The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

When winter had fallen over the eastern continent, there had been three Witch Queens between the Greater Sea and the Lesser. Spring found only two.

At first things grew more peaceful. Olerohe’s warriors were commanded back to their garrisons and towns, though no one knew quite whose order it was. Queen Shilwan was said to be making a pilgrimage to Akym wearing nothing but chains Akym had sent her.

The realm of Akym sat quietly triumphant. Queen Lirytas did not rush to seize fallen Olerohe, when Olerohe’s fallen Lady would soon beg leave to lay it at her feet.

In Jinsai, Queen Keris and her archons just waited. Jinsai’s terrain favored defense, but never against such an enemy. Even as the three realms had loosely allied and broken in the past, no two of them had ever coordinated an attack, much less marched together. Now, completely under Lirytas’ will, fallen Olerohe might sit out the next war. For the first time in history, it would not threaten Akym’s flank, freeing all of Akym’s amazons to roll over Jinsai like a tide that would never go out again.

Queen Lirytas, her eyes reflecting demon-altar fires and the way they shone on her oiled slavewomen, might do more. She might take the time to enthrall her new serfs in Olerohe, and send them, instead of her own warriors, across the frontier into Jinsai. They would kill with no mercy and die with no fear and hunt with no thoughts but her voice in their heads.

Against such mindless warriors, the fight the women of Jinsai would make would be skillful and desperate, but it would be hopeless. When Lirytas’ own legions finally marched in, they would find surviving Olerohese drones ready for new commands, and horrified, exhausted Jinsaia perhaps ready to accept the same slavery.

After that, there would be one Witch Empress, and nothing else but slaves from sea to sea. Lirytas would snuff any dream that anything else would ever happen. It was likeliest that whoever she left with the power to dream at all would dream only of her.

2.

Eshwe stood with her sister Jinsaia warriors in Queen Keris’ lofty audience hall, still unused to the place. The vast windows, set high up in the stone, let Jinsai’s great cool winds come and go as they would, and sometimes it was like standing in woods up near the treeline.

Echoes sounded differently off stone. Eshwe tried to think of it as a fortress, but in the wars with Akym and Olerohe she only knew the small, rough-masoned tactical forts they built themselves.

She and the other warriors wouldn’t have been here at all, but these were not ordinary times, and Keris’ senior archon, Weikua, garrisoned the palace as it had not been since their great-great-grandmothers’ day, before the last of the male tribesmen had been wiped out. Queen Keris had not wanted her halls trodden by troops of amazons—and, to be fair, had not wanted, either, to keep women used to ranging the countryside pent like watchdogs behind her gates, just to guard her sleep.

But Weikua saw more clearly through her one eye than many other woman saw with two, and prevailed.

The first night Eshwe stood watch, assassins had tried to kill Queen Keris. They’d slain one of her handmaidens and wounded two more, and when the guards had chased and cornered them they fought like demons and then slew themselves on their own blades.

Afterward, word had come down. The five women who’d infiltrated the palace were amazons of Jinsai, a lost patrol last seen on the frontier with Akym. They all wore collars. They all died smiling blissfully, dripping down their thighs.

Eshwe’s centurion had once said Weikua sometimes saw through the eye she’d lost in battle, long ago, and it showed her what was secret and true and dangerous.

Eshwe shivered, wondering if Weikua had seen that with her dead eye. The captured amazons would have been taken before Queen Lirytas, darkest and strongest of the Witch Queens, and with her arts she would have turned them. She would have taken their souls and replaced them with the spell of obedience that bound anyone she wished to use.

Eshwe wondered if it had hurt, if they had grieved for the harm they would do when they were no longer free and could only obey their new mistress. Lirytas was, not surprisingly, said to be cruel, and she might have told them, as they struggled, that they were to kill their own queen or die trying.

She wondered if she would live through the war to come, and find out for herself how it felt to become Lirytas’ slavewoman.

The centurion spoke quietly and they all came to attention, hands on hilts in the wartime way. Eshwe felt foolishly hopeful as the sound of all of them coming to ready rang between the stone walls. She saw Queen Keris, beautiful and grave, and wondered if she’d taken heart from the sound of her warriors’ discipline.

Keris only looked forward, as a party came into the hall.

Four Jinsaia amazons marched in, boxing in another quartet whose hands were full of chains.

At the center, chained, a nude blonde woman walked proudly upright, as smoothly as she could in her bonds. She still dripped from the search and bath all strangers endured, these days, before they were allowed into the Queen’s presence, and her hair was slicked back on her head. Behind her, a robed seeress walked and nodded to Weikua, who stood at the Queen’s side.

Queen Keris regarded the nude woman, who bent at her knees and hips, folding with strange grace to kneel, and stranger grace to rise again.

The Queen’s voice was strong. “Jinsai welcomes the envoy of Akym, and asks pardon for the envoy’s treatment. In these times anyone may bring weapons or poisons or magics, and I am forbidden to endanger the realm I ward.

“No discourtesy is meant to Akym or Akym’s Queen or the envoy herself.”

The chained blonde inclined her head again. “i am commanded to say that Jinsai’s Queen is as gracious as she is brave and beautiful, and my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, sees no insult in a prudent ruler.

“i am commanded to say that my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, greets and welcomes her sister sovereign and sister sorceress.

“i am commanded—”

“Who is it,” Keris asked, “that I speak to? What noblewoman of Akym comes here to speak for her liege lady?”

The envoy stared at her. “i am commanded to say that i am no noblewoman. i am nothing but the instrument of One Whom i am permitted to worship. Before my life had purpose in obeying my Mistress and Owner, i was eldest daughter of the Priestess of the Wind.

“That faithless whore betrayed my Mistress and Owner, and Her Divinity took my will and freedom from me, to punish her. i am exalted to be Her Divinity Queen Lirytas’ humble slavegirl. One of many She owns.

“i am commanded to say that it is no insult from my Mistress and Owner to send a slave on Her errand. i am as Her tablet or Her parchment. i only transmit Her words and Her will.”

Eshwe saw how straight the woman stood. For a second she thought she wears chains well—but she’s used to them, then. But she heard the calm conviction in the woman’s voice, the joy as she spoke of being enslaved before her mother’s eyes. She seemed to smile just as they’d said the assassins had smiled, as they sacrificed themselves trying to kill Queen Keris.

There was nothing in her now but Queen Lirytas’ will. It was very good that this woman was so tightly chained.

“What message does Akym send to Jinsai, on this parchment that breathes?” The Queen clearly saw what everyone else did, Lirytas blatantly showing her power to crush minds by sending this puppet here as her emissary. I can do this to you, too, little Queen, she was saying to Keris. Keris stayed calm.

“i am commanded to say that my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, wishes only peace across the land. my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, wills that all who live in the land, the women of Akym, the women of Jinsai, the women of Olerohe, be at peace, tranquil and safe. my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, wills that all find peace and fulfillment at their labors.”

Eshwe found herself nodding a little at the slavewoman’s cadenced speech and shook herself. So much talk of being tranquil, of the need for everyone to find her proper place. Peace would come when all bowed to One Who would rule them, set them to their tasks, tell them what to think and then put their minds to sleep . . .

Something rang. Eshwe started, guiltily, and saw senior archon Weikua with her ceremonial lance and the seeress with her staff looking at each other. Each one had hit the flagstones with her rod, and those who had begun to fall under the spell were roused.

Eshwe looked at her queen, but Keris’ eyes were bright and dangerous over her smile.

The nameless emissary from Akym swayed in her chains. The metal on stone had broken her hypnotized concentration, and she could do nothing until her dark Queen’s next command rose in her thoughts.

“Akym’s Queen could not think such a shallow trick could bring Jinsai’s Queen under her power,” Keris said.

The emissary’s eyes lost their glaze and she smiled up at Queen Keris. “i am commanded to say that some of your women just began their long sleep under the commands of my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas. She bids them to be most welcome, for the gift of Her soothing words.

“They have tasted the beginning of submission to Her Will, and they will fight it less hard when She offers it again. Perhaps they will sleep in battle, lying down to dream when they see Her banners. Perhaps, mounting guard by an important bedchamber, they will look up to see a pattern of stars they do not remember being told to know, and enter to do Her bidding upon the woman sleeping helplessly—”

“What is her message, slave?” Keris folded her arms, clearly putting protocol aside. Her enemy had done it first, trying to use a catspaw to hypnotize her before her court.

“i am commanded to say that my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, graciously offers you the chance to yield to Her and surrender yourself and Your realm to Her care and protection. It shall be decided whether you are returned here as Her slave to be the instrument of Her Will in Her province of Jinsai, or whether you remain at her disposal elsewhere.”

Eshwe couldn’t believe it, but she held her peace. Even if the only outside eye was a mindless slave, spouting what her sorcerous owner had put into her head, Eshwe couldn’t shame her corps by reacting to this insult.

Others were angrier and forgot themselves, but the outcry was muted even before Weikua’s one-eyed glare swept the hall. Eshwe wanted to think it meant most of them held discipline, but in her gut she knew the cold truth: it was that close to being over. Evil, mindstealing Lirytas felt that free to threaten.

Keris hadn’t looked away when the protest had swelled. “Akym’s Queen knows this is unworthy of response.”

“i am commanded to say that my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, makes this offer out of generosity, to afford Jinsai’s Queen the honor and pleasure of abasing herself and accepting domination of her own will. When my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, takes that will from Jinsai’s Queen, it will have more value for having been used so wisely and submissively in its last moments. my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, honors you with the chance to offer her such a pleasing gift.

“my Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas, reminds you that you will soon join your counterpart, the one who lately sat on Olerohe’s throne, at Her feet. She will be pleased with a matched pair of high-bred slavegirls. The one who is now slave Shilwan learned in a single lesson that she was no queen but only a slave still asleep to her slavery. she only held the province in trust for her Mistress and Owner, Her Divinity Queen Lirytas.

“When you learn this of yourself, Keris, and open your mind and thighs to Her, only then you will find peace in your heart for the rest of your life, and peace for the women of Jinsai, forever.

“Give her your people and yourself and sleep in Her power.

“Such is the Will of Her.

“Submit to Her Will. Become one with It.

“Obey.”

She stopped, and Eshwe wondered what Queen Keris would say to all that.

But then the emissary spasmed in her chains, rattling them under her wail, and the inner ring of amazons holding them stumbled off-balance. The cry rang oddly on the stone. It was the sound a woman made in a bedchamber, against another woman’s skin.

The other guards—and many in the hall—tensed, in case this were some new trick, but the seeress took charge as the amazons let the Akymi emissary down, the links clattering on the hall’s flagstones.

