The sticks came down like rain.
Three of them — boys, sons of the Ktorian household knights, their arms thick from the training yard and their mouths thick with the cruelty that boys learned from watching their fathers. They swung their practice sticks with the wild, uncontrolled enthusiasm of children who had discovered, for the first time, that hurting someone smaller was a kind of power.
Evriana was ten.
She was small for her age — the particular, inherited smallness of a half-blood child whose body had not received the full blessing of the bull-kin bloodline. Her hair was dark, but the amber eyes that marked the Ktorian blood were paler than they should have been, washed out, the color of weak tea instead of strong honey. Her frame was narrow, her arms thin, her legs the kind of skinny that made the other children call her 'chicken'.
She bled.
