After his confrontation with Nevo in the training yard, Arn began to take his training more seriously. It was easier without the guard treating him like a slave—and Master Quenden’s insights might have played a secondary role in earning Arn’s attention. Most days, he spent the morning chopping wood with Gamden and then moved on to sparring once his muscles were sweaty and sore. He would sleep in a state of fatigue that thankfully robbed his mind of visits to the dreamworld.
Arn was learning about this new world. The furry four-legged creature he had spotted on his arrival to the siege camps was called a dog. One of Master Quenden’s many visiting guests brought his dog—an uncanny, waist-high, tawny thing that looked Arn in the face as it passed. Master Quenden had seemed delighted to rub the animal’s scalp.
Secondly, Arn had learned the reason why some of the catapult projectiles hurled at Starath turned to rocky debris midair, dropping into the churning waters of the Deep. According to one of the slaves that huddled around the supper fire in the evening, it was magic. Magic, according to this storyteller, was an ability that some people possessed to do things that people couldn’t do. It didn’t make much sense to Arn, but he added it to the growing list of things in this world that did not exist in Razaad.
One evening, Arn stopped by his shack to change out of a sweaty linen tunic—their clothes here held perspiration far too easily—before going to find a late dinner at the cookfire behind Quenden’s home. He found Gamden sitting inside, head in hands.
He couldn’t help but scoff.
“Don’t give me that,” Gamden snarled, sitting up straight.
Arn rose from snatching up a fresh shirt from the pile in his trunk. He shrugged—flickering firelight gleaming off his gaunt, scarred torso. He still looked nothing like the muscular hunter of his past—but even then, he didn’t mope like his friend. “It’d be easier to take you seriously if you were not so glum all the time.”
Gamden raised his hands defensively. “Maybe you should take something seriously, as a start! You’re seriously mad at me for being sad we’re prisoners?”
“Prisoners?” Arn asked. “We were prisoners on that damned island, Gamden.” He waved a hand at Gamden. “Forgive me for moving on.”
He started to go, but Gamden grabbed his shoulder. “You’re going to get killed Arn. You’ve given yourself away to someone who will use you up like a resource. Quenden and all of these people are the ones we should be fighting.”
“Let go of me,” Arn growled, “or you will regret it.”
Gamden’s hand disappeared from his shoulder and Arn shoved out through the leather flap. The sun was setting over Starath, casting angled rays of light across the grim, grey clouds. Arn inhaled the air like finally finding the surface after a long dive—it was cooler than the hot day had been and quieter than the discontent inside Arn’s sleeping space. Arn pulled on his new shirt.
“You have a lot of scars,” a woman’s voice said. It was Massema, leaning against the adjacent hut; he had missed her because of the shadows.
Arn lifted a hand under his face as though showing her that he was missing his nose for the first time. “You have not noticed yet?” he asked, bitterly. He had once worn his scars with pride—but that was before Thalla.
Massema shrugged. “No, I had,” she said. “What was that about? Sounded like a fight.”
“That?” Arn retorted, derisively. “You should come by the training yard more.”
“You don’t have to be like that,” Massema said. She turned to walk away, and Arn noticed—for the first time—that she too had a brand between her shoulder blades. Her dark blue shirt was tied around her neck, leaving her shoulders and back bare.
“Wait,” Arn said. He suddenly felt immensely uncomfortable. He hadn’t been about to apologize, had he? “I am going that way,” he said instead, and fell into stride with her, towards the back of Quenden’s property.
It wasn’t a long walk, and they spent the first half of it in silence. Then Arn managed, “He does not think I should kill for Quenden.”
“Why do you? Or, ‘why will you’, I guess.” Massema looked at him with a raised eyebrow. She had dots near her eyebrow, like two little scars above and below. Arn had no idea what might have caused that.
“It is who I am,” Arn simply said. He still had trouble sounding fluent in their language, but at least he could communicate competently now. It had only taken… four months of immersion. “Where I go, what I do—it comes back to me.”
Massema snorted. “No one has death as an identity,” she said. “You can change. Quenden can make us do many things, but he can’t make you kill. Any harm he could inflict on you—any beatings or floggings—would be easy in comparison to the harm that might befall you in combat. A lesson I am sure you know, judging from all those scars.”
“I thought I had changed, once. I laid on the sand of a beach and saw that there was no line between land and sea,” Arn said. A few of the words slipped into his native tongue, but he figured Massema could put it together. “I thought that meant I would not be bound by the line. That I could just… drift out into the Deep.”
Massema stopped walking and put her hand on his arm. Her fingertips were soft—not calloused—unlike anyone who had ever touched him. He shifted away, alarmed. The slave scribe smiled weakly. “You can be more than death, Arn. I know you can.”
“How?” Arn asked. And he wasn’t asking how she knew.
“I’ve seen it before,” she said, answering the wrong question.
Arn pursed his lips. For a moment, he just looked at her quietly. Why would she have this conversation with him? What did she want? He took a deep breath. “I am hungry,” he said, and approached the nearby cookfire to see what his masters had put in the stew this time.