Dawn from the back of a drake, fleeing for my life across a tufted plain bordering the sea, was indescribable, except that again I wept, wept as the long pink shadows swelled from our bodies, fluttering across the passing grasses like a gossamer flag. I was tired of crying, and tired of the Archipelago with its way of breaking me open. I had learned hatred; now I knew beauty. That I had learned them both within a day of one another seemed obscene. How could the world hold such extremes? How could my heart?

The drake ran on, tireless and faithful, and we clung to its back. I waited for the sounds of pursuit, shoulders hunched against the blows I imagined would come soon enough.

We stopped at a stream cut into the rocky soil so the drake could drink. Almond passed me a canteen as I leaned against the saddle.

“Can you hear them?” Kelu asked the smaller genet.

Almond’s ears flicked outward, inward. “Something,” she said.

Kelu nodded. “We have to keep going.”

The drake turned its head to me, nuzzled my jaw. That its chin dripped water didn’t seem important. I cupped its face and brushed my thumbs against its cheek, below the round red eyes.

“Master,” Almond said, voice soft, “can you ride?”

“Yes,” I said, unable to drag my gaze from its. “Are they really following us?”

“I think so,” Almond said.

I closed my eyes and rested my brow against the drake’s. It rumbled.

“We can’t run forever,” I said, voice tired.

“No, but we’re going to try,” Kelu said.

That was when the ride became torment. The first night and into the morning had been a wonder, but as the hours passed and Kelu spurred the creature on I longed to stretch, to rest, to stop moving. My legs ached save where they touched the drake’s sides. My spine trembled with weariness. I realized I had not slept, or what sleep I’d had I’d caught between strides, jerking awake when my head nodded forward. I worried about falling off, about losing my glasses, about eating, about being caught. I worried that my wrists were beginning to lock around Kelu’s waist, that my knees wouldn’t bend when I finally dismounted for the day, that the pain would be more sadistic than the elves when it caught up with me again. I had had no poppy, but while both drake and genets could bolster my sense of well-being I could sense their effect on me attenuating; soon I would be again at the nonexistent mercy of my sickness.

I longed for an ending, and there was only more of the same.

“They’re coming,” Almond hissed into my back. I looked over my shoulder and glimpsed a purple shadow growing against the plain’s grass-felted edge.

“I thought this was the fastest mount in the stable,” I said.

“Yes, well, they don’t care if they run their horses to foundering and trade them for fresh ones,” Kelu growled. “Everything’s disposable to an elf.” Lower then. “This is probably fine sport for them. I bet there are banners. And hunting cats.”

Hunted like a fox... what an obscenity. I crouched lower into the drake’s stride and prayed to lose them.

With the implacability of the tide rising, our hunters closed the distance, until even I could hear the bells on their harnesses and the heavy drumming of their host’s hooves. They had sent dozens of elves to chase me down.

I gathered the drake’s mane in my aching fingers. “Come on,” I whispered. “Just a little more.”

The thick muscles knotted beneath us and the drake surged forward, racing away from our pursuers. Its skin had gone fever-hot, and its sinews no longer glided wet beneath it... I could feel the effort as a friction in its body. But oh, how it gave that effort! I leaned into every stride, pressing Kelu against the pommel of the saddle. I did not want to be captured. I didn’t want to be parted from it or the genets. I didn’t want to go back to that cell. And as if sharing my desperation, the drake sprinted out of reach.

“We might make it,” Kelu whispered, shocked.

“Run, great heart,” I said, “Run!”

The drake coughed an answer, rolled the bit into its mouth and plunged on, and somehow, somehow we opened the distance... until the host fell away, taking their bells and their drums with them.

“God,” I whispered, looking past my shoulder. Clinging to me, Almond followed my gaze and said, “I think we out-ran them!”

And then Kelu cursed and the drake pulled up so short I tumbled half out of the saddle, my leg tangled in one of the stirrups and my arms scrabbling at the pommel and the reins. The drake wove, almost fell onto me—God! But pitched forward at the last, spilling the genets from its back.

Before us a second elven raiding party was waiting, shining brighter than the ascendant afternoon sun. Their blue shadows stretched over us and I felt eclipsed by their power and brilliance. I hated them. Not just for being so much more beautiful, so much more real than I was, not just for catching me so effortlessly, but for how they’d caught me... sprawled on the ground, half trussed in my own mount’s tack, as graceless and awkward as a new foal.