“The emissary has died, my Queen.”

Keris looked sharply at Weikua. “Did someone here slay her? Or is this some poison we did not find?”

“Neither, my Queen,” the seeress said, moving the limp form with the tip of her staff. “None of your warriors defied your orders. We will examine her, but there is no sign of misdeed on her.

“Her Mistress simply willed her to die when she was done. She obeyed.”

Keris nodded. “A last sign from Lirytas that her power is great, that over her slaves she holds utter sway, and that she will kill anyone for any reason that suits her. And a final blow at the Wind Priestess, letting her daughter die among strangers, promising them the same fate she was warped to exult in.

“When you have examined her body, find a priestess of the Wind rites to see to her pyre. If Lirytas has not yet destroyed her mother, perhaps the winds will bring her consolation.” Keris turned away.

Up in the vault of the hall, the winds were still.

3.

Eshwe had been excited and proud to be asked to serve in the inner guard. They had tested her for it. A young seeress with lovely full lips had started speaking to her and she had found herself struggling to stay awake. Like the emissary’s offhanded spell in the audience hall, the hypnosis had snared her but not made her its captive.

No one knew what evil power Lirytas might send, and stronger women than a simple, stubborn guard like Eshwe might bend to it with joy. But it was what they could do. And it could show a seeress if a woman had already been enslaved, or at least if her will had been seduced in another trance she’d been commanded to conceal or to forget.

For what it was worth, Eshwe felt good that she was found unbewitched, and strong enough to hold out a little bit.

But she saw a downside soon enough. Guarding Queen Keris’ inner council meant hearing it, and with the rest of her element of the Third Century, she was learning how grim the wisest and strongest women in Jinsai thought things were.

“You think I was a fool,” the Queen said to Weikua. “Letting one of Lirytas’ pawns even that close to me.”

The older woman shook her head. “No, dear Lady. You were wise when you were a child, and you did not grow foolish.

“It matters not. Lirytas knows how we guard you, how anyone she sent openly would be searched and stripped and bathed and held away from you. Even that try at hypnotizing you or anyone else—it was an arrow meant to hit wide of the mark. A show of her power.”

Keris nodded. “I felt that. As when you were teaching me blades, and you played your sword in the sunlight, to dazzle me.”

Tavteia, a captain of horse, leaned forward. “Perhaps she will not truly try to take the Queen’s will by trick. She truly wants the Queen to bow to her. To surrender. It would be sweeter for her.”

Keris regarded her. “I think you judge her goals well, Captain. But even my noble fellow sovereign is not so devious that she would not take me any way she could.”

Weikua nodded slightly as the cavalrywoman hung her head, feeling a bit less clever.

“Did Lirytas taste submission from Shilwan?” The captain of spearbearers Hawk Striking Low was from the south, from one of the tribal confederacies that had joined with the northern cities to form the realm. “Did she seduce Olerohe’s queen to want to be her toy?” The other captains stirred nervously and the priestesses looked displeased.

“There has been talk, from women who were there, that Shilwan was of the kind who craved to be used. That she trained certain weaker-willed maidservants to keep her bound, to beat her and use her as a whore, and bespelled them to forget this outside the hours of her pleasure.

“That it was she who first sent to Lirytas, begging to serve. That the message she sent was signed ‘Your slave’ and scented with her own musk.”

Weikua shook her head. “Queen Shilwan,” she said, stressing the fallen witch’s rank, “was none of those things. If she did what the stories say—and other minds might be taught those stories, made into lackeys of Akym’s queen by other lackeys of hers—then it was after she had succumbed to Lirytas’ power.

“She was enslaved through Lirytas’ magic and became her thrall. She did not go willingly to Lirytas’ palace to be collared. Not while she still had will.”

Weikua gestured to her counterpart among the priestesses, a robed old woman whose name Eshwe did not know. She spoke with a soft voice that Eshwe wanted to keep listening to, despite the words it carried. She made herself look at Queen Keris, but as before, the Queen was bright-eyed and aware: the priestess wasn’t hypnotizing her.

“The realms are all ruled by Witch Queens,” the wisewoman explained, “but each one follows her own path. We are the clockwork realm—the least dependent on the supernatural. We trust artisans and craftswomen, and we admire a clever device more than a brilliant spell.”

“Easier to fix when it stops working,” said Hawk Striking Low.

“Indeed.” For a second the priestess smiled and looked like anyone’s canny grandmother. “Akym is at the other end of things. Intense magic, and usually of the darkest kind. They deal with the Powers as entities—aware beings who want payment, worship, vengeance. Akym has not decided that goddesses help best when they do not talk back.”

Eshwe gripped her sword hilt. Until recently, when Olerohe’s border skirmishes with Akym had suddenly ended with Olerohe’s abrupt capitulation, she and most other Jinsaia had thought the worst had been over with in Akym for a hundred years.

The Queens Never To Be Named had practiced necromancy in Akym back then, abducting women from the neighboring realms but happy enough to feed Akymi, too, to their sacrificial fires to appease the ravening beings they summoned. They had been devoured by their own atrocities. Their names had become blasphemy even in Akym, and they were just bogeys to frighten children.

Now Eshwe was learning that there could be worse things.

“Olerohe,” the priestess was saying, “was different. Mystical. Their magic was more passive—seeing and knowing, more than doing. The best of them were open to the deepest currents of power, which they could read. Shilwan was said to be one of the most sensitive of her line, able to stare into the crystals she used to go deeply into trance, to learn what happened far away and to see what was hidden about things near to hand.

“But it was there that she was most susceptible. Lirytas seduced her while her mind flew, after Lirytas’ goddesses charmed away her desire to resist and her memory of what she owed her people. The crystal became her addiction, then her master, then the leash Lirytas bound her with.”

The priestess looked at Hawk Striking Low. “She tried to fight it. Some of my order at her court told me of things that now show she was trying to warn of what was being done to her. But Lirytas had so bent her mind that she could not think clearly by then, or speak of it. The one priestess she reached became a slave herself, so erotic and compelling was what Shilwan had to tell her.”

Hawk Striking Low bowed her head for a moment.

“I have such crystals,” Queen Keris said. “I do not use them often. Now I will not use them at all.”

Weikua and the old priestess traded a glance. Weikua said, “My Lady, with respect, that art is not your strength, so it is not your weakness. You have always been very much of this world. Queen Lirytas is not likely to expect to reach your soul that way.”

Keris looked at them all. “What is my weakness, then?”

4.

“Mercy, perhaps,” the old priestess told her.

“Hope for another way,” Weikua said. “She knows, or suspects, what you can do to stop her. She may not think you can bring yourself to do it.”

Keris met their gaze. “When my mother told me about that part of my reign to come, I nearly asked her to disown me.” The captains and the junior priestesses stirred to hear that, but kept silent. “But worse than facing this choice myself would have been knowing I had condemned a sister or cousin to face it. And the terrible day was never supposed to arrive.”

She smiled wearily at them all. “There they are, my weaknesses. Mercy on my kindred, and hope that the clouds would pass.” Her smile faded. “But it is not a cloud darkening Jinsai’s sky. It is the fall of night.”

“In this night,” the priestess said, “there are worse things than dying.”

Eshwe felt herself tensing along with every other woman in the council chamber. She didn’t want to hear this terrible secret, to which they were trusting everyone’s freedom and life. Something that had frightened the younger queen to the point of nearly refusing the crown was bad enough; something that made her desperate enough to admit it, here, was awful.

Keris nodded. “So be it. If there is mercy, let the goddess who gives it be generous with my people. With all the people.”

Eshwe heard Keris say nothing for herself. Goddess, my Queen is first of her people. Hear her prayer thus.

Goddess—save the Queen.

“We must tell Lirytas, though.” Keris spoke firmly. “As a threat it can give her pause without my having to use it, and if we can restore Olerohe as a functioning realm during that pause, we can all survive later.” Eshwe saw the captains shaking their heads, and even Weikua avoided their eyes.

For the first time, she knew how they felt. Fighting Olerohese warriors at the frontiers, she’d still never dreamed of marching past them to conquer the whole realm—or that they would come in their thousands to take Jinsai from the Jinsaia. Wars had been small things, not the death of nations. But—now to threaten nightmarish things to try to save Olerohe, because only thus could they save Jinsai?

Eshwe’s head hurt. It could not be good to be the queen, and think like that.

“I wish she had not mind-molded her emissary to die. I would rather have used her own puppet than send one of my own women to face Lirytas in her palace.”

“That,” Weikua said, “was no doubt part of why she did it.”

“I will bring your challenge to the dark witch’s throne,” declared Hawk Striking Low. “Only tell me what it is, my Queen.”

“No, let it be I who does it,” said Tavteia. The two captains stared at each other.

It was unseemly to boast of bravery, and instead each one began to name her battle skills. Two other captains spoke also, and Keris watched four of her ablest officers quarrel over the privilege of carrying her mysterious threat to a woman who would probably turn them and keep them.

Eshwe watched. Queen Keris did not look annoyed. She was looking at each captain, trying to decide whom she would condemn with the honor.

Queen Keris was truly beautiful. Weariness and time had laid lines by her eyes and mouth, and her shoulders were softening, but as Eshwe looked at her, she seemed lovelier than the tautest-bodied barrackmate or the smoothest tavern girl.

She thought of the queen and the crystals that could let her call to Lirytas. She suddenly saw Keris lying in the dark, envying the maid curled beside her, stung by knowing the maid slept so easily because she trusted her queen to keep her safe and free. How tempting it would be to rise and find the crystal, to kneel to it and let its trance take her mind, and give herself to Lirytas.

Lirytas would smooth Keris’ face as she smoothed her mind, lulling her with promises of peace and safety. It would be the worst of betrayals but Lirytas would not leave the pain in her newest slave’s mind. Keris would have bliss and forgetfulness.

Eshwe looked at the woman who faced that choice every endless night now, and kept saying No. She wondered if Queen Keris thought of it now, as she looked at the women she would choose a slave from. She knew Keris would say No again, and another piece of her would fall away.

Eshwe slid past the guard in front of her and stepped to the table.

Everyone turned and she heard metal sliding from scabbards. She went to one knee with parade-ground speed and held out her open hand, blushing to think they’d worried—were still worried—that she was a newly-triggered assassin, another will-less reminder from the other Witch Queen.

“My Queen,” she said. “Send me.”

Keris looked at her. “Rise. Who are you?”

“My Queen, I am Eshwe of the Third Century.”

