Lance awoke with a start. A wave of visceral panic stole rationality from him for several moments as the dregs of a nightmare leaked out of him. Calm was not swift in coming. His heart pounded, and his lungs seized around short, choppy inhales as he stuffed the details of that cursed dream into the back of his mind. Cold sweat covered his body, and the sheets under him were uncomfortably damp.

  He lay back, rolled onto his side, his bunk creaking under his weight as his eyes darted from shadow to shadow, looking for signs of intruders. Finding none.

  Somewhere further up the wide corridor of the Servants’ Quarters—a barracks populated by narrow bunk beds and illuminated by moonlight through arrow slit windows—two others were fucking. From where he should be sleeping, he heard their bed creaking, followed the sounds to see a young man’s bare back painted in sweat and silver light, the edge of the upper bunk’s rail keeping his partner well concealed. Soft gasps and moans issued from both of them, but if the sex was good, he could not tell.

  It hardly mattered, anyway. A momentary distraction, enough to draw his attention away from the storm of crazed thoughts caroming through his head. He was beginning to calm down.

  He knew he had nothing to fear from the barracks—he had lived in them most of his life. In none of those years, on none of those nights, had he ever been attacked. The most substantial thing that had ever come out of the shadows was a deep cart overflowing with fresh laundry—uniforms, linens, wash rags and bath towels, and if it were the end of the week, a duvet cover to replace the old one.

  But he only half believed it—that he was safe here, with terrors in the night gripping onto his mind, pawing at old insecurities, squeezing out irrational conspiracies to haunt every blackened corner in this hall bathed in moonlight.

  He turned his back on the nearest shadow. A frock of wavy, auburn hair peaked over a coverlet draped over the next bunk, where Laramy slept. Above and behind him, in a window thick with fog, was an intricate web. A spider labored diligently to repair it, awaited a meal to sustain it until death came for it at sunrise…when a servant dashed its home into ruin. He closed his eyes, and as fast as he had, fresh flashes of the old nightmare resurfaced to chase him away from sleep.

  I’m losing this fight. He thought sourly. It would be tonight, too.

  In the nightmare, he was a child. It was dark as pitch, and whatever space he occupied reeked of feces. He sat on coarse gravel, which dug into his bottom and the soles of his feet. He hugged his knees to his chest, a thick layer of oil pressed unpleasantly between his belly and his thighs. He could not recall the last time he had a bath, and in a child’s mind the words weeks, months played over and over. His scalp and genitals itched, and his hair was a messy, dirt infested tangle.

  And he was alone. Always alone. In every variation of this nightmare, even the worst ones, there was just the absolute darkness, and him.

  At least it wasn’t the bad one. He smiled at the ridiculousness of it. This version of the nightmare had been bad enough. What sense was there in inviting a worse variation. He watched the moon from his bed, a vague orb behind the fogged glass, and tried to find some sense of inner peace—that doorway into sound sleep and pleasant dreams.

  He lay awake for hours, lay there as the bed across the aisle creaked, the boy groaned and the girl gasped. One theatrical moan, and the pitch and keel ceased. The couple drifted off to sleep, leaving him alone to stare at the beams above him, and wonder what had gone so wrong that he couldn’t be like them. That he couldn’t just be normal.

  He gave up on sleep with the darkest hour of the night upon him. Dawn would be coming soon. He might be able to convince the palace guard stationed on this floor to let him out early, so that he could prepare for the coming day.

  He kicked his legs over the side of the bed, slid the drawer under his mattress open and removed shirt, briefs, pants and a towel. He tiptoed across poured stone floors, and approached a door made of plank boards bound together with bronze straps. He opened it, and peaked into the hall.

  A Wraith stood sentry just outside. He was elven—his ears long, sleek and pointed, his features soft and round, dark eyes framed by thick lashes, and hollow cheeks drawn down into a firm chin. A curtain of ink black hair fell over his shoulders and down his bare back, and bands of black script stood in relief against his torso. Bands of writing in the language of Shadovane coiled around his midriff and bicep, paying honor to the Shadow Queen. The image of an elf who might have been close kin—a brother or a cousin—was branded over his heart, encircled by more of that writing.

  The Wraith turned a stern gaze on him. “Go to bed, boy.”

  “I can’t sleep.” Lance whispered. “It’s almost time, isn’t it? So…can you take me to the showers. I promise I won’t disturb anyone.”

  The wraith grumbled something under his breath. His lip curled into the hint of a grimace. “This once, but you’ve had your last favor from me.”

  “T-thank you.” Lance tried on a modest smile. It felt wrong.

