Kingshelm (Renegade Druid Cycle Book 1) (19 page)

“It is the key to enlightenment,” Lady Madeline said, walking into the study. “You will spend your entire journey rising in the ranks of our Order unlocking more and more of that axiom’s truth, and thereby becoming a more powerful mage. Your lessons begin today, my Emperor.”
 

Barryn knocked hesitantly at the door to Lady Sanguina’s chambers, wondering what infraction he had committed to earn a summons to the savage woman’s den. She was not called the Mistress of Pain for nothing, and Barryn had quickly identified the thread of sadism running through the tapestry of her being.
 

She enjoyed punishing her paying clients.
How much more does she brutalize anyone else who fall into her grasp?

“Knock louder!” came the harsh, commanding voice from within. “Like a man, not a timid girl.”
 

Anger and embarrassment rose up his spine and caught in his chest, and Barryn hammered the door with the meaty part of his fist.
 

“You may enter,” the voice replied alluringly, almost sweetly.
 

Barryn followed the command—for command it was, cloaked in the silky veil of invitation.
 

Not since he entered the service of the House of Portia had he seen so many cushions, tapestries, and rugs. Incense and some other smoky, herbal aroma hung thickly in the air. Candles and lamps throughout the den cast a ruddy light on the golds, reds and deep blues that predominated.
 

Lady Sanguina lounged on a couch in the middle of the room, surrounded by the tiny hearts of flame from the candles yielding their energy to her. A simple, light blue robe cinched at the waist with a gold cloth belt contrasted with her red skin and black hair. The cloth fought valiantly to keep her breasts contained, yet looked to be on the losing side of the match.
 

She smiled and took a puff from a tall hookah standing next to her. “You were expecting a dungeon, perhaps? A hellish chamber for an infernal creature like me?”

“No, Lady Sanguina, that isn’t what I thought—”
 

“Of course it is,” she said. “Otherwise, I need to work harder on my persona. That is what the clients expect from me. That is what the girls expect from me.”

Arousal and vague fear swirled in Barryn. Her breasts—
Those red, devilish tits!
What would I even do with them?
he thought—rose and fell with the Lady’s breaths. But she had masterfully cultivated an air of dread that chilled his excitement. In the midst of the brewing tussle in his mind, curiosity gave both arousal and dread a miss, and Barryn asked the obvious question.
 

“Then why am I here?”
 

Lady Sanguina smiled and walked toward him. She stopped just short of Barryn and lightly brushed her breasts on his chest as she leaned in to whisper in his ear.
 

“Because I am claiming you as mine, and you must see me as I really am,” she said, then leaned back to look in his eyes. “For I will teach you to do to me what I do to my clients, but that requires we have absolute knowledge of each other. And absolute trust.”
 

Barryn’s heart was pounding. “But I’ve never…”
 

The Lady smiled sweetly and condescendingly. “I know. I know. And the conversations Lady Tethys and I had regarding your potential…
usefulness
…as a training aid for the new girls would make you blush harder than you already are. You were especially valuable just after your arm was sliced open. Do you know how hard it is to get a man to perform in bed when he’s injured? How about an injured
virgin
?”
 

She laughed mercilessly. “But I could have taught a nun to seduce you. And then she could go on to give a statue an erection, then fuck it into pea gravel.”
 

She stepped away from the heathen boy. “But I am a selfish bitch. I want you all to myself. It is the curse of the M’Tarr, you see. My people take what they want. When they want it. Regardless of the cost. I am a child of the Shoraz-Athar and the very embodiment of M’Tarr ethics, such as they are.”
 

Barryn felt he was regaining his voice, and he remembered his druidic breathing exercises. Now that the moisture was returning to his mouth, he realized that it had been dry as a ball of flax.
 

“But why me?”
 

“I grow tried of your questions, young Barryn,” Lady Sanguina said. “You ask questions, and thereby soak up knowledge like a sponge without giving any in return. I would hear you speak. Tell me a saga of your clan. Then I might answer your question.”
 

The red woman returned to her plush couch. “Begin.”
 

