Rain pelted the keep, making it difficult to find purchase between the stones. Borenson spent long minutes clinging to the wall before he reached the top.

There, he found that the wall-walks really were all unmanned, but as he scurried down the steps into the inner court, he spotted two city guards—young men with few endowments—huddled away from the drenching rain in the protection of the portcullis.

In a moment when lightning filled the sky, he rushed them, slaughtered them as thunder shook the keep, so that no one heard their cries.

Even as he killed the young men, Borenson wondered. Not one Invincible? Not one man to guard all these Dedicates?

It felt like a trap. Perhaps the guards hid among the Dedicates.

Borenson turned and looked at the rain-slicked stones in the keep. The lights were out in the great rooms, though a lantern still burned in the kitchens. A wild wind burst through the portcullis, swept through the bailey.

There was an art, a science to killing Dedicates. Some of the Dedicates in there, Borenson knew, would be guards themselves, men like him who had dozens of endowments of their own and long years of practice in weaponry. They might be crippled—deaf or blind, mute or without a sense of smell—but they could be dangerous still.

So, when slaughtering Dedicates, common sense dictated that you avoid such men, kill first those who served as their Dedicates, weakening the more dangerous foes.

Thus, you began by slaughtering the women, and the young. You always sought to kill the weakest first. If you killed a man who had twenty endowments, suddenly you would find that twenty Dedicates would waken, who could sound alarms or fight you themselves.

Though it might be tempting to spare one or two Dedicates, the truth was that if you did, they might call for guards. So you killed them all.

You murdered commoners who had only given endowments, never received. And you started at the bottom of the keep, blocking all exits, and worked your way to the upper stories.

Unless, of course, someone in the keep was awake.

I had best begin in the kitchen, Borenson told himself. He took the dead gatekeeper’s key and locked the portcullis, so no one could enter the keep or escape, then went to the kitchen. The door stood locked, but he set the prong of a warhammer in its crack. With endowments of brawn from eight men, it was no great feat to pry the door free from its hinges.

When he rushed into the kitchens, he found a lowly girl who’d been left to sweep the floor, long into the night. A young thing, perhaps ten, with straw-blond hair. He recognized the child—the serving girl who’d catered to Princess Iome last Hostenfest. Too young to have given an endowment, he’d have thought. Certainly Sylvarresta would never have taken one from her.