We kept loosely to the Chosen laws, though I stretched my privileges to the limits, and sometimes overstepped them. He did not punish me, and in all his corrections he was not harsh. It was as if with him I was not Quelled. He called me handmaid or Elsha. He no longer called me harsha, or made me feel in any way a lesser human being. For that I loved him.

At night we stayed in tiny caves, each one guarded with his sacred sign. Sometimes in the night I woke, disturbed by the wind or the placid snorting of his donkey, or the howling of wolves on the distant mountain slopes, and always I felt straight away a warm tranquillity, a sense of joy in my high lord’s presence. I felt at one with him, at peace.

He stopped walking after a while, and waited for me at a wide part of the icy track. I caught up with him and stopped a little way behind him, to his left. He stood with his back to me, one hand about his silver and wood divining staff, the other holding the short rope about his donkey’s neck. Mist clung about him in veils. He wore black edged with scarlet, and his belt was studded with red stones and silver. He wore no hood, even in that biting cold, and his long, greying hair flowed down over the black fur of his collar. His robes fell in kingly folds down to his feet, and his boots were red and grey, the finest I’d seen. He let go his donkey’s rope and beckoned to me.

“There is Talbar,” he said. I stood beside him and looked beyond the crumbling cliff at his feet.

Talbar lay below us, wreathed in fog. It was a small mining town in a valley. In spaces between the mist I glimpsed houses of dirty grey, only two or three stories high. In the distance, pale with cloud, were the tattered tents of the Quelled.

The Firelord turned and said, “You are not afraid, Elsha, of a strange town?”

I gave him a grin, my eyes on the dusting of ice on his shoulder. “I’m not afraid, my lord,” I said, teeth chattering. “I am so cold, I won’t feel it if they kill me.”

“I don’t think things will come to that,” he murmured, smiling. He glanced at his sacred sign, conspicuous and gleaming gold against the heavy black of my cloak. Then he looked again at the town, far below. “This is a mining town, Elsha. The people of Talbar are used to the Quelled. There will be no violence here.”

“Then I have no cause to be afraid, my lord.”

“Are you ever afraid?”

“Only of myself, lord.”

He half turned, and looked sideways at me. I looked at his left shoulder, close to his neck. I had discovered that, because my eyes looked in slightly different directions, I could almost focus on his face while appearing to look at his shoulder. It was a skill I was developing. I saw now that he was thoughtful and grave, though his amber eyes smiled.