  After nineteen years living in the palace, he should be used to the Wraiths, but in all of that time, he had only managed to hide his anxiety around them a little better. More than anything else about the palace, they were an unsettling reminder of the relative distrust between the crown and the noble houses, between the noble houses and each other, and in all of them, a unique distrust of the servants who kept them all comfortable. His fear of them was as sourceless as his complex about shadows and as raw as any of his nightmares. On occasion, he dreamed about them, too. Confusing dreams full of fire and chaos, and broad patches of unrelieved darkness. Those were comparatively rare, and less visceral besides.

  It’s okay to be afraid of soldiers. He told himself. He was far from the only one who gave them a wide berth.

  The Wraith Core was perhaps the most well natured sect of the military. It was the one most populated by the lower classes, and though the ones who came from outside the palace seldom spoke of their former lives, they were as prone to laugh and banter as any of the servants.

  Still, some itch at the back of his mind told him not to trust them.

  “Come now. Let’s not waste time.” The guard took him by the shoulder and shoved him lightly forward. They marched by the cold light of glow bulbs, which worked by channeling electricity and were almost exclusively used for lighting where the nobles refused to roam. The candles they used in their own chambers were nearly always perfumed with lavender or bees wax, and the light they gave off was softer and warmer. These glow bulbs washed the color out of flesh, making all but the few kitunes scattered across the various departments the servants took ownership over look deathly ill.

  The Wraith pulled a door matching the one in the barracks they had just left open, and gestured him down the spiral staircase it looked in on. They descended four floors out of the tower proper and into its first basement, where the Wraith drew up short of another door, which was fitted with a small, glass window set high into its face.

  Beyond the fogged out lens, he could see blurred silhouettes moving about, though he could make out no more detail than that. Men and women of nearly every race across empire were present in that room, but there were no elves among them.

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  A caste system was enforced, with the nobility in their high towers, behind their impassible walls, and commoners in the city which expanded into the box canyon beyond its gates, rising higher toward the First Turn and then flatlands where farms were rumored to be abundant. All of those that were free were elven, and the rest…they were servants, taken into the castle and bound never to leave except by explicit order, and he had never heard of any such order being given.

  “Well, go.” The Wraith said. “Unless you would rather I took you back to your barracks?”

  Lance lingered for a moment. He hated this place, the way the Shadovani elves insisted on making bathing a group activity. At least this way, this early, there would be few chances for him to embarrass himself, and ample room to stare at blank walls and flooring.

  He pulled the door open.

  Hot, vaporous clouds billowed around him as he entered. The Wraith was already marching back up the stairs when he took a last look over his shoulder. He took the plunge, stepped beyond the cloud of rapidly cooling fog, and nearly smacked his shin against a knee high block of poured stone, avoiding a painful scrape and the days spent dealing with it by some uncommon luck.

  The block was one of perhaps ten like it which spanned the distance from one wall to the other, framing a narrow aisle between the entrance and the shower pit. Bundles of discarded clothing sat atop them.

  A laundry worker, dressed in a snow white shirt—sleeves rolled up to the elbow—and trousers, scooped them up and threw them in a large cart parked near the door. Some of those bore brands of grim the like of which seemed beyond repair—grease and black dust, and all manner of other substances which stained as surely as water was wet.

  She favored him with a tender smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. “The work never ends, does it?”

  He returned the gesture. “I’m sorry for adding more.”

  A mechanical chuckle. Her gaze slid from his face and all the artifice that was there to hide her discontent faded away. She moved up the row, back about her business.

  She’s not very pleasant.

  He stripped off his clothes and set them atop the block, then crossed over to another series of blocks deeper in. These were framed on three sides by shelving units like those that might be found In a nobleman’s study, except that these were not covered in books but clean towels and fresh changes of clothes brought in by servants from the night crews. Lance’s own bundle went into an empty space with the rest, and then he turned, and the awkward and mortifying game of getting through this part of the morning began.

  Night workers toweled off amid shelves and blocks, gabbed and laughed, their hair limp and sopping wet, and falling into their eyes. A kitune boy--marked for his blood-red skin, the scattering of darker moles over his body, and conical ears thrust from the sides of his head which ended in tufts of dense hair--twisted his damp towel and snapped it across another boy’s rump. The other boy yelped, glowered indignantly at the first, who roared with laughter.

  Several others joined in.

  “It’s not funny!” the boy sulked.

  “Oh, grow a pair, James.” Another boy--all and dark-haired with thick lashes framing deep, brown eyes—snapped his towel across the complainer’s thigh.

  The complainer, James, screwed up his face into a wrathful scowl.

  Lance deposited his clean clothes on one of the shelves, and left them to their business. He tried very hard to avoid looking at them, but despite his best efforts, his eyes drifted from one to another, among the blocks and beneath the showers.