The lead hunter set his spear across his saddle. “You can fight us, if you wish,” he said in a mellifluous voice.

“And this would accomplish what?” I asked, breathing heavily.

“Very little,” the hunter said. He looked past me at the horizon. “Save, perhaps, to delay us until Amoret’s party arrives, and result in a tiresome—.”

“A what?” I asked, unfamiliar with the word that had ended his comment.

“A jurisdictional squabble,” Kelu said in Lit. Her mien was some combination of sulk and anger.

“Ah,” I said. To the elf, “Apologies. Your tongue is still new to me.”

“I imagine it is.”

I realized then that he was talking to me, instead of past me. “Who would win?” I asked.

“We would,” he said. “But it might require my master’s presence, and that would discommode him.”

“And your master is?” I asked.

“Sedetnet,” he said.

Almond squeaked next to me. Kelu said nothing. “Just Sedetnet?” I asked. “No blood-flag?”

“My master needs no blood-flag,” he said. “Will you come, then? Or will we have to drag you?”

Amoret was a known quantity, and not a good one; this new person—at very least his servants acknowledged that I was a sentient being. Surely that boded well. I said, “I will go with you. But... I am not sure the drake can carry us.”

“You can ride with me.” The hunter’s horse carried him forward, parting him from the company of his comrades. I squinted up at his face and could barely see it for the glimmer of light beneath his skin. This elf was all sunlight, hair that shone like gold leaf, complexion touched with cinnamon and honey. His eyes were the green of peridots, pale, clear and light.

He held out one of those shining hands, and I stared at it. This then, was my fate. With a sigh, I slipped my fingers in his and let him haul me upright, stumbling on the stirrup still wrapped around one of my ankles. Once I freed myself I turned to the still recumbent drake.

“Come now,” I said softly. “No more running.”

It lifted its weary head.

“I won’t let them mistreat you,” I said, knowing it for a ridiculous promise and making it anyway. “Come on. On your feet, great heart.”

Like an old man it heaved itself from the ground, then stretched its neck to rest its face in my hands. I pulled it closer, hugging it. When I opened my eyes I found the hunter watching me.

“He deserves the best you have,” I said.

He nodded. “It will have it.”

One of the other elves caught the drake’s reins and tied them to the back of his saddle. The genets were mounted behind two others, leaving me to the hunter-leader, who pulled me up in front of him. Like the drake, his body was warm, and everywhere we touched I felt ripples of pleasure and heat.

“Lean back,” the hunter said.

“I would rather not.”

“It’s a long ride.”

When I didn’t move, the hunter shrugged and racked his spear in the saddle, gathered the reins and turned the horse toward the south. I rode with a sun at my back and the sun in my eyes, and I couldn’t tell which one burned brighter.

I began that ride downtrodden in spirit and sore in body; by the time we stopped that first evening I was pain-raddled and desperate. When the hunter let me off his steed I tried to pace and crumpled. The two genets rushed to me while the elves watched, distant and stoic.

“There’s no more of the drug,” Kelu said, grasping my arm.

“I know,” I said, panting. My limbs kept trying to twitch out of their grasp, which is when I thought to say, “You should let go as I am about to have a seizure.”

Kelu released me at once; Almond a little too late, and I flung her away before the convulsions took me. Against grass dyed copper and blood-red by the sunset, I writhed and gasped and lost my sense of time and not long after of place, until all I knew was a distant pain and somewhere, somewhere, the rush of the sea.

When my spirit settled again in my body I found the hunter crouched near me, a blur of iridescence and gold. His hand drew near enough for me to see my glasses on his palm, and the revulsion I fought at the sight of them in a stranger’s hand was almost overwhelming. But I refused to let them know how much it bothered me, that they had witnessed my episode. With a trembling arm I reached for my spectacles and set them again on my nose.

His spear rested across his lap; he was balanced with one hand on a knee and the other lightly braced against the ground.

“Almond,” I managed past my dry throat. “Did I...?”

“She has been healed,” the hunter said. “Are you done?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never know anymore. I never understand.”

