Princes' Game Series Guide: Even the Wingless (Patreon)

Now we get into super spoiler material. As I promised, this synopsis gives you enough context to understand the characters, setting, and background; since this is the first book, there's a lot of context I have to give you, too, so this particular synopsis is pretty long. Like... really long.

Please heed the introductions and ratings info from the first part I posted (you can read that here if you missed it). Read this only 1. if you want to, and 2. if you feel you're in a good place for it. I don't go into details but I do say directly what happens and how it affects people.

• If you haven't read the series, and you want to, then DON'T READ THIS UNLESS YOU LIKE SPOILERS. And by spoilers, I mean nearly blow-by-blow stuff. Read the book first, then you can come back and giggle at my attempts to fit it all in five pages.
• If you have read the series, you can either read the synopsis (to see how well I did) or skip to the end to read the additional info I put afterwards, some of which might be fun/interesting.
• If you haven't read the series and aren't planning to, I am particularly interested in your opinions about how I did. Do you feel clued-in? Like you can understand some of the artwork of the characters, or participate in some of the conversations going on with other fans about events to come?

Now, having said all the things, here's the material. Read on, at your discretion.

***

  

Book 1: Even the Wingless

Rating: R. Rape. Violence. Outright torture. Slavery. Lots of sex, most all nonconsensual.

“The book where telempathy > abusive dragons.”

This is the story that starts it all. Not just the series, but the chain of events that rearranges galactic politics for three separate nations. And it starts with Lisinthir Nase Galare, who is, in the words of one of my favorite reviews,“ the most bad*** character I've seen in one of Hogarth's stories, and you'll cheer for him the entire time.”

Our set-up then. The Chatcaavan Empire is enormous and full of warring factions. The current Chatcaavan Emperor rode to power on his ability to play them against one another to keep them in check, and now straddles the throne of a political power focused on its ability to conquer and annex territory... because the other thing you do with people who like fighting is direct that fight outward. This is a social system that rewards the strong and enslaves or destroys the weak, and its pinnacle is the throneworld court. The Chatcaavan males who go there do so to prove to one another they still deserve their positions by savaging one another, and the one who can beat them all is the one who gets to lead.

If you think this sounds unsustainable, you’re not wrong.

Women in this subculture are chattel, prizes to be passed around (or distractions to make your enemies soft). They’re sorted into harems, and naturally the most powerful male has the most females. In addition to two harems and a nursery full of baby dragons bred on them, the Emperor has one extra female, his Queen. In bygone, better ages, this female was the known as the Queen Ransomed, so called because she held everyone’s behavior to account: she was ransom for their moral conduct. In this current, debauched age the position has evolved into the Slave Queen, the most exalted and most debased of all Chatcaavan females.

Chatcaava fight for titles. To be titled is to have a destiny. The moment you earn one, you leave your name behind. So the Emperor is known only as the Emperor; the Slave Queen only as the Slave Queen. Etc. Important Chatcaava have titles, not names. This is significant later in the series.

The Empire has a treaty with the Alliance, but it ignores it when it feels like it. One of its most egregious treaty violations is the trading of Alliance citizens as slaves, which it picks up from raids. There’s one such slave in the palace, a Seersa girl the Queen named Khaska. As the novel opens, a new set of ‘special slaves’ is brought to the palace for the approval of the Emperor. This delivery is timed to coincide with the arrival of the newest ambassador: Lisinthir, on loan to the Alliance by the Eldritch. The Alliance wanted an esper ambassador from a less pacific race than the Glaseah, and the Eldritch were all they had. Every other ambassador’s failed to get any useful data out of the Chatcaava (and has come back traumatized, injured, or dead, to boot)... the Alliance is hoping someone who can read minds will have better luck. If he can stay alive.

They got lucky in Lisinthir. Or rather, they didn’t, because it wasn’t luck at all. Liolesa picked him for his aggression and backbone. Her gift for seeing where things fit suggested Lisinthir was the man for the job, so she liberated him from the Eldritch court, where he was suffocating (or terrifying people by calling them on their petty insults and dragging them to the dueling field). She warned him it would be a hard assignment. So did the Alliance team that prepped him for it. But he felt useless at home. This seemed like a chance to put his talents, his intelligence, and his mettle to the test.

