Reaching for his pocket under the coat, Ren feared for a moment that he had lost the silver filigree key, but it was still there, nestled safely against his thigh. He closed his hand around it. 'For when you need to escape.' His mother's last gift to him. She had seemed so healthy and strong when she had kissed his hair and stroked his back, but only a few days after giving birth to Thais, she had died in her sleep. The physician had told them it simply happened, sometimes. It made Ren glad to not have been born a woman. They risked so much bringing life to the world. His mother had carried and given birth to three children while still ruling her country. Ren had never seen her weak or faltering.

“Sifa and her people are right,” Anik said, pulling Ren from his thoughts. “Skarlan is a place of horrors for our people.”

Ren kept quiet, waiting for him to continue on his own. He wasn't sure why Anik was suddenly so willing to talk, but he definitely wasn't going to stop him.

“It was our land long before it was theirs. They have more soldiers and more weapons, so they can do and take whatever they want.”

“We've always been told that Lowlanders attack patrols and travellers unprovoked, killing and stealing.” Ren posed it almost as a question, voice gentle to avoid igniting the anger that always seemed so close to the surface in Anik.

“If you had watched hundreds of people, friends and family, burn alive in their own homes and carried their scorched corpses into the woods to rest, you'd want to kill the people who'd done it, too,” Anik said. His voice remained calm, but his eyes were hard as he stared at the embers as if they were to blame for all of it.

Ren wrapped his arms around himself. “But why would they do that?”

Looking up, Anik met his eyes, and Ren saw that it wasn't so much anger as frustration that shone in them. “You really have to ask? You've said exactly the same thing the soldiers always say. Lowlanders are dangerous, disgusting, vermin. We're only good dead or as slaves, right? Half the slaves in your golden city are from the Lowlands, working themselves to death in the mills and waste grounds so you can have the comfort you think you deserve. You just never see them. To you and everyone else, we're just a resource.”

Ren felt himself flush in the face of the accusations. A part of him wanted to bristle, to defend his honour and the honour of his people. The pain in Anik's voice held him back. Surely not everything Anik believed was true, but maybe not everything Ren had believed was true, either. He could only imagine the agony of a hot brand against his bare neck.

“What did Halvard do to you?” he asked quietly.