Court Wizard: Book Eight Of The Spellmonger Series

by Terry Mancour

  The girls looked around at each other’s scraggly visages in amused disbelief. They certainly did not see themselves that way.

  Ishi smiled, and indulged them in a moment of her pure grace. For a bare instant, each woman in the hall saw the rest not as they were, but as their most beautiful and dazzling ideals of feminine beauty.

  “That, my blossoms, is what we aspire to,” she said, without further explanation. “It will be up to each of you to see how close to that ideal you can come. But each of you should know the attainable possibility, before being asked to trust me blindly.”

  There was a pause, and then a gasp and a titter of voices from behind Ishi as she mounted the stairs to her private chambers.

  “Mum?” came a call from the hall below. “Mum, what shall we call you?”

  Ishi considered. She could maintain the identity of the Baroness, of course, but this occasion called for a masking pseudonym. She had contrived one.

  “Call me Lady Pleasure,” she decided. “Soon all of Vorone shall know me by that name.”

  The lessons were relentless.

  The food was good, if simple, at first, prepared by Goody Candrice, and each girl was given a clean blanket or quilt, and a warm, dry place to curl up at night. They were broken up into groups by age. They were each assigned simple chores – wood, water, cooking, or laundry.

  While the conditions in the House of Flowers (as Lady Pleasure now styled the Flower Bed) were far, far more pleasant than those the girls had enjoyed in camp in winter, there was very little time to enjoy them. From morning to night, Lady Pleasure and her staff conducted lessons. The first day was devoted entirely to walking properly, less like a farm girl and more like a lady of town, secure in her sophisticated femininity. The next day was devoted to caring for the face, and basic clothing. The day after that was dedicated to speaking properly, and conversing politely.

  They were not all agreeable with the lessons, at first. But the girls who raised a fuss had a brief, if intense, conference with Lady Pleasure, and afterwards were amongst the most devoted of her strange family.

  By the end of the first week the girls were rising at dawn, as quiet as nuns, preparing breakfast, washing, and gathering for lessons – increasingly interesting lessons – in everything from flirtation to dancing. At noon they would enjoy a light luncheon of bread, soup, and riverfish, practicing light conversation while Lady Pleasure mingled among them, correcting posture and diction.

  Afternoons were devoted to the study of art, music and history, particularly the history of the Wilderlands, Vorone, and the Duchy of Alshar. Lady Pleasure was a stickler on that point, though the long list of Dukes and Counts and the various struggles with Castal over the Gilmoran territories seemed inane to most of the girls. Though they grumbled, they sat and they learned until they could recite them by rote.

  But Lady Pleasure was more adept than that. Ishi knew that the kind of weapons she was crafting needed not just awareness of their own femininity and its value, but the value of femininity in the construction, administration, and destruction of power. Though she tied the various eras to surviving fashions in the court, making the exercise at least somewhat interesting, the history lessons were by far the least favored among the girls.

  Three weeks into their studies, Lady Pleasure began taking the most promising of her pupils aside, two at a time, for extended study in her private chambers. There the discussion ran to pleasure in all of its manifestations. Ishi imparted to them the ancient secrets of human female sexuality older than man’s time under Callidore’s sun.

  A long list of topics were covered in those heated sessions in the Garden Chamber, as her room came to be called: The importance of the moon, the fleeting moments of beauty before the ravages of age inevitably came, the use and employment of glamour, the art of erotic enrapture, the immutable laws of attraction, and a woman’s ability to use her sexuality to improve her lot in life – or even change the course of empires.

  Those were the sessions in which Lady Pleasure selected the first of her Maidens, those who were old enough to be wed themselves (two of them proved to be young widows) but were still in youth’s full bloom of beauty. Twelve of them she chose for that first trial. While the rest of the girls continued to grow with their lessons, the first twelve Maidens were taken aside and instructed in the most secret arts of sexual pleasure. She used the mesmerized bodies of the handsome young guardsmen to instruct the Maidens.

