by C. L. Wilson
Virgin, she still was, but there wasn’t a single inch of her body that had not be used and degraded in every other way imaginable.
Her defiance was gone. The Shark had drained that from her long ago. He’d drained her of tears, too. He’d tormented her so long, so relentlessly, that now all she could do was lie there, dull-eyed, and endure, praying for her ordeal to end.
And then, at last, the cabin door opened.
“All right, I’ve let you indulge long enough,” Balat chided as he swept into the cabin. “My girls have work to do. My buyers expect a level of perfection.” The slaver stalked over to the bed and nudged the Shark with his foot. The three collared slave women stood several paces behind him, holding fresh wash water and an armful of what looked like strung pearls.
The Shark gave Summer a few, last leisurely licks before heaving a regretful sigh and rolling over to get off the bed. “You should reconsider your asking price, Balat,” he said as he straightened to his full height. “There is much more to her than her reputation suggests.” He trailed his fingers up and down her body. “I’ve barely had time to taste what she’s made of, but it is much more rich and plentiful than we’ve been led to believe.”
“I’m satisfied with the terms of sale. There’s no need to quibble for a few more coins. Now, come away and let my women work.”
Balat leaned over and cupped both hands behind Gabriella’s head to lift her hair off her neck and fan it out above her head. Once her neck was bared, he slipped a cold metal collar around her throat. “Now this, Your Highness, is a containment collar tuned specifically to your very delicious, very unique magical signature.”
The instant the collar’s locking mechanism clicked shut, Summer’s connection to the source of her magic splintered. The sunlight was still shining through the cabin windows and yet all she could feel was its mild warmth. No charge of magical energy. She slumped back against the bed and stared up at her captors in mute horror.
Mur Balat smiled. “Effective, isn’t it? A little invention I designed to facilitate the storage, transport and sale of magically gifted merchandise.” He turned away. “Come, my friend. You’ve had your fill.”
“I know. There’s just something about this one that keeps making me want one more taste.” The Shark ran his fingers across Gabriella’s eyelids, down the slope of her nose, and across her lips, then he leaned down and traced the same path his fingers had wandered with slow, languid sweeps of his tongue.
The Shark stood up with a sigh. “Barely even a whiff of anything tasty. Disappointing how well it works, isn’t it? That’s why I hate having to use Balat’s collars instead of tzele. They never leave me much to snack on.”
“Don’t be so greedy,” Balat chided. “You can glut yourself on the other two all the way to Trinipor. Now, come along, my girls cannot work with your great bulk lying all over my merchandise.”
As Balat and the Shark headed for the cabin door, Gabriella hissed after them. “He’ll be coming for you, you know. Dilys will hunt you both to the farthest corners of Mystral, and when he finds you, he’s going to kill you.”
The Shark stopped, turned around, and laughed. “No one is coming, princess. We went to great pains to ensure that.”
“You’re wrong. You’re on a ship in the ocean. No matter what you’ve done to hide your trail, you’re mad to think Dilys won’t track you down.”
The Shark turned around, his hungry, predatory smile sharp as knives. “Oh, I hope he does. You have no idea how much I hope he does.”
For the next several days, Gabriella was left to the ministrations of Balat’s three peridot-eyed slaves. Every inch of her skin was scrubbed, waxed, plucked, polished and perfumed to perfection. Her hair was treated with hot oils, washed, trimmed, and brushed until it shone like satin. Her teeth were polished and bleached to pristine whiteness. Even the reddened marks on her neck, wrists and ankles where her bonds had chafed her skin were erased. The slaves, it turned out, had a gift of their own—one not hindered by their collars—for healing flesh and eradicating scars and blemishes. A useful talent for servants of a man who dealt in human merchandise.
She didn’t feel her sisters’ magic again, but considering that she couldn’t feel her own, that didn’t surprise her. No doubt they’d been drained and collared by Balat and his filthy companion before they’d gotten around to doing the same to her. She was, after all, widely acknowledged as the least powerful of the Seasons.
