Servant Mage does all the heavy lifting of an epic fantasy story in the short length of a novella, and I think the length did this world a disservice. Kate Elliott has come up with some really neat ideas here, and this is a world with some politics I could be interested in.

However, I think this being a novella forces a lot of world building shorthand in the way I like least. Everyone asks questions and gives long answers to those questions that give the reader all the information we need about snippets of the world...but in a lot of instances it made no sense for the characters to be speaking as they did. They very much felt like characters running around in a fantasy novel, instead of characters inhabiting a world that I'm getting a peek into. 

I still think there is so, so much promise here, and if you want a quick interesting fantasy read, then I say try out this novella. Kate Elliott certainly has some great stories and ideas within her.