“No other answer is possible, Swordmaster.” Xeno was gasping and choking, his face almost purple, as if the collar were choking him.
“Tell me again, slave, and this time we shall be precise. Speak the name of your master.”
Xeno straightened his back, and even though he was still shaking, sweating, and purple, his voice was loud and clear. “I call no man my master save the true Lord of Avonar, the Heir of mighty D’Arnath, the Prince D’Natheil, may he reign in peace and glory until the Wastes are restored and the Darkness is forever banished from the worlds.”
Xeno did not scream until the last word was out, even though Calador opened his belly so wide that the slave had to hold in his entrails with his huge hands. Then they all spilled out, and he toppled into the dirt. Dead.
Calador put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back a few steps. “I knew it! This stinking dog was assuredly planning to kill you.”
Though it was a bit frightening to know how close I had come to death, I had a difficult time thinking of Xeno as a servant of the evil Prince. He certainly didn’t look dangerous, all spread out in the pool of blood and entrails. Calador sent me in for an early supper while slaves were summoned to clean up the mess. But in truth, I couldn’t eat for the rest of that day.
Harres, my new hand-combat master, was not a slave, but a warrior like Calador and Mum. He was very strict and came near twisting me in knots. One day I was slow to get up after he had pinned me to the sand for the twentieth time in an hour. My arm felt like it was half torn off. My face was scraped and raw from the hot sand. And my side had a cramp that kept me from getting a full breath, even if I could have done so in the afternoon heat.
“I said, repeat the move,” screamed Harres. “You’ll never get it right if you don’t work at it.”
“I can’t,” I said, barely able to get up on my hands and knees.
“Do you want me to coddle you like the slave did?”
“No, of course not.” But I didn’t understand why Harres couldn’t go just a little slower like Xeno had. Truly I was making progress.
Harres grabbed my sore arm and yanked me to my feet. “Let me show you what your ‘easy’ master wanted to do to you, what your enemies want to do to you.”
He marched me through the fortress, past the barracks, the servants’ courtyard, and the slave pens, to a long low building made of sand blocks. If I hadn’t already vomited up my breakfast that morning during sword practice, the stink in that building would have made me do so. Harres dragged me through the open doorway, past a line of empty wooden carts, each with a slave chained to the handles. The slaves were just sitting there, hot and dirty and scared-looking, waiting for something to be put in the carts. Beyond the carts were several wooden platforms and some big crates, with more slaves working busily around them. At first I thought other people were sleeping on the platforms, but when I saw one of the workers cutting the hair off of the body on the platform, I realized that the body was dead.
At another platform, a slave was tugging a boot off of another dead person. He dropped the boot in one of the crates and pulled off the next boot. He was starting to pull off the dead man’s breeches, when Harres kicked him. “Here, slave,” said Harres, “look here.”
The slave waved his arms around his head, as if Harres was hitting him in the head. Harres had to yell at him again and kick him several more times before the man dropped to his knees and spread his arms out as slaves were supposed to do. The slave was a young man who looked very fit and strong, but one look at his face told me that only his body was fit. His mouth hung open and strings of spit dribbled onto his filthy tunic. His tongue seemed too big for his mouth and kept sliding this way and that. And his eyes… they were terrible. Empty in a way much worse than the warriors. And wickedly scared. He wasn’t thinking about being scared like other slaves. He was scared as if he was going to be scared forever.
Harres yanked at the slave’s short hair, slapped his cheek, and poked at his shoulder. The slave flinched and moaned, drooling and trying to shrink up into a ball. “This man was chosen to be your hand-combat trainer, young Lord. He was intelligent and obedient, his body superbly qualified as you can see. We thought him well suited to teaching-a good use of a slave. But we have discovered that this Xeno befriended him in secret, promising to help this fellow escape. When this young slave tried to report Xeno, as was proper, your kind tutor tortured him and left him hike this, leaving himself in the position to be appointed your tutor instead.” Harres pushed the slave with his foot until the man fell over in the sand at my feet. A big wave of stink made me step back; the slave had fouled himself. “Was this the fate Xeno had in mind for you? If you are like this, then his master, the Dar’Nethi prince, has nothing to fear from your revenge. Remember, young Lord. You can trust no one in the worlds. No one.”
I shivered, even though it was blazing hot.
“Back to work now.”
After a few more kicks, the slave, covered in spit and sand and filth, crawled over to the dead body and started tugging at its breeches again.
Even with the hard training and the ugly and unpleasant things, I liked living in Zhev’Na. My house was fine. I had my own things to use as I pleased and could eat only the food I wanted. The Lords and their warriors protected me from D’Natheil and the other Dar’Nethi who wished to make me like that awful drooling slave. And they treated me like a man and not a baby. I knew that the taunting was only to make me harder and better, and outside of my lessons, everyone left me alone. Best of all, I was too busy and too tired to think about sorcery.
The slave Sefaro ran my house-they called it the “Gray House.” He laid out whatever clothes I needed and had my meals brought to my sitting room when I said I wanted it that way. The dining room downstairs seemed awfully big just for me. Every moment I was not training or eating, I slept. I dreamed a lot about Papa and Lucy. Xeno was in my dreams, too, holding his belly together so his entrails wouldn’t leak out, along with that drooling slave that could have been me. And I kept dreaming those things about Comigor that were more real than life. Every morning when I woke up, I wanted to go right back to training. I was determined to be as good as Papa-better-because then I could kill the prince that murdered him and caused all this trouble.
Some things I missed about Comigor-though it got harder and harder to remember exactly what. Books mostly. Books were one of the few things I asked for that Sefaro could not get for me. He knelt in front of me and spread his arms wide, saying that I could kill him if I wanted, but no books could be had in Zhev’Na. I was really angry with Sefaro, because I thought it couldn’t be true that there was no book in the entire fortress. I even imagined what it might feel like to stick my knife in him. But I didn’t kill him. Even if he were lying about the books, it didn’t seem like a bad enough thing to kill him for. Later that night, when I thought about how scared he looked when he told me, and what I had considered doing to him, I felt really strange… freezing cold inside. No one had ever been scared of me before. Zhev’Na was different that way. Killing was a lot more common than in Leire. I would just have to get used to it.
A few days after Xeno was executed, Darzid came to visit me. He stood at the side of the fencing yard and watched while Calador whacked me hard with his sword and then teased me while I tried to counter. Scratching or pricking me on my arms or cheeks or legs while I tried to get in a stroke was one of Calador’s favorite things to do. That day he kept on longer than ever and started mocking me with his empty-eyed laugh that wasn’t friendly at all. I knew Captain Darzid was watching, so I tried really hard to get in a good thrust, but Calador wouldn’t stop. My arms were stinging and bleeding. Calador whisked the tip of his sword across my forehead, and more blood dribbled down my face. I was so tired I could hardly lift my rapier. Then Captain Darzid started laughing, and the horrid sun beat down, making my head pound and my bruises hurt, and before I even could think, I clenched my left fist and pictured what I wanted.