  “So we’re to be whores, then?” Andrette asked, frowning.

  “You are going to be far more than mere whores, my dear,” Lady Pleasure insisted. “Any woman can be a whore. We are all naturally equipped for that. No, you are being trained to be the perfect companion to a man . . . so perfect that he will willingly spend his valuable resources for you to favor him with the power of your femininity,” she explained. “You will be great courtesans, each of you, in your own right. It might be your purse he thinks he’s buying, but you will give him so much more than that, he will never count the cost of your company. If you master the crimson arts, you will enchant him out of his wits.”

  “Still looks like spreading for coin, to me,” Andrette said, skeptically.

  “That’s nothing you haven’t done before, Daughter,” Lady Pleasure pointed out, coolly.

  “I just figured—”

  “That you would be . . . more, somehow?” she chuckled, skeptically. “My dear Andrette, whether you are a Queen or a peasant wife spewing brats forth from your crack, your power lies in your femininity. For some of you, that will be the only power you will ever enjoy in this brutal world, and briefly, at that. Without my help. With my lessons, you are just beginning to learn what can happen when combine your feminine power with greater power.

  “But that is a lesson for another time. Tonight we begin preparations for your winter debut. The Dance of Holly, for the Yuletide festival.”

  ‘Yule, Mum?” Haneth asked, her eyes wide with delight. “A real Yule dance?”

  “I think that you will find this Yule a bit merrier than last in Vorone,” she smiled. “A new wind comes from the south, and it will stir a great many things to light here in the wood . . . if the conditions are right. For our part, Maidens, we shall prepare the way with special blessings . . . and open our Hall to gentlemen callers on that sacred night.”

  The girls looked around at each other and grinned nervously. “Gentlemen callers?” Haneth giggled.

  “Clients, she means,” Andrette stated, flatly. “Just like in the camps. Only they smell better in Vorone.”

  “And so do you, my Maidens,” Lady Pleasure assured them. “And you will learn to act like real women, now. At Yule we will introduce ourselves to Vorone’s society, and welcome all that the new year will bring for us. For after winter comes spring, the time of blooming. Come spring, you will all be in perfect form to blossom as dazzling as any ingénue.”

  From that night forward, the first class of twelve Maidens began learning the Holly Dance popular in the Wilderlands, and the symbolic significance of the ancient plant and the other evergreens that were featured at Yule. Meanwhile, the other girls of the Hall of Flowers prepared three special chambers, small in size but intimate in appointment, for their first callers.

  While it meant some of the larger chambers were overcrowded at night, the three rooms – the Lily Chamber, the Tulip Chamber, and the Rosebud Chamber – were bedecked in the finest tapestries and linens the house’s dwindling coffers could supply. Indeed, Elspeth’s daily accounting to Lady Pleasure of the declining balance the House enjoyed was the worst part of Ishi’s incarnation every morning. She hated hearing Elspeth lecture her against unreasonable expenses.

  But she knew she could spare no expense, here. This was an investment. In Vorone.

  Ishi knew how powerful a public festival could be in restoring the people’s spirits, and Vorone’s spirits had been wracked repeatedly over the years. The despair and hopelessness in the faces of the folk of the disused capital was t
ragic. Yet there was much hidden strength here, she saw. The folk of the Wilderlands were hearty, bold, and unused to lean times. In some ways the residue of humanity who had found themselves in Vorone, out of easy reach of the goblins in the north, were the finest of the Wilderlands stock. Brawny men and sturdy women, each possessing a rustic beauty.

  But Vorone had too long been bereft of any real purpose, save sheltering the people and carrying on a sham existence between Ducal visits. Without the presence of the court in the palace, it was merely a regional capital town of modest commercial importance, at best – and one on the edge of a smoldering war zone.

