The Crimson Queen (The Raveling, #1)

by Alec Hutson

“Do you want me to do what he said?” Keilan suddenly blurted. “Teach you how to read?” Xin was silent for a moment. When he finally spoke, there was an odd tone to his voice, something Keilan hadn’t heard before from the Fist warrior. “If you teach this one how to read, our lives will be forfeit if we return to Gryx. The masters will hang us outside our old stables. They will cut off our ears and our noses and feed them to their dogs. They will flense us, slowly, until the red-brick dust of the city cakes our raw and bleeding bodies, and then we will hang there, twisting and burning in the merciless sun, before we are finally cut down, doused in honey, and staked to a fire-ant hill. We will die as examples to the other Fettered, so that they might know what happens when a slave dares learn how to read.” Keilan found he was holding his breath. “Yes,” Xin said, turning to him just as they approached the end of the bridge and the rest of the waiting caravan. “This one wishes to learn.”

He remembered an old curse of his homeland, inflicted only upon true enemies – ‘may you live in interesting times. ’ Interesting times had indeed come to these lands.