield.”

  That cut her to the bone, but she smiled brightly. “You know that I’ve been jealous of your height my whole life! I’ll never outgrow you, and I’ll never forgive you for it.”

  Izak let out a weary exhale. Then he tweaked her nose, stood up, and swept the dirt off her blankets.

  “Enjoy the rest of your day, Your Highness,” he said, giving her a joking bow that didn’t feel very funny.

  “And you, Commander,” Kelena said as if she weren’t bleeding inside.

  He picked up his swordstaff, bowed to her, nodded to his friend, then ducked out of the pavilion into the falling rain.

  Kelena pulled the blankets over her head, curled into a ball, and wept.

  ***

  A thin misting drizzle fell as servants and Thorns scrambled around, loading bedding onto the baggage train and disassembling the pavilions.

  As the darkness grew, a distant ghost city faded into the sky, a green aurora in northeast. It looked to be thirty to thirty-five leagues away, but Alaan could not trust the accuracy of his judgment after so long without sleep. He felt lightheaded, almost drunk.

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  That evening—if he had not wishfully imagined Izak saying so—they would arrive in Siu Rial.

  Nearby, the princess sat on a chunk of unburnt firewood, her knees pulled up to her chest and making a tent of her maroon traveling skirts. Her hair was tied back, but short black wisps had escaped from the rest and curled damply around her face.

  She picked at the soggy bread she’d been brought for breakfast. “Have you told Izak about the… the feeding in Siu Augine?”

  “The murder,” Alaan said. “No. Did you murder the public house girl in the village outside Thornfield as well?”

  “I didn’t mean to.” The princess huddled lower. “It will happen again. Soon. I wish it wouldn’t, but wishing didn’t stop it last time. The hunger is growing worse by the night.” She tore a tiny piece from the bread and stared down at it. “Food and wine taste like nothing to me now. They feel like nothing in my stomach.”

  Despite the fine droplets hanging in the air, Alaan’s eyes felt dry and hot. Exhaustion sat like a weight on the back of his neck and dragged at the pit of his stomach.

  “Your brother does not feed like this.” In three years, Izak had only ever drunk blood from wineskins, and that rarely. Lathe had stolen energy from those around her, but had rarely drunk blood at all, even when she had robbed it from the healers for Izak. “Most dirters I have observed do not.”

  The princess set the food aside.

  “My father does.” She hugged her legs and rested her cheek on her knees. Her stare was distant and lifeless, her face pale as death. “Mother said he can control it because the strong gods blessed him, but they cursed me because I’m empty…”

  Through the thickness of lethargy covering his mind, Alaan recognized the growing dread consuming the princess.

  “How much blood is required?” he asked, cutting the wind from her terror’s sails.

  She blinked. “Blood?”

  “When you feed.”

  Her dark brows knit; she studied Alaan. “You’re disgusted but not frightened. You’re never frightened. That’s part of why you loathe me so much, isn’t it? Because I’m a coward.”

  Two answers came to him—that he despised anything that stank of cowardice because it recalled his own failure as an Ocean Rover and as a man, and the shorter answer, which he said aloud.

  “Yes.”

  Bitter longing flowed through the grafting.

  “I don’t know how to stop being scared,” she said.

  “Continue fighting. Beyond cursedness. Beyond shame and disgrace. With every loss, another layer of fear is stripped away, until nothing remains.”

  Alaan heard himself speaking as if from far away. He had to stop. He should not speak again until after he had slept, until he knew what he was saying and could control it. But his voice continued without his permission.

  “I can lose nothing more. I have no god or tribe or wife or self that I have not betrayed. There is nothing left to me, and so I fear nothing.”

  “I wonder what it is that I have.” The princess’s words seemed to echo across a great distance. “If I knew, I would try to lose it, too.”

  Her eyes were as wide as the Deep Chasm staring up at him, a darkness that promised infinite, peaceful death. Waves rocked him, pulled him toward the void.

  “Alaan?”

  Cold wet grass and churned mud smeared against his cheek. Wetness soaked into his uniform. An icy, delicate hand touched the back of his neck. Someone called to him from above the surface of the waves. Alarm that was not his filled him.

  The princess. She was the voice in his ear, the hand on his neck.

  “—my father!” she whispered urgently. “I heard him. He’s coming. I know you don’t want him to see you like this. Please Alaan, if you can understand me, get up!”

  He opened his eyes and saw trampled, mud-streaked green blades and the damp, maroon hem of the princess’s skirts. Every color was so vibrant that it shook. He was on his stomach in the wet grass.

  “It’s only for a little while longer,” she pleaded. Her face glowed white; her eyes were black holes to nothingness. “You only have to make it to Castle Sangmere. You’re so close, Alaan! Please get up, he’s coming!”

  Filling his lungs, Alan pushed himself up and got his boots beneath him. The princess scrambled back, relief soaring through the grafting as he straightened his posture and stood at attention.

  The dirter king rounded the corner of a baggage wagon. His frozen eyes swept over Alaan, an amused smirk pulling at his lips as he noted the muddy blotches on the Royal Thorn uniform and the corresponding wetness matting the left side of Alaan’s face and beard.

  “What happened here?” the monster asked with icy pleasantness.

  Alaan couldn’t answer. It was all he could do to remain standing and meet the king’s stare.

  “I slipped in the mud,” the princess said quickly. “Alaan tried to catch me, but I dragged him down with me. Well, more like I fell on top of him. I’m sorry, Father, I may have ruined his uniform. I’m so stupid.”

  Through the fatigue, Alaan struggled to grasp what she was saying. Had she fallen on him? He felt as if he’d just had the wind knocked out of him, so it was a possibility, but he felt that same breathlessness every time he was jolted back to consciousness lately.

  Was any of this happening?

  Through the grafting, reassurance surged, anchoring him.

  Sounds passed between the monster and his daughter, washing over Alaan like the tides. The carriage was ready to depart—that was the meaning, whatever their individual words.

  Finally, the dirter king turned away. As the princess accompanied her father obediently to the carriage, Alaan followed. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, his stomach sickly electric like the lightning that gathered in the belly of sails during storm season.

  Not until he was in the carriage did Alaan remember where he had found the determination to move again.

  Through the grafting, he sent the princess a thread of gratitude.