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“One, medium on Sara and the horse,” I heard George say and I watched the camera on the other side of the punishment horse move slightly to comply. “We’ll go there in a moment. Philip, if you could wait to apply whatever pressure until I make that cut… there, okay, go ahead.”
* * *
Sara
“Sara,” Philip repeated, “don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
Trembling came over all my limbs, and the urge just to run away from the horse and the cameras and my guardian rose urgently inside me. I remembered Viola’s attempt to get away from the prince, how the Magisterian royal had just gripped her harder and kept her where she was, how he had then sat her in his lap, how Viola’s position seemed so much more humiliating because of the futile attempt she had made to escape.
How much weaker would I seem if Philip had to drag me back to the punishment horse, while my entire world watched me respond sexually to his dominant touch and saw how helpless I was to resist him?
I looked at the horse, and then I looked straight at the camera, disobeying Philip’s command. I clenched my fists hard so that I wouldn’t put them behind me like a little girl trying to avoid punishment. I took a step forward, and then another, the tremor in my limbs worsening with each movement so that I finally fell as much as I climbed onto the horrible thing, looking at the camera the whole time.
I couldn’t glare the way I wanted to, but I did everything in my power to make the truth clear to the audience in my eyes. I meant to show them, even through my terrible ordeal of submission, how a woman could hold to her world’s ideals of autonomy while still possessing the shameful needs a dominant master had awakened in her.
I got onto the punishment horse on my knees, the central raised section of it parting my legs so that I had to straddle its padded surface. My eyes were still fixed on the camera, but, as I watched, the lens turned away from me.
I frowned hard as I realized once again that the Magisterians called all the shots, literally. I felt certain that I had shown at least a little of my rebellion to the galaxy—they must have had the camera on me in close-up at that moment, and they couldn’t have cut away from my face quickly enough to conceal my disobedience completely. But now they would show my master’s face instead. And, I realized with a stifled sob of helpless need in my throat and a tingle between my thighs, they would showmefrom behind: my bottom above my parted thighs.
I felt Philip’s hand on my back, then, and I couldn’t suppress a little cry of fear and surprise. Knowing that the director would refuse to show any defiance on my face made it very hard—no, I realized, impossible—to keep that defiance there.
“Down, girl,” I heard my guardian say. He applied a light pressure on the small of my back, as if to emphasize his command.
I had managed to keep from looking at him, because I had known how weak it would look: how, if I did turn my head my expression would have lost all its defiance as I pled for mercy with my tearful eyes—how I would even look as if I begged for forgiveness when I hadn’t done anything wrong at all. I couldn’t resist anymore, though: I looked behind me, over my shoulder, and I saw his stern face.
He had shifted the horrible cane to his left hand so that he could reach his right out to touch my back. When our eyes met, I felt the fear rise in my chest, alongside the renewed impression that Philip understood how to handle girls like me: that despite how thoroughly he would discipline me now, no real harm would come to me even in my degradation.
My face twisted into the plea I had so desperately sought to avoid, and I felt sure the camera had captured it.
Suddenly the prince spoke, from the huge chair where he sat with the former president of Artemisia on his knee.
“Sara hasn’t done anything to earn the whipping you’re going to see her get, my friends,” he said. “Earlier today, just like Viola, she got spanked for disobedience, and Major Harrow had to paddle her for defiance a little later, but this session with the cane before she serves her guardian sexually for the first time is something she has to take because she’s a concubine now, on Viola’s behalf and on the behalf of all you Artemisians. Major Harrow’s duty is to make her very sorry you all defied the federation. Go ahead, Major.”
Philip didn’t smile, really, but his eyes crinkled a very little, and I knew he meant to send to my heart the same reassurance he had given me when he announced his intention to buy me. That thought—the idea that this man meant me to be his own, and he intended to treasure me in the very special, very dark way he had showed me he could—brought another little sob into my throat.
“Down,” he said again, and this time he enforced the word with real firmness. I gave a little cry, and I reached my hands out to stop myself from falling all the way to the upper surface of the horse. I put them on the supports to either side, on the same level as my knees, and I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do next, my head turning from side to side in a panicked moment.
But my guardian proceeded quickly in what I realized must be an almost judicial process.
“On your elbows,” he said brusquely. He pushed again on my back to reinforce the command, and I obeyed, suddenly fearful that any failure of compliance would call down more punishment. I felt the padded leather upholstery of the punishment horse’s surfaces fully now, under my belly as well as beneath my elbows and my knees; not plush, but certainly adequate to prevent me injuring myself.
My master will keep me from harming his property, my naked body, while he whips my bottom until I can’t sit down for days—then has his way with me, in every mode of a man’s pleasure, until he sates his lust.
I felt a fierce surge of arousal at the shameful thought, and I felt the governor curb my need harder than it had ever done before. Something about my prone position, about the exposure of my bottom in the lacy underwear that would not protect my bottom in the slightest, seemed to strengthen my body’s responses to a mortifying extent. To my horror, I felt my hips respond, pushing my backside out and raising it up, offering my most private places to the man who would soon whip me.
The rapidity with which Philip completed the preparations only worsened my predicament; his right hand had left my back, but once I had gotten onto my elbows I felt both his hands return, the cane still in the left one. He laid the stout leather belt across my waist, and he buckled it quickly, fixing me in place on the horse.
“The restraints,” Prince Hendren said, in a voice that suggested he thought himself a very helpful commentator for the Artemisian audience who had of course never witnessed the caning of a young woman before, “will keep Sara from hurting herself. Major Harrow can’t have her spoiling her value that way. Sara is going to become frantic as she undergoes her punishment, and it will assist her as well as her guardian to know that no real harm can come of it.”
I knew that they had turned the camera back on my face, but I couldn’t see it. Part of me wanted to renew my defiance, but without knowing where to look I closed my eyes instead, willing the whole scene to disappear from the universe just as it disappeared from sight. The audience, I felt certain, saw the tears leaking out from between my eyelids as Philip quickly fastened the cuffs around my wrists and my ankles.
I felt him bending close over me to do that, and then I felt his presence vanish as he stood up again and took his place.
“Twelve strokes at my discretion, Sara,” his voice said from behind me, “for your improvement as a submissive sexual servant. You will count them as I bestow them.”
CHAPTER29
Sara
