Tear Jerker / The Mark of the Horse Lord

• The book starts with Phaedrus having to kill his best friend in a gladiatorial fight to the death and thereby winning his freedom, which he has no idea what to do with.
• Then we find out that when his first owner and probably father died, his slave mother drank poison rather than take her chances with a new master.
• Midir does not seem to have been a nice person ever, but it's hard not to feel sorry for him, violently blinded as a child, cast out and having found nothing to live for but revenge.
• Murna, whose mother ritualistically murdered her father, whose pet otter was murdered by a heartless Midir who cared so little he forgot he even did it and who finally finds love in her unwilling marriage only for her husband to die for the good of the tribe.
• Also a moment of awesome, at the end, Phaedrus fully becomes the Horselord, sacrificing himself rather than letting the Romans use him as leverage to subjugate his people.