I took her hand in mine; it was damp and tasted salty when I kissed it. I didn’t think she’d been sitting in the dark sweating.

“It took something away, didn’t it,” I said to her tear-wet hand. “I didn’t really understand before.”

“What did? What didn’t you understand?” she asked, trying to get her hand back.

I held on tighter. “Being strapped down while someone hurts you. Being helpless. Even out of the walls of that cell, I’m not free of the Asylum—any more than the torturer’s death freed you of his tormenting.”

She stopped struggling and stared at my face. Finally she reached up and touched my cheek, tracing the path of my tears, invisible in the darkness.

After a moment she turned back to look at the lights.

“It makes you feel filthy and small,” I said, then laughed painfully. “I’m not used to feeling small.”

“And guilty,” she whispered. “As if you should have been able to stop it like the hero in one of Tosten’s songs.”

Her damaged hand gripped mine and the strength of that grasp was a testimony to Oreg’s healing skills. Together we watched the night and felt a little better for each other’s company.

WHENISLEPT AT LAST,IDREAMTIWASSMALL WITHdirty hands and ragged clothes. Hunger spurred me to dig through the trash that covered the cobbled alleyway, hoping that there was some scrap of dry bread that the rats and wild dogs had left behind. I was so intent on my quest that I didn’t hear them until a large hand grasped the back of my neck.

They dragged me kicking and screaming before a harsh-faced man who said, “Purple eyes. This is the one.”

I awoke in the early hours of the morning and used the dream tofind my brother.

10
GARRANON IN ESTIAN

Only as adults do we understand our childhood.

THESKY WAS YET DARK WHENGARRANON AROSEfrom his temporary quarters, walked the corridors of the castle, and entered the rooms that had been his since he first came to Estian. His things had been moved out yesterday at the king’s orders—Jakoven thought they’d been placed in a different suite, but Garranon had sent them home to Oranstone.

The malachite floors gleamed in the light of the torch he carried from the corridor. The floor was older than the walls, one of the few things Jakoven had left when he rebuilt the castle. Green, thought Garranon, green for the king’s favorite, the color of Oranstonian whores plying their trade. Appropriate.

The king had dismissed him from these rooms, the rooms that belonged to the king’s whore.