by C. E. Murphy
She knocked her bedroom door open with her hip as she spoke, Marius fixated on her until Nina’s shrill scream broke through the gag as a pathetic, high sound. She twisted on the bed, hands knotted, hips raised as she struggled against her bonds and only tightened them with her efforts. A blush scarred Marius’s cheeks, his gaze torn between Belinda and the writhing, bound girl on the bed. “You have admired her, have you not?” Belinda whispered. “She has known a man’s touch before. Take your pleasure from her, and think of me.”
Nina screamed again, bucking and flinging herself against the bed. Marius flinched, his colour still high, and spoke with no conviction: “She does not want me.”
Belinda released his hands, letting her robe flutter around her as she went to the bed. “She will,” she promised, confidence burning inside her. More than confidence: a drive to prove herself, to explore, to control; all things lying outside Belinda’s sense of self, lying beyond her long-imposed stillness. There were reasons to draw back, reasons that seemed far away and faded behind a wall of golden fire. It was without hesitation that Belinda sat at Nina’s side, stroking her hand down the younger woman’s belly as she repeated, “She will.”
Nina shrieked again, spitting a curse that spilled new tears from her eyes and turned to dry sobs inside a breath. Belinda leaned down, kissing tears away and touching Nina’s breasts. She could taste her servant’s thoughts if she wanted to, helpless repetitions of resignation struggling with the need to defend her own honour, discomfort at the erotic potential of her mistress’s touch, a horrifying acquiescence that hungered for more. “Nina.” Belinda whispered the name, taking her hands away and shifting to sit at the head of the bed, lifting Nina’s head into her lap. “Are you afraid, Nina?”
The girl nodded, dying hope coming into her eyes, into her thoughts. Perhaps her mistress would let her go from the nightmare she’d been brought into in the dark hours, if she admitted to her fear. Belinda’s soft smile made that hope blossom and Nina twisted, not in rebellion this time, but in supplication. Love me, protect me, save me, I’ll do anything spun through the desperate action and Belinda’s own body tightened with desire. “Do you want him to fuck you, Nina?”
Belinda felt hot tears spill along her own temples, felt the tension in Nina’s neck as the girl shook her head frantically. Another smile curved Belinda’s lips, offering another shard of cruel hope to her serving girl. Power sang through her, encouraging, dominating, and Belinda leaned closer to whisper against Nina’s ear. “Do you feel any desire now, Nina?”
Nina shook her head again, coldness in her body and thoughts telling Belinda the answer was true. The witchpower needed no gathering: it was there, golden and heavy, exploring the nuances of Nina’s emotions. It heated and shot a throb of need into Nina along thin tendrils of connection, so sharp and unexpected that even Belinda gasped with it, uncertain if it had been her own choice to fill Nina with aching want. Belinda knew that aspect of desire all too well, memories of a lifetime’s training at learned arousal in a submissive position rising, then spilling into Nina. Caught by her own lust and the witchpower’s strength, Belinda focused on the ache in her own body and the heat of need climbing in her.
Nina gasped, eyes unfocused. Her hips relaxed, then lifted in a different way. Her nipples hardened under the onslaught of desires chosen for her, and triumph blossomed in Belinda’s breast. Hungry with the ability to do so, she sent shame through the witchpower, and watched tears fill Nina’s eyes again, even as she whimpered behind her gag and pressed her knees apart. Emotion washed back to Belinda, need rising until it hurt coupled with Nina’s humiliation at her body’s sudden betrayal. Belinda let the shame go, replacing it with rage. Nina vaulted upward as best she could, straining and twisting, cords standing in her neck as she screamed deep, raw sounds of fury against her gag. Belinda fed that, her own breathing growing ragged, until Nina’s eyes were shot with blood from the force of her protests and sweat soaked her body. Belinda sensed, more than saw, Marius hovering a few feet away, too taken with the sights to retreat and utterly uncertain of his place there. Nina’s diametric changes in emotion excited him beyond his comprehension, as did the girl’s dark head in Belinda’s lap.
