“Elio?”

Elio started to stand. “I am going to kill you, you little—” Fighting manners dictated that Kip let him stand before they fought.

Kip slugged the boy in the face, knocking him sprawling. He jumped on top of Elio, squashing the breath out of him and trapping his arm in a wristlock. He sat on the boy.

Abruptly, Kip was cold, in control.

Elio said, “I’m going to kick your ass, you little puke. I’m going to make you regret the day you were born.” Apparently he’d recovered from his shock, then. “Let go of my arm!”

Elio jerked and jumped, trying to throw Kip off, but Kip merely ground forward until the boy cried out and stopped fighting. He knew wristlocks well, though it had always been from the other side. Back home, Ramir used to grind Kip’s face in the ground, make him cry, furious, humiliated. Made him kiss the dirt and say nasty things for his amusement before he’d let him get up.

The bully didn’t stop: “I’m going to kill you, you fat little bastard. You can’t hold me forever, and once I get out, you’re going to have to watch your back. I’ll be there. I’ll be waiting for you, and you won’t get off with a sucker punch next time.”

Kip realized suddenly that he was riding a tiger. There was no winning here. He was in a position of power, so he’d look the bad guy if he used it to his advantage. The normal course of things now was that he would give Elio an ultimatum, like Take it back! or something similarly stupid. Elio would refuse, and Kip would be stuck. If Kip let him get up, Elio would come back tomorrow—and he probably would beat the snot out of Kip. If Kip tortured Elio by grinding his arm, it wouldn’t do permanent damage, but many of the boys wouldn’t know that, and even if Elio submitted, Kip would look like a cruel bastard to everyone in the barracks. Or worse, someone would interfere before Elio submitted, and Kip would look cruel and weak.

Stalling, Kip said, “Elio, I might not look it, but I’m tougher than you, I’m meaner than you, I’m smarter than you, and I will always go further than you dare.”

“Save it, shit-eater,” Elio said, sensing weakness in Kip’s hesitation. “Oww! Start begging now, you little bitch.”

Kip was suddenly so tired of it all. What had Ironfist said: ‘The winning is just the beginning’?

“Elio, I was going to give you one more chance to take it back. But you’re not going to take anything back. You’re too damn stupid, and I’m too tired to keep playing this game. But I want you to remember something after you go to the infirmary: this is me being merciful.”

Still holding Elio’s wrist in the wristlock, Kip brought his left forearm down sharply with his weight behind it.

Elio’s arm broke with a crunch. Everyone gasped. A bit of bloody bone speared through the skin. Elio screamed. It was a high-pitched sound. Not what you would have guessed the boy would sound like at all.

Kip got off. As forty boys watched, wide-eyed, Elio crawled away, bleeding, weeping. He stood and lurched out of the barracks, cradling his broken arm. None of the boys helped him. No one in authority ever came.

As Elio careened out of the door, Kip saw that his Blackguard—the slim, tall young man—was standing in the dark corner, leaning against the wall. He’d watched everything, no doubt ready to move if Kip’s life were in danger. Other than that, he wouldn’t interfere. He just watched, eyes glittering, face blank.

With feigned nonchalance, Kip lay back down in his bed and pretended to go back to sleep instantly. Just leave me alone. He turned his back toward the boys who were whispering to each other, amazed, repeating the story that didn’t need repeating. They’d all seen it.

Kip’s sleep was a lie. Eventually the boys snuffed their candles. In the darkness, Kip relived the battle at Garriston.

The man he’d thrown into the campfire, skin tearing off his face like chicken sticking to a pan. The eyes of men, faces contorted with fury, trying to kill Kip, hefting weapons as Kip fell through the gap in the wall. Fell, fell. Feet kicking at him from a hundred sides.

The taste of gunpowder in the air.

The joy of sweeping a blade into a man, his flesh parting, the blade winning free of his flesh, liberating blood and soul.

Surrounded by soldiers, matchlocks coming up. Kip shooting their own musket balls in their faces.

An eyeball, blue as the sea, sitting on a paving stone, the head it had been blown out of nowhere to be found. Staring at Kip, staring. Accusing. Killer.

What have you done?

He remembered losing fights to Ramir, the village bully. They’d thought Ramir was going to be pressed into King Garadul’s army. Kip had killed soldiers—boys—no older than Ramir at Garriston. Boys who’d probably been pressed into service. Innocents doing guilty work.

He’d thought he wanted to kill Ramir, sometimes, back when he was a boy. Back when he didn’t know what it meant. Back when he didn’t know how easy it was.

What kind of monster have I become?

Chapter 18

Gavin put the fist-sized charge into the tube and began spooling out a narrow finger of green luxin, pushing it under the waves. In the last two days, he’d gotten pretty good at this, but he still couldn’t rely on the charges, which were made of intermixed layers of yellow and red luxin wrapped around a bubble of air. The trick was making that innermost layer improperly—in exactly the proper way. The luxin bubble decayed, exposing the unstable yellow luxin to air. That unstable luxin flashed into light, igniting the red luxin. The successive layers did the same and made an explosion big enough to clear the reefs.

But handling explosives that you’d deliberately made unstable was tense work. And sometimes the charges blew as soon as they touched the reef; other times they didn’t blow up for several minutes, or at all.

Karris was steadying the boat, sometimes poling, sometimes rowing.

This time, the explosion came before Gavin had pulled away the placement tube. The tube shot out of his hands, and the sea jumped beneath their boat. Gavin had been braced for the wave, but the tube shooting up into the air pulled him off balance. He stumbled backward. Ordinarily, falling in the water would have been fine, but at the moment it was full of razor-sharp chunks of coral boiling up to the surface from the explosion.

Karris snagged Gavin’s belt as his foot plunged into the water. She heaved. He swung abruptly back toward the boat and swept her feet out from under her as he crashed onto the deck.

Gavin rolled hard to keep from capsizing their little craft, and ended up on top of Karris. He laughed. “Nice catch!”

The look in her eyes was so intense that he thought his heart was going to stop.

“Get. Off,” she hissed. Her body was rigid. He must have misinterpreted that split-second look. For a sliver of an instant he could have sworn—

“Sorry,” he said. He pushed himself up. “Good catch,” he said again. Did she cling to him just for a moment there? Did her body rise with him, keeping the contact for just one moment more? He looked at her.

The sun was baking the bay and had been for the last two days. Gavin had stripped off his shirt to cool down immediately, and after modestly sweating through the first day, Karris had followed his lead on the second, wearing only her tight Blackguard’s chemise. The sight of her on her back, lean stomach exposed, legs on either side of him, skin radiant from golden sun and sweat—his breath stopped, thoughts scattered. He tried not to—failed—looked at her breasts.