The worst she could have expected would be much worse than being locked up in a gloomy mausoleum to labor for the Emperor every waking moment. There were not many female mages among them—so Hakkon had told him—because female mages, unless they were very powerful indeed, were treated like breeding stock for the purpose of making more mages.

Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d come to Valdemar when they were both eleven, and by the time the Emperor summoned him, they had been absolute best friends.

And, fortunately, she had also had neither great wealth in the form of a dower, nor great beauty. The former would have made her a rich prize that the Emperor could have used as a reward for one of his faithful. The latter—well, she’d still have been a reward for one of his faithful, but first the Emperor would probably have made her one of his many mistresses. He collected beautiful women and seemed to relish best the ones who were openly afraid of him and dared not defy him.

Well, she’d escaped the Emperor’s trap. Her twin brother had been the one who’d gone as a hostage.

And her brother had died there.

Nothing sinister about that, though. It was just reflective of the lack of care that the hostages got. Idor and his body-servant had both fallen ill. No one came to check on them at first when they did not turn up for meals, and by the time Kordas himself had gone to Idor’s room to see what was wrong, it was the first that anyone knew how sick they were. And by that time, it was too late. Despite the best that the healers could do, they had both died within hours of being found.

This was typical. You needed someone like Hakkon to make sure you got your share of food at meals, that nothing was stolen from you, that you weren’t beaten or worse by the predators among the children. In theory, having nobles send their firstborn sons (or daughters, if they had no sons) to the Emperor wasn’t a completely bad idea from the Emperor’s point of view. The youngsters were all treated alike, they got the same education, they integrated into the fabric of the Empire, and they would theoretically grow up loyal to him.

In practice, with a thousand children there, it was barely organized chaos, in which older children ruled the younger, and abuse was common.

The moment that Kordas had discovered Isla’s brother had been lying sick and alone for days was the moment Kordas had vowed to himself that no child of his was ever going to be sent into Imperial care.

Pain in his jaw made him realize he was grinding his teeth—as he often did when he thought about the Emperor and the Imperial Court.