“Go to the Empire,” the Alliance told him finally. “Find out whether they’re angling for a war or if this is just the way they are. Try to get things changed. Find out where they’re stealing our people from and if you can, stop that.”

Lisinthir arrives then, and finds himself an outsider in a sadistic court. He’s treated as an alien—someone who definitionally cannot participate in the contests that establish people’s rank in the hierarchy—so he can’t make any progress. Worse, they’ve decided to celebrate his arrival by parading their newest Alliance slaves in front of him, one of which isn’t an Alliance citizen at all, but the crown princess of the Eldritch kingdom, who went missing on an ill-advised jaunt off-world to see her beau. He allows them to believe this insult doesn’t upset him, and this pricks the interest of the Emperor.

The Emperor is a product of his environment. Entirely. He won the throne by being the most Chatcaavan Chatcaavan possible: by killing, raping, and dominating his way to the pinnacle of power. He sees nothing wrong with this; he won fairly, by Chatcaavan standards. But there’s a faultline in his personality, and it’s linked to his intelligence, and it’s that he’s curious. He wants to understand things. Unlike many Chatcaava, he’s as willing to use information to win his battles as talon and teeth. And Lisinthir’s behavior puzzles him, and puzzles interest him.

He decides he wants to take Lisinthir apart to find out what makes him tick. And Lisinthir, sensing an opening, decides to let him try.

The first third of the book is about Lisinthir’s maneuvering to liberate the crown princess and the other slaves. He’s abetted in this process by Khaska: in reality Laniis Baker, a former Fleet lieutenant who had the poor fortune to be captured. He is also, surprisingly, helped by the Slave Queen. Because he treats her well, and that confuses her. She’s lonely, and she can’t help but be drawn to him.

Together, they hatch a plan. As one of the few winged females, the Slave Queen can shapechange. If she can learn the pattern of the Eldritch princess, she can impersonate her while Lisinthir has the real Eldritch and the other slaves smuggled out of the palace. This Lisinthir arranges with the Alliance through his contact, an Alliance windtalker who can speak fluent Eldritch and uses this as an additional layer of security in their communications.

(This windtalker is, it turns out, Jahir; Liolesa offered him up, or tried. Fleet already knew about him and Vasiht’h because of their work with Fleet personnel on Starbase Veta, so they had already thought of contacting him.)

The process of shapechanging has two parts. The Chatcaava touches a person and draws their pattern from them (known as the Touch). And the Chatcaava Changes, in which they shift their shape. When the Slave Queen attempts to Touch the Eldritch princess to learn her pattern, the princess pushes her away, finding the intrusion of the Slave Queen’s mind too upsetting. When the Slave Queen reveals this to Lisinthir, he offers her his pattern instead.

She Touches him; he touches her, and in doing so learns something of her mind. And he weeps for her, for her imprisonment in her tower, for her loneliness and desolation. Seeing her misery reflected on the face of an alien—for Chatcaava cannot cry tears—the Slave Queen is changed herself, forever.

They succeed in impersonating the princess; the slaves are secreted away (including Khaska/Laniis). The Slave Queen suffers the public torture intended for the princess, and Lisinthir is forced to watch as she endures it. It’s the only way they can buy the slaves enough time to make it over the border. The Emperor, having little experience with Eldritch and no experience with the shapechange (more on that later), does not realize he is tormenting a fake.

Later, Lisinthir is hauled before the Emperor and accused of arranging the (successful) escape. He does not deny it—in fact, he boldly claims the deed, and tells the Emperor they were his people and he could do no less. The Emperor finds this infuriating, but also fascinating, because Lisinthir is acting like a Chatcaavan, not an alien, and like a Chatcaavan Lisinthir stole back the chattel he felt belonged to him. So he lets Lisinthir live, and even stay. And he starts wondering just how far the draconic streak extends in this alien.

What follows then is a series of increasingly difficult emotional and psychological tests. The Emperor wants to know if Lisinthir has “horns” or if he’s just another weak alien. Lisinthir wants to understand whether the Empire is going to go to war with the Alliance, and is committed to forcing the Empire to behave like a treaty partner rather than a rapacious gang. They both think their time together is an opportunity to learn about one another.