He nodded and withdrew. I supposed he asked only to know how much room to set aside for me, or to decide whether I needed a special watch. They covered me with a blanket, but I didn’t grow warm beneath it. I tried to sleep but no position was comfortable. The need for the drug itched beneath my skin. I had returned to the hell I’d been trying so hard to escape, and the flame-bright presence of the elves taxed my oversensitive skin past endurance. I lived because I did not know how to die... and in the morning, I let their beautiful, too-hot hands drag me from my hollow and load me back into the saddle.

How long we traveled thus, I cannot say. I was accustomed to spending my misery in a bed, hiding in my flat. To be forced into constant motion made the pain impossible, so vast I could only slump in the arms of my captors and let them carry me where they would. The days and nights bled into one another, sweat-and-darkness, hallucinations and fever.

And then the voice came from behind my body, caressing my back.

“We are here.”

I grappled for a sense of truth and sight and when I thought I had it, knew I had gone insane. “Yon tower is missing its base.”

To my surprise, the hunter said, “Yes.”

I re-evaluated. “Then that really is the top of a tower floating in mid-air.”

“Yes,” he said.

I adjusted my spectacles and then looked again, but the sight persisted, stubbornly absurd. Its lowest bricks spiraled upward in a stair-step pattern, growing a coat of white plaster until they culminated in a gray and silver balcony. Stained glass windows threw off the light of the sun in shimmering reds and cobalt blues, rising in elegant points toward a conical roof. The edifice seemed to swirl out of nothingness and hang there, unmoving, several stories above us. The shadow it cast on the grass seemed particularly incongruous as there were no buildings surrounding it, none at all. Just this one bit of a tower floating in the middle of a shaded lilac grassland.

“How do we enter?” I asked.

The hunter kneed his mount forward. As we approached, I saw a circular path on the ground, formed of some substance I couldn’t identify.

“Here,” he said, pointing at where it was broadest. “Sit here.”

I slid—fell—off the horse and managed to huddle on the flat surface. It felt like stone... like warm stone. But so thin! Perplexed, I brushed my hand across it as the hunter reined his horse away. I turned to ask him what material had been used to fashion it when it broke free of the ground and coiled into the air, sinuous as a snake. I grabbed for its edges, afflicted by vertigo and nausea simultaneously, but before it could take me entirely the path stopped, connecting with a snap to the edge of the balcony. I stared at the join, wide-eyed. I could find no seam. On either side of the not-stone I could see the distant grassy ground and the toy-sized hunter on his horse.

Pride warred with terror. Terror won. I crawled to the balcony, then used its rail to clamber to my feet. As I watched, the path collapsed, trapping me, and a wave of weakness engulfed me. God, not here, not now! Not another seizure. I slid to my knees and gripped the bars as if they were the door to a cage and set my forehead against one, cool, hard, textured like wrought iron. My throat was so dry I almost couldn’t swallow, but I tried. The nausea and the actinic sparks in my limbs warred with one another and I waited to see which it would be, vomiting or convulsions. I wondered if the tower’s owner would be distressed if I left a mess on the elegant stone balcony. Probably.

My body had not yet decided how to fail me when I felt the presence, the one from Amoret’s manor. The void so great it devoured everything around it, a clinging, aching, stretching darkness that caressed my burning skin and set me to shaking.

“Will you jump?”

His honeyed voice was so intimate and yet so detached that I twitched away, feeling as if I’d been stroked merely to have my reaction assessed. My shoulders twisted and I clenched my jaw. I would not, would not fall in front of that voice. Being on my knees was mortification enough. But the longer I remained there, the more my limbs tightened. As I slumped to the balcony floor, too wracked even to fear the edge, the presence approached, bringing its bleak radiation with it, until when at last the seizure took me all I saw was black, oil-and-ink-and-dried-blood black.

I found the hem of a silk robe near my face when I fought my way back into my body... aubergine with strange sigils in flame-red and orange. The fabric rippled in a measured rhythm, like a metronome; I realized after a time that it was so thin it was responding to the breathing of its owner. And so I looked up at the void and saw that it had the face of an elf, a narrow, pointed face with cool and predatory eyes, long-lashed and an absurdly delicate lilac. Strands of glossy violet hair interrupted his brow and cheeks, cutting his face into puzzle pieces I could only barely fit together in my fugue. He was very tall, I thought... or I was very low. I couldn’t decide which.

