Iome looked into his eyes, wanting to hate him for what he’d done. Her father lay in his own urine on the floor at her feet. Her mother was dead on the paving stones outside the keep. Yet Iome looked into Raj Ahten’s face, and she could not hate him. He seemed . . . so sincere. So beautiful.

He reached out, stroked her hand, and she dared not pull away. She wondered if he would try to seduce her. She wondered if she’d have the strength to fight him if he did.

“So sweet. If you were not my kin, I’d take you as a wife. But I’m afraid propriety forbids it. Now, Iome, you too must do your part to help me defeat the reavers. You will give me your glamour.”

Iome’s heart pounded. She imagined how it would be, with skin as rough as leather, the cobwebs of her hair falling from her head, the way the veins would stick out on her legs. The dry smell of her breath. To look, to smell, to be repulsive.

Yet that was not half the horror of it. Glamour was more than beauty, more than physical loveliness. It could be recognized partly as form, but just as much was manifest in the color of one’s skin, the glossiness of one’s hair, the light that shone in one’s eyes. It could be seen in posture, in poise, in determination. The heart of it often lay somewhere in a person’s confidence in and love of self.

So, depending on the ruthlessness of the facilitator involved, all these could be drawn away, leaving the new Dedicate both ugly and filled with self-loathing.

Iome shook her head. She had to fight him, had to fight Raj Ahten any way she could. Yet she could think of nothing, no way to strike back.

“Come, child,” Raj Ahten said smoothly. “What would you do with all your beauty, if I left it to you? Lure some prince to your bed? What a petty desire. You could do it. But afterward you would only spend your life in regret. You’ve seen how men look at you with lust in their eyes. You’ve seen how they stare, always wanting you. Certainly you must tire of it.”

When he put it that way, in such a silky voice, Iome felt wretched. It seemed vile and selfish to want to be beautiful.

“In the desert near where I was born,” Raj Ahten said, “a great monument, a statue, stands three hundred feet tall, half tilted in the sand. It is the statue of a king, long forgotten, his face scoured away by wind. A banner at his feet, written in an ancient language, says, ‘All bow to the Great Ozyvarius, who rules the earth, whose kingdom shall never fail!’

“Yet all the scribes in the world cannot tell me who that king is, or how long ago he reigned.