Arousal began to overwhelm his fear, and Barryn reached within to retrieve his most challenging skaldic poem,
King Aradric’s Raid Across the Shoraz-Athar
. Barryn had felt the very soul of the Caeldrynn coursing through him when he finally mastered the song’s meter and complex alliteration.
 

But it was the lay’s subject matter that Barryn hoped would impress, and sting, Lady Sanguina.
King Aradric’s Raid
was the story of how one of the greatest High Kings, Aradric of Clan Riverstar, fought the M’Tarr raiders of a bygone age and chased them back into their windy mountain crags. Before he could think better of it, he gave voice to the words in his hoard:
 

Lo! In the days before wicked castle dweller | did despoil and pillage the Rivered Lands

When glittering gold fell and flowed
 
from royal cup | and was the joy of Thirty Thanes

The bearers of sword and shield

Red demons of ice and fire’s fury in man’s form | did from the mountain coldness fly…

It was too late—the song was begun, and Barryn could not stop lest he anger the divinities and ancestors from whom his poetic skill flowed. Lady Sanguina’s eyes flared, and she became erect and rigid in her seat. Barryn couldn’t think, couldn’t react. He had opened his word hoard, and the stanzas continued to fly out unbidden and uncontrolled.
 

Then the lady closed her eyes and leaned her head back slightly. She was swaying with the rhythm of the poem, and then her eyes opened and her back straightened. Shoulders thrown back, eyes unfocused, the demon-woman began to sing a wordless accompaniment to the poem that rose and fell, flashed hot and fast then slowed and chilled Barryn to his core.
 

For half an hour they continued thus, and the boy felt 10 years older and hundreds of years wiser. The sagas always made him see the legendary deeds and fabled lands of the Caeldrynn’s ancient past, whether he was a rapt listener or the one reciting them. But Lady Sanguina’s etherial voice carried the
smell
of the cold wind rolling off the mountains of the Shoraz-Athar, and he could feel the spattering blood and frosty grass of the battlefield.

Steel bit into flesh as the M’Tarr scimitars and Caeldrynn axes flashed and flailed beneath the far-off leaden winter sky. Heroes and cowards on both sides fell in battle, and the M’Tarr broke off and flew to the foothills beneath the Shoraz-Athar. The woman’s singing and Barryn’s poetry brought the tale to vivid life nearly a thousand years after the fallen dead littered that icy battlefield, the frontier of the Clan’s greatest holdings in Mergova. The Age of the High Kings returned for a time in the fancy whorehouse in the land of the Castle Dwellers—land that was once the roving-grounds of Clan Riverstar—as their voices danced together with the incense smoke wafting in the candlelight.
 

The wordless song lingered minutes after Barryn finished the poem, and Lady Sanguina took his hand.
 

“I was not always a whore, though I thoroughly enjoy the trade,” she said when her song was through. “Among my people, I am known as one of the finest Blood Singers alive. The history of the M’Tarr is woven in the songs I know, just as the lore of the Caeldrynn lives on in the poetry you have.”
 

She pressed her bosom to the young heathen’s chest and let her hair fall over his shoulder. His whole body yearned for her, even as his mind reeled.
 

“Now to your question,” Lady Sanguina whispered in his ear. “You and I are bards, young Barryn, and our circumstances cannot take that away from us. You are a fellow weaver of tales—that is why I desire you.”
 

It was the winter solstice—celebrated by the Caeldrynn as the high holy day
Albana Arduaan
, the Gate of Winter—and Barryn was observing it in his cage on the floor of Lady Sanguina’s dungeon.
 

The “training sessions” he had endured over the past several weeks had taken him through a trackless morass of humiliation and embarrassment to locations in his psyche he had never willingly explored alone. His journey, prodded by Lady Sanguina’s lash, had taken him from the pits of despair to the brink of ecstasy.
 

She had taught Barryn a safe word,
salaamashaz
, that he was to use if she pushed him too far. It was the M’Tarr appeal for truce, and she was bound to abide by it once uttered.
 

