I pushed back my hood and sat on the floor by him, the toes of my sheepskin boots on the stones of his firepit. I sipped the hot mint tea he gave me and for a while we did not talk. I knew he watched me out of that one blue eye, and that he saw the whip mark on my cheek.

“I look so different, now that I am sixteen?” I asked, glancing sideways at him It was a game with us, that if one of us was whipped, the other never mentioned it It was our small denial of the power of the Chosen.

He grinned, and his eye glittered. “No. You look the same. Almost. You are still Elsha. You will always be Elsha. “ He put his left hand on the back of my neck, and gently rubbed the aching muscles there. “You won’t be defeated, lionheart,” he murmured.

I finished the tea, and put the bowl down on the hearth. It rattled on the stone, and I was appalled to see how my hands shook. Lesharo must have noticed, but he said nothing. He finished massaging my neck, and folded his hands across his knees. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the sooty brown of his coarsely woven sleeve and the strong tendons of his hands, pale under the everlasting firestone dust. His nails were deeply edged with black. I looked at my own hands, paler still than his under their dust, smoother, and trembling. I said: “Tomorrow I must bring out four-and-thirty loads.”

He said nothing, but his folded hands were tense.

“The Chosen have a saying,” I added. “They say a dead Quelled is better than a defiant one.”

“Then defiance is not worth its price, is it, lionheart?” he said gently.

I did not agree, but said nothing. I cursed my brand, without which I might have escaped, might have gone to live another life, might even have pretended to be Chosen.

Lesharo reached into a pocket in his shirt, and took out his reed pipes. He polished them slowly on his sleeve, then blew softly into them. I stared into his fire, dreaming. The music made me think of high places, of triumph, and of joy.

When he had finished playing, I said, “Tomorrow is the first day of the great Fire Festival. Lesharo, don’t you ever wish you could go with the Chosen? Don’t you wish you could make that pilgrimage to the holy mountain and see the Firelord?”

Lesharo smiled, all amusement and gentleness. “You’re a strange one, for a Quelled,” he said.

I felt my face flush. “You sound like my father,” I said.

Lesharo leaned forward, and threw some firestones on the fire. The flames leapt, shooting gold and scarlet lights across his face. “Your father speaks a truth,” he murmured. “You are not like the rest of us, Elsha. You have a feeling for the Firelord that is not normal for a Quelled.”