Weikua’s eye fixed on her. “Why do you come forward?” The fierce old archon inclined her head to the captains, who looked incredulously at Eshwe. “Do you have accomplishments these ladies do not?”

Eshwe felt small and silly now. She did not look at the captains, and turned from Weikua to her tormented Queen. “My Queen, I am not a rider like Captain Tavteia, or a swordmistress like Captain Hawk Striking Low.

“When I tried the bow my teacher told me to take up the sword because I would find it harder to miss.” There was soft laughter here and there, nervous but not unfriendly. “I have never been awarded for great deeds, but I have never been reproached for failing to do my share. Or my duty.”

Keris’ eyes seemed to bore into her, and Eshwe was horrified to see more pain in them now, not less.

“You need these women, my Queen. Their skill will defend you, and others like me will follow them. They can lead, and make us forget what we cannot do.” She glanced at the captains, forgetting their vanity just now. “You spent time finding and gathering them to your side, for just such a war as this.

“But you have thousands like me.” She recognized some of what Keris was feeling, and was dizzy to see gratitude from her sovereign. “To do this requires only that a woman hear you clearly and speak as clearly to—the other queen.

“And die when she is slain.”

“She understands.” Keris blinked and turned to Weikua. “By all the goddesses. Why am I not glad at all, Weikua?”

Neither Weikua not the captains said anything until Tavteia looked up at Eshwe. “Do you think even the evil one would slay another queen’s emissary?”

Eshwe shook her head, weirdly calm. It was unreal, to stand here and debate with these women. “No, Lady Captain. She will most likely enslave whatever woman is sent. But she may pretend to let the envoy come back, to do her will.

“No one who has been in her hands, now, can be let back into Jinsai alive. Or anywhere near our Queen.”

“She means we must kill whomever we send if Lirytas lets her come back,” Weikua said flatly. “To send you, Tavteia, would be to make Lirytas a present of one of our best cavalry commanders. It might amuse her to twist you into leading her riders against our infantry. Or she might just make you a serving wench.

“But even if you return to us cursing her, Lirytas may still be in your head, making you obey. This warrior says that we would do better to kill her than to kill you.”

Tavteia looked at Eshwe again, and Eshwe was nervous now.

But Queen Keris said, “So be it.”

At her nod, most of the council filed out, some of them looking at Eshwe, who stood where she was. Then, on command, the guard element came to attention to be marched out, and Eshwe straightened too before she saw her leader gesture her still.

It hit Eshwe then. She would still serve her queen, but she was no longer a warrior with the rest.

She bowed her head, hoping for a sliver of goddess-mercy to keep her from weeping like a child. Someone took her hand, and she looked up.

It was Queen Keris’ mercy, and as she held the queen’s hand, it felt nothing like weakness.

5.

The Akymi guards had met Eshwe just over the border. They were three chariots full of powerful women with fixed stares that both drew and repelled her, and they said nothing when she identified herself. They neither deferred to nor menaced her. They were there only to fetch her quickly to their mistress and to show her their mistress’ power.

Queen Lirytas needs us to see her mindbent slavewomen. Her own need is to be feared—or she imagines seeing their obedience will inflame us and make us yearn to bow and obey alongside them.

Eshwe swallowed as she thought this. Is that her weakness? It is not a weakness anyone can do anything about.

She mounted a chariot behind the guard-slave with the gold band on her arm, and they clattered off down the paved road to the capital.

Eshwe had come to the frontier last night from Keris’ palace. She’d ridden pillion on a great war-charger, pressed behind Tavteia. Her mind had been full of the threat she was to bear to the other Witch Queen, and her heart full of everything she was giving up, but the ride had not been the long night of fear she’d expected to face. The horse under her, the woman against her, the easy cantering pace, the rumble of Tavteia’s cohort around them as they sped to the frontier, all wrapped Eshwe in company but left her in peace. She held her hands around Tavteia’s taut stomach, and the captain of horse took her hand and held it for much of the way.

Tavteia had asked to be the one to bring her to Akym, almost hesitantly, as though Eshwe were a kinswoman or another of the Queen’s champions. I suppose I am, now. But not a sword or a lance in her hand, like this woman. I am a stone from a sling, or an arrow fired at night. I will not be retrieved.

The thought kept trying to empty her of courage, but she kept seeing Queen Keris’ face. Eshwe’s courage and purpose were there.

It sustained her now as she hung on to the Akymi chariot’s rail, between two of Lirytas’ silent tools.

The ride was endless and quick, and she wondered how much magic had been in it as they pulled up in the courtyard.

She alighted when they stopped and the chariot rolled quickly off, and as the sound died away into tomblike stillness, she realized that no one had yet spoken to her since she’d arrived here in the other realm. There were guards rigid as statues, but not one came out to her. She’d wondered if they would bind her and search her as the Jinsaia had the first envoy, but she was learning that Queen Lirytas did not fear the things that her Jinsaia rival had to.

Perhaps Lirytas wanted someone to try to kill her or drug her. Breaking them might taste better.

“Envoy?”

Eshwe turned and stared. A woman padded gracefully down the stone steps from the palace doors. She was nude but her skin was pearlescent and faintly bluish, as though she were coated in lacquer that kept shifting its pastels along her lean curves. She was bald, with a circlet of dull metal around her head with Lirytas’ seal set in front.

Her lips and nipples, her lush shaven pussy were a slightly darker blue, and her blank eyes were flat grey, like polished slate. Eshwe shivered as they focused on her nevertheless.

The woman had been tinted somehow to look like a corpse, but she was so lovely that part of Eshwe started chanting to her that she should just take the woman aside and fuck her. Somehow she knew the woman wouldn’t resist. No. She’d submit, cooperate, make soft pleading sounds, stoke Eshwe’s lust until Eshwe was hurting her, raping her on the rough flagstones.

Shock at how much she wanted to do that to the graceful blue slave woke Eshwe from her half-trance. Was she being put under a spell now, or was it part of what had enchanted the blue woman, making her a magnet for any other women’s desire? Or was Eshwe just this weak?

The woman waited, patient beyond a slave’s patience, empty. As Eshwe wondered what this woman had been before Lirytas had made her into a toy, she recalled a drawing from the wall of Queen Keris’ private study, where she’d learned her mission. Now she knew who this palace’s queen had sent to the door.

She knelt, before the woman who had been Queen Shilwan of Olerohe. “Your Majesty,” she whispered. In this evil place even the memory of a good queen needed veneration.

“Who is—Majesty?” the shining blue woman asked politely.

“You are Queen Shilwan.”

The slave’s head turned once to each side in denial. “There is no Queen Shilwan, envoy.” Her slate eyes pointed down at Eshwe as she still knelt. “Shilwan’s memory was a lie and Shilwan’s mind is an insect in the garden of my Mistress and Owner and Shilwan’s will—never was, at all.”

“Shilwan’s mouth and cunt and all her body are for the use of any guest of my Mistress and Owner.” She sidled closer, almost close enough to straddle Eshwe’s head. “May they pleasure you?”

Eshwe watched the pastels ripple hypnotically as the slave nearly danced to her, and saw the blue petals of her pussy start to gleam. She forced herself to look up, finding the slave’s blank owned stare only slightly less arousing.

Seeing their obedience will inflame us. Eshwe fought herself until she could remember her queen’s face.

“I greet Olerohe’s queen,” Eshwe murmured, wondering if anything of Shilwan was still in that supple shell to hear her.

“Olerohe had no queen,” the slave said, almost singing. “It pleased my Mistress and Owner to fill a slavegirl’s mind with dreams of royalty and bespell some fools to share them. Now the game is over, the slavegirl is awakened to her slavery, and there is no dreaming. Olerohe will worship Her as i do.”

Eshwe rose. This was seeming like a game, too, as Lirytas’ power crushed everything. She looked into the smooth slate eyes as long as she could, and spoke. “The envoy of Jinsai’s queen will now seek audience with Akym’s queen.”

The slave straightened and the servile lust that had come over her passed away. “Be pleased to follow this one,” she sighed, and turned to drift up the steps. Eshwe did follow, trying to keep from getting fixated on how the rippling patterns on the other’s skin kept shifting and following her lithesome contours.

If this woman or some other trap did capture her will, Lirytas would hear Keris’ threat from a hypnotized Eshwe half into thrall. The protocols between the realms forbade such tampering with envoys, and Lirytas seemed at least to be following the forms, but if she chose to bend them by bending Eshwe’s will to hers, Eshwe might never know it was happening. For her mission, it would be the same thing—Queen Keris’ threat would be delivered, if only when Lirytas found it near the top of Eshwe’s ransacked mind—but Eshwe clung to her own purpose, to stand before her queen’s enemy and do her duty while still in her right mind.

She tried to keep thinking of the pale blue nude as Queen Shilwan, but it was worse than just seeing her as one of Queen Lirytas’ toys. She was grieving for what had befallen this other, weaker queen and knew she was covering her fear. An awful dread was pushing her to imagine how her own queen would look, reduced to Lirytas’ other prize pawn, taught to love it as she crawled beside Shilwan. She remembered what the envoy had promised, before she obeyed Lirytas’ last command and died in Keris’ hall: a matched pair of high-bred slavegirls.

The blue slave stopped in the middle of an inner courtyard, more shadowy under tall walls, darkened balconies, ivy that looked black against the dark grey stone. Eshwe paused with her, looking at the expressionless guards. They stood like statues but she could feel their warmth, the power of their unmoving bodies. Lirytas had magicked them, taken their wills but made them stronger than human. Without her spells they’d be stiff and useless in a fight for having stood that way so long.

Suddenly Eshwe wondered if they ever changed the guard here at all. These women would not need to eat, or rest, or fuck. And they were forever asleep.

Rhythmic noise came from one of the doorways, and a section of amazons marched in. They were trim and strong, and their bodies varied in build and hue, but the women’s natural look just made it worse to see the unnatural sameness with which they moved. Eshwe had seen some clockwork figures in a crafter’s shop, but seeing ten real women, warriors like her, made to move that way . . .

They were nude, or nearly, and shaven bald like Olerohe’s fallen queen, with the insignia of their new liege tattooed on their foreheads, over their hearts, and above their bare clefts. They wore no clothing or armor, other than belts on their taut waists from which hung short swords, and tall boots with metal inlay that went just above their knees. Eshwe remembered—it was how the Olerohese royal guards were shod.

These had been Queen Shilwan’s bodyguards, helpless to defend her against the magical seduction of her will, and probably enslaved by her own spells—the first command Shilwan’s new owner had put into her mind.

The former monarch and her former life guard stared past each other, equally mindless under the will of the stronger Witch Queen.