  A time was coming when the fallow strength of Vorone, of all the Wilderlands, could arise again, she knew. There was at least a chance that things could get better, if they were managed properly. She wasn’t a traditionally powerful goddess – she couldn’t make the granaries full or wage holy war on the gurvani. But that didn’t mean that she could not have an effect on the outcome. With just a little inspiration, a little admiration, and a little wonder, Lady Pleasure decided, she could find a way to inspire the Voroni back into their strength once more.

  Unfortunately, someone got wind of her plan days before the Yule festival. On the same day, Lady Pleasure entertained to gentlemen who claimed to have business with her.

  The first was the town constable, a vile man of noble lineage and common tastes. Lady Pleasure saw him in the Sunflower Room, a tiny chamber roofed with expensive glass.

  “Excellency, it has come to the attention of Baron Edmarin that some along Perfume Street have been whispering that you plan on opening a bawdy house in this hall.”

  “People do find things to gossip about, Constable,” she assured him, pouring him a glass of fragrant herbal tea. “I am merely taking in poor orphan girls, the few who are left after most departed last summer, and teaching them civilized manners. An act of godly charity, would you not say?”

  “Oh, yes, Excellency, if that is all they are,” the constable chuckled wickedly. “Perhaps you teach them all sorts of those intriguing things I hear about those temples in the Southlands. I heard that you were in one, yourself,” he added, eyeing her obscenely. “I don’t object to such practices at all, but I want to ensure the security of your house. Such places must be . . . inspected.”

  “And what kind of inspection would you propose, Constable?” Lady Pleasure asked, invitingly, as she sprawled on the couch across from him.

  “Oh, a simple examination of the wares, and the occasional sample, to ensure quality,” he proposed, cocking one crow-like eye at her. Ishi hated crows. Wretched birds. They were the totem animal of her sister,

  “And who would the palace designate as the inspector, Sir Constable?”

  “Oh, I think that such a grave duty falls to no less person than the Constable of Vorone. Indeed, it is in the charter that the officer administer all such places of . . . amusement,” he said, sloshing the delicate tea around the rare glass like it was cheap grog before finishing it. A detestable man of low breeding and high entitlement. “A few auxiliary passes might not go awry, if you want your place to stay out of the office’s eyes.”

  “Yes, I’m thinking that being in your eye is a very poor idea, Sir Constable,” Ishi agreed. As usual, the idiot mistook her declaration for submission, not as a challenge.

  “Quite right Baroness. I’m the last man you want against you in Vorone. I can be your best friend, or I can be your worst enemy. Just give me and my gentlemen a few evenings a month, and I’m sure we can overlook any official unpleasantries.”

  As Ishi and Elspeth watched the nasty little man leave from the deck above, Elspeth shook her head in disgust.

  “Are you really going to let the likes of him paw at poor Andrette and Ilsie?”

  “He claims to want to inspect the girls for their worthiness, to determine their quality . . . when he has no concept of quality himself. No, Elspeth, that is not the kind of man we can do business with. He’s the kind of man who continues to take and take until he feels entitled to take everything.”

  “So what do we do about him, Mum? Complain to the Baron?”

  “Edmarin’s life won’t survive the new year, Elspeth. But the Constable shall predecease him. That tea you prepared? Mountain hibiscus, white oleander and black lily stem, from the high country lakes. Separately they are harmless, even a bit bitter. Together, in the proper proportions, at the proper heat, they release a slow-working toxin. If he does not receive the antidote, within three days the man’s liver will fail, his eyes will turn yellow, and he will begin acting like a madman for a few brief, destructive hours before his heart finally fails him.”

  “But you do have the antidote, Mum?” Elspeth asked, desperately.

  “I do, Kitten. But he will never see it.”

  That afternoon, a second gentleman arrived. This one wore a fashionable southern-style aristocratic long coat over his doublet and hose, not a surcoat and mantle in the local style. But though his fashion was impeccable, denoting just the right amount of class and sophistication, the man within the clothes was every bit as vile as the Constable. Worse.

  “Baroness,” he said, giving a curt nod. “I have heard you plan to open a brothel, here.”

