“She’s not moved for five days. Her nose is broken, and her eyes are swollen shut. She’s learned the hard way not to cross the Chosen.”

“She’ll never learn, that one. Only four years old, and already her spirit is all spit and fire.”

“Not anymore. I think he hurt her spine. They won’t allow her to live, poor child. They’ll break her father’s heart.”

And I remember my father’s voice, distraught and imploring: “Don’t give up, little Elsha, joy of my life. Don’t give up.”

I did not. But to this day my nose has a hard lump high between my eyes, and is slightly bent. My back is fine, else I could never have survived a single day in the mines. And they tell me that my eyes never quite look in exactly the same direction.

I was five when next I saw the Chosen. I knew, that fateful day, that something terrible was going to happen. My mother hugged me close before she went to the mines, and I remember the smell of firestone dust in her grey Quelled clothes, and the heat of her tears on my cold cheek. “Be brave, child,” she whispered, and would say no more.

The caretakers did not take us to the garden that day, or out to move the goats to new places in the mountains. They gathered us five-year-olds together, washed our faces carefully, and rubbed ointment made from herbs on our foreheads. The others thought it was a new game, and laughed. But I knew evil hung in the air, colder than the wind.

That morning we were allowed only a little water. About halfway through the morning, a cart came for us, drawn by four Quelled youths. The other children clapped, delighted, and climbed up by themselves, but me, they had to force.

Five Chosen marched alongside our cart, roaring with laughter at something one of them had said. Their heads were thrown back, their teeth gleamed in the pale grey light, and their fine-spun gold and scarlet cloaks swung radiantly as they walked.

The four Quelled youths pulling our cart were harnessed to it with leather halters and chains. Their clothes, like ours, were of dull grey and brown, though theirs were blackened and torn while ours were clean. They moved in that restrained, solitary way of all the Quelled, silently and without vigour.

I remember one of them clearly. He must have moved when he was being branded, because his mark, instead of being a perfect circle in the centre of his forehead, was a wavering oval across his right brow and down across his cheek. The eyelids were puckered, the eye itself dried up. There was no flame symbol within the circle of his brand – only that terrible sightless hole. He would have had a striking face, without that withered eye. In spite of his bowed head and the demeaned way he walked, there was something sensitive and strong about him, as if a secret inner life burned in him of which the Chosen knew nothing. I felt akin to him.