Beauty's Release - By A. N. Roquelaure & Anne Rice Page 0,76

there, panic that we were to be seen in this new livery of shame, and the more I shook with sobs and anxious breaths the more the harness constricted me and the weights danced as they hung from my nipples.

Gareth came up beside me and ran a quick comb through my hair.

“Now, Laurent,” he said, scoldingly. “What is there to be afraid of?” He patted my bottom where he had whipped it only moments ago. “No, I’m not tormenting you,” he said. “I’m quite serious. Let me tell you something about fear: Fear is only good when you have a choice in things.”

He jerked the phallus to make sure it was in well. It seemed to grind me harder, more deeply, my anus itching and throbbing around it. I couldn’t stop crying.

“But do you have a choice in things?” he asked honestly. “Think on it. Do you?”

I shook my head to admit that I didn’t.

“No, that isn’t how a pony answers,” he said gently. “I want a good shake of the head. That’s it. Again. That’s it.”

I obeyed, and each toss of my head tightened the harnessing, moved the weights, jarred the phallus. He touched my neck with maddening gentleness. I wanted to turn to him, weep against his shoulder.

“Now, as I was saying,” he said. “And you listen to this, too, Tristan. Fear is only important when you have a choice. Or some control. You have none. In a few moments, the Lord Mayor will be here with his farm cart. He’ll be returning the old team, and you’ll be part of the new team to take the cart back out to the manor house for the afternoon load, and you’ve no choice in this whatsoever. You’re going to be marched out there and tethered to the cart, and you’ll pull it all afternoon and be whipped soundly as you do it. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it. So when you think about it, what is there to be afraid of? For a year you will do this, and nothing can change it. You understand me, you know you do. I want a nod now.”

Tristan and I both nodded. And to my surprise, I was a little calmer, the fear seeming to darken, become something else, something nameless. Hard to explain it—per—haps impossible—the feel of this new life beginning, just beginning.... All the roads I had followed had led me to this place, this gate, this beginning.

Gareth took a little oil in his hands from a nearby jug, and he rubbed it onto my balls, murmuring that it would make them “glisten,” and then he gave the tip of my cock the same polishing. I could hardly endure the stimulation, the chills crawling over my skin, and I shied away from his hand as he laughed and pinched my rump.

“When are those tears going to stop?” he said as he kissed my ear. “Chew hard on the bit when you cry. Chew hard. Doesn’t that feel good, the soft leather in your teeth? Ponies like it.”

It did feel good. He was right. It helped to chew on it, to work it between my jaws, the stiff roll of leather tasting good and feeling strong enough to take the clamping down, the chewing.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him polishing Tristan, thinking, “Any moment we will be out on the road; we will be marching and hundreds will see us—if they bother to look up, bother to take notice.”

Gareth turned to me again. A small loop of black leather was fixed just under the tip of my cock and this was adorned with a small bell that gave a low, brassy jangling noise with every movement. Unendurably degrading. Such a little thing.

Memories of the exquisite adornments in the Sultan’s world inundated me—jewels, gold, the multicolored carpets strewn on the soft, green, garden grass, the fine leather manacles—and the tears streamed down my face, but it was not that I wanted to be there! It was only that the dramatic change intensified everything!

Tristan, too, was being made to wear the bell, and every movement of our cocks brought some appalling sound from the things. And we would become accustomed to all this, I knew. In a month, it would seem natural!

I watched Gareth take from a hook on the wall a long-handled thrash I’d never seen before. It was a bundle of stiff but flexible leather strips, a sort of cat-o’-nine-tails, and with