“But, my little pet, I am bound by it only once per year, as is the custom of the M’Tarr,” she had told him after he had mastered the word’s pronunciation. “So if you need to use it, little one, make it count.”

He had not used it, at first from fear that he would have greater need for it later on as the abuse intensified. But as the floggings, the bondage, the humiliation, and the allure increased over the weeks, so did his desire to turn them on his tormentor. Barryn wanted to discover how far he could go with Lady Sanguina into these strange realms.
 

Soon, bitch, it will be my turn to hold the lash. And when I am done, I will fuck you until you moan.

Barryn rubbed his eyes and shook his head.
Blessed gods, where did that come from? I am learning much from My Lady. Too much. Monster like her…Gods and heroes, when will she teach me to fuck? Now I’m talking like the Castle Dwellers. Breathe. Feel the Light. Coldness of the stone. Purification. The elements are here, and I draw my power from Them. The Gods are aloft and await me at the end of my journey. I am Barryn of Clan Riverstar. They can’t take that from me. My Lady can’t take that from me. She’s never shown me this much of her body. I want her to take everything from me. Please let me touch your tits. Power of the stone, I feel its strength. The Sun is above me, the Moons await in the night. Power and wisdom from the Ancestors and Heroes of old…

The door clanged and opened on well-oiled hinges. Lady Sanguina paused in the doorway. She was dressed only in tall boots, long leather gloves and a black leather body harness. Its straps and buckles concealed nothing of interest on her exquisite, red-tinged body. Barryn, naked in his cage, visibly reacted to the sight of her statuesque form.
 

The M’Tarr woman laughed and gently tapped the end of a yard-long metal rod on the stone wall. “My pet is glad to see me, it appears. Isn’t he?”

“Yes, my lady.”
 

“Good. Do you remember the Word of Truce?”

“Yes, my lady.”
 

“Excellent. If there were a day you needed it, this is it.” She walked across the stone floor toward Barryn’s cage and tapped the rod on a bar next to his face. “What is this?”
 

He looked at the end of the rod and saw a rune. Horror and desire flooded his mind as he realized the thing was a branding iron.
Will she really burn me?

“It is the Lightning Rune, my lady.”
 

“It is indeed, little pet. I will burn this into your pink skin to remind you who you belong to. Kiss it, little pet, before I warm it up for you.”
 

Lady Sanguina thrust the branding iron into the cage in front of Barryn’s face, and he gently kissed it.
If she is too rough with you, just tell me, even if you are too proud or afraid to tell her yourself. Lady Sanguina is a good person, but she really believes pleasure and pain are one and the same,
Lady Tethys had said
. I can talk to her if it becomes too much for you.

Lady Tethys can save me,
Barryn thought.
But there is nothing to be saved from. I want this. I think I want this. I want it because she wants it, and I want My Lady. Gods and heroes, what am I becoming?

Lady Sanguina strode to a brazier and placed the end of the brand in the hot coals, then walked to Barryn’s cage. A key hung from an iron hook built into her leather choker. This she removed and stooped gracefully to unlock the cage and let the door swing open. Barryn remained inside.
 

“Good pet! You are learning discipline, finally. Do I need to put the leash on you?”
 

“No, my lady.”
 

“Good. I am bored with the leash. Go fetch me a tool and meet me at the whipping post. I need to toughen you up before I touch you with the brand.”
 

Barryn crawled on his hands and knees toward a wooden rack festooned with various implements.
The cold stone is drawing the fear from me. My fear is going deep into the earth below me. Sunlight is coming down into me from the Realms Above.
 

He selected a leather blindfold and a short whip with multiple tails. Barryn donned the blindfold and gently clenched the whip between his teeth, then crawled to the whipping post and waited.
 

“Very good, little pet. Very good!” Lady Sanguina’s persona broke for just a moment, and her voice betrayed genuine admiration for his choice.
 

She stood Barryn up facing the whipping post and bound his wrists above his head, then traced the handle of the whip gently from the nape of his neck down his spine.
 

“You are learning so much, little pet,” she murmured next to Barryn’s ear. “Soon, you will be ready to do this to me. Would you like that?”