Eshwe started to vow something with a lot of never in it, but she looked more closely at the guards’ tattoos. Lirytas’ flowing symbol of ownership was clear and sharp on each one, mind heart and sex, and Eshwe suddenly saw that the markings were not tattoos at all. They were brands.

The lines were sharp because the women had stood still when the irons had touched them. Lirytas’ magic had stilled them. Even screaming as they stood frozen might have moved their skin and blurred the lines. Perhaps Lirytas had let each one scream inside her mind, as her body stayed rigid for the three burning kisses.

Eshwe realized she was crying. The pain might still be in these women’ s memories, something their mistress could lash them with. Or she might have bent them so much into becoming her creatures that they craved it from her.

Never faded from her mind. Now all she could pray was Let us die first, Goddess.

6.

“You are to be searched, envoy.” The blue slave looked at her, smiling faintly. “It is the way of these times, and . . . no discourtesy is meant to Jinsai or Jinsai’s Queen, or the envoy herself.”

Eshwe shook, recalling her queen saying that to Lirytas’ envoy. It was an old formula—but this slave-queen smiled more deeply at Eshwe’s start. Lirytas had listened, and spoken, through the bewitched noblewoman then, and now she watched and spoke to Eshwe, using Shilwan like a puppet.

“My queen respects a prudent ruler,” Eshwe said, and began slowly to take off her weapons and the light armor she wore because it ill-suited any warrior to go without. She set each piece on the stone floor, hearing the metal clicking echo around the courtyard. When her boots were off, her feet cooled on the stone. She didn’t let herself pause when she came to her doeskin tunic and slid out of it, feeling as newly helpless as she was meant to.

Lirytas, wherever she watched from, did something to her mindless guards, and twenty glazed eyes flared together with dark interest, staring at Eshwe’s naked body. The enslaved amazons almost smiled, and she felt it excite her in a way she hated and knew she’d want more of.

She wondered if Lirytas would bid them to ravish her here, the way she’ d daydreamed of raping Shilwan in the outer courtyard. She was one and they were ten, and their bodies were supple and strong, with a witch’s lust and a witch’s power to drive them. She’d be helpless as a tavern girl—but she’d surrender to them as the blue slavegirl would. She’d be more yielding and more abject than the most depraved, insatiable tavern girl a mother ever wept over.

Eshwe gasped and recovered herself. There was no sense in subjecting her to that, even for Lirytas. Eshwe herself was dreaming of it, on her own. This place’s slow, old evil was seeping into her. If she stayed she might start to dream of worse things to submit to, to beg for.

She thought about what waited for her back in Jinsai, if she ever returned there, and it cleared her head.

The blue slave kept smiling. The witch that controlled her knew what had been lapping against Eshwe’s will, and was pleased.

“Come,” Shilwan said, and undulated away toward another door out of the shadowy courtyard.

The ten branded slaves came to attention, their boots ringing more loudly than Eshwe’s armor had as she’d given it up, and the sound stayed in her heart. She found herself coming to attention, bare feet together, and pivoted until she faced the door where Shilwan waited languidly. The amazons marched on either side of her, and she fell into their rhythm, almost one with them as she marched away with them.

Almost. Eshwe was weaker without weapons and shorter without boots, and she was the only woman here—perhaps in the whole palace, or the whole realm—not lost in worship of the dark-souled Queen. Now, as she became part of the machinelike drill, she felt it as a lack. She was the wrongness, and only by surrendering her will to Queen Lirytas and becoming her property could she make it right.

Eshwe fought the quiet temptation, and nearly missed the simple way just marching in step was starting to hypnotize her. She tried to break step, and realized with a giddy start that she couldn’t. The cadence owned her and she wanted it to.

They stopped while she could still think, beside a shallow pool with a chest-high stone column beside it. Eshwe walked to the column and placed her hands on it, leaning onto it and spreading her legs.

A pair of bare-breasted women stepped from a shadowy corner, dark skirts flowing from their hips to the stone floor, and stood on either side of her. The Olerohese warriors and the woman who’d been their queen watched, silently, as Eshwe was handled. The new slavewomen’s touch was warm and smooth and Eshwe moaned before she could help herself. No one else made a sound, other than the calm breathing of the slaves searching her. Their hands ran through her short hair and made soothing circles on her scalp. Their fingertips tracked every inch of her skin, making certain it was her.

One of them teased her lips open and put a cool, fragrant finger along her gums, around her tongue, and her eyes seemed to glow as Eshwe sucked on it and hummed quietly against it.

Eshwe could barely stand as they probed gently into her anus and her pussy, together, searching, maddening her. She wanted to slide down the column and beg, and she didn’t know what kept her still and standing. When she realized they were done and she was still moving her ass slowly, mutely inviting Lirytas’ slaves back into her, she cried again for a moment.

Then she was in the pool, kneeling under the water, feeling it warm and clean, lightly scented. The two skirted slaves helped her stand and step dripping onto the stones. She bent to the column again, lightheaded and compliant.

Their hands began to anoint her, oil that warmed her in the newly-cool air. She felt her hair slicked back and something thick weighed it down, and it seemed as though the weight burdened her mind, too, lulling her into a daze. Eshwe tried to stay focused but there was nothing to focus on but standing here, relaxing under trained hands and warm perfumed ointment.

Something else was applied between her thighs and she felt them loosening. She sighed, happy to open to it, and then whimpered as the touch started to heat her soft places. She knew it would keep her aroused. When she was brought before Lirytas to speak for her queen, she’d be naked and dripping like a tame girl fresh from the harem, prepared and needful.

It had to matter. But she was forgetting why.

Someone started to whisper, a chant, a poem with a slow but enticing meter that drew her ear, soft words about submission and opening and sleep. Another voice joined her, and perhaps another, and the syrup-sweet words flowed on into Eshwe’s brain. Obedience like a flower that would lure the drowsy bee to light there, quiet her buzzing as the petals folded slowly closed . . .

She realized she was staring across the column into the empty eyes of the bewitched queen, and that she had no idea how long she’d been doing it. She forced her eyes down the lovely blank face and the enchanting, enchanted pearlescent body and lowered her forehead to the stone.

No.

The whisper and the anointing stopped. Eshwe closed her eyes, uncertain whether she’d just won something, or started to lose everything.

In the golden light of her private audience chamber Queen Keris had told her the dreadful truth she was to bear to the enemy. Keris was tired and resolute and somehow astonished that Eshwe had volunteered. But even more than when Eshwe had seen her watch the envoy curse her and die, the Queen, for all her weariness, was unbearably beautiful. Keris saw Eshwe start to weep, and sighed and started to excuse her, taking it as fear that Eshwe finally couldn’t hide. Eshwe, seated with her queen at her queen’s pleasure, had flowed to the floor and put her forehead to it. Eshwe could hold in the harder sobbing, until the old seeress had spoken.

“Keris, the girl fears only failing you. She cries for you and your hurts. She cries because she fears that even when she does this you will grieve.”

Eshwe had felt her queen’s hand lightly on her head then. “My heart is at rest,” the queen had promised, and her weeping had passed, and they had gone on.

Eshwe sighed and raised her head, trying to ignore the new lassitude that weighed her limbs and her mind. She tried to go on.

The fallen queen was no longer staring her down, but stood beside the column. An envoy would enter another queen’s presence chained, after she was searched and cleansed, but instead of a practical set of them, Shilwan held only a delicate pair of manacles joined by a silver chain that Eshwe could have snapped, even as sleepy as she felt now.

Enchanted, Eshwe thought. Too frail to bind a body, they might imprison her mind and her will as soon as she wore them. There was Queen Lirytas’ promise to observe the forms, but . . .

With her mind chained by the magic of the manacles, would Eshwe remember that promise? Would she be told to forget it?

She held her hands out, and the pale blue slavewoman clicked them on. Eshwe felt nothing strange overcome her. Yes, Queen Keris. This girl is yours. May she always be so.

Shilwan hooked a finger onto the chain and gently drew Eshwe after her, into the palace itself. Eshwe followed, her cuffed hands before her like a suppliant. She was bathed and oiled, and now she would be led into Queen Lirytas’ presence like a newly-bought concubine, playing captive.

She’d already lost her way in the lamplit corridors when she realized the hypnotic booted rhythm was gone. The mindless branded guards had stayed behind. Had Lirytas wound up her toys again and marched them back to wherever she kept them? Or were they still standing there at the cleansing pool until their mistress recalled them again?

Eshwe yielded, step by step, to the steady pressure of Shilwan’s lead. The lockstep was gone but there were softer ways she was being hypnotized now, just the way she was letting herself be led, be lost in the enslaved queen’s sinuous pastel curves as they flowed before her, blurring the corridor around them.

“Your Majesty,” she whispered, unsure if she were trying to rouse Shilwan or praying again to her own liege lady, in Jinsai so very far from here.

Blue enslaved Shilwan, lately Olerohe’s queen, did not answer her.

7.

Queen Lirytas’ throne room sighed with echoes and whispers.

Polished black stone threw back the weak light of candleflame and brazier-glow, and the brightness of the sun that seeped in from unexpected openings. It was warm here, intimately humid, and Eshwe had no way to tell how much was the season, how much was magic, how much was from the sullen fires of fragrant wood—and how much from the sex, as slavewomen writhed together, caressed each other, slowly opened themselves to hands and fingers and . . . implements she couldn’t make out in the shadows.

Women were everywhere—taut sentinels, languid concubines, softly bending servitors. It was so excessive that it roused Eshwe from the trance she’d fallen into. She managed to think Can this queen really use all these women?

Many of them looked at her as she entered, and she couldn’t tell which gazes really saw her, and which eyes rolled up in orgasm when she looked away. Even apart from the softly-crying lovers, it was not at all like Queen Keris’ audience hall, where Jinsaia came to make their petitions and hear each other and to see the queen’s justice done. Here, some women gaped adoringly at their owner, others slept on the ends of leashes. She doubted any of them really knew where they were or what they saw, and she shook with the knowledge that they would live like that, in an endless orgasmic trance, as long as it pleased their Queen to keep them that way.

If Eshwe’d had willpower to spare, she might have walked to those benches and corners and reached for the first throbbing body she could find. Lost herself in its wetness before other hands took her in turn.

Goddess. She’d expected to feel alone—at least, alone with the smiling monster that ruled here, with every other woman being the monster’s thrall, aware of nothing but her new deity. But there was a tainted awareness in the slaves here, and they watched her, to see what their mistress’ latest toy would be made to endure, and how long she would last. Passively waiting to be told how to be part of what would be done to her.