She hoped collaring and having their magic eaten was the worst that had befallen her fellow Seasons, but she remembered Balat ordering the Shark to leave no discernible mark on Summer because there wouldn’t be time to erase it, as there would be with Autumn and Spring. She tried not to think of what sort of marks the Shark might be leaving on her sisters, or what he might be doing to create them.
Raging over their fate but being helpless to do anything about it made her despair, so she forced herself not to think about it. Despair would help none of them. Instead, Summer focused all her energy on observing her captors and testing the limits of her magic-inhibiting collar in the hopes of discerning some weakness she could exploit.
She was kept naked, collared, and bound. Partly, Summer surmised, that was to make it easier for Balat’s slaves to work their relentless, beautifying efforts on her body, but she had no doubt her captors also meant to keep Summer feeling as vulnerable and defenseless as possible.
Every evening, after the three women finished their day’s work, the Shark came to visit. He stayed with Gabriella throughout the night, subjecting her to intimacies no man but Dilys had ever been allowed—as well as some not even Dilys had claimed. But where she had received only wild, breathtaking pleasure from each caress, stroke and bite of Dilys’s hands and mouth, the Shark’s foul parody of lovemaking left her shaking in her skin, and not just from repugnance. There was something about what he did that stole from her more than her dignity and whatever magic Balat’s collar had not completely suppressed. It was as if each touch of the Shark’s loathsome hands, each stroke of his foul tongue, ate away at parts of her, not just her magic.
All the while, he whispered to her, “Did you let Dilys do this to you? Did you enjoy it? I know he did. One day soon, I’ll make sure he knows just how well I’ve enjoyed you, too.”
If she could have, she would have incinerated the Shark on the spot. She would have Shouted every cell in his body to liquid goo. And how ironic was that? All her life, she’d feared the dangerous magic she possessed, feared the harm she could do—had done—with it. She’d wanted to be free of her magic, so she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone. And now, thanks to Balat and his collar, she was. And what did she want? To have every dangerous, lethal bit of her magic back so she could rain destruction and death upon her captors.
She tried to shut out the Shark’s taunts, to show him no weakness and stay strong in the face of his abhorrent attentions. But the long, dark, torturous hours of the night ate away at her will as surely as his touch ate away at her magic, and by the time he left her each morning, she was a trembling wreck, flinching from the slightest touch, her face streaked with the tears she couldn’t stop herself from shedding, her throat raw from the screams and pleading cries for mercy she couldn’t keep trapped inside herself.
Begging was a victory she would rather die than give him, but as the days and interminable nights went on, she could feel even that will eroding.
The Shark could have dragged the magic out of her with any impersonal touch, but he chose to heap degradations upon her for his own sick entertainment and to exact some sort of twisted revenge on Dilys. She wasn’t sure why the Shark hated Dilys, but whatever the reason, it was deeply personal, the hatred too obsessively virulent to be caused by anything else.
“Does Dilys know about this enchanting little freckle you have down here?” the Shark crooned one night. “I’m going to take great pleasure in describing it to him, letting him know how I’ve touched it, savored it in every possible way. How do you t
hink he’ll react to that? The great Dilys farking Merimydion once again proven incapable of protecting his women. Just as I’ve proven him incapable of protecting his House and his interests. Will he finally do the honorable thing and take his own life? A true prince of Calberna would.”
That roused her fury enough to make her snap, “Dilys has ten times the honor in the tip of his little toe than you could ever hope have in your whole body. I don’t know what kind of sick, shabby House you spawned from, but clearly, the gods must have held your mother in great disfavor to have saddled her with a piece of garm shoto like you for a son.”
It wasn’t the best insult she’d ever come up with—Autumn could no doubt have done much better—but it still did the trick.
The Shark’s eyes blazed a bright, furious gold. He reared back and backhanded Gabriella hard across the face, snapping her head to one side, splitting her lip, and setting her cheek on fire.
“You will shut your mouth, or I’ll shut it for you,” he snarled.