“So,” he said. “Interesting.”

I’m certain I was, kinked into a tortured ball at his feet. I thought of the stories of fairy queens and the offerings left at their flowered altars to appease them and wondered what sick story would involve a crippled invalid of a folklorist as a gift. Probably one in which the faerie queen drew mortal offense and a bloody rampage ensued.

“Can you stand?”

“I’m not even sure I can talk,” I said, hoarse.

“Sarcasm,” he said. “This must happen to you often.”

I stared at the nearest flame sigil. “A habit of mine. Only at the most inopportune moments. To add excitement to my life.”

The elf crouched then, so close he had to spread his legs to keep from clipping me with a knee. His cool fingers gathered my chin and lifted my face. I was enveloped in that power, so sickeningly intense—perhaps I could be forgiven for not realizing until his lips were almost on mine what he intended.

“No,” I said, ducking my head as far as his fingers allowed. “My mouth is full of bile.”

His elegant brows lifted. I was just as surprised. It was not the reason I thought would come to mind first. “Is that also a habit of yours?”

“Only when I am about to vomit,” I said, beginning to shake. He was everywhere, all around me, the density of an aura like lead. The world cramped around him.

“And you are about to do this now.”

“I’m considering it,” I replied.

He pulled my glasses from my face. “It would be a pity to lose these over the edge of the balcony.”

“How civilized,” I said. “Thank you.” And then I wrenched away from him and lost my dignity and my meager breakfast. The elf did not move, but watched me until I collapsed against the bars, my heart fluttering from the violence of the episode.

“Fascinating,” he said. And then, “Are you done?”

“I think so,” I said, my voice gone raspy.

“Can you stand?” he asked, his curiosity mild.

I wanted to say ‘yes’, but I opted for the truth. “Not at all.”

“Mmm,” he said. For the first time, some emotion crept into his voice. Regret? “Alas, my dice are inside. Pick a number.”

“A what?” I asked, perplexed.

“A number,” he said. “Between... oh, one and five.”

I stared up at him, licked my dry lips and finally said, “Three.”

“Ah,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to carry you, then.” Before I could object he slid his arms beneath me and lifted me up against his chest. I almost fainted from the sudden proximity of that power. As it was I had nothing in me to flinch, to protest, even to hang on. As he carried me into the tower, the fingers pressed against my back slowly brushed against me, another of those casual intimacies that made my skin want to shrivel away from the air.

I’m not sure what I expected from the lair of an elf who lived in a floating tower. Perhaps anything would have been a disappointment. Certainly the stained glass windows that served the study as its doors lent it a sublime quality, but... it was still a study. Two chairs before a low table, a desk, shelves with books, and only some anomalies: a full-length mirror in one corner, a few pillows here and there. But aside from being a rather tall and elegantly shaped space, colored by its lighting, it was still... just a study.

He did not set me in one of the chairs, but instead on one of the fashionable ottomans. I could not possibly stay upright, and wanted to say so... and then my hands sealed on the velvet edge and I found myself hunched but seated. I could not pry my fingers loose and I glanced at my right hand to find thorned vines orbiting my wrists, gossamer as smoke and as pregnant with menace as a distant thunderhead.

“Well, this is rather rude,” I said finally.

“Would you rather I drape you across my bed?” he asked. I couldn’t shake the feeling that his curiosity was honest, that he didn’t care one way or the other what I decided.

“No,” I said, “but a chair with a back would have been sufficient. This flagrant display of power is rather vulgar.”

“But then I couldn’t see you entirely,” he said. “Which will become important.”

“Forgive me if I show no excitement,” I said. He set my glasses back on my nose and took his time about it, and after the first instinctive distaste I found myself fascinated by the care with which he smoothed back the hair and made sure the legs were properly wound behind my ears. I had never liked anyone to handle my spectacles, much less to put them on me, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to be the exception, and yet... “Will you kiss me now? I assure you, I taste even worse than I did before.”

His smile was faint. “You have no idea.” He left his hands on my face and caressed my cheekbones with his thumbs. “Such a work you are.”

I could not escape the sense that he was not looking at me. “Pardon?”

He withdrew and slid onto the edge of the desk, balancing himself there with the other foot. How did the room hold him? The cold coming off his body suffused the study, engulfed me.