“Is that better?” Belinda whispered the question over Nina’s hair as she released the rage. “Have you fought enough, love? Do you think we believe your anger?” Sensuality bred from exhaustion slipped in with the words, slow need throbbing again. Nina turned her head, whimpering as her body betrayed her again, and finally her gaze came to Marius. He took a rough step forward and she moaned behind her gag, lifting her hips. “Touch her,” Belinda commanded, and he put his hand between the girl’s legs as if Belinda manipulated his desires as well. Nina sobbed and Belinda flooded her with the impulse to submit and offer herself to the merchant youth. She accepted it, spreading her already-wide legs and pleading with her captured voice and eyes. A curve slipped over Belinda’s mouth: she had no sense of Nina believing her emotions and needs were anything but her own, betraying as they might be. A servant girl was an easy target, bearing nothing like the will of a prince or queen, but it could be done. Her gift extended that far.
Belinda looked up, a smile still playing her lips. Marius was trembling, his hand sealing the heat between Nina’s thighs. “Do you wish to be cruel to her, m’sieur? As I was to you?”
A flash of heat scored off him, then faded as he shook his head, uncertain of which woman to look at. Without touching him, Belinda couldn’t know his thoughts, but the emotion that poured from him said despite the momentary impulse, his better nature was true. That he wanted the helpless servant was unquestionable, but he had no need to do her brutally. Belinda pulled her lower lip into her teeth, watching the youth with dark eyes, and sought out that instant of spitefulness that had sparked through him.
It was there, buried beneath an overwhelming eroticism at the strength Belinda had shown the night before. He was a man; he did not think of himself as submissive, and yet he’d given her his throat and, mortifyingly, his arse, and liked it all. Belinda grasped that moment of humiliation and played it forward, making it larger than it had been; making him think on and remember it, when he preferred to put it away.
There was a woman here who could not resist him, Belinda whispered into that sliver of embarrassment. A woman who could not use him the way he’d been used. A woman to regain his manhood through, a woman to dominate and show his strength to. She would not dare laugh at him as Beatrice had seemed to, or would she? Was that amusement in her wide eyes now, recognizing that he’d been taken by a woman? Was she gagged to stop her laughter, those sounds in her throat not need or fear or desire, but mocking?
Marius curled his lip, hand twisting at Nina’s crotch to slam soaking fingers inside her. She cried out behind her gag and Marius’s eyes darkened further, free hand fumbling at his leggings to loosen them. Belinda’s heart raced, lip caught in her teeth as she leaned in, unable to stop herself from encouraging his building outrage with her own body language. Her breasts spilled forward, close to Nina’s face, and she felt a spike surge through the man, as his imagination had the servant suckle the mistress.
Belinda nearly laughed with split concentration, feeding enough of her own raw want to Nina to keep the girl on the agonizing edge of fear and desire. At the same time she drew on Marius’s barely acknowledged desire for domination, turning it and feeding it into anger that it had happened. He closed his hand over Nina’s throat and replaced his fingers within her with his cock, a hard claiming that pulled a raw gasp of pleasure from Belinda. Nina cried out in bewildered pain and Marius tightened his hand at her throat, every struggle she made pushing him deeper into the violence Belinda had called up in him. She laughed, rocking her own hips forward with enthusiasm, floating on physical and emotional links to the two she had made unwilling lovers.
It was easy. Too easy, perhaps; sex and passion were easily built upon, the mortal weakness for pleasure. So easy she’d become lost in it, letting ne
wfound power stretch and explore even beyond what she would have thought to be her own limits.
Beneath lust, beneath desire brought to the boiling point, the thought that the witchpower was controlling her made a cool angry place inside her. Whether it did, whether it could, she would not allow it to happen freely. Belinda licked a hungry tongue over her lips, rolling with the need that built between Nina and Marius until it lay so close to completion it seemed nothing could stop it.
She threw her head back and with all deliberate cruelty, as much to herself as to the bespelled pair beneath her, called the stillness. Proving to herself that she could. The witchpower was second to the stillness. It had to be, even if it could burn away that recollection with passion. It had controlled her. Now she must control it.
Stillness swept over her, a lifetime’s practise stronger than any desire she had ever known. She distanced herself from the passion that wet her thighs, slowed her heartbeat and ignored the pain nipping at her breasts until it was gone.