She laughed and licked the blood off her lips. “The truth stings, doesn’t it?” Scum-sucking pirate and magic eater he might be, but the Shark was still Calbernan enough to bear the same ferocious devotion to his mother as the rest of his countrymen did to theirs. She’d wondered about that.
And then, because she’d rather be beaten senseless than suffer one moment more of his filthy, degrading touch, she goaded him more. “Who’s your father? Does your mother even know?”
Another slap. To the other cheek this time, and a much harder hit than the first. She rotated her jaw, feeling the twinge of protesting tendons as she did. Oh, yes, disrespecting his mother was most definitely an emotional trigger. He’d nearly dislocated her jaw with that blow.
“I’ll take that as a no.” She spat blood on the sheets of her bed. “Is that why you hate Dilys Merimydion? Because he’s the son of a queen, while you’re nothing more than some jealous, puffed-up get of a Houseless trollop?”
“Oulani souss! If you were a man, I would kill you for such slurs.” The Shark’s hand drew back, fingers curled into a fist.
Summer braced herself. This blow was going to hurt.
But before the Shark could swing, the door to the cabin burst open and Mur Balat stormed in shouting something in a language Gabriella didn’t recognize. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh as magic rolled through the room.
The Shark froze in place, his fist clenched and drawn back, ready to strike.
“Idiot! Fool! Witless, undisciplined bastard! I told you not to mark her!” He marched forward and yanked the Shark’s arm. The pirate’s frozen body toppled over like a marble statue pushed off its base.
Gabriella watched in surprise, half expecting the Shark’s arms to snap off when he hit the deck, just as a statue’s would have done. Instead, whatever spell had frozen him seemed to wear off when his body and the deck made contact, and rather than breaking into pieces, he crumpled bonelessly against the dark wood and lay there, gasping for air.
“Get him out of here,” Balat snarled, and two large men standing near the cabin door rushed in to grab the Shark by his arms and drag him out.
“Aneesh! Gulette! Ula!” Balat shouted. “Get in here and work your magic!” Mere seconds later, the three female slaves were ringed around Gabriella’s bed, moving her face gently this way and that as they examined the swelling skin and developing bruises left by the Shark’s blows. “You have less than twenty-four hours to repair the damage that idiot pulan has done. If she fights you, dose her with tzele. Whatever it takes to get the job done. She must be perfect. The buyer will balk if he finds a single blemish.”
Chapter 21
Gabriella’s buyer had arrived.
Gabriella, still a little woozy from being dosed with tzele for fighting Balat’s slaves, swayed on unsteady legs as the hulking guard fastened a chain to her collar and led her like a prized dog up to the main deck of the ship. Mur Balat was greeting his guest, a noble-featured gentleman clad in robes of expensive silk brocades who had just rowed over, presumably from a ship anchored somewhere nearby, though she couldn’t tell where that might be in this thick fog.
“Ah, here she is now,” Balat announced as the guard walked Gabriella near. “What did I tell you, Your Excellency? Exquisite, is she not?”
Thanks to twenty-four hours of ice packs, magic, and gentle fingers that stroked her skin like fairy wings, the bruises on her face had all disappeared. Every inch of her had been washed, shampooed, curled, polished, and plucked, every tiny blemish banished, every pore shrunk to porcelain fineness, until she gleamed with the perfection of smooth, sun-warmed marble. She’d been draped in a long white sheet of fabric that was open on one side and held in place by a jeweled clasp at shoulder and hip. The drape was meant more to tantalize than cover, since as the fabric was so sheer that the dark coins of her nipples and the narrow, freshly-trimmed vee of black hair on her pubis were clearly visible. The slaves had rubbed her lips with scarlet paste, lined her eyes with black cosmetics, then curled her hair and pinned it up in a loose pile on the top of her head, fastening it in place with jeweled combs.
The buyer’s eyes showed appreciation for their efforts as the servant holding Gabriella’s leash walked her closer to the men.
The well-dressed man circled her once. “Very nice . . . but I would see all of her before we finalize our transaction. My lord is quite particular. He expects perfection.”
