Page 73 of The Dark Lord’s Guide to Honeymooning (and Other Acts of Tyranny)

“That last one can’t be real,” Sebastian interrupted.

“Happened twice at the Academy,” Griffin said solemnly. “Poor Marcus is still negotiating visitation rights with his mirror self.”

I must have been more drunk than I thought because Griffin’s statement made perfect sense.

By the fourth round, we’d abandoned any pretense of proper scoring. Sebastian had given up entirely and was lying on his back, making the flowers around him grow into increasingly elaborate patterns. Thorne was throwing with his eyes closed just to make it fair. Griffin had started drunkenly narrating each throw like it was a dramatic battle.

“An’ the gall—gallblabber soarsh through the air!” he announced, completely wrong about the organ’s identity. “Will it fin’ dish target? The crowd holdsh ish breath! The very fate of the—the realm hangsh… in th’ balance!”

It landed three feet short with a sad splat.

“The realm is doomed,” Thorne deadpanned.

I was leaning heavily against Kazimir, who despite drinking as much as the rest of us, seemed frustratingly unaffected.

“How are you still sober?” I demanded.

“Practice,” he said, then proved he wasn’t entirely unaffected by pressing a kiss to my temple. “Also, my runes.”

“Cheater.”

“I want it on record,” Sebastian said from the deck, “that this is the strangest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Including the Bone Witch incident?” I asked.

“That was an accident. This is on purpose. This is us actively choosing to throw pickled organs around while drinking something that might be poison.”

Griffin hiccuped thoughtfully. “Technic-cal-ly, the Bone Witch cursh was also a choice. Jush… sheveral bad choishes shtacked on top of each other.”

“I thought it was rather mild, as curses go,” Sebastian continued, missing his throw by a spectacular margin. “But Auremar was furious. Called it an attack on the dignity of the crown.”

“The dignity of his crown was compromised long before anyone started rhyming,” Kazimir muttered, landing another perfect shot.

“At least rhyming has artistic merit,” I added, trying to fish out something that might have been a liver. I gave up trying to use the tongs and thrust my whole arm into the jar.

Sebastian took another drink, and vines curled around him. “You know what’s funny? The curse made people more honest. Hard to lie when you have to make it rhyme.”

“Poetry ash truth,” Griffin mused, swaying backward so far I thought he would fall. “Thatssssh profound.”

“So what you’re saying,” Thorne said slowly, “is that we’re all cursed right now. By moonshine. Into throwing organs and telling the truth.”

We all stopped to consider this.

“Are we the organsh?” Griffin asked, squinting at the jar where I was still trying to grasp the slippery liver. “Meta-metaphorically shpeaking. Are we all jush… pickled thingsh being thrown at arbi-arbitrary targetsh by forshes beyond our control?”

“That’s dark,” Sebastian said as my hand finally closed around my organ.

“No, no, he’s onto something.” I pointed at Griffin with my liver, the pickle juices running down my arm and onto the deck. “We’re all preserved in our own jars of trauma and bad decisions, and life just keeps throwing us at holes we can’t quite reach.”

“Some of us reach the holes,” Thorne said.

“Because you’re already dead inside,” I said with the certainty of superior logic. “Preserved. Like these organs.”

“I need to lie down,” Sebastian announced. He was already lying down.

“The real question,” Kazimir said, his lips twitching as he fought to keep a straight face, “is whether we’re aiming for the holes, or if the holes are aiming for us.”

There was a long, contemplative silence broken only by the sound of snapping sails and Sebastian’s flowers aggressively sprouting.