  Fluted spigots poked out of the ceiling in concentric rings throughout the central portion of the room. They resembled flowers hanging from tree branches in a way. Their spouts were designed by a queen long passed to look like the blooming buds of tulips, and the pipes were hidden inside intricately worked tubing, which was made to look knobbly and organic, though the whole contrivance was cast in a silvery metal of a kind he had never identified.

  Against his better judgment, he snatched a look at a jua boy—coal dark with dense curls that hugged his scalp and taller than nearly all of the other boys in the showers.

  His gaze lingered too long and the boy noticed, shed a withering look on him. Fire climbed into his cheeks.

  Dead things. He thought, as he hurried away. Old people. Lady Jain.

  He summoned the image of a wizened, old hag. Lady Jain was among the most powerful nobles in Shadovane, and kept the Royal Office of Operations, which oversaw all of the coordination efforts behind the palace’s grandest parties, as well as its more mundane services. Age had melted her in the way of a large candle left to burn for several hours. If all else failed, he could count on her image to banish the embarrassing results of his minds more perverted forays.

  He approached an unoccupied spout in a sparsely populated section of the room, and depressed a blackened, stone pedal in the floor in front of it with his heel. Water fell from the spout. He tested it with his fingers, depressed a gray pedal next to it and released it when the water had reached a bearable temperature.

  He kept the image of Lady Jain’s pug-like face hard in his mind as he bent to a dish on the floor and pulled out a bar of soap, and swiftly rushed through the work—lather, rinse and done. The whole affair was over in record time. He had no desire to linger here longer than was strictly necessary, and so backpedaled until his feet depressed both pedals, cutting the stream of water off.

  Lady Jain. He thought as he returned to the blocks and the shelves, snatching harried looks at a number of other boys as he passed them—among them, a kitune with a thick mat of black curls covering his chest, and a lanky human a little older than him with smooth cheeks and piercing, ice-blue eyes.

  He pulled his effects off the shelf, set his clothes on the nearest block, ruffled a towel through his hair, and patted his face dry. It was then that he noticed him.

  A boy who shared some features in common with the giida people—loose, chestnut curls and eggshell skin, a beak of a nose thrust out from between eyes framed by dark circles. He was clean shaven, his eyes a warm, mud brown, lips somewhat thin and quirked upward at the corners. There was a natural, rosy flush to his cheeks, a feature that made Lance weak in the knees and sent his heart racing. He struck a slender figure, was not particularly muscled, and as he toweled himself off, he stood slightly duck footed, making him appear somewhat awkward without meaning to.

  Lance didn’t realize he was staring, that his towel had dropped from his fist and was now a rumpled mass soaking up dew on the tiles. The other boy bent to towel off his calves, turned at that moment and met his gaze, and froze.

  His eyebrow twitched, and something that might have been curiosity, anxiety or frustration stole over him. His lips firmed, his gaze jerked away from the voyeur servant Lance had become, and he snapped his towel to his crotch.

  Lance shifted his attention pointedly away, a knee jerk response as the awkwardness of the situation caught up to him, that he had been watching this stranger, breaking the one unspoken rule regarding conduct in these compromising times.

  He snatched his clothes from their place and hustled to get them on. Underwear flew up his legs. His arms snapped into shirt sleeves, fingers worked frantically over the buttons. He needed to get out of here while there was still time to salvage—

  Shit! He’s coming over here. Why is he coming over here!

  What do I do? What do I do?

  He thought about running. Grabbing his pants off the block and bolting out of the showers in his briefs, but he would be out of the frying pan then, open to more trouble than he had any business entertaining. At best, he would be sent to Lady Tamalsen for a caning, then. The Mistress of Servants would carry the insult in her bones.

  He whipped his pants straight and nearly jumped into them, hiked them up as fast as he could.

  “Hey!” the other boy called. “Hey wait!”

  He broke into a jog as Lance buttoned his fly.

  Lance didn’t give him time to get any further. He bolted out of the showers, missed a step on the way down the stairs and caught the rail just short of a tooth cracking fall; and then hurried down the flight barefoot, with his shoes hugged to his chest.

  When he reached the bottom, the towering doors into the canteen just ahead, he bent to catch his breath. And cussed.

  “FUCK!” he said through clenched teeth. “What were you thinking!”

  He stood there, bent double, his lungs on fire, trying to gather the thread of what had just happened. It had all gone off the rails so quickly. Before it had a chance to get anywhere good.

  “You fucking coward! You absolute weirdo!”

  He noticed the stitching on the hem of his shirt, and realized he was wearing it inside out. One last reminder to tell him just how badly he had messed up. How easily he had let his one shot with that boy slide through his fingers.

  Oh god. What if I see him again? What if he approaches me. He thought. I need to talk to Sami. She always knows what to do.