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Lyr cooks some barley broth and Damon sits up from his bed to eat it.

It is another day before Damon is strong enough to hold a long conversation and the first thing he does is ask Lyr how he came to be here after all. Lyr explains about the barrel and the man who freed him from his cell.

Damon frowns. “The man you describe can only be Doroth Zain. He sat with Gelen the Green at the Justice. He is Vindar’s brother and they look much alike. But he is the High Word, Zai as Man. Why would Doroth help you? Why would he help me? He should want me dead for my sins more than anyone.” He pauses. “Perhaps this is a trap.”

“Perhaps,” says Lyr. But if this is a trap, he happily walked right into it. “I am surprised that when they discovered me gone they did not come here to find me. Surely they would guess where I would go?”

Damon shrugs. “The men did not know you were hidden on the ship. No other vessel has passed this way. Perhaps they do not think you could have got yourself here.”

But Lyr is wary. He often watches the horizon for a ship coming to take him back to Pershel. But no ship comes.

More days pass. Damon is sitting up all day now and healing well with Lyr’s careful cleaning and applying of mould to his injuries. His back and shoulders will always be weakened. He will never be The One Man Army again.

Sometimes, as he lies beside Damon in the bed before the fire, Lyr looks at those marks covering Damon’s back and thinks about the fact that if he had taken this flogging himself, these injuries would have killed him. But not Damon.

One night, the wounds are healed enough that Lyr can trace his finger over the scars as they sit together by the fire, drinking the sour red from Damon’s secret store.

“Why did you do it?” Lyr says.

“Do what?”

“Why did you take this punishment in my stead?”

“Because it would have killed you and it did not kill me.”

“You don’t think I deserved to die for what I did. I know you loved Endrew.”

“I did love Endrew. He was the best of my family. The best Darek by any count. But you did not mean it to happen.”

“I’m a slave,” says Lyr, running the side of his thumb over a long welt that crosses Damon’s back from side to side. He fancies he can remember that one, the slap and rip, Damon’s grunt of pain as his flesh was torn again. “I killed the Crown Prince’s son,” he says quietly.

“You are a slave,” says Damon, “and my mother was a slave. And my father made a slave out of me for twenty years.”

“Did you hate the army so much?”

“I did not hate being a soldier so much as I hated being forced to be a soldier. I was a good soldier.”

“The greatest warrior Azuria has ever seen. The One Man Army.”

“I was not that,” says Damon. “I wasn’t like they say. I wasn’t that.”

“Then why do they say you were?”

“I was good at killing and I killed a lot of people. And people like a story. Pluma-Ferris was… I am not proud of it. I killed many people who just wanted to live happily in their own land. All Trysta wanted was to live happily in her own land. When we met, she tried to kill me. She nearly did. But I bested her and told her if she wanted to live she could join the Imperial Army as a slave warrior. It saved her life. I told myself it was the only way. But it was not. I should have let her kill me.”

“How is she your friend? If you killed her people and took her prisoner? You forced her to fight for her enemies.”

“Trysta hated me for a long time. And who could condemn her for it? But Trysta is as loyal as she is brave and fierce. She told me she realised we were the same. I was a slave too. I had no choice about what I did. I went where they told me and killed who they told me, for twenty years. If I’d refused, my father would have been made a slave.”

“Do you regret it? Do you wish you’d refused to serve for your father’s crime?”

“I don’t think about it.”

“You don’t think about the choices you made. Everything it meant for you to become a soldier.” Lyr says, picking up the bottle and refilling Damon’s cup.

“It does not matter now,” Damon says. “I thought I’d found a way to build a better life. I should have known it was impossible for me to do so.”

Lyr leans in and kisses Damon, softly. The kiss grows deep — but halts when Damon hisses as Lyr’s fingers brush his shoulders where some of the welts are still sore and raised.