Free A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix

Prince has incurred two demerits, he will not be off duty for several weeks.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lucisk without inflection. ‘You had best get moving, Cadet Khemri, if you don’t want to incur more demerits.’
    ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ I replied. ‘Thanks.’
    Out in the corridor, Haddad leaned in close.
    ‘You need to meet your priests, Highness. I recommend a fast detour to your off-duty accommodations. It will reduce your settling-in time in the barracks, but I think meeting your priests is of more importance in order to establish more relay points to the Imperial Mind.’
    ‘Sure,’ I replied, once again channelling the insouciance of my favourite Prince from history, or perhaps legend, Garikm XXXII. ‘What can they do to me, anyway?’
    Quite a lot, as it happened.

5
    C ADET DUTY BARRACKS Thanruz, unlike the opulent suite of rooms I had just seen that would be my off-duty residence, was a bare cavern hewn from the rock. Basic beds were lined up in a row, separated by extruded Bitek storage pods. Water was dripping from the ceiling in one corner, and the whole place was very harshly illuminated by Mektek incandescent arrays that had been fixed to the rock above each bed.
    When I arrived, some species of lower cadet officer with bronze epaulettes, rather than the silver of Lucisk or Janokh, was haranguing the eight other cadets who would be my classmates for the next year. The cadets were standing in various poses of disinterest, annoyance, and anger at the feet of their beds, obviously experiencing the same disillusionment that I had gone through: the discovery that being a cadet in the Navy pretty much cancelled out all the benefits of being a Prince, at least when we were on duty.
    I picked up their projections as I walked in. My face was clear now, thanks to Uncle Krughal, one of my new household priests who had some experience in hazardous material cleanup, though as Haddad had foreseen, it was really a job for a Bitek specialist priest—which we didn’t have. Krughal’s Psitek nanobrushing had removed all the stain, so I knew that it wasn’t my dirty face that was making the cadet officer, one Prince Jesmur, snarl as she caught sight of me.
    ‘Cadet Khemri! You’re five minutes late. Take your station by your bed.’
    ‘Only five minutes!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m improving. Uh, which one is my bed?’
    I asked because there was no overlay to show me, but of course there was only one bed that didn’t have a Prince standing in front of it. Call it an early lesson that overreliance on tek overlays is dangerous and thinking is to be preferred.
    :Khemri <> Naval Record Demerit Applied Authority Jesmur <>:
    ‘What was that for?’ I protested as I strolled over to my bed.
    ‘Insolence to a superior officer,’ said Jesmur. ‘If you keep at it, I’ll assign a group demerit to this class.’
    All the other Princes looked at me, none of them happily. There were five female and three male Princes, and we all looked quite different. There was a lot of variation in skin, hair, and eye colour, ranging from the darkest black skin, dark hair, and purple eyes of Prince Aliadh to the orange-tinted skin and yellow eyes of Prince Fyrmis, who—as was not unusual for some planets—had no hair at all. My own brown skin and black eyes were pretty much in the middle of the pack. My hair at that time was long and tied back in a queue, though later when I became more aware of Imperial fashions, which primarily consisted of the aping of old Earth customs, I had it shaved save for a strip in the middle, a hairstyle called a mohuck for reasons that had not survived the march of history.
    It did not take long to learn that in addition to looking different, we also had different abilities, and that even among Princes, no one was created equal. Though we had all been augmented in the same way, that augmentation had built on different genetic potentials. Some of the Princes in my class group were faster