His first memory was of the fire.
He was just a little boy at the time, maybe around the age of five. Yet, he remembered the fire years later.
It stuck him that the fire had blazed all around him. He had never felt the slightest bit of pain or heat. Not until later did he realize that this was odd. The once lush fields had become blackened and dead. However, the spot on which he stood was still green. Strange, he later noted.
The next memory he had came from no more than a day later. Having gotten after the fire, the boy wandered in the direction he instinctively knew was homeward. Not four feet from his home, raiders caught him. They bundled the boy into a wagon with about a dozen other children that were about his age.
He did not know how long he was in the wagon, but he did become aware of one distressing fact. He and the others heard the raiders, who were posing as traders, talking with the Kyne southern border guards. He knew that this meant he was crossing into Renth, a province that allowed, to his deep fear, slavery.
One of the other children asked him, "You are Kynese, so what family are you?"
Not sure of how else to respond, the boy held up his wrist bracelet. Carved on its shining copper surface was a little Dragyne.
The wagon came abruptly to a stop. The other children looked fearful of what was coming. The raiders took the boy and two others from the wagon. One, a girl, wore a tattered and torn dress. The other boy looked at the boy with undisguised envy.
A scruffy man with brown hair unkempt and eyes an unsettling shade of green walked out of a nearby hut. Looking over the three children, he told the raider, "The boys we have use for. The girl..." he paused, looking her over, "can be useful in a few years." He handed the raider five silver coins. The raiders shoved the three children at the scruffy man and the raiders moved on to their next destination.
"Welcome to Scret, little ones." The man noticed awareness in the eyes of the boy who had the copper bracelet. "Ah, boy-o, you know why you are here, don't you?" He laughed a cruel laugh.
He sent the boy and his two companions to a hut a short distance away. Other slaves locked the children into iron anklets, a mark of their status as slaves. Oddly, no one noticed the boy's bracelet. Female slaves separated the girl from her companions and taken to a third hut. The boys, ushered along by other slaves, entered an unusually small hut. Male slaves shoved the boys roughly inside and slammed the door shut.
"Some mess we are in, huh?"
"Yeah." Other than those few words, the boys said nothing to each other for some time.
Those first few weeks as a slave were the roughest, particularly for the boy. The boys, as well as the girl, spent their days in the kitchen. The other slaves mocked them. The boy, Tobias, got the nickname Hawk despite his wishes otherwise. The girl, Zula, mockingly got the nickname Prairie Flower, since she had come from mountainous Jento. She also got the nickname the She-wolf due to her temper. The other boy, Darcy, managed to acquire the nickname of Tiger. However, the other slaves called the children by the nicknames affectionately rarely, but often enough so that they were not as bad for the trio. This victory was the first of Tobias' few triumphs.
The most important thing, they soon realized, was sticking together. Therefore, Zula made her way to the boys' hut whenever she could. This was trouble, as the trio grew older.