Marius, unprepared for sudden flaccidity, croaked in disbelief, all his desire for violence, for sensuality, drowned as thoroughly in Belinda’s calm as it had been built by her witchpower. Nina cried out again, dismay at the cessation of emotion; Belinda had not even left her her own dismay and fear at what she’d been brought in to. There was nothing left for either of them, no climax, no pleasure, so cold and wrapped in the survival trait Belinda had developed for herself were they.
Passion was easy. Cutting its throat was power, and that power lay in the stillness, not the witch-magic itself. Relief trembled deep inside her, that even lost in pounding want, she could bring herself back under rein. Belinda rose from the bed a paragon of tranquility, dressing gown gathered around her breasts and leaving her shoulders bared. Marius lifted his head, face twisted with befuddlement, and she touched his cheek, heartbeat slow through years of training. “Finish her while I dress, my love.”
Not quite trusting her now-silent witchpower, Belinda released her hold on the lovers, leaving them nothing but their own emotions, Nina’s fear and Marius’s bewilderment. The young man scrambled away from the servant girl as Belinda left the bedroom, wrapped in carefully held stillness.
“I’m doing this for Jav.” Eliza thrust her jaw out with the words, laying them flat between herself and Belinda. Belinda dropped her eyes, letting Beatrice’s easy smile quirk her lips.
“So am I.” She lifted her gaze, meeting Eliza’s evenly. “With that in mind, we might make the best of it.” Marius, flushed and flustered, had left before the noon bells had tolled. Belinda had climbed the stairs, skirts gathered and curiosity high in her mind, to investigate what he had left behind.
Nina, exhausted, confused, blushing to the tops of her breasts, had been left curled on her side, bindings released to let the girl huddle around herself, small and afraid. Surprise had wrinkled Belinda’s forehead. She would have taken the order brutally, the finish she demanded was one the pretty serving girl would never wake from. But that was her training, her expectation, and her cold way of facing the world. Marius was, at his core, a kind man; if Belinda had doubted it before, she no longer did. Left with a living, breathing, blushing girl, she’d bathed Nina herself, finding herself unaccustomed to the gentleness she felt at doing so. She liked the girl, and if Nina were to live, then best to do right by her, as much as could be done.
Nina had been calm when the bath ended, able to meet her mistress’s eyes. Whether a need to survive overcame humiliation or whether Belinda’s careful attempts to alter the girl’s memories were successful, Belinda was unsure. If her ministrations had worked, Nina’s night had been spent in Beatrice’s bed, indeed, against the cold and a fire that had burned out without new wood to feed it. Belinda told herself there was nothing of soft-heartedness in trying to rebuild the girl’s thoughts, only a test to see whether she was able, but a thread of unusual guilt ran beneath the experiment. She had been roughly used often enough to wish the edge could be blunted, and she’d been trained for it. Nina had found herself caught in a web she had no chance of understanding, and it brooked unexpected sympathy within Belinda’s heart.
She’d offered Nina a length of cloth to dry herself with, deliberately brushing her hand over the girl’s naked breast. Nina had squeaked, a small sound of startlement that flooded Belinda with the same innocent confusion and desire that a similar touch had once brought, and Belinda had been satisfied with her investigation. Nina had been set to airing a room for Eliza, putting out bedding and wall hangings of equal quality to the ones in Belinda’s rooms, and Belinda had gone to await her new housemate.
Eliza arrived with almost nothing. A stand for the wig made of her own lustrous black hair, a trunk barely touched with clothes. Her men’s wear was blatantly folded on top of the few items within the trunk, and she shook them out now, as Belinda watched. “Nina will do that,” Belinda offered softly. Eliza’s lip curled.
“I don’t need a servant, Beatrice. I’ve done for myself all my life.”
“I know. But if we’re to make the best of this, there’s no harm in settling into the house like you belong, is there?” To her surprise, Belinda meant the question, oddly hopeful she could make a friend of the prince’s beautiful friend. “Nina honestly won’t know what to do with herself if she finds all your things already put away.”
“Nina knows I’m a guttersnipe,” Eliza snapped. “Just as everyone else does.”