This is where all the rape comes in, because it’s a tool the Chatcaava use on one another if a male is too useful to be killed outright, but too dangerous to be ignored. They strive to dominate one another in private, rather than in public with duels (which might result in death). The first time the Emperor inflicts himself on Lisinthir, Lisinthir thinks seriously of calling it a day and going home, until the Slave Queen explains that this is a good sign: it means the Emperor is taking him seriously. Alien males don’t get raped; they’re toyed with, they’re not treated as serious rivals. If he can stick with this course, he might manage to accrue enough power to get what he wants.

So Lisinthir sticks with the course. Hard. He starts fighting back, and even succeeds in besting the Emperor in bed. He reflects that he’s sexually assaulting a head of state, and wonders how he can hold that in his head along with who he is. These thoughts continue to trouble him as he tries to find the line between the moral behavior he was taught, and the behavior necessary to be respected in the Empire. The challenges become more fraught when the Emperor discovers Lisinthir’s weakness is, in fact, the weak and powerless. He threatens random innocent females to see if he can coerce Lisinthir into behaving, and this works. Sort of. Because the Emperor expects humiliation to make Lisinthir biddable, and all it does is make him angry... and Lisinthir takes that out on the Emperor’s administrative helpmeets, Second and Third. He starts forcing them into giving the Alliance concessions, so effectively that Second tries to poison him. This is how Lisinthir takes up smoking hekkret, the only form of that poison that might convey an immunity to its more concentrated form.

Finally, Second goes to the Emperor and tells him that Lisinthir is getting too confident and too powerful. The Emperor tells Lisinthir to submit to him or he’ll kill the Slave Queen, and he means it. Intriguing aliens are one thing. Intriguing aliens who are manipulating his government are another. Sensing the gravity of the threat, Lisinthir does, in fact, submit.

Badly. Lisinthir is not very good at submission. He’s actually awful at it.

This situation lasts until Lisinthir rescues the Emperor’s newest son. Confused by an enemy who can hate him so much and still save his children, the Emperor stops with the humiliation tests and returns to the garden-variety raping, which is a fairer contest between them: sometimes Lisinthir wins. Because Lisinthir can win those contests, he thinks of them fondly. He even enjoys them.

This gets confusing. For both of them.

All the while, the Slave Queen watches this transformation: of Lisinthir into a (dragon-style) male of power and authority, and strangely, of the Emperor into this increasingly fascinated scientist. She sees Lisinthir daily, and lets him talk out his upsets, and listens to his stories of gentler cultures and better times. He teaches her Universal, the common tongue of the Alliance, and about personhood and consent and love. These stories start changing her. To think of herself as a person and not an object is fraught for a Slave Queen, because there is no hope for her life, for any possibility of agency or happiness. But she can’t help but respond to the ideas and ideals.

In an attempt to win back the Emperor’s favor (which he’s been losing by getting caught raiding and called on it by Lisinthir), Third goes out and raids a border world and comes back with an enormous number of slaves. The Emperor is entertained—he wants to use them to see if he can faze Lisinthir. Lisinthir tells him to let the slaves go; the Emperor refuses.

When they fight this time, Lisinthir is armed. He is ready to die for this... or kill.

Naturally, the guy with the natural talons wins. 

While the Surgeon is trying to keep Lisinthir from expiring, the Emperor goes to see the Slave Queen in her tower, where the new slaves are sleeping. He opines that the new slaves are boring because they’re nothing like Lisinthir. She agrees and suggests they are a distraction. This makes him laugh. He tells Second to send the slaves back, an action that appalls Second: “It will look like we’re admitting to wrongdoing!” The Emperor agrees and tells Second to make it work for them. “Tell them I’m changing.” Second asks, horrified, “Are you?”

This is the point where the Emperor starts losing his own court. Second is his oldest and staunchest partisan and even Second is beginning to wonder why the Emperor doesn’t just kill this irritating interloper and move on.

