pass across her face as my hand lingered on her chin, and sensed a small flicker of something inside her, the same something that had led me to her. A fractional widening of her eyes told me she had sensed the same thing in me.
“You are very special,” I said. “I shall call you Eresa. It means ‘jewel’ in the Stahlhast tongue.”
“Jewel?” she asked. The genuine puzzlement on her besmirched brows brought a smile to my lips, the first real smile in weeks. I have come to understand these many years later that this was when it began, when my heart began its long journey away from my origins. This small, wretched girl and her simple curiosity had stirred something new within me, something not of the Hast.
“A shiny precious stone,” I said. “Very rare, like you.” I took her hand and led her away from the midden where she had been picking bones from the accumulated muck. “Come along. I believe it’s time for you to have a bath.”
Eresa, it transpired, had the power to conjure sparks from thin air. They were little more than small flowers at first, brief fluttering blue embers lighting the gloom of our hut much to our mutual delight and my brother’s satisfaction. In time, with a judicious amount of coaxing and encouragement, her flowers grew into sustained and powerful bursts of pure energy. This wisp of a girl was soon capable of birthing flame in any combustible object or stopping the hearts of rats and, some years later, the soldiers she would face in battle.
I found another a month later, a tall youth who had gained considerable muscle thanks to the improved diet Kehlbrand provided. I felt his power blossom as he worked the pick into a slab of stone in the quarry, the tool biting deeper than the others, too deep in fact to be the result of his improving frame.
“It only works with stone, mistress,” he said, shuffling uncertainly under my careful scrutiny. “I just look at it and it crumbles. Kept it hidden all this while. It seemed for the best.”
“Indeed it was,” I assured him. “Don’t call me mistress. My name is Luralyn, and it’s the only name you need address me by. What is yours?”
It shames me to say I cannot recall his true name now, for at the time it scarcely seemed to matter. I named him Varij, the ancient word for “hammer.” Following this it became my habit to name all those I found. Casting away their former titles was a way of binding them to the Darkblade. “You are reborn,” I would tell them, words that soon became a mantra. “You are made new in the sight of the Darkblade. You will be his shield and his lance in the battles to come.”
I could find no more Divine Blood at the Fist, despite three months of searching. By then the transformation of those who toiled in the quarries from slaves to artisans was complete. The provision of improved housing and better food had succeeded far better in increasing the amount of ore hewn from the tor than any amount of terror or whipping. But I knew it was more than just full bellies and sound walls that spurred them to such feats of labour. I could see it on every face as the Darkblade made his farewells with the promise of a return the following year: complete and utter devotion. Truly, he had made himself a god.
I watched Kehlbrand prepare to leave with a dull ache in my chest and a familiar cloudiness in my head that came from a troubled sleep. “You dreamt last night, didn’t you?” he said, pausing in the act of strapping his quiver to his saddle. “You always get the same look on your face when you dream. Like you’ve eaten a sour apple but can’t remember where you found it.”
“It found me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for it this time.”
He raised an eyebrow at the gravity in my voice, sensing more than just my frequently expressed bitterness at being left behind. I was to take Eresa and journey to the other tors, freeing the enslaved and spreading the Darkblade’s word, whilst also searching for more jewels with particular talents. He would take Varij and the warriors of five Skeld south into the borderlands.
“There’s an outpost of the Venerable Kingdom we’ve never been able to storm,” he told me the night before. “Walls too high to scale. But