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language was that?”
    “We’ll talk on the road,” Cullin said again. He turned on his heel and strode out the door. I stood unmoving for a moment, then followed him quickly. I didn’t have much choice.
    We rode hard for the first hour along the packed surface of the road leading north and west from the border. There was little chance for conversation. The sorrel, much livelier for good feed and expert care the stableboys at the inn had given it, was still no match for the bay stallion Cullin rode, but it struggled gamely to keep the pace Cullin set. When he finally drew off the road and dismounted by a small stream surrounded by trees and lush grass, I was more than ready for a rest, and so was the sorrel.
    We let the horses drink a little. Cullin tossed me a cloth to rub down the sorrel. He looked at me across the withers of the stallion as he attended to it.
    “Tell me about your parents,” he said. “Do you remember them?”
    The question surprised me. I had never thought about who my parents might have been. No one had ever spoken to me about them. I shook my head. “I never knew them,” I replied. “My mother either died when I was very young, or she was sold away.”
    “And your father?”
    I gave a bitter grunt of laughter. “Who knows? It might have been the Lord Mendor for all I know. Nobody ever bothered to tell me. A slave’s parentage isn’t important.”
    “You weren’t born into slavery,” Cullin said quietly.
    I looked up at him, startled. Cullin stood with his forearms resting across his saddle, regarding me gravely. His eyes were brilliantly green. There was an expression in them I couldn’t quite read. I began to protest that I had never known anything else but slavery, but Cullin shook his head.
    “No,” he said. “You don’t have that air about you. No man born to slavery would be as fiercely independent as you. No born slave could have killed that bounty hunter.”
    “I remember nothing else but being a slave,” I muttered, ducking my head and paying meticulous attention to the task of rubbing down the sorrel. But his words had touched close to one of my persistent childhood fantasies—that I had been kidnapped as a child and forced into slavery. In my daydreaming, my father—usually a nobleman, sometimes even a prince—came to rescue me. I outgrew those hopeless fantasies quickly under the harsh reality of the lash of the Stablemaster’s tongue, and the very real sting of the short whip he used to discipline his slaves. I looked up to see Cullin regarding me with a curious expression on his face. Somewhere between speculation and hope. Even though he had not changed his stance, I thought I detected an overtone of tenseness, almost expectation. But even as I watched, it was gone as if it had never been and I wondered if I had really seen anything.
    “What is your earliest memory?” he asked, his tone casual again.
    It was a strange question. I frowned and studied the now glowing hide of the sorrel. Finally, I looked up at him. “Standing beside a horse, very much like this, with a curry comb,” I said. “I was almost as tall as the horse’s withers. I might have been seven.” I raised my hand to rub the long-healed ridge of scar tissue behind my ear, hidden beneath my hair. “And headaches. Blinding headaches. Sometimes so bad I couldn’t see because my vision was so blurred.”
    “Do you still get headaches?”
    I shook my head. “No. I learned how to ignore the pain.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. It was during the worst of one of those headaches with my temples throbbing and nausea coiling in my belly when I had found that quiet place inside myself where I could reach out and stop the pain, to correct and repair the damage.
    “You remember nothing before you were seven?”
    I shook my head. “No.”
    “Very odd,” he said quietly. “Most people remember quite a lot from when they were very young.” He grinned. “I remember falling from my father’s