“Of course.” Balat clapped his hands, and one of the peridot-eyed women stepped forward to release the two clasps holding the drape in place. White, gauzy silk fluttered to the floor. Swift hands darted out to snatch the jeweled combs from her hair, and long black curls tumbled down to the top of her buttocks.
“Ah . . . beautiful.” The man circled Gabriella again to view her from all sides. He put out a hand to touch her, then hesitated. “May I?” he asked Balat.
“Of course.”
Gabriella tried to flinch back, but the hand on her collar held her firm. Thanks to the sunlight filtering through the fog, the last of the tzele was wearing off, taking with it the pleasant sense of being removed from her body. Now she was acutely aware of standing naked on the deck of Balat’s ship, bare to the lascivious eyes of the crew. Rather than humiliating herself further by struggling against her captors, she lifted her chin and stared straight ahead. It wasn’t as hard as it might have been. The hands of Balat’s guest roved over her not with lust but with the impersonal touch of a buyer thoroughly examining a piece of merchandise.
She’d never really thought much about slavery. It wasn’t a Summerlander custom, and the countries that practiced it were far from her small sphere of influence. But if she got out of this—no, when she got out of this—she was going to start a one-woman war against it. She might not succeed, but by Helos, she was going to do everything in her power to wipe slavery from the face of Mystral.
Starting with Mur Balat.
“A delight to all senses, just as you promised. She is certified pure?” Balat’s client inquired as concluded his inspection.
“I confirmed it myself. You’re welcome to verify, if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary. And her weathergifts?”
“Still intact. Just suppressed by the enchantments on the collar. Once your lord has broken her to service, I can adjust the enchantment for a small fee to keep her more dangerous gifts shackled while allowing her to access the ones he finds most beneficial.”
“Excellent.” The client reached into his robes and withdrew a small, wrapped parcel. “Here is the payment you requested.”
Balat accepted the parcel, and with a hushed, almost reverent air, he unwrapped it to reveal a small, ragged book. His hands shook slightly as he opened the cover of the book and began ever so gently turning the pages.
Summer couldn’t see very well from this angle, but the book appeared to be extremely old, the parchment pages curling at the edges. Balat turned to a page near the back of the book, placed a rune-etched gemston
e atop in the center of an intricate drawing sketched on that page, and murmured a few words. The book glowed violet, and for an instant Gabriella could have sworn she saw a gleaming silver fountain rise up from what had appeared to be old but perfectly normal parchment pages. The image—and the violet glow—were gone in an instant, and Balat looked triumphant.
“I have been seeking this particular tome for a very long time,” he murmured. “We do, indeed, have a deal. The Season known as Summer is yours.” He snapped his fingers, and the servant holding Gabriella’s collar handed her leash to Balat’s client. “And may I say, Your Excellency, as always, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”
A few minutes later, Gabriella was aboard the small skiff, being rowed through the fog towards her buyer’s ship. Her last sight of Mur Balat was of him striding towards the sterncastle, calling out for the crew to make sail. Then the ship that had been her prison—the ship still carrying her sisters—disappeared into the fog and was gone.
The Reaper had disappeared into a fog bank near the Vargan Banks, a series of wide underwater plateaus some two hundred miles off the easternmost coast of Frasia. But though the fog blinded the above-water eyes of the dolphins and whales, Dilys was still able to track their progress via his undersea spies.
When those eyes reported that the Reaper had weighed anchor in the fog bank, unease crawled up Dilys’s spine. Fearing the reason for the strange behavior, he poured more magic into the sea, boosting the Kracken’s speed. Sure enough, less than three hours later, his eyes in the sea reported several other craft making their way towards the Reaper’s location, and he didn’t need those eyes to tell him what was happening.
The meetings at sea were quick, taking less than half a day. When they were done, the fog finally began to dissipate. Five new ships were sailing in five different directions and the Reaper was speeding towards Frasia’s port of Sau Lauro. There was no telling which of the five ships now carried Summer and her sisters. The Reaper had suspected they would be followed and had arranged countermeasures to protect against it.