Eshwe thought about other things. If the women were not for Lirytas to play with, Eshwe wondered what other mind was still free here in the palace of Akym’s Witch Queen, that the Witch Queen wanted to impress. Seeing that many women subjugated and kept simmering in lust and worship certainly impressed Eshwe, but she doubted that was why.

She kept wondering—not because it might lead to an advantage, but because it was better than waiting to have her mind paralyzed and her will taken away, to join these slaves as another oiled, chained, hypnotized ornament for the rest of her life.

There wasn’t time for that. This was the throne room, and she stood before the most dangerous being in the three realms. She had her mission, and nothing else. Without yet daring to look Queen Lirytas in the face, Eshwe knelt, afraid the drugged oil and the spell of this dream-castle would make her clumsy.

But in this place it was easy to slide gracefully to her knees, hard to imagine rising from them. She managed to stop herself before she bent forward to touch her forehead to the polished stone. She awaited the queen’s pleasure. From the corner of her eye, she saw a small movement of the queen’s hand, and Shilwan’s shimmering body flowed into an obeisance beside her.

“Akym welcomes the envoy of Jinsai.” The voice was pleasant, calming. Eshwe tried not to let it slip into her flesh, find her nerves, but they were already murmuring under the voice’s touch. She made herself look up, before she could hear and helplessly obey a command to do so, in that voice.

“The envoy of Jinsai’s queen bears her greeting to Akym’s queen.”

Lirytas was a pale curve on a throne draped in dark velvet, her eyes glowing out of shadow. She was nearly slave-naked herself, her voluptuous form adorned only with golden ornaments. A triangle of gold mesh hung over her loins and her breasts were tipped in more gold—paint or cups, it was hard to tell, and Eshwe resisted the urge to gaze more steadily and know.

“We have discussed the matter of searching,” Lirytas said. “Perhaps it is no longer about apologies. Chains and oil quite become a girl, and my slaves saw how deeply you enjoyed the search.” Eshwe recalled her moans and writhing but refused to look down.

“What noblewoman does pretty Keris make a present of, to me?”

“My Queen honored me by accepting my plea to serve.” Eshwe spoke carefully. “I am not highborn; but there is no low birth among Jinsaia.”

“A commoner. From some farmer’s litter with shit in its ears, sent off the land to fight because its birthmother pupped too often.” Lirytas’ voice made her contempt real, and it started convincing Eshwe, darkening the warm memories of her mothers as they raised her. “A purist might say this violates the forms, that an envoy must be at least of equestrian rank. I could declare you outside the protocols and throw your body back across the frontier. Or I could just add you to my herds, somewhere. Small but strong enough to pull a load, once you learned that was your reason to be.”

Lirytas smiled, and Eshwe knew the desire to be in her power. Even to be tied to a punishment rack, just to know it would keep that gorgeously hateful smile alight.

“But I can hardly claim to be a purist now, can I? And too close an adherence to the finer points marks a parvenu. I am not that.” Eshwe sensed Lirytas was enjoying the chance to play with someone she hadn’t enslaved. She didn’t look for opportunities there. She had no hope of outwitting the mind that dwelt in that sleek body, behind those malevolent eyes.

“Not to say I might not want to take you, anyway. Simply because making a woman my devoted slave is never time ill-spent.

“Over there, perhaps, by the sconce. I see seven oiled submissive girls on those cushions; if in a few moments there are eight dreaming there, none of them will have the mind to count.”

Eshwe felt the need for it rise in her. Being here under the Witch Queen’s gaze, among her other conquests as they dreamed or waited, was making her want to be corrupted into submitting. For a mad instant she wished frantically for some secret to betray or some evil thing she could do, to offer the witch on the velvet throne.

If she would only deign to put her collar on Eshwe and command her to do worse.

She held onto her mission, and to her true Queen, with her fingertips.

“Did pretty Keris send you to offer her submission to me? Perhaps my late envoy’s message has eaten its way into her dreams and found the slavegirl who kneels within her. Shilwan begged for her own chains, herself, after she lost her will through the crystals. Keris is too staid for that, but perhaps she can be tempted.”

Eshwe felt a sickening glee as she thought of her own queen weakening some midnight, and seeking out the crystals and the oblivion of letting Lirytas into her mind without a fight. She made herself answer. “No, your Majesty. That is not my mission or my message.”

“I thought not,” Lirytas said agreeably. “But I do enjoy picturing her on that floor where you are. And . . . I think you are starting to learn to enjoy that thought, too.” Eshwe trembled, that they both knew that about her.

“But that is not my correct title, little envoy.” Lirytas said that easily, with no trace of a parvenu’s sensitivity to rank. She seemed concerned to correct Eshwe. To correct her thinking . . .

“Akym’s envoy to Jinsai spoke of her queen in those terms,” Eshwe said. “One who is not owned may not speak of an owner.” She stopped speaking because her mouth was trying to twist into saying Mistress and Owner despite her, and the need to submit to Lirytas was back over her like a slow wave.

Eshwe tried to stay upright against the invisible tide. She remembered the assassins who had tried for Keris’ life, the captured Jinsaia whom Lirytas had subverted.

Perhaps they had been brought here, to kneel as she knelt, while Lirytas hypnotized them and bent them like soft metal into her own weapons. Had she enslaved them all at once, or had each one had to watch her comrades being turned into Lirytas’ drones, knowing she’d be next under the dark spell? Had the last one left given up in despair, thankful that her new mistress, her owner, was letting her forget the queen she’d loved and was being mindmolded into betraying?

She breathed deeply, trying not to let the rich, sweet air of the throne room dim her wits more than they were. As the flesh sounds diminished, more women seemed to awaken to her presence. Eshwe felt more calm slave eyes on her, and felt like a drowsy mouse in a chamber of tranquilized but wakeful snakes. If it pleased Lirytas, she’d kneel here helplessly while the bewitched ladies in waiting slithered across the polished stone to coil around her, plunge delicate teeth into her.

“Your Majesty,” she gasped, “Jinsai’s queen sent her envoy to speak for her. Not to be played with.”

The women still leered at her, not blinking at her protest. She wondered if they could truly hear any voice but Lirytas’, anymore.

Lirytas seemed equally unconcerned with the lese-majeste. “To be sure, envoy, your role under the protocols is to act in her place, and pretty Keris’ place in my court would be as my toy.” Lirytas sat back and savored that thought again, and the room pulsed with the moans of every other woman in it as her pleasure resonated in each slave’s mind and pussy. Eshwe rode it out, and ignored the new moisture cupped between her thighs. She’d clamped her jaw shut but the cry had escaped her anyway, with the others’.

Lirytas smiled. “Little one, you have no idea how delightful it is to treat with you. I am surrounded by sluts who live to be played with, and it is so very, very sweet to play with someone who resists, and means it. But even a frisky toy can be taught obedience.

“Abase yourself, slave.”

8.

The command was inside Eshwe before she really heard it. She put out her chained hands and bent forward like a diver, her palms slapping on the floor as she slid onto her face, her belly. The stone was smooth and excitingly cool against her after the numbing heat of the air.

She felt the urge to rub her pussylips against the marble and yielded to it, and the humiliation of whimpering as she tried to fuck the throne room floor only made her hips twitch harder.

“So ripe and so easy,” Lirytas crooned. “Come to me, slave.”

Eshwe found that sliding her oiled body along the floor was even more erotic than humping it in place, and she knew the added joy wasn’t just from friction, but from obeying the sorceress.

She had a mission. It was almost unthinkable now, to carry Queen Keris ’ dignity as she crawled nude in her own sweat and juice to adore Keris’ enemy.

For a moment she held perfectly still, and the desire in her waited, as if conquering her in a moment would be sweeter than taking her now.

Yes. If I keep resisting a little, she can keep overcoming me.

Eshwe reached back to her slick hip and inward, then brought her hand up to her mouth. Even as she heard Lirytas’ contented chuckle, she opened her mouth, and bit herself just below her thumb.

She forced herself up to her knees, deliberately leaning on her left hand, and the pain felt clean.

She made herself look up into the sorceress’s eyes. “I serve my Queen, your Majesty.”

Lirytas drew her hand back from her own lap, where a glistening nearly enticed Eshwe’s gaze to look. She thirsted then for the saltiness there. She drank from her own wound instead.

“Your queen can learn to cherish other servants. I could send her a present.” Lirytas snapped her fingers and a flute began to play, a quiet melody that insinuated itself into Eshwe’s mind. She found herself yearning for something deep and pounding to sound with it, a drum. She was hearing it before she realized it was her heartbeat, matching itself to the tempo of the flute song. Her hips were swaying, slightly, and it was becoming more and more important to give herself to it and to stand and display her body for the lovely nude witch on the velvet throne, and all her avid slavewomen.

But one of the slavewomen was even less able to resist the music than Eshwe. Before Eshwe could succumb to the flute she yielded first, and drifted to her feet from the arms of a lover who looked vaguely sad even as the dance aroused her. Eshwe felt herself juicing as she watched, and her mouth loosened on her bleeding hand as she found herself lowering it to her cleft. The slave’s eyes rolled up as her body swayed and bucked, utterly owned by the music.

“She could be charmed to surrender that way to any music,” Queen Lirytas said, leering at Eshwe as Eshwe fought not to masturbate in front of her. Lirytas’ voice made it harder to fight. “Her mind bound, I could send her to Keris to beguile her. Or send her through other pawns to market in Olerohe, and let her be sold to someone else who would bring her to court without my hand visible.”

Eshwe closed her eyes, but the music seemed closer and she could smell the girl’s arousal as she writhed. She could see her put through her paces on a market block, turned mindless by a cheap beggar’s whistle now that the spell was on her. The dancing girl would be as helpless as anyone who saw her. She opened her eyes, and wanted the girl.

“How she is possessed by the music is less important than how seeing her can seduce, enthrall, subjugate the watcher. Keris will fall under the spell of her dance, and then of her body, and then of her whispers. By then, in the dark of your queen’s bedchamber, she will be lapping the honey of her newest, last teacher.

“Then, perhaps, I will receive a message as I once did from Olerohe, from a newly-awakened slavegirl begging for my chains, to save her from the strange charade of ‘queen’ that she could no longer sustain. And by the time she came to me, she would have learned to dance herself.”

Lirytas looked past the dancer, and Eshwe tore her gaze away. “Or perhaps, envoy, I could make you into a dancing girl? You could greet your queen on your return to her. And before she could ask you what befell here in my palace, she would be lost in the curves your hips and breasts made as they moved.

“When you curled before your queen at last, and she could speak again, all she would be able to ask would be where to put her tongue.”

