My assimilation into Suleris was that simple. Davor marked me with the blood-flag, a design stamped at the base of my throat just below the meeting of my collarbones; with that and a set of simple livery I was sent into the house to collect dirty dishes and soiled laundry from opulent rooms empty of their guests. Whatever powers and assets Suleris managed had made them rich beyond the kings of history... their wealth rivaled that of folk tale emperors who ate off gold-plated dishes and drank vintages of wine so rare they had to be crushed by the feet of virgins. And such decadence! Even I, living on a student’s budget, could recognize the signs of high living in the disarray left behind in banquet halls and recherché salons and solars. There were even guests who left opium burning in their rooms, and perhaps I lingered there longer than I should have. My own supply I hoarded for the worst of my days, knowing that I would have to accomplish my mission before I ran out or I would be in dire circumstance indeed. I was slow at my tasks, and often found myself slumped against walls, having suffered a seizure, but knowing how near I was to a possible cure kept me from surrendering to despair.

But the part I thought would give me difficulties—being accepted into the household—was nothing to the task that I’d felt sure would be easy... finding my wayward king. I hadn’t anticipated there being a tour guide to lead me to his cell, or even a map with a block of rooms labeled “Here There Be Dungeons,” but I’d felt that having such an august prisoner would surely elicit gossip among the servants. The first week passed, and though I’d been in and out of dozens of rooms and listened attentively to even the most innocuous of conversations, I came no closer to discovering his whereabouts. Curled up on my cot in the servant’s quarters beneath the worn but thick blanket I’d been issued, I wondered if he was still here. Perhaps Sedetnet had erred.

“Morgan,” the sommelier said. “Would you bring this to the study? It’ll be wanted shortly.”

Wine flowed in never-ending streams throughout the house, as ubiquitous as the blood in a man’s veins. I was forever delivering bottles of it hither and yon, which bothered me not at all; it was a gentle service, and the sommelier a genial man if eternally distracted by the nuances of his trade.

“I’ve never been to the study,” I said.

“It’s above the entrance on the top floor,” he said. “Use the northeast stair. It looks like a study, you’ll have no trouble recognizing it.”

Stairs... one of my favorite things. I smiled and took the bottle. “Consider it done.”

“Thank you, Morgan.”

So I set off through the network of passages that served the main household; I’d found the service corridors far finer than I’d expected. Narrow, perhaps, but well-designed, with doors flush to the walls of the main halls with their elegant molding and astonishing murals. The stairs exacted their toll as expected, and once I reached the top I allowed myself the luxury of a short respite, leaning against the wall and catching my breath. Then I slipped through the door and into the house, finding myself in a circular foyer lined with windows, motes of dust glimmering in the shafts of golden light that fell onto the thick rugs beneath my feet. It was not a room... merely an interstitial area between broad halls and chambers, but it had benches padded in velvet and a petite table suitable for tea and pastries. Suleris was so rich even such places were beautifully appointed. There was no detail left undone.

The study was adjacent to the resting area and as the sommelier promised there was no mistaking it. The heavy wooden doors had been left open, revealing a room lined with bookcases. The floors, walls and furniture were all the same rich red wood, and as I entered I smelled paper and polish and the lingering bouquet of the last wine that had been opened here. I set the fresh bottle on the tray on the sideboard and hesitated. It had been so long since I’d been anywhere near so many books. I drifted toward the mantel, studying their spines with mute longing; once I reached the fireplace—what did they use it for, in this temperate clime?—my eyes rose slowly toward what I took to be ornament.

It was no ornament. It was a single yellowed vertebra, larger in circumference than my waist and mounted on an illustration of a dragon. I stopped, struck numb at the sight of it, and reached to brush my fingers across its porous surface. The angry hiss of the hallucination from my flat echoed in my mind. The skulls of my brothers and sisters adorn your people’s halls.

I backed away from it, turning, and found myself facing a map.

Though I knew I should make my exit, I couldn’t resist the map. I had never seen the Archipelago. It was much larger than I’d anticipated, twenty-six islands of varying sizes, and they were each tinted either red, green, blue or gold. And it was while staring at this wealth of information that I discovered a severe deficiency in the linguistic education Kelu had spearheaded.

I couldn’t read.

