“No? Well, I have. Eleven years I lived that life, with not one day to call my own. That’s what I’m going to change, Amasai. Not your sheltered Chosen lives, not your feasts and your festivals and your grand houses and your wealth. Just the lives of the Quelled.”

Amasai stood up and began pacing the room. I waited, agonised. I needed his support, or all was lost. He came back to the fire, crouched by the basket of firestones on the hearth, and threw some on the flames.

“I know what you want to achieve,” he said. “And it’s all good and just and right. But the Chosen won’t accept it without a fight.” He took another firestone, and held it up in the firelit space between us. “We need these, Elsha. And the only way we can obtain them is by slave labour. Who in his right mind would go willingly into those filthy mines and work under those conditions, often enough and long enough to supply every living soul with fuel?” He threw the fuel on the fire, and the move had anger in it.

“I know of a place,” I said, very low, “where Quelled and Chosen work side by side in a mine, singing and joking, for as much of the day as they want, and share their firestones when they come out.”

“Name it to me.”

“I cannot.”

“No. Because it doesn’t exist. It’s a dream, Elsha, an impossible ideal. It could never work like that.”

“Pay the Quelled, then, for their work. Give them proper homes and food and education and leisure, in return for their service in the mines. Remove the status of slavery.”

“Elsha! The Chosen will never agree to that! You live in a fantasy. The Chosen will fight to the death to defend their way of life. The most you can hope to achieve is to lessen the time the Quelled work, get them better supplies of food perhaps, and more blankets for their beds. But as for educating them, building them homes, giving them something resembling a Chosen way of life—”

“I must, Amasai! Otherwise all my life is for nothing! Why do you think the Firelord chose me – why he honoured me and blessed me, and gave me his divining robe before he died? Why do you think he made you commander of his army? Maybe he foresaw all this, foresaw the conflicts, and knew you’d fight on my behalf. You must fight for me, Amasai, for all the Quelled. It is what he wished.”

He stood up and went over to a window. For a long time he looked down across the city, his fair head bent. He came back at last, and stood in front of me. He still looked uncertain.