“Amoret,” he said, mostly to himself, “is a fool. Tell me, O prince. How long have you had these... body issues?”

“Body ‘issues,’” I said and laughed bitterly. “Such a genteel phrasing. Very well, then, I can pretend. For as long as I can remember.”

“Naturally,” he murmured. He reached over his desk and poured himself a glass of something red as garnets.

“You called me the prince,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “You are no more human than I am.”

Of course, he said, as if it were patently obvious. “And you know this just from looking at me.”

“And touching you,” he said. “You are truly a work.” He came off the desk like a great cat prowling and lifted my chin, set the glass at my lips. “Clear your palate, O prince, O beauty.”

The last thing I wanted was wine from his hand, much less fed to me like an animal. But my throat was so dry and oh... it was good wine. Dry with so many touches of fruit and just a hint of something high and spiced, like cinnamon. So I drank and suffered him to stroke my throat as I swallowed and when he withdrew the cup I even looked up at him.

“Tell me, Morgan Locke,” he said. “What would you give to have all your pain taken away?”

I lost my breath, my next heartbeat. He smiled and brushed my cheek with a thumb, still holding my face in his hands. “You heard correctly.”

I managed a grim smile then. “Forgive me if I doubt anything could possibly take away my pain.”

“Ah,” he said. “You require a demonstration. Very well.” His hands dropped to my vest and began unbuttoning it.

“This demonstration requires me to be naked?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But it will heighten the impact considerably, and that would amuse me.”

“I see.” I watched his fingers travel down my chest. “You have a facility. Do you undress people often?”

“You do everything often when you have enough time,” he said. I wondered how he was going to strip the vest from me when my hands were clamped to the ottoman and then he passed it through my arms. I shuddered, tried to pull away as he gathered my blouse at my waist and plucked it free of me, leaving me nude save for my pants and boots and...

“Ah,” he said, thin fingers scooping the pendant up. “You’re wearing it.”

“My captors seemed to have overlooked it,” I said. I had forgotten it myself.

He glanced at me with his heavy-lidded eyes. “No doubt.”

“So,” I said. “Now you will show me the illusion of a life without pain, is that it?”

“Ah,” he said, and laughed to himself. “No. No, I will show you the pain of a life without illusions.” He hooked his foot through the base of the mirror and pulled it over. “Enough talk. It’s time you saw yourself.” And then he slipped around behind me, set his hands on my face and pulled, like he had gripped my skin and was yanking it off my body, and everything in me resisted. I would have screamed had I had a voice, but it overwhelmed me, the nausea, the sickness of it, the fingers cutting, clawing, sucking. It was like the room with the elves but worse, a thousand times worse, a violation a thousand times more intimate. I thought I would die—

—and then it sloughed off and the pain vanished. Completely. I glanced up in wild shock and froze.

Behind me the elf smiled, draping his arms around my shoulders and leaning down to rest his cheek against my hair and meet my eyes in the mirror. My eyes. My sea-by-storm-and-starlight eyes. The milk and moonlit cream of my skin. My hair draped to my lap like the velvet nap of the finest gown, droplets of water-jeweled light clinging to its edges. My body grown slim and gracile and glass-edged, refracted from the prism of life.

“My God,” I whispered, a tear darting down one cheek, and it shone.

“The prince lives,” the elf murmured, and he sounded smug.

I swallowed. “That can’t... this can’t... this is falsehood.”

“Your human seeming is the falsehood,” the elf said. “A glamour maintained by the magic in your blood, enchanted to forever feed on itself.”

“What?” I whispered.

“You have been wearing a mask,” he said. “A twisting of your own self by your blood to, I suppose, keep you hidden in plain view. But you have grown too large for the mask, and it takes more and more of you to hold it in place, and now it leeches from your body for fuel. The enchantment was put in place before you came into your power. It is destroying you.”

I stared at myself in disbelief.

“Would you like to move?” the sorcerer asked mildly. He caressed the thorned gossamer chains, unmaking them. “Lift your hands.”

I did. No pain. Just the opposite... a gliding warmth, an ease that made me feel as if I was born to movement, as if I was the breath of the world and stillness belonged only to that slight hesitation between breaths, to the peace of death. I swallowed and looked at my palms, turned my hands. They were mine, yes, but far more refined. More finished.