The little circular marks, cradled in their alien diacritics, were indecipherable. They looked more like art than words. I had never realized how great a light literacy had shed on my world. To be deprived of it... I felt as if someone had blinded me. Dismayed I traced the ciphers on the vellum. They could be names, numbers, distances, notes... they could be anything. And I... I was helpless in the face of their opacity. Would that Chester were here to give me some basis for understanding...!

A faint heat bathed my back, and just as I began to puzzle at it a body slammed me against the wall, crushing my cheek against the map. My nascent struggles were quelled by an invisible force and then the hands clawed beneath my skin, digging up the magic there and yanking it past the scream in every particle of my being. My vision bled black, threatening to drown me as the pain flared from fingertip to fingertip, from crown to the tip of my heel. And the revoltingly intimate caress continued, slowed even, as if my attacker was savoring every lick of it.

When he released me I slid down the wall, half-crumpled near elegant feet glowing with the force stolen from me, shod in dainty sandals more appropriate to a woman. But then, he had very pretty feet, the bastard.

“Not a feast.” Such a smug voice. “But fair for an afternoon diversion. Get up.”

Just like that, as if it were some easy task. “I cannot.”

“‘I cannot, Master,’“ he corrected. When I didn’t repeat it, he slipped his foot from his sandal and used his toes to lift my chin. “Come, come, new boy. For you are new, aren’t you, or you would know me. Address the blood-flag’s head correctly.”

I was not here to draw attention to myself. I closed my eyes and said, slowly, “I cannot, Master.”

“Better,” he said. “I suppose I over-drained you. But you were there and one gets... absorbed... in one’s pleasures.”

I had no idea how to respond to that without spitting on his toes, so perhaps it was for the best that he let my head drop back to the ground. “Strange of you to linger, though. Was it that you’d never seen a map before?”

Was he serious? But from the curiosity and condescension mingled in his voice, he was. I wondered anew at the elven penchant for arrogance.

“I have seen a map, yes,” I said.

“Then why do you stare so?”

He assumed I’d seen a map of the Archipelago, a reasonable assumption... as far as he knew I’d been born here, and the elves concerned themselves not at all with the rest of the world. What other map would I have seen, save Serala’s? As I struggled to frame an answer that would not reveal me, he crouched and lifted my face, and at last I was forced to look at him. As with every elf he shone; my fleeting impression before I averted my eyes was of blond and white and cream, of feline eyes a summer-sky blue and generous lips a sensuous coral pink.

“Come now. You can’t be inarticulate. Some elf was taken enough with you to actually have these made for you.” His finger flicked against the frame of my spectacles. “Speak.”

“I wondered at the coloring,” I said.

“Master,” he reminded me.

“Master,” I said, maintaining a bland expression. They were just sounds, devoid of meaning. I could say them and not be demeaned.

“Ah, you are ignorant of politics,” he said. “What a pathetic master you had before me, to have coddled your weaknesses and yet left you uneducated about your betters. Well, let us rectify that, eh? Stand up.”

I managed to drag myself to my feet as he watched.

“Tch,” he said, shaking his head. “So clumsy. I see why you were discarded.” The cold that gripped me at his words made it to the surface for he continued, “Oh, never fear, frail mortal blossom. I’m far more magnanimous than the average petty lordling. I am true nobility. They are merely pretenders. Now... pay attention.”

I forced myself to turn and focus on the map when what I wanted to do was escape him at speed. But truly, the map was interesting.

“Here in yellow you have the islands controlled by the blood-flag Nudain. As you can see, Nudain is falling out of power, though they are nowhere near so poorly off as blood-flag Aresset with its lonely two island holdings. Vanel is also failing, here in blue. Suleris is red...” He caressed the entire middle of the map. “Leaving only Ekadet in the north.”

I squinted. Suleris and Nudain held the largest islands and all the surrounding chains, with the other blood-flags relegated to lesser isles and scraps of land here and there, lonely splotches of color amid the gold and red. “This is the capital?” I asked, pointing at the largest island.

“Yes.”

“And Suleris doesn’t hold the capital of Serala,” I said.

He narrowed his cat-like eyes at me, mouth pinched. Then he smiled a smile I liked not at all. “For now,” he said.

“Nudain, Aresset, Vanel, Suleris and Ekadet,” I repeated. “What of Sadar?”

He snorted. “A minor power. He owns a single city. The only reason Ekadet hasn’t consumed him is that he’s not worth consuming.”

