“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
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