Eshwe wanted to raise her hand again, but it was too heavy. Goddess. To be sent back like a drugged sweetmeat to enslave Queen Keris—it was so awful it made her wet. Eshwe would be Lirytas’ girl by then, and when Keris whispered that question Eshwe would know what she must answer.

But Eshwe remembered why that could not happen, and left her arm on her thigh, not yet into her damp core.

Someone gasped to her left. Shilwan curled appeasingly on her knees beside her, gaping up at her mistress with such longing that Eshwe felt the agony. The lights of the throne room shone on her opalescent skin, shifting as she trembled with her need. Lirytas had taken her will but the enslaved queen could hear what her enslaver said, and she must be receptive to the savage joy her enslaver felt as she spoke of her plans for putting the third Witch Queen in chains.

Shilwan was in a quiet submissive frenzy. Eshwe couldn’t resist thinking of how easy she would be to take, that way—and felt badly enough that she turned to Queen Lirytas.

“Please, your Majesty. You do not need to torment her.” Eshwe felt cold as the glittering eyes found her again. “She already worships you, and I—neither Jinsai’s queen nor her envoy need more sign of your power over women’s minds.

“Please. Relent.”

Lirytas held her gaze. Eshwe felt no alien thoughts reach into her, and thought to worry if this was some new control that she wouldn’t feel until she was under it and happy to be. But the queen only looked at Shilwan again, who strained forward but could not move from where Lirytas’ offhand gesture had dropped her to kneel.

“Did the yard-whore offer freedom of her body to the guest?”

Shilwan lifted her hands, palms together. “This whore did, as You commanded, oh my Mistress and Owner! But the guest declined the use of Your whore’s body and service.”

Lirytas owned Shilwan’s mind, and must know this, but seemed to enjoy the exchange. Perhaps Lirytas made puppet shows of her court, putting words into the mouths of the women she kept spellbound here. Perhaps she left some mind in a few of them, to be stunned or horrified by what she made them do for her, or to each other.

“The envoy has enough intelligence not to be seduced before the chariot ‘s dust had settled. But she has the leisure, and my leave, to fuck you now.”

Shilwan started to kowtow again but slowed as though she were forgetting how. Eshwe knew the other queen was commanding Shilwan’s mind directly, making her Eshwe’s toy for now.

Eshwe tensed. Losing herself in sex was at least as dangerous now as it would have been in the outer courtyard . . . but the lithe blue slave was suddenly, unbearably more desirable than ever. She looked down, thinking of her mothers and sisters, of her brave beleaguered queen. She wondered how she would say No.

Then Shilwan looked at her. Her eyes were no longer blank—they were the brown eyes she must have seen through when she was free, and they were wide, and desperate, and too human and pretty for Eshwe to look away from. The slave—the queen—didn’t move, and Eshwe realized what she was waiting for.

9.

“Come to me,” she commanded the former queen, as gently as she could.

Shilwan obeyed her, uncoiling and crawling over to her, her pastel body mesmerizing as it came. She looked hungry and sad at once, and she licked her lips over and over.

“Stop,” Eshwe said and the blue queen froze like a sculpted turquoise nude. Eshwe held herself to quell the uprush of sadistic pleasure at controlling her, and the flood of cruelties she could inflict on this woman that Lirytas had put into her power. Was Lirytas whispering in her mind, too?

For now, Eshwe doubted that. She had any woman’s evil in her, and her own dark side could envision playing harshly with such a submissive pet. But unless Lirytas stopped her, Eshwe had something else in mind.

“Join me,” she told the slave softly, loving how Shilwan looked as she knelt in a pose that mirrored Eshwe’s. They faced each other, and Eshwe saw the hope in the slave’s eyes—and the terror. She sensed what Eshwe wanted to do, but she must have been teased that way before.

Eshwe hoped, herself, that Lirytas let her do this, and wasn’t using her to hurt Shilwan again.

She leaned to the blue lips and whispered “Yes,” before she kissed them. “Just hold still.” Then she bent to the spread, paler-blue thighs and put her head between them, seeking the taste of the fallen queen’s pussy. It was soaked with Shilwan’s endless desire, and she wanted to adore it and lick around it, but she didn’t know how much time Lirytas would allow—she was surprised to be allowed at all.

Eshwe’s tongue slid between Shilwan’s nether lips and their heat and bitterness started her own to swell. She heard a deep cry that seemed to run through the blue woman, and answered it into the woman’s pussy. She kissed there and lapped the fresh flow, and found the clitoris straining against her nose. She nuzzled it, blew on it, took it lightly in her lips, and then breathed it in.

Shilwan’s cries grew mournful and she thrust herself against Eshwe’s face. Eshwe wanted to reach out and cup Shilwan’s backside, to hold her against her mouth and just to enjoy the feel. But in the manacles she could only press her palms to the silken insides of the fallen queen’s thighs.

She felt the other woman’s hands on her back, and then on her own ass, strengthless and soft. Shilwan was trying to stroke her, to respond, but she was too lost in the orgasm Eshwe was giving her to concentrate, or to have the strength to do much besides buck and moan.

Then her head was against a lean blue hip and Shilwan had collapsed down her back, warm and trembling but loose. Eshwe turned to kiss the hip and felt Shilwan’s mouth, confused but ardent, flirting with her own backside.

“Magnificent,” Queen Lirytas said. Eshwe felt her lover pull upright, again a puppet on her owner’s string, but her eyes stayed brown. They were wet.

“Thank you,” whispered the fallen queen. “But I did not please—”

Eshwe leaned forward and kissed her, putting in her tongue so Shilwan could taste her own pleasure. “Serving you—was joy, your Majesty.”

But as she leaned back, Shilwan’s eyes were already slate grey again, and her smile was serene and mindless.

Eshwe looked into them just the same, and then turned to Lirytas up on the velvet throne again. She bowed. “Thank you for allowing that, your Majesty.”

Lirytas smiled. “Giving her pleasure—besides that of obeying my will—helps keep her world surprising. And I enjoyed watching it. So unexpected. I thought you would try to ride her mouth raw. Decency is too rare, in any case.

“But you are not here just to lick my slaves to orgasm, envoy. You have something for me from the woman who sent you.

“I could strip her message, and everything else, from your mind. You know this.” She watched Eshwe nod. “After there is nothing else left, I would probably leave you just aware enough to use your tongue, and women could ride you as you lie stupefied on your back.

“But it is novel even to speak of this as a choice. You have served me, by showing me how pleasant the unexpected can be—now I know that as I pluck the fruits of Olerohe, I must put aside a basket or two of strong-willed women while I reduce the rest to submissive pulp. I might have missed this joy, without your example.

“I will indulge you, and let you tell me what my toy-in-training wanted me to hear. It will likely amuse me more to hear it from her little soldier than from a newly-broken slavegirl.” Lirytas narrowed her eyes. “I must say that Keris shows a little ruthlessness by sending me a victim along with the message.

“Just a little, though. A fierce kitten is still a kitten. And no doubt she regrets it, for your sake. Perhaps that will be what draws her to look into the crystals, and thus into my inward eye—a need to see that you are still alive, and whole, and not droning my name because it is the only word I let you remember.”

Eshwe couldn’t hide the fear that took her. Lirytas’ evil did not keep her from knowing Keris’ heart. Mercy and hope, her ministers had named her weaknesses. Jinsai’s queen would endure sleepless nights forever without submitting her own mind to the crystals to ease it—but she might weaken and use them, to see what befell her faithful messenger. Keris had looked into her eyes, and would not let Eshwe be no more than a spent arrow.

Please, my Queen. Do not look. Do not succumb. Lirytas will play with me, but you she will take, if you try.

“Very well, envoy. Speak for your queen.”

Eshwe nodded, and bowed, to separate this duty from what had just happened. “Jinsai’s queen greets Akym’s queen, in the season of Akym’s taking of Olerohe’s queen. The realms are out of balance, and the freedom of millions of women is no longer safe. Akym may rule itself as its queen pleases, but Jinsai must stay free and Olerohe must have its liberty restored.”

She spoke carefully the words Queen Keris had given her. No queen could command another, but she could declare what she thought must be, in the end.

Lirytas smiled. “I could convince pretty Keris that her freedom was a small price to pay for a taste of my honey, taken on her knees, each day for the rest of her life. Can you picture her face as that knowledge displaced the foolishness she speaks now? When she was oiled and chained where you kneel now, envoy, the women of Jinsai would be a gift she would offer me. She would beg me to enslave them, but her voice would be so slurred with need that I would require her to repeat the plea. Again, and again.

“But I have one army bound to my will, and another that will learn to obey me. I will take Olerohe, and then Jinsai. Then it will all be Akym between the two seas, and Akym shall rule itself as its sole queen pleases.” She looked down at Eshwe, genuinely curious. “What does my toy-to-be add to that?”

Eshwe said, “Even Akym despises necromancy, your Majesty, but Jinsai’s queen will face the Goddesses’ wrath to save everyone from being enslaved. She will complete the last spell in the book-that-has-no-title.

“Jinsai’s queen will kill the world.”

10.

Lirytas didn’t blink, and Eshwe despaired. If the dark queen had foreseen even this—

But when Lirytas spoke, she sounded angry. “Death magic? The virtuous wench who prefers clockwork toys to true conjuring is threatening death magic? Whom will she kill? And who will she find to do the wet deeds for her?”

Eshwe was so happy not to hear that Lirytas was ready that she barely twitched at Lirytas’ rage.

“There is no ‘last page’ in the Great Book—it was torn out. The best that so-called witch can bring forth is a bluff?” Akym’s queen glared down at Eshwe, her eyes full of a dangerous light.

“Jinsai’s queen does not bluff for the freedom of her sisters in any of the realms,” Eshwe said, finding a way to imagine Queen Keris beside her now. “She will kill no one else. This spell was cast before anyone now living first took breath. In the time when the Queens Never To Be Named ruled Akym.”

“I name them,” Lirytas said. “Each night. They worshipped power, and pleasure, and themselves, and I curse only their failure of control.”

“Your Majesty,” Eshwe said, “you are alone in the world among free women for doing that.” Suddenly she didn’t care at all if the enemy queen struck her dead for it.

But Lirytas just looked at her. “Tell me about the necromancy.”

Eshwe knelt straighter. “It was in the time of the last queen, when she seemed ready to triumph. Women gathered near the place where the realms come together—from Jinsai, from Olerohe, even from Akym. There is a story there were women from other lands across the sea.

