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A smile emerged on her face, and it banished my fear.
“Yes, Chalondra?” my mistress asked.
“What…” My forehead creased even harder as I tried to bring the question into focus in my mind, and at the same time my heart sped up as if in anticipation of at last having an answer—if only I could ask correctly. “What… please… what does it all mean?”
I dropped my eyes to the purple coverlet, trying hard to keep the knob out of my field of vision, despite how badly part of me wanted to look at it. I felt tears prick at the corners of my eyes when I heard how very badly I’d done in phrasing my desperate query.
“Look at me, my dear,” I heard my mistress’ voice say, and I obeyed, though her tone no longer contained any of the strictness she had used a few moments before. Her smile—thesmile she had had on her face when his lordship had told her she would have the captain’s quarters—had returned.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be with you and his lordship,” she said, “but I suppose my best answer to your question is that it all means you’ll be safe, which is what I care about most, after my own security.”
I blinked at the utterly unexpected nature of this response.
“Until today,” Mistress Franla continued, “I didn’t know his lordship well at all. I accepted his offer of a position as Mistress of Concubines because I had heard good things about him, and of course because he paid me handsomely despite my only being able to see to you for a few hours a week.”
My eyes went wide at this news, and rather to my surprise, my mistress laughed at my confusion: not unkindly, but lightheartedly, as if she were a much younger woman.
“Now, of course, that part-time position has changed rather drastically,” she continued with a smile. “And though I must confess I was quite concerned about both our fates, since I have found the vast majority of the Vionian nobility to be… well, frankly, to be very dangerous, especially when put in a dangerous corner as his lordship was. Even if he kept us safe for the moment, I wondered if the baron would use his power over us to sell us, or to trade us for his own safety… or even simply to hurt us for his own pleasure.”
I blinked at that, my mind torn between comprehension and confusion. Mistress Franla smiled again, a little more wryly.
“I know that sounds… well, rather absurd, to you, Chalondra. But there is a vast difference between what your master and I do to discipline you and what some nobles do simply for theirmomentary enjoyment. At any rate, his lordship is different, in my experience—and my experience is very broad.”
“And…” I said, grasping at straws that might make it all make sense. “And when he gave you the captain’s quarters…?”
My mistress nodded.
“It was the final confirmation for me that you and I had a very great stroke of luck, to be with his lordship today, when the empire fell. Your spirit and mine are different, my dear, but your master is the rare sort of man who can appreciate and help both of us.”
CHAPTER 29
Chalondra
When Mistress Franla left me there at last, I couldn’t keep my eyes from the knob any longer. I had to stand a little awkwardly even to keep the front of my panties from touching it—not an uncomfortable posture, really, but one that made certain my attention couldn’t stray far from the effort of holding my limbs that way.
To distract myself as much as possible, I thought about what the older woman had said about her spirit and mine. I felt as if I didn’t have enough experience, of her individually and of her and his lordship’s Vionian culture more generally, truly to understand. But part of what she meant seemed clear to me.
Mistress Franla, I thought she must have been trying to tell me, didn’t have the misfortune to have the dark, shameful needs I had. If she had been born Kamnian, and the company had requisitioned her for auction on Vion Prime, she would have borne her sexual servitude in a very different way from mine. My mistress’ mind and body—her spirit—wouldn’t have betrayedher the way mine did, even now as I looked down at the knob and tried to push away the dark, impossibly delicious thoughts it stirred.
What would happen?If he found me that way, rubbing myself against his bed in desperate search of a climax? If the empire’s fall didn’t get in the way of what a nobleman does to a pleasure girl who tries to rob him of his right to decree her pleasure and her pain, as it had back in his now-ruined palace?
I looked up, across the bed, to the window full of stars—the stars my lord had shown me, to which he hadtakenme. More of Mistress Franla’s meaning seemed to make itself known in my mind: what she had said about the baron being a rare sort of man.
I felt it, that rareness, as a sort of aching warmth in my chest. I thought of lying over his knee in his study, of the terrible pain in my bottom as he had spanked me so very hard, just for failing to look where he had commanded me to look… of the sound of his pleasure, the growl deep in his throat, while he taught me to please his cock with my mouth. Then I thought of his smile, when he had invited me to press the button that had made the little ship start to rise and ascend through the roof and into the sky.
I didn’t really know what sort of spirit Mistress Franla had, except that it differed greatly from mine—above all where serving a nobleman was concerned. I understood that going over the baron’s knee, sucking his penis, longing despite myself for him to come and deflower me with as much brutality as he chose to employ… those helpless needs belonged to girls like me, and not women like my mistress.
And that, she had wanted to say to me, represented not a part of me different from, much less at war with, my spirit. It made anessential partof that spirit. Another nobleman, another owner, might try to turn my body’s involuntary urge to submit, to yield, so far to his advantage that it destroyed my independence of mind. Not my master, my lord.
I took a gasping breath as the idea came together in my mind. I felt my eyes widen, and then film with moisture, blurring the gorgeous view of colorful, tiny jewels on black velvet, with the two great suns of Sheliak hanging motionless, all of it much too far away for any motion to be perceptible.
I blinked the tears away, and I felt my limbs relax a little, as if the deep thinking I had just done had brought a sort of answering tension in my body.
Then I let out a little cry because the slight movement had pressed the front of my panties gently against the knob, and that very light touch had revealed to me that this bed, aboard my master’s yacht, was not actually truly identical to the one in his palace bedchamber. This bed, I realized, had been fashioned tolookprecisely the same, but it also had at least one secret—a terrible secret as far as I was concerned.
The knob at the bottom of the bedpost, on this bed, was quite warm. Much worse, it moved. It vibrated, and that vibration rendered me helpless not to press my pussy more firmly against the soothing surface. That greater pressure, to my dismay and involuntary delight, made the knob vibrate more intensely, so that I had to cry out louder and longer.
I gripped the top of the bedpost more firmly, and I hardly even tried to stop. I had already broken the rule, hadn’t I? My master would certainly punish me. Heshouldpunish me,because I needed to learn. I had to be trained, didn’t I? Surely the knob must represent part of the training, too: a bed girl… a plaything… a girl for fucking… she must learn to ride her owner’s bed, to show how suitable she was for his dark lessons.
