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“I still think you stole these or bribed someone for them,” Darius said as we waited in line at the palace gate to be admitted.
“No,” Mara said, completely matter-of-factly, as if she didn’t hear the note of teasing in Darius’s voice. “They wanted to give me more, but I said I only needed five.”
I could only imagine who “they” were.
“It’s just a shame we had to bring Lulu with us,” Leander said, making no effort to keep Lucius from hearing the slight.
I stared warily at Leander for a moment—after six weeks, I could tell Leander and Darius apart now, partially because of the way each of them spoke, and partly because Darius’s cock curved up just enough to make things interesting when he fucked me—then glanced back to Lucius.
“Someone has to keep the rest of you from stripping naked and offering your asses to every senator and king’s councilor inside the palace,” Lucius grumbled in return.
Almost as soon as he finished speaking, attendants at the gates checked our invitations and let us into the palace grounds. And as soon as they did, we came face to face with a gorgeous young man—perhaps a little too young—who had been tied up in bright red, silken rope, and who hung from a tree just inside the gate, like a piece of fruit.
I came to a complete stop at the sight of him, admittedly gaping. The man might have been eighteen if I was willing to think he looked younger than his age. He was tied so that his body arched, his head was pulled back, and one of his legs was bent at the knee. The rope crossed over his mouth like a gag as well.
To top it all off, he was slathered in some sort of gold-tinted ointment, particularly his cock and balls. And as party guests passed him, one or two would reach out and rub his protruding cock to keep him hard.
“My, my, they do know how to bring out the best inside the palace,” Darius said, grinning at the way I stared at the boy.
“He’s not even the prettiest of the ones you’ll see this evening,” Leander laughed, throwing his arm around my shoulders and dragging me on, around the tree and toward the palace itself.
“I think the palace of Royersford has stunned our provincial friend,” Darius said, looping his arm over my shoulder as well.
It had, but not for the reasons they suspected. As I glanced back over my shoulder at the hanging boy, all I could think was Magnus. Twenty years ago or so, that had been Magnus. I knew it without having to sit Magnus down and ask him exactly what he’d done as a royal whore. Now I knew.
The hanging boy wasn’t the only decorative whore at the palace either. Two naked women with long, thick hair woven with flowers, cascading down their backs stood on either side of the palace door. They appeared to be acrobats of some sort, because they bent and contorted themselves into every sort of intriguing position imaginable, most of which accentuated their breasts and cunny.
“What do you think, Mara?” Leander asked, stepping away from me to throw his arm over Mara’s shoulder as if she were just another of the boys. “Will we see you entertaining the crowds at the palace next?”
“I’m not that flexible,” Mara said, completely unbothered.
I grinned at Mara, and I was pleased when she noticed my grin and smiled back.
“I grew up around all of this,” she said with a shrug. “I hardly even see it now.”
It made sense, but I didn’t know how she couldn’t see the decadent and fleshy displays all around us. Even I gawped at the naked women—there were more of them just inside the palace, along with more nubile young men—as they posed and displayed themselves in ways designed to titillate.
Then again, I’d come to terms with the fact that I liked women as well as men, just not as much.
The interior of the palace was filled with the scent of flowers and food, along with music being played by unseen musicians. There were dozens of people loitering about, enjoying refreshments that were being taken around by almost naked servants. Darius grabbed a pair of slender glasses filled with something blood-red and handed one to me.
“The point of the game is to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible, then to fuck with as many strangers as you can find,” he said, a flash in his eyes.
Once again, I could tell he was trying to scandalize me, but he was in for a disappointment.
“So, in other words, it’s exactly like revels around a faire on the frontier,” I said.
“A what at a what?” Leander asked, peeling away from Mara as she saw someone she knew and walked off.
Lucius had stormed off to do whatever it was Lucius did as soon as we crossed into the palace.
“Never mind,” I laughed. Not wasting my efforts by explaining or contradicting the assumptions people made about me extended to the twins as well. It amused them whenever I proved to be more sophisticated and debauched than they assumed a frontier boy would be.
On top of that, I was too fascinated by the palace of Royersford to pay Leander and Darius any mind.
I’d been raised right next to the palace in Yacovissi and attended the palace school, but compared to the palace I stood in now, every frontier building of grandeur I’d ever been in was a silly doll’s house.
The Royersford palace was easily ten times as big as anything I knew from the frontier. Leander and Darius drew me through the entry room and on to a massive courtyard with cloisters running around it and a deep pool in the middle. Several naked men and women were swimming in the pool, and after I did a double-take, I realized that half of them were wearing some sort of skin-tight wrappings on the lower half of their bodies that made them look like sparkling mermen and mermaids.