“They spoke together but the answer was clear. If the unspeakable one started to take wills and enslave anyone she saw, anyone she thought of, there would be no freedom afterward. They themselves would be taught to hate their present resistance, and they would become the unspeakable one ‘s trained bitches, hunting down any who somehow resisted her spells.

“The world would be a night-temple of chains and blasphemy. Women no more, only husks full of worship, dancing and fucking and killing and dying, all for her pleasure, at her whim.”

Lirytas looked at her. “Yes. Just so. She and her court called up something they could not control. Before they could seduce it to become their weapon in bending souls—it took them instead.

“Did these gathered women cause that with their meddling? Tell me.”

Eshwe jerked as the queen’s will seized hers for the moment. It wasn’t even conscious on Lirytas’ part, but Eshwe babbled for a moment as her mind obeyed and tried to say it all at once.

Lirytas waited until she could speak again.

“I am sorry, your Majesty.” Lirytas waved impatiently. “They did not. The women knew nothing would stop her. They knew of her last conjuring, but they were certain she would succeed, and that what she called up would reach out from its firepit and take their minds first of all. They feared they would leave the gathering place as the willing slaves of the unspeakable one—”

“Her name was Misanu,” Lirytas snapped. “Your tongue will not turn to fire for speaking it.”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Eshwe paused for a moment, wondering at the queen ‘s tone. “They feared that when what—Queen Misanu called up had enslaved them, they would obey her and help her crush everyone else.

“Even if they escaped that somehow, they could not save the world from what she would turn it into.

“So they prayed to the Goddesses, and said that they would end the world instead. Destroying it would be a lesser sin than letting it be perverted.

“They prepared the spell for a great blight, but then they cast it aside and . . . began with what was on the page one of the Akymi women had torn from Queen Misanu’s book. They did more to it, but no one who knew what they did lived after that night.

“They had brought warriors to the gathering, and when they had recited the spell, the warriors killed them, every one. They stood still and died by turns, and their bodies were burned. Then the warriors fought each other, not in madness but in desperation, and soon their blood stained the ashes of the pyres. In the end, the last woman who could move her hands, though she was blinded, wrote what she was told by the last women who could see, and they bled to death together.”

Lirytas seemed more astonished than angered, now. “But the world lives. Misanu lived, to call up that which she could not put down.”

“Yes, your Majesty. The women who gathered refused to kill the world unless they knew they had to. They left the last part of the spell to a delegate—the only woman who walked away alive from the killing place. She was sent away too soon to hear the necromancy they worked.”

“The ancestress of your queen,” Lirytas said, quietly. “Yes. Who duly handed it down her line.

“And now the delightful Keris has her hand on the throat of the entire world.” She smiled, and Eshwe felt the other’s will reach into her again, more gently but just as irresistibly. “Did she tell you how she can do it? What might be done to her to prevent it?

“Or help her forget how to do it? Or to forget why she might think she wanted to?”

Eshwe tried to close her eyes but could not.

“I see. She did not share that with you. But by necromantic logic, I imagine one more death is needed to finish the sending.

“Her own, by her own hand. Which would not please me—or I suspect you either, envoy.”

Eshwe sighed, feeling her mind released, her body tingling as it became her own again. “I do love my Queen, your Majesty. But by then it would not matter.”

Lirytas looked around at her slavewomen, who had subsided into dreamlike couplings while her attention had been on Eshwe, but she appeared to be looking past them. “No. It would not.

“And Keris has provided, in case I try to reach her mind and make her obedient?”

Eshwe nodded. “She knew you would think of that, your Majesty. She had her seeress prepare her, over several nights. If her will falters now, it will kill her, and by her consent before the Powers. That will be enough to satisfy what the spell requires.”

Lirytas shifted on the velvet. “Just what I would expect from a witch who patronizes clockwork.” She raised an eyebrow. “And she let one of her attendants hypnotize her, night after night to bind her will to something?” The idea of trusting an underling like that seemed to astonish the dark queen most of all.

Eshwe wanted to say We love her as she loves us—how could you understand?

“So if I attack Jinsai, or try to put my collar on her, Keris will destroy everything?”

Eshwe nodded. “Yes, your Majesty. My Queen will do that. Likewise if you do not release Olerohe, and its queen.”

“Very astute.” Lirytas sat back. “I will release OIerohe.

“But OIerohe has no queen. I have a pale blue trinket that pleases me, that no longer remembers life other than at my feet.

“I do not think even pretty Keris would end the world for the sake of one soul. One which has already been surrendered to me.” She smiled down at Eshwe. “Shilwan will belong to me until I let her die.

“Or does someone offer to take her place?”

Eshwe felt the warmth again, and thought of it—walking naked in this place, mindless and marked as Lirytas’ property. All memory of her childhood, her mothers, the Third Century, Keris herself, wiped from her thoughts. If Lirytas let her have thoughts at all. With or without them, it would be Eshwe, nude and blue, staring out of blank eyes to disconcert the next envoy to shiver in the outer courtyard.

She lowered her eyes. “I . . . will not.”

Lirytas’ laugh sounded almost kind. “Perhaps you will not decorate my palace, little envoy, but you may yet work my will elsewhere.” Before Eshwe could respond to that, she went on.

“Why stop with Olerohe? Why not demand Akym as well?”

Eshwe blinked. “My Queen said that you would prefer to let the world die than give Akym up, your Majesty.”

Lirytas smiled. “Hmm. I can control, but she can destroy. A point of balance that leaves each of our central interests intact.

“A stalemate. Fortunately, I enjoy chess. So much fun to mesmerize an opponent into losing her focus. Or into focusing on what I will, not what she wills. Until our wills become one, and she obeys. Yes.” Akym ‘s queen stroked her thigh, trapping Eshwe’s whole awareness for an endless moment.

“Yes. If Keris wishes to play chess for the realms, and more—it pleases me to watch her eyes glaze over as she sends delicious pawns to me. The longer the game, the sweeter.”

Eshwe looked away from Queen Lirytas’ thigh but her tongue still dreamed of its smooth length. She found the queen staring at her.

“But what to do with this pawn?”

11.

Eshwe’s eyes and pussy were open and moist as she knelt under the witch ‘s coveting. She knew Lirytas was picturing her as the eighth harem girl again, soothed to forget duty and home and living only to worship her owner and to rut with her owner’s other toys. The moment she softened and accepted Lirytas into her mind and soul she would lose all the pain. She would miss none of what she left behind and regret nothing she betrayed.

Her mission was done. Keris’ words had been spoken, and by a vassal who kept faith with her. The threat would stay Lirytas’ hand, at least for now. No flood of slave-warriors would wash over her comrades into Jinsai.

Eshwe was a spent arrow. Why should she not surrender now? Lirytas would not torment her. She was no rival queen to be abused like fallen Shilwan.

She might please Akym’s queen with one final surprise, and beg for her collar.

Keris, if she knelt here, would not beg.

Eshwe did not weep now, and did not even let her face show anything. But she could not spit on her queen’s struggle by giving up this one.

“Or I can give you both joys, little envoy. You can return to your country and your queen, but I will enslave your mind, and leave a part of it asleep, dreaming until my will touches yours again and snuffs it out. Then you too will sleep and obey me. Perhaps to teach others to sleep in my will.” She smiled, and Eshwe’s head spun at her generosity.

She is already bewitching me. I must resist, as long as I can.

“Your Majesty, all the realms know how easily you can make a woman yours. I cannot return alive to Jinsai, slave or free. It was decreed before I left.”

Lirytas cocked her head. “You seem like one who would do that. Why did you come? Why would Keris send such a devoted one to be mine, or to die? Why not a parchment around an arrow, across the frontier?”

“To let you see that Jinsaia will die for this, your Majesty. A common warrior, and Jinsai’s queen.”

The Witch Queen nodded. “Death, as a provenance for death-magic. Such beautiful, old logic.

“When I was young, envoy, still a princess of the house, I read of this in the protocols and bothered my mothers and aunts with it. I was displeased that such interesting duties of queenship seemed so rare and unlikely. It is so satisfying to be able at last to traffic in them—countries as hostages, queens as forfeits, death as a surety.” She seemed sincerely happy. Eshwe thought of her own queen, grim but dutiful as she looked on those duties, nearly refusing the crown.

“But I accept that you would go home to die on a sentry’s lance, envoy, and that you are no braver than your queen, who will also die and set the rest of it running. You can remain here as my chattel, and live, without voiding your queen’s resolve.”

Eshwe’s head was clear. Lirytas seemed to have withdrawn her subtle pressure, and was letting Eshwe think. Even so, she was sodden with lust, and the dark queen’s thralls all around her were moaning and sliding against each other again, lost in the pussy-haze she kept them in. Showing her what she could become.

Goddess! Was Lirytas actually offering her own kind of mercy? Eshwe couldn’t even begin to think of what that could mean. She had more to think about, too.

Living. Eshwe had fought her share of battles, and she had seen women die. None of them had wanted it, really. Even fighting for Queen Keris, or to keep frontier women from losing crops and stock to raids, what it came to in the end was the spear in your gut, the blade in your neck, the first spasm from the venom on the arrow. Eshwe didn’t want to die.

But if there were still three queens on the land—the mistress, the slave, and the free—she still knew whose cause she would take death for.

“Your Majesty is generous. But I am Jinsaia and my liege is Queen Keris. I would go at her bidding to her banner, and take the fate she gives me.”

Lirytas looked at her. “Do you beg me not to take your will from you, girl?”

Eshwe looked back. “I do not beg for it, your Majesty. With respect, I ask it.”

“Mmm. Nobility is not just about blood.

“And it is as delightful to destroy as decency.

“Look now into my eyes, child.” Eshwe obeyed helplessly, her thoughts congealing before she even clearly heard the queen’s command. “I will make you my newest slave and you will know bliss and orgasms. Nothing else but my will. Once yours is gone and forgotten.

“Sleep, little slavegirl . . .”

The manacles rang lightly on the stone as they fell from Eshwe’s wrists but she heard only Lirytas’ hypnotic voice. She began to crawl as Shilwan had, but she did not remember that either. Her cunt sang, already tasting the submission it had been teased with since Eshwe had come here, and its song opened Eshwe’s mind for the words Lirytas was sliding into it.

She no longer fought. She had nothing left. The sorceress was too compelling, and too beautiful curled on her velvet. Eshwe saw Keris’ face fade in her mind but she was too deeply under Lirytas’ spell to regret that. She was dreaming of oil, of being possessed by music, of women without names or memories nosing her thighs apart, mauling her breasts, mewing into her mouth. Most of all she dreamed of pressing her lips urgently and devoutly to the fragrant folds of—

Of—

Coolness on her cheek roused her. She was motionless, on her knees, with one of Lirytas’ exquisite legs draped over her shoulder, satin skin of her inner thigh. She could smell the heat of the queen’s cleft, a handsbreadth from her face. Eshwe looked up and the queen smiled down.