“Observe,” the elf said. “Your skin can also give you pleasure.” And he set his lips to the slope of my shoulder and breathed on my skin, warmed it, rolled his lower lip against it. I shivered, and when his teeth rasped against the pendant’s chain and plucked at it I swayed toward him, overcome.

He smiled. “Stand. Move. Try your flesh.”

I said, hoarse, “I’m afraid to,” and even my voice had changed, had gained layers, like the currents beneath the surface of the sea.

“Because?” he asked.

“I don’t want to grow accustomed to it,” I said, another tear streaking my cheek. And then to my horror I began to weep, and even crying felt good, felt fine, as if my eyes had grown soft and wet on their own.

“But you can keep it,” he said, caressing my hair.

“If I do something for you,” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “Is that right?”

He considered, then reached past me to the desk. There he gathered a crystal die between his fingertips, rolling it as if to caress its surface. He dropped it and glanced at the number. “I suppose so.”

“You suppose?” I asked, my voice rising. “Do you make all your decisions by rolling dice?”

“Yes,” he said. “I do now, anyway. It adds a random element to my life that is otherwise utterly lacking. So now... ah, I suppose I will have to force you to perform a quest for me.”

I could barely believe him. “Just like that, you have decided on something so important.”

“It’s important to you,” he said, leaning back behind me and resuming his stroking of my hair. “Nothing is important to me anymore. Which makes giving you a task a burden.” He sighed. “But we must, we must. Let’s see. I don’t want the bother of keeping you here, so I must send you away. To learn or fetch something. Ah, no. There is something that could be of use to me. I had forgotten.”

“What’s that?” I asked, trying to be suspicious and feeling only a piercing joy so close to sorrow I could not keep my breath, my composure.

“Your brother,” he said. “I would like you to bring me your brother.”

I glanced at his face in the mirror, found nothing in it: no avarice, no greed, no hunger. Only the same smooth mask. “My brother. The king.”

“Yes.”

“You can keep a tower afloat and strip me clean of an enchantment no one else has even been able to see,” I said, “And you expect me to believe you can’t find another elf and drag him into your lair?”

“Oh, I could,” he said. “I know where he is. But if I did so, it would precipitate another war.”

“Another war,” I repeated.

“I would win,” he said, playing with my hair. “But it would be boring. I’ve done wars before. They hold nothing for me now. And all the pieces in motion now...it is a burden, keeping them all in mind. Adding more variables would be exhausting.” He said, “Besides, I would have to coerce the king to leave with me, and that would be tiresome.”

“And he would just come with me.”

“You are his brother,” the elf said. “I am given to understand he holds such things in high esteem.”

“You probably want to torture him,” I said.

He considered, slowly winding my hair between his fingers. “No,” he said. “At least, I don’t think so. I’ve seen every possible reaction to torture. There’s nothing interesting about it anymore.”

I stared at him. “You mean to tell me you don’t torture people because it doesn’t provide you with enough entertainment?”

“If you torture enough people, you soon discover that one person’s scream is very like the next’s,” he said. “They begin to blend.”

My new skin pebbled into gooseflesh and—God help me!—even that felt good.

“Bring me your brother,” he said. “I will undo this thing from you permanently.”

“Will you promise not to hurt him?” I asked.

He laughed then, that caress of a voice. “Oh, my dear, dear prince.” He lowered his mouth to my neck and breathed on it, licked my skin. “Haven’t you learned that there is no telling what will hurt someone? I could make such a promise, but what a futile promise it would be. Here I have given you your heart’s desire and you are weeping.”

I shuddered.

“Do you want me to stop?” he whispered against my skin, sweeping my hair from the back of my neck.

Yes, I thought, and also no, and his arms slid around me from behind.

“Come,” he said. “We’ll dance and you will see what a wonderful gift it is to wear no masks.”

I wanted no such thing, but he turned me in his arms and it was so easy, so easy to move, to twist, to gather that purple mane in my limber fingers. I felt hot as sunlight, as summer, and the other was so cool, so accepting. It bled together, the cold and the fever, the ease, the pleasure, the shimmer of skin and light, and I didn’t know if I kissed a woman or a man or an elf or a demon, or even if it mattered... only that my body oh God my body worked and it yearned.

I knew it was wrong. But I wanted it anyway.