The black-haired Prince obeyed at once, moving with a quiet elegance, though he was on his hands and knees, and Beauty saw that his bu**ocks were raw and red as though he too had known the discipline of the wooden paddle not too long ago. He kissed the Mistress's boots, his dark eyes quite open and direct, and retreated through the back door to the yard at her gesture. The black hair was thick around the little pink mouth of his anus, his small bu**ocks rather exquisitely round for those of a man.
"Now you're to take that brush in your teeth and you're to scrub the floor with it, starting here and back to there," said Mistress Lockley coolly. "You are to get it good and clean. And you're to keep your legs wide apart when you do it. If I see those legs together, if I see you rubbing that hungry little mouth against the floor or touching it, you're to dangle, is that understood?"
Beauty kissed the Mistress's boots again immediately.
"Very good," said the Mistress. "The soldiers tonight will pay high for that tight little sex. They'll feed it well enough. For now, you'll hunger in obedience and humility, and you'll do as I say."
Beauty went to work at once with the brush, scrubbing hard at the tile floor with a back-and-forth motion of her head. Her sex ached almost as much as her bu**ocks, but as she worked the ache grew fainter and fainter, and Beauty's head was strangely clear.
What would happen, she wondered, if the soldiers adored her, paid plenty for her, fed her little sex to overflowing so to speak, and then Beauty were disobedient? Could Mistress Lockley afford to hang her outside?
"I'm turning into such a bad little girl!" she thought.
But the strange part of it was that her heart beat fast at the thought of Mistress Lockley. She liked her coldness and her sharpness in a way she had never liked her fawning Mistress of the castle, Lady Juliana. And she couldn't help but wonder, was there just a smidgen of pleasure in it for
Mistress Lockley, all that paddling? After all, Mistress Lockley did it so well.
She was scrubbing away as she thought, trying to make the brown tiles of the floor as shiny and clean as she could, when she suddenly realized that a shadow had fallen over her from the open door. And she heard Mistress Lockley's voice say softly,
"Ah, Captain."
Beauty raised her eyes cautiously but boldly nevertheless, fully aware it might be impudence to do. And she saw a blond-haired man standing above her. His leather boots went up well over his knees, and a jeweled dagger was buckled to his thick leather belt as well as broadsword and a long leather paddle. He seemed bigger to her all over than the men she had known in this Kingdom, yet he was slender of build except for his massive shoulders. His yellow hair hung luxuriously long down his neck, curling thickly at the ends, and his brilliant green eyes were crinkled with laugh lines as he looked down at her.
She felt a stab of dismay, though she didn't know why, a sudden melting of the coldness and toughness that affected her. And with calculated indifference she went back to her scrubbing.
But the man came round in front of her.
"I didn't expect you so soon," Mistress Lockley said. "Tonight I thought surely you'd bring the whole garrison."
"Most definitely, Mistress," he said. His voice was almost lustrous. Beauty felt a peculiar tightness in her throat and scrubbed on, trying to ignore the softly wrinkled calfskin boots in front of her.
"I saw this little partridge auctioned off," said the Captain. And Beauty flushed as the man made an obvious circle around her. "Quite the little rebel," he said. "I was surprised you paid so much for her."
"I have a way with rebels, Captain," said Mistress Lockley in her iron-cold voice without either
pride or
humor. "And she's an exceptionally succulent little partridge. I thought you might enjoy her
tonight."
"Scrub her and send her up to my room now," said the Captain. "I don't think I want to wait until this evening."
Beauty turned her head, deliberately shooting a harsh glance at the Captain. Brazenly handsome he seemed, with a blond stubble of beard on his chin as if his face had been brushed with gold dust. And the sun had left its mark on him, deeply tanning his skin so that his golden eyebrows and his white teeth seemed all the brighter. He had his gloved hand on his hip, and as Mistress Lockley told her frostily to drop her eyes, he only smiled at Beauty's insolence.
PRINCE ROGER'S STRANGE LITTLE STORY
Beauty was lifted to her feet roughly by Mistress Lockley, who, twisting Beauty's wrists behind her back, forced her out the back door into a large grassy yard of heavy-limbed fruit trees.
In an open shed on smooth wooden shelves half a dozen naked slaves slept as deeply and easily, it seemed, as they had in the more sumptuous Slaves' Hall in the castle. But a crude woman with her sleeves rolled up had another slave standing in a hogshead of soapy water, the slave's hands tethered to an overhanging tree branch. The slave was being scrubbed by the woman as coarsely as if he were salted meat for supper.
Almost before she knew what was happening, Beauty had been forced to stand in such a tub, the soapy water swirling about her knees, and as her hands were tied to the branch of the fig tree above, she heard Mistress Lock-ley call for Prince Roger.
At once the Prince appeared, upright this time, with the scrubbing brush in his hand, and he went to work on Beauty immediately, covering her with the warm water and scrubbing at her elbows and her knees, and then at her head, as he turned her this way and that very rapidly.
It was all necessity here, and there was no luxury to it. Beauty winced as the brush scrubbed between her legs, and she moaned when the harsh bristles ground at her welts and bruises.
Mistress Lockley was gone. The heavy woman had spanked the poor whimpering scrubbed slave back to bed and disappeared herself into the Inn. And the yard, save for the sleeping ones, was empty.