Lisinthir wakes up in the clinic, eventually, where the Surgeon gets him back on his feet. Lisinthir goes directly from there to challenge Third in public for enslaving Alliance citizens... and kills him on the Chatcaavan dueling field. He kills Third’s assistant as well. Then he joins the Emperor and calls his honor satisfied. The Emperor is also satisfied. But this is a problem, as the Slave Queen tells Lisinthir... because if the Emperor believes Lisinthir to be emblematic of the Alliance, he’ll want to test the Empire’s strength against the Alliance’s. Because Lisinthir makes the Alliance seem like an interesting fight.

This will precipitate the war the Alliance wants so badly to avoid.

Lisinthir decides at that point that his only hope is to drag the Emperor down into the gutter. The Chatcaavan who replaces him won’t be as curious or fascinated by psychological puzzles... he won’t care enough about the Alliance to make active war on it. All Lisinthir has to do is convince the court the Emperor is so sunk into depravity in the bed of his alien catamite that he’s weak enough to be culled.

This is when he decides to tempt the Emperor into experiencing the Change. His reasoning: if he can teach the Emperor the Eldritch shape, he can distract the Emperor with the ability to feel other people’s feelings. Someone of the Emperor’s enduring curiosity wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to experiment with that pretty much FOREVER. So he taunts the Emperor into Touching him by accusing him of cowardice, and the Emperor calls his bluff, steals his pattern, and learns to be an Eldritch.

And is utterly enraptured by the experience.

By now the two are totally engrossed in one another. The Slave Queen is keeping Lisinthir sane by reminding him of who he was, and he needs it because the process of changing the Emperor is changing him. And the Emperor is beginning to change. Can’t help but change, drowning himself in this exploration of people’s motivations and how that informs their decisions, their strengths, their weaknesses. All the things he’s learned to predict by observation are now subject to direct proof—how could he not be entranced? Everything about this is new. He finds himself fascinated by willing submission, which ‘tastes’ better through the skin, and at this point he and Lisinthir draw the Slave Queen into their experiments. By now their encounters are edging closer and closer to consensual acts.

But the Emperor is not yet fully theirs, and Lisinthir finds a way to challenge him a final time. When they are playfully arguing about which of them is stronger, Lisinthir claims he is, because he can endure anything on behalf of those he longs to protect, even humiliation and defeat and death, if necessary. The Emperor thinks this is bunk and tells him to prove it.

So Lisinthir asks him to be a voyeur into Lisinthir’s mind while he’s suffering the types of tortures the Emperor inflicted on him while threatening the Slave Queen’s safety. “Really feel what I went through.”

Doing this—being forced to witness what he inflicted on someone he’s come to cherish—shatters the foundation of the Emperor’s belief system. He suddenly sees himself as a tormentor, and Lisinthir, not as a victim, but as a pillar of strength. It’s an overwhelming shift for him, and Lisinthir compounds it by revealing that the Slave Queen was the Eldritch the Emperor tortured... that not only is Lisinthir capable of this kind of strength, but the Queen too.

The Emperor stops wanting to hurt them, or anyone. And for a halcyon few weeks, they drown in one another’s arms, and Lisinthir and the Queen watch the Emperor start to transform from the sociopath required by Chatcaavan society into someone they could love.

The problem is that... he’s transforming from the sociopath required by Chatcaavan society into someone they could love. Lisinthir’s plan to see him dragged down by the court has worked, and culminates in Second—the Emperor’s strongest ally—challenging him as unfit to be Emperor. Unfortunately for Second, the Emperor is still a savage fighter. He kills Second, cementing his hold—temporarily—over his restive court. But he senses the precariousness of his position, and so after one more night in the arms of his lovers, he tells Lisinthir he has to go back to the Alliance.

This tears Lisinthir’s heart, but the Slave Queen agrees. The Emperor has to re-establish his hold on the Empire or he will die, and take any hope of reform with him. So Lisinthir, numb but acquiescent, goes, leaving the Emperor and the Queen Ransomed—retitled by the Emperor to her proper, historical rank—to miss him, and make an attempt to remain in power.

