Above all, I am grateful to all the faithful readers who have loved Elsha over the years, written to tell me how her story has shaped their lives, and told others about it. Some have even named their daughters after Elsha All this reminds me that characters and stories that are not consciously planned, are gifts, and do not belong to the writer. The writer merely sees the story, and writes it down.

The people who make the story truly live and endure are the readers. For that I thank you.

Sherryl Jordan

March 2019

PART ONE

FIREBRAND

1

High Dreams

ALWAYS AT THE HEART of my life there has been fire.

Fire heated the brand that marked me with the sign of the Children of the Quelled. And with the Quelled I toiled in the dark mines of Siranjaro for the black fuel we call firestone. Fire it was that gave me heat when all else was wind and ice and killing cold. Fire cooked my food, warmed my frozen clothes, and was my life’s light. By fire at night I dreamed my high, heroic dreams.

From when I was a child I had my dreams, though I did not often talk of them. While my parents worked in the mines, the other children and I were looked after by the caretakers, the ones too old or ill to work. We grew vegetables, carried water, wove clothes from goat hair and wool, tended the tiny flocks, and kept out of the way of the Chosen.

The Chosen were our lords, our masters. My earliest memory of the Chosen was of a man with tall boots dyed gold and green, a fur-lined coat, and trousers of blue wool. He carried a short whip. I had been crouching in the garden, singing to my cabbages to make them grow, and a darkness had fallen over me. I looked up and saw the man. He said nothing, for the Chosen had convinced themselves that we Quelled had no intelligence and no speech. He looked across the stony frozen earth, past the hard-won rows of withered vegetables, the wizened beans, and the spindly, precious wheat, and he made a sound like a laugh. Then he put his boot on my cabbages, ground them hard into the dirt, and turned to go.

Fury overwhelmed me. I picked up a stone the size of my fist, and threw it hard. It landed with a dull thud in the small of his back, and he stopped and slowly turned around. He came back, smiled, and wound my hair around his hand. Then he lifted me by the hair until my feet swung above my crushed cabbages. I was so angry and shocked, I hardly felt the pain. I lashed out with my feet. He gave a yell, and with the whip handle started hitting me.

I don’t remember how it ended. I do remember that for a long time afterwards I lay on my sleeping mat by the fire in our black goatskin tent, with a soft darkness all around, and voices that whispered and faded, and whispered again. I heard the quavering voices of the old caretakers, hushed and grave.