Spoil the Rod
Don’t spoil the rod, my old master had told me. She’s insatiable and she’ll eat you alive.
As I lay for the thirteenth hour in the northeast corner of the castle courtyard, tucked in by thorn-filled blackberry brambles, exhausted and scratched to all hell with ticks burrowed in parts of sweaty flesh they should never have access to and my elbows only inches from soil soaked in my own rancid urine, it dawned on me that he may have been on to something.
Still, I wasn’t going to worry too much about it until the biggest job of my life was done.
For the forty-seventh time tonight, I watched Bartholomew, nineteen with not a whisker on his chin, stumble along the outside of the graystone, torchlit walls of the main hall, disappearing and reappearing in between thick columns car