The words tipped off a memory: Tornen. Tornen e Ekadet... the man Kemses had been fighting in the line duel. I suppressed a grim smile. Port cities were never worthless, even in a country that appeared to be mostly coastline... apparently Erevar was not so minor a prize as was supposed. “And Sedetnet?”

He laughed. “You know the sorcerer! Was he your last master, then? Somehow I can see him indulging your weak body and then casting it off for some newer whim. You are lucky he didn’t decided to turn you inside out to examine the color of your bones... or give you a fur coat and sell you to us as breeding stock for the genets. But no. He has no care for politics. Fortunately for him, as if he did we would all unite against him. Are you enlightened now?”

Not even a quarter as enlightened as I wished to be, but I couldn’t imagine revealing that I had no idea how to read. I opted instead for safety and said, “Yes, Master.”

“And you see the power of Suleris.”

In bright crimson, yes. Only Ekadet held close to as much land. “Yes, Master.”

“Good,” he said. “Time for you to return to the kitchens. But before you go—” He pressed me back against the wall, sealing my wrists to it before he leaned in and brushed his hands down my ribcage. And as I struggled to tear free of my invisible bonds, he petted the magic out of me and drank of it and I would have screamed if he had allowed it.

“Very nice,” he said. “Better than wine.” He waved a hand, releasing me. “Off you go.”

White, tearing pain warred with atavistic revulsion and the latter won, propelling me from the study on trembling legs. It wasn’t until I’d reached the relative safety of the stairwell that I began to shake in earnest. My stomach had knotted, my muscles followed suit. I was on the fourth step, looking at the long, long fall down, when my knees gave way. I hoped with a grim resignation that whatever insult my tumble would inevitably bestow would heal before someone found me or surely they would wonder how I’d survived. And then my head struck the railing and I knew nothing more.

The sound of dripping water coaxed me to consciousness next as someone draped a cool, wet rag over my eyes. I felt remarkably calm for how raw my spirit felt against my skin, as if I’d been alienated from my physical shell... though I could just, just pierce the numbness enough to sense the pinprick sparks in my joints that were the aftermath of the worst convulsions.

“You ran into Thameis, I wager,” said Davor from near my feet.

I cleared my throat experimentally and tried my voice: hoarse but serviceable, so long as I didn’t wax garrulous. “Study’s owner?”

“And the entire manor and the island and indeed most of the surrounding islands, yes,” he said. “I would have thought you’d have been intelligent enough not to let yourself be caught in a room with an elf.”

If I hadn’t heard the rue on the words I would almost have thought it a reprimand. “Not my intention.”

“No,” he said with a sigh. “I imagine it wasn’t. Stay out of his way in the future. He’s a ruiner.”

“Brilliant plan,” I said, unable to help the wryness. “Would never have thought... of it.” And then I erupted into a coughing spell that startled the woman on the stool beside me and prompted Davor to catch my ankles.

“Ah! None of that,” he said. “The doctor’s been by, he says you’re not to strain yourself for the rest of the night.”

“Same night?” I wondered, though by then my voice was a rasp of a thing.

“New night,” he said. “We found you yestereve in the stairwell, you’ve been unconscious since. It’s approaching sundown.”

I sighed. “Naturally.”

His voice held curiosity then. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“No,” I said.

“Then you have been used often enough to know your reaction to it.”

“Convulsions,” I said. “Nausea. Pain. Fainting.”

“Horrible,” the woman on the stool murmured. She wrung another cloth out and wiped my face with it, slow and careful strokes.

“I didn’t know you were bait for them,” Davor said.

“Not something one admits,” I said while marveling. Bait? Were there truly humans so enticing they drew elves whatever they willed? Did the moral decay here ever reach an end?

“How do you feel about working with animals? Or madmen?”

“Sending me to the circus?” I asked with a crooked grin.

“No,” he said. “Just thinking of duties I can put you to that will keep you out of their easy reach, or overshadow you so much they won’t notice you at all. If you are bait they’ll feed on you until you don’t rise again.”

I would have stared at him had I been able to. “Possible?”

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “Worse, I’ve had to figure out what to do with the remains.” He paused. He was looking at the floor then, voice muffled. “Sometimes the bodies don’t die for months.”

“Animals, madmen,” I said. “Sounds positively delightful.”

He said, “I’ll see what I can do.”