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friend, but he didn’t have any of the blood in him at all—and it was Kerren who was trying to comfort him. The worst thing of all was that he needed it. The trembling wouldn’t stop.
    Little by little the line was whittled away in blackness. Each person uttered a scream and then was gone; each person brought him closer to whatever fate awaited. He kept his eyes fixed on the brown robes in front of him, watching as they creased with movement, trying to discern whose hand had made them. And then these robes moved, and nothing stood between him and what lay ahead.
    He saw it clearly then. A fire, stoked and roaring, was encompassed by a stone pit. A man—no, two—stood beside it, dressed as guards dress, but cleaner.
    The woman moved forward. She looked back once, no wildness in her eyes, and no hope, and Darin met that gaze only because he couldn’t look away in time.
    He watched as one man pulled an iron from the fire; watched as another rolled the right sleeve of the woman’s robe up and muttered something. The woman tensed, the man moved forward
with the iron. Darin could see its end glowing red in the darkness, as if the Dark Heart’s power hallowed it.
    It touched white flesh, and Darin was struck by the scream and smell simultaneously. He stepped back, kicked the foot of the person who waited behind, and stopped.
    The iron was pulled away; the woman’s arm was wrapped roughly in gauze bandages, and she walked into the waiting Swords in a daze, stumbling with the shock.
    They looked up then, these two, and he met their eyes.
    “Boy,” one man said curtly.
    Kerren stepped forward. “I’ll go first,” he said. His voice was not even, but at least he could speak. He squeezed Darin’s hand again and smiled tremulously, releasing it for the first time that evening.
    Very quickly, as if afraid to change his mind, he covered the ground with his coltish, large stride. He held out his arm to the man with the bandages; it trembled, but not overmuch.
    The man took it, looked appraisingly down at the slave, and then nodded, almost as if in approval.
    It was done very quickly. Nor did Kerren scream, but a grunt of pain escaped between his clenched teeth. Even as the bandages were being tied around his lower right arm, he turned back to look at Darin.
    You see ? he seemed to say.
    Then it was Darin’s turn. There was no one to stand between him and the brand. He wanted to be able to do as Kerren had done, but he didn’t have the strength. He walked, but his step was flat and slow. When the man reached out for his arm, he tried to pull back. It was useless, of course, and only got him a cuff in the side of the face.
    The nightdress’ sleeve came away, and his skin lay white and exposed in the darkness. He felt the breeze against it as he looked wildly up at the man with the poker. His eyes snapped shut before he could see the truth of the pain that followed.
    And then it was over. The smell of the burning flesh in his nostrils was his own; Swords had to come to drag him, swaying, back to where the group had begun to gather.
    The bandages on his arm helped. They hid the scar that would be forming even now. He heard somebody call it the mark of House Damion; heard somebody say that they, as slaves, belonged to that house; and heard the dire warnings given about a failure to obey its lord. All of these things were distant.
    Kerren’s hand was not. It slid into his left one and held it as
firmly as Kerren could manage. Darin held on and only later did he realize that Kerren had offered the right hand; the injured one.

chapter three
    Two people died of infection during the march through the prov ince. They burned with a fever that Darin had seen once or twice before, but was unable to do anything to stem. The high priest was not amused by this, although he did not seem to be too surprised, and it went the worse on the survivors. Many times in the next two weeks, Darin wished it had been he who had died. But if the Lernari