  “I am considering many business opportunities,” she countered, reasonably. “You are, Sir?”

  “I am . . . you may call me Master Luthar. I am well-known in the precinct.”

  “Ah, yes, your reputation precedes you,” smiled Lady Pleasure. He was the leader of the local thugs. “Tea?”

  “No, thank you. You said you were open to business opportunities. I might have one for you.”

  “Really? Do tell, Master Luthar.”

  “I am a member of a society who wishes to see the folk of Vorone prosper, with good security for their business. For a modest contribution, you can help ensure the security of your Hall and all of its clients.”

  “I have guards already,” Lady Pleasure demurred. “Fine, strapping fellows. And I can procure more. Certainly they are enough to contend with a simple drunk or madman.”

  “The dangers I could protect you from are more insidious, Excellency.”

  She looked confused. “Do you specialize in vermin?” she asked, at a loss for what other dangers she might be exposed to.

  He chuckled, an unpleasant sound. “As fair as Vorone might be, Excellency, it is subject to the same mischance as any other town. All sorts of misfortune can befall even the most magnificent enterprises.”

  “I tend to have very good luck, Master Luthar. And I am familiar with the kind of ‘luck’ your society proposes: I’ve seen the vicious gambling parlors, the hidden fights for sport and wagering, the awful loans you force the merchants of this quarter to pay just to stay in business, the fixed games you use to offer the impoverished false hope and real debt slavery. I see no business advantage in contributing to that. No, the Hall of Flowers will stand unprotected from the likes of you.”

  “Such a pretty bunch of flowers,” the man said with mock sadness as he watched the girls practicing the Holly Dance in the hall below. “So nubile, and ready to be . . . plucked.”

  “The incautious finger will discover that those roses have thorns, Master Luthar. And sometimes things more dangerous than thorns.”

  “They are but girls,” he dismissed arrogantly.

  That irritated Lady Pleasure.

  “You see those girls, and you see things to be exploited, used . . . ‘plucked’. And when they are no longer pretty, you throw them into the gutter. I see them as young ladies to be tended, nurtured, trained. They are here to be developed, not used up. That is the difference between you and I, Master Luthar, between all who would profit from the act of love without understanding it, and those who appreciate its subtle nuances. Your own desire for fat little boys, for example . . .”

  “I . . . Madame! That is a bold accusation!” the man blustered, his face colored. “I’ll have you know I am married!”

  “And l also know tha
t you go after your stableboys after a good ride to get your blood up, don’t you?” she followed. “On that little country manor outside of town? I wonder what your wife would say, if she knew of such proclivities. Especially the unwilling nature of the lads. I believe you had to thrash the last one when he rejected your advances? For shame. There’s nothing admirable about that.”

  “You . . . you can prove nothing!” the criminal boss sputtered.

  “I don’t need to,” Lady Pleasure smiled. “All I need do is drop the suggestion of it into local society. Like a pebble in a pond it will ripple larger and larger, until your wife’s ears hear them – likely from her dearest friend. By then the anxiety will have built up in you, and the pressure will be nearly unbearable. The first mention of it, the first accusation will be enough. Proof won’t matter to her, you see, for she shall see the truth on your face and in your eyes. That will be enough, Master Luthar, to blacken you in her eyes forever. And when your own wife turns against you—”

  “I believe we have concluded our business for today!” the dandy said, gathering his hat and sword. “I wish you the best in your endeavors, my lady, and I will be sure to take an active interest in your affairs.”

  “He certainly left in a hurry,” grunted Elspeth, as the man nearly ran from the hall. “What did you say to him, Mum?”

  “I confronted him with his worst fear. Not death, nor disgrace, but dishonor in his wife’s eyes. Not every man has that weakness, but those who do invariably betray themselves with wickedness of some way or another. It did not take much to reveal his secret. A man such as he has many. It was just a matter of figuring out which one he feared the most, and employing it against him.”