Brand felt the air snap with the sound of the whip coiling backward, and that alerted him enough to roll to one side without looking to see where the blow was coming from. He was in training, of a different sort than the usual 'keeper games. He was being tested for fighting attitude. It was a double-edged axe. If he showed too much spirit, he would be beaten hard. If he didn't show enough, he would still be beaten, but also forced to study harder, and Brand didn't like studying at all. He didn't know why they wanted him to learn things that didn't have any bearing on the world outside. At least, fighting was useful. Fighting, he knew about.
The elder children's nighttime whispers told of these tests. They would run them again and again, until almost all of them showed some fighting spirit, and then they would train them harder at it. Only those too infirm or cowardly but smart enough would be kept in training for other purposes. Not all future Chainkeepers would be guards or warriors, a good amount of them would be grain counters and Leashed birthers or farming heads. Those too stupid and weak would be sent back to the Hub, though a few would maybe be kept as servants in the castle. There was nothing under the sun that couldn't be used one way or another, as one of his mentors liked to say.
The man with the whip was behind him. Brand's roll had been lucky: he had rolled against the blow, so the whip had passed above him and he was now on the whipman's weak side. The man would have to turn, step back, then raise his whip and strike again. That was too many moves. Brand could attack in just one move. He raised his arm upward, aiming for the man's armpit. He struck without thinking of the repercussions, of the beating he would get later for showing 'too much' resistance, but mostly, he forgot of the second whipman, the one who he had been trying to avoid when he rolled to escape the sneak attack of the man he was about to hit. But his fist didn't strike the flesh, for the other whip caught him across the legs and curled around him, dragging him to the ground. He smiled. It was the perfect result: attack, but not harm, be attacked, but not be harmed. The sweet spot.
But the man in front of him didn't seem to think so and kicked him in the face.
Blood spurted from his nose and he fell back, hitting his head against the ground. His sight was wobbly, but he could see his mentor standing to one side, looking at him with no emotion in his vacant eyes or stone-gray face. The man just watched as he was whipped across the stomach, and only when he rolled on the ground to protect his stomach from the whip and his back from the kicks did the man do something. He coughed a little.
The men hitting him stopped. A beating was okay, some blood and a broken bone acceptable. But if they weren't contained, they could kill him. It was more common than unheard of. They weren't full Chainkeepers. They were rejects, too stupid or not strong enough to be mentors or guards, and too violent to be a servant again. The sewage of the training process.
Down on the polished-rock ground, on all fours and bleeding from the nose, Brand heard the strange voice that had spoken to him in the corridor weeks before. Don't resist. Make them think you're weak. Bury that ember deep, make it so it doesn't shine through your eyes. But you know it. You are free, no matter what they do to you. They can't own all of you.
It couldn't be coming from anyone around him, and he glanced both ways to see if he was the only one who could hear it. No one else seemed to have heard it. What is this? Why am I hearing it? He remembered seeing an old man years ago, a castle servant, who fell into odd dreams in the middle of the day. He spent one out of ten days in that reverie, and no amount of whipping could snap him out of it. When he eventually came to, the 'keepers hanged him from the ceiling for one full day. So the poor man was useless and wretched and spent the other days bemoaning his luck, blaming the spirits of the Leashed dead. One time, Brand had seen him as he was waking up from his fugue state, and he heard the words the man was uttering, in a low, humming voice. He could still recall the words: I can't do it. I'm not your man.
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Will I become like him? A crazed old man speaking to imaginary voices?
He got up and relaxed his muscles. Even though he didn't know why, he did as the voice counseled. He buried everything where no one could find it and showed his torturers the same kind of face his mentor showed. Emotionless, dry, resilient. The face of a man who knew his place. He let his nose keep bleeding on his shirt. It would stop eventually. He savored the metallic taste of it on his upper lip, and a thought overcame him. He imagined it was another's blood he tasted, a mingling of the whipman's blood mixing with his as he stabbed the man in the neck. He grabbed that thought and buried it too, and none of the men who watched him suspected the crime he had cherished.
The voice is right, he thought, whatever or whomever it is. They can't take anything away anymore.
One of the whipmen pushed him down the hall to the line of children waiting for their chance to be beaten mercilessly for one reason or another. Even when you were done, you still had to stay and watch. A lesson is learned when inscribed on the flesh, his mentor frequently said, but it's reinforced and taken as law when witnessed enough times. So it wasn't enough to be beaten, you had to be beaten over and over again in your mind, reliving the blows as you saw the other kids being beaten. So the only way to endure it was to not care about the person standing next to you. The cruelty was like the water that fell on the small creek in the courtyard: a steady trickle, not enough to drown yourself in it, but enough so you couldn't ignore it, the dripping a constant reminder that evil, like water, flowed endlessly from multiple sources, and it inevitably ended up pouring on you.
The boy next to him was also beaten hard, the next one, not so much. Even the whipmen had tired of beating him, it was a small, cowardly boy who put up his arms to protect his face at the slightest provocation. He would make a fine, cowardly mentor, or a regular, hunched Leashed servant. Brand couldn't help thinking. The voice can't be speaking to them too. They would listen to it as I did, and they would hide their pain deeper. So I'm the only one who hears it. The question is, why me, out of all? Brand couldn't see why anyone would care about him specifically. He wasn't stronger or brighter or better than any of the other boys. He had never risen above or fallen far below the rest. He remembered nothing that could make his life special. He didn't remember anything beyond the castle walls. He couldn't remember what had brought him to the world. He knew from the mentors that he must have had a mother and a progenitor, but that was theoretical to him. His only memory was the searing pain from the brand that had given him his only name. Maybe that was it. Maybe Rill was right, and he was marked for something greater. Maybe everyone knew except the mentors and the whipmen, and they were keeping him from something that was his, a gift of transcendence.
Don't be stupid, said the voice again. You're not special, at least not yet, and it won't be because someone else made you that way. It will be because of what you do.
That night, when he went to bed, he dreamt of things he had never seen or imagined before: an endless plain covered in green, a tree that grew to the heavens, and people milling about with no one watching over them. Things he had never dared to wish for when awake. And the most marvelous part of the dream was that no one in it had a torque around their necks.