Important Characters

• Lisinthir Nase Galare – Our hero. To the bloody end.
• The Emperor – His nemesis in the beginning, and his lover later. The Emperor recurs throughout the series. He is not always called the Emperor.
• The Slave Queen/Queen Ransomed – The Chatcaavan queen, who begins the story as a victim and a prisoner and learns, during Wingless, that even fettered people have power.
• Khaska/Laniis Baker – The Seersan Fleet lieutenant Lisinthir rescues from the harem returns later in the series.
• The Eldritch Princess, Bethsaida Galare – She doesn’t come off very well in this book, having a mental breakdown during it, but Bethsaida remains an important character (and her fate is referred to in other books in the Her Instruments series).
• Second – While he dies in this book, Second (the Emperor’s administrative right hand in the Empire) casts a long shadow. He will later be referred to as Second-who-was, to distinguish him from his replacement (also called Second).
• Third – While nowhere near as lovingly remembered, Third, the Emperor’s administrative left hand and raider of Alliance worlds, is held up throughout the series as a model of sociopathy and abuse.
• The Surgeon – A bit character in Wingless, the Surgeon is the Chatcaavan responsible for tending the wounds of the males fighting for rank in the court. He introduces the Chatcaavan concept of being ‘Outside’: Chatcaava who are Outside are not fair game for violence or abuse, but they also can’t access the upper class of society, where violence is de rigueur.
• The Mother – Also a bit character in Wingless, the Mother is the Chatcaavan who gives birth to the heir that Lisinthir rescues during the novel. Laniis remembers her as being kind, even to her (an alien).

Military/Political Stuff

By changing the Emperor’s outlook, Lisinthir sets into motion an enormous political brangle. In Wingless we witness it only from the pinnacle of the court, which is a very narrow subculture. We don’t see, because the characters are not intimately involved in, the competing factions in the Empire, and the different social classes that make it work. Those elements are primed now to become important, and make their entrée into the series starting in Book 2.

Personal Stuff

Lisinthir went into the Empire an Eldritch without prospects for a useful future, and discovered that he likes playing the game of thrones, intergalactic-style—not only that, he’s good at it. This is an important epiphany for him because it sets the course of his life. But his transformation is nowhere near as dramatic as the Emperor’s, who has had a complete shift of worldview, or the Queen’s, who has learned to embrace agency and is going to run with that agency with a vengeance in the books to come.

The more important takeaway is that they’re in love with one another, as a triad, and that love is going to change the worlds.

Amusing Sidebar

I wrote this story, originally as a novella (it lacked an ending and the Slave Queen’s viewpoints), way back when Kushiel’s Dart was making a splash as the first major fantasy novel to portray (unabashedly and openly) a sexual masochist and submissive as a protagonist. The success of that novel inspired Tor to hire an editor to acquire “things like that”… and I happened to know that particular editor. I emailed her and said, “Hey, I have a story just like Kushiel’s Dart! Except it’s science fiction instead of fantasy, it’s got a male lead instead of a female, and he’s more dom than sub. Also, it’s got dragons as antagonists.”

To my total surprise, she asked me to send it to her. (I hadn’t even finished writing it. I finished it REALLY QUICKLY.)

To my everlasting surprise, she said she wanted to buy it. For Tor. And even asked the owner if she was good to make me an offer (he said yes).

Even the Wingless, then, was very nearly my first published novel, and back in the days before e-books that would have been a very big thing.

As it happened, that editor left her position and handed over her selections to other editors at Tor, and Wingless landed on the desk of someone who didn’t want it. Since I hadn’t signed a contract yet, she told me ‘thanks but we didn’t actually mean it’ and that was the end of that.

Probably for the best. I can’t imagine what would have become of my career had I launched it as ‘that author who writes about dragon torturers.’ Not only that, but when the editor was discussing revisions to the novel, she told me she wanted me to “add more sex, and make it more graphic.”

…

Yeah, I think that was definitely for the best.

JUST FOR FUN: Reader Highlights

(These are passages underlined by readers in their copies of the book. If they’ve set those highlights public, you can see them on the Amazon kindle website.)

"Anger whittles at your soul. It becomes you. It moves you to acts you would otherwise abhor."

He had entered the Empire an Alliance Ambassador. She wondered if he would exit a dragon.

"Apologies are meaningless. Actions can make lies of them... or truths.

Madness is escape, and death is release. Both are better alternatives than life in chains."

"I don't understand you!" Second said. 

"No," Lisinthir said. "None of you do."