“Eliza.” Belinda took a few steps forward, putting her hand on the taller woman’s shoulder. Eliza flinched away, jaw set again. Belinda dropped her hand, but not her voice. “Have you noticed the prince has a friend from each obvious class, in you three? The nobility, the merchants, the poor. You were all too young, I think, for him to make that choice deliberately, but if you play it right now, it could make him even more beloved than he is. No one expects you to become something you aren’t. You know where you’re from, and God knows the nobility will never let you forget it. But if you’re generous with your time and your money and bring the poor to Javier’s attention, even the nobility won’t be able to despise you outright. And the poor will love you for it.”
Eliza spat, the sound so violent Belinda expected to see a glob of moisture land on the bedpost. “The poor will hate me as much as my father does for living.”
“Javier loves you,” Belinda said steadily. “The poor will see you as one of them who touches the stars. You can give them all a dream. Dreams are more precious than coin, sometimes.”
“What would you know about it?” That was spat, too, but Eliza had stopped putting her own belongings away.
Belinda drew her lower lip into her mouth, searching for an answer honest enough to ring true without belying the persona she’d assumed. “I could see it from the prince’s face,” she said after long seconds. “That to him, sleeping with the pigs was a colourful expression. That it was outside the possibility of reality. I wasn’t born to nobility, Eliza. My title came with my marriage bed.”
Eliza’s shoulders stilled as if she dared not breathe until Belinda’s confession was through. For her part, Belinda took a deliberately deep breath, speaking to those squared shoulders. “We were landed, though not generously. No Ecumenic seems to be well-endowed now, not after a half century of Walter rule. My husband was old, his wealth a gift for loyal service to the Reformation queen. We had no dowry to offer him, not even my beauty.”
Eliza’s shoulders pulled back, a twitch as loud as words. Belinda cast a smile at the floor. “Don’t bother,” she murmured. “You’re beautiful, Eliza. I’m pretty. I don’t need protests to other ends. Besides, it wasn’t beauty my husband desired. It was a girl wellborn enough to not cause comment and ordinary enough to…not cause comment. He had certain pleasures,” she said to the slight turn of Eliza’s head. “Pleasures a beautiful bride might have dared object to, or that a father with his daughter’s beauty to sell might have found ways to avoid. Pleasures a young man might risk saving a beautiful woman from. I…did
n’t offer those risks. I never slept with the pigs,” she added more clearly, and out of all of it, that was the lie that stung to speak, “but I know more of that life, from my childhood, than I do of this one.” She fluttered a hand at Eliza’s room.
“Your husband,” Eliza said in a high voice, “died of old age.” There was a question around the edges of her statement, one that neither woman would allow to come to the fore. Belinda’s heart went tight, internal expectation that she didn’t allow near her features.
“I was fortunate.” Her voice, too, was high and soft. “Perhaps there’s someone you know whose age is creeping up on him.”
Stillness, as profound as any Belinda knew, settled over Eliza again. When she spoke, it was not to the topic at hand, its weight too heavy in the afternoon-lit bedroom. “Do you really think they could be made to see me as something other than Javier’s whore?”
“I think that if that’s what you want, you’d better begin by growing your hair out.”
Eliza turned, a startled hand going to her shorn locks, protest blackening already dark eyes. “It’s that or wear your wig all the time, and hair’s cooler than a wig. You’re acting out of defiance.” To her own surprise, sorrow curved Belinda’s lips. “You’re throwing it in their faces, that you’re a woman protected by the prince and so you dare to do the unconventional. I know you don’t like me, but I have no reason to lie to you when I say you aren’t physically capable of being conventional. You’ll be beautiful when you’re sixty, when all the rest of us are merely old. Wear the wig,” she said softly. “Grow your hair. Put aside the men’s clothes and dress in your own gowns. Set convention. Be generous to where you came from, and yes, Eliza, they will see you as something other than Javier’s whore. Not all of them. There will always be small-minded and bitter people. You’ll have to be stronger than they are. But you are beautiful. You’ll be able to make most of them love you.” She sighed. “And you’ll be able to make Jav regret all his life that he’s not the one who can have you.”