She couldn’t move. If she could have, the longing in her would have put her lips on Lirytas’ pussy in less than a heartbeat. But the spell that had drawn her here in a trance kept her body still.

“Envoy, terror such as you just gave me can be savored once from someone. If I kept you for it, it would pall each time after. And if I did take your mind, I would gain only another toy, of which as you see I have many.” She sighed. “And it is your queen I want there, melting in my heat and her mind broken. I need to wait for that, before I settle for a lackey.

“So kiss me, or not, and then take your leave of me. Perhaps your punishment for vexing me so amusingly will be that your countrywomen will put you to death but you will not be my catspaw. Irony can please me too.”

Lirytas smiled and stroked Eshwe’s hair. Her touch was soft, and part of Eshwe wished she could lean into it and yield to temptation. “But who can say? Perhaps, between Jinsai’s brave warrior envoy and gallant queen, there are Jinsaia whose resolve is less keen. Who will find reasons not to slay such a worthy daughter of the country, and let her past the frontier.

“With whatever may, or may not, have been put into her thoughts.” She caressed Eshwe once more and pulled away.

“Will you kiss me, little one?”

Eshwe thought of how the queen’s cleft would taste, and turned her head to kiss her thigh instead.

“By your Majesty’s leave,” she said, her lips brushing the skin.

Lirytas sighed, and swung her leg sinuously up and over. Eshwe turned in a daze and crawled away, drawn to the curled blue shape of Shilwan, still abased before her mistress. The mindmolded fallen queen was the most familiar thing in Eshwe’s foggy mind, and she nuzzled the pearly skin for reassurance.

Shilwan was still, but then quivered as her queen directed her thoughts again. She leaned into Eshwe, warming her, but her eyes were still the solid slate-grey of the slave doll. Eshwe rested against the blue flesh, deafened by her own ragged breathing and the liquid sounds of the court, sinking back into its round of sex.

Then Lirytas laughed, and Eshwe roused herself to see slavewomen around her just as she’d imagined, slithering on their bellies across the gleaming black stone, eyes alight and full of her. Hands possessed her oiled thighs and backside, took her wrists and ankles, and they were on her too quickly to have resisted.

Eshwe didn’t try to resist. Before even the idea of it could start in her mind, someone took her pussy with their mouth and she spasmed like a hawkstruck rabbit. They held her and stroked her as the tongue and lips worked her slowly. Now and then she felt teeth, smooth and hard, against her softness, and was beyond surprise at her lack of will to pull away.

She floated, giving herself to it. She forgot Keris and endless licks later she forgot Lirytas too. Orgasm jerked Eshwe’s body, but Eshwe’s mind was far away.

She woke curled against Shilwan, who still knelt. The slave waited and then drew Eshwe to her feet, and Eshwe followed her out, dazed. Neither of them looked back, but by now Eshwe was past caring why.

The once-Olerohese guards took her in tow again and their cadence entranced her again, but this time as she washed off the soporific ointments her head grew clearer. She found her garments and weapons seemingly well-tended and with no signs of tampering.

In the outer court, hearing the chariot clatter nearer, she stood alone again with Shilwan, and looked at her.

She knelt, and leaned forward, kissing the slave on her mons. She thought she heard the slave sigh, but it might have been a breeze. When she stood, the blank eyes regarded her.

“Your Majesty,” she said, so some part of the brown-eyed woman inside could hear it. She stepped to the fallen queen and kissed her on the mouth. Shilwan responded, but was it the queen or the whore?

Eshwe stepped onto the chariot, and looked back into the slate eyes that never left hers, until she passed from the gateway.

12.

Eshwe saw the trees and stopped. She was back in Jinsai. She hadn’t been lost, but she hadn’t marked the place where she crossed back into her country, either. There was no passing from dark to light.

Lirytas’ chariot had left her where it found her, and she was only a hill away from the place where they waited for her. She wondered if they would examine her first. She started to feel maudlin, and leaned away from if-only.

The queen she summoned up now in her mind was Shilwan, in that brown-eyed moment as they knelt together. Shilwan, her worst enemy’s plaything and unable to want to be anything else, might give anything to be walking into what Eshwe was, now.

But vanquished Shilwan had nothing to give, even a soul. There was nothing Eshwe could do for her, beyond what she’d tried before Lirytas’ throne. Eshwe pleaded with the Goddesses that Lirytas had at least let Shilwan feel her mouth.

She squared her shoulders and walked up the last distance to the hilltop.

She kept walking, not looking for now at the tent and Captain Tavteia’s horsewomen in the open place. She looked out over the gently rolling ground. Above the distant mountains, a storm was waiting for the right time to sweep eastward, and it looked strong enough to reach this place. It would drench Jinsaia and Akymi equally, if they stayed out for it.

I will never feel that rain. It didn’t make her sad. It was astonishing.

She walked down to the warriors and raised her hand. They returned it and she looked at them. They were troopers, like her, but then the tent opened and Tavteia and the queen’s seeress stepped out.

Eshwe bowed, and then knelt.

“I did as my liege lady bade me,” she said. From the corner of her eye she saw the riders watching her. If Lirytas had made Eshwe hers, and she found herself trying to brush close with slow poison or a slave-drug or something else, Tavteia’s horse archers would spit her on a dozen shafts.

It made her feel better. “Akym’s queen knows what Jinsai’s queen will do if she reaches her hand toward us. She will not march on Jinsai, and she will set Olerohe free.

“But she refused to give Queen Shilwan her freedom.”

“She had to have something to refuse us,” Tavteia said, meeting her eyes as though this were just a report from a foray. “And someone still to hurt when the day ends.”

But Tavteia stayed behind an invisible line in the grass, between the one who had been under the dark queen’s spell and those who were free of it. Eshwe did not try to cross it either.

The Captain nodded, and two of her riders sped off.

“Lady Captain?” Eshwe carried the pretense. “What if she lied, and there are her legions behind me?”

Tavteia looked at the hilltop for a moment. “We do not rely on her word, warrior Eshwe. We only hear it. What holds Lirytas is her own belief in what our Queen will do.

“If her legions come, we here will all die heroically, and the inner sentries will tell, and our Queen will stop the world turning.” She looked back at Eshwe, and the pretense fell to the ground. “For your sake, I wish that was how—”

“No,” Eshwe said. “No, Lady Captain.”

Tavteia nodded.

Eshwe stood, and waited.

Tavteia looked at her. “Did she . . . touch you?” Behind her, the seeress looked at Eshwe. After falling into Queen Lirytas’ eyes, Eshwe barely felt the wisewoman’s gaze, but she knew it penetrated.

“We can search you. In your mind. It would be more trances and—”

“No, Lady Captain.” Eshwe looked into Tavteia’s eyes, and saw the noblewoman ready to plead. “I think Lirytas expected that. I don’t . . . remember all the time I spent in Akym. Some of what I do remember . . . was . . .” She thought of crawling to the dark queen on her dark throne with nothing but the need between her legs, ready to become Lirytas’ thing forever, and here she felt too ashamed to speak it aloud.

Tavteia glared away, hating what her bow and sword and brace of cavalrywomen could not strike down. “It cannot be just this.”

“Her Majesty knew it must be this,” the seeress said. “Captain, I would have cast the rituals. I do not want this woman to end her journey here, either, and I might have found a way to believe her mind was still hers. She and the Queen are wiser than we are. Or colder.”

“Perhaps my mind is my own, my Lady,” Eshwe said, and they looked at her. “Queen Lirytas said so, and it made her laugh.” She watched Tavteia’s hand clench on her sword hilt. “It does not matter. We know what she can make a woman want to do for her. My Queen should not have to trust what might be—when her guards can strike once and give her the safety of what is. One tainted warrior dead in the grass.”

She looked Tavteia in the eye. “And I never want to feel my wits fading and my lust rising, and know I will obey a command to kill her. This way I will not.” She stepped back a little.

“Better to use the bow, Lady Captain, not the sword.” She found herself smiling. “We of the foot know a horse soldier would rather stand back and bend the wood, anyway.”

Tavteia smiled, but did not return mockery of the infantry.

“Her Majesty sent a message for her messenger,” the seeress said, and for a moment, Eshwe felt her composure slip. It was passing sweet to know her queen thought of her, but she worried that the queen might have the same hopes that these women had, that they could safely risk letting Eshwe back into Jinsai, even into Keris’ own presence.

There they are, my weaknesses, she had said in council. Mercy and hope.

“No, child,” the seeress said, knowing Eshwe’s fear. Perhaps she had shared it. “It is not that.”

She beckoned to someone in the tent, and a young woman stepped out. She was short and soft and very pretty, a dancer at court. Eshwe had seen her there and smiled at her, and she had felt the girl’s gaze on her too.

The girl stopped and gazed into the seeress’ eyes as the seeress drew her chin up with a finger, and the seeress spoke softly to her. Then her head dipped down, and the seeress put a hand on her hair and left it there before waking her from whatever the trance had been.

With a nod, the girl turned and smiled brightly at Eshwe, undoing the gown she wore and setting it on a camp stool. She was dressed to dance, nearly nude but adorned with jewels and metal that only showed the eye how nude she was.

She was dressed much as Queen Lirytas had been, but they were like tigress and kitten. The kitten now made her way to where Tavteia stood, and Eshwe wondered why the queen would send someone to dance for her.

“Warrior Eshwe.” The seeress regarded the girl as she walked. “Her Majesty’s gift is release from anguish.”

Eshwe wondered what the riddle was, but stopped in horror.

The girl passed Tavteia and crossed the line, coming to her.

13.

She put out her hand, losing her voice. Hadn’t they told this little court-kitten what was about to happen to Eshwe? To anyone she touched, after Lirytas had had her?

The girl stopped. “I know,” she said quietly. “I saw the Queen and I asked what afflicted her and she told me. We all knew of your quest to Akym but . . .”

Eshwe looked past her, stepping further back. “Lady Captain, please. Fetch her back. She is still clean—I have not touched her.”

Tavteia shook her head and the girl surprised Eshwe—she nearly skipped forward and then she was in Eshwe’s arms. If I let that happen in battle I’d be . . .

. . . dead . . .

She looked down. The girl looked up, soft and warm and still. “I am called Wenet,” she said, and kissed Eshwe lightly in the skin above her tunