Hauk had tried to use the same tactics Fain had to calm him. But that had only pissed him off more.

“You’re not Fain! You’ll never live to be the warrior he is. You’re just a sorry excuse for a brother, and a disgrace to your name, and to every War Hauk who’s come before you. It’s not right that Fain was cast out while you’re left to bear our badge in his stead. You’re worthless, Dancer. I hate you!”

Now Sumi was staring at every bit of shame he carried. All of it. His scarred back was a road map of the minsid hell he’d survived. Of all the people who’d found him lacking and rejected him for it.

But he didn’t see disgust in her eyes as she tended him. Only kindness and concern. Her gentle touch was so different from Dariana’s.

Not that Dariana had ever touched him except to publicly humiliate him.

Closing his eyes, he felt Sumi running her fingers over the claw marks that covered his burn scars, and the ones left behind from his Endurance. While her touch soothed him in ways he wouldn’t have thought possible, the memory of those wounds tore through him, and left him bleeding even more than the Partini’s knife had.

A light frown wrinkled her brow. “What happened to cause all these?” she whispered, fingering the vicious claw scars.

Normally, he’d have never answered. But before he could stop himself, the truth come out. “Dariana.”

“I don’t understand.”

Hauk sighed as she bandaged his sutures. “Every year, on the anniversary of Keris’s death, I’m required to go to her and ask if she’ll accept me as husband. And every year, she refuses unification with me.”

Sumi felt sick as she realized that these scars were Dariana’s annual answer to his marriage pledge. “She claws you?”

He gave a single curt nod.

“Why do you keep doing it, then?”

“I’m Andarion and I’m pledged to her,” he said nonchalantly as if that explained everything.

Her heart broke over the cruelty his family forced on him. “I don’t understand why she doesn’t just release you.”

He sighed heavily. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t have to tolerate it again.”

“What do you mean?”

“After his Endurance, Darice will be old enough to bond marriage.”

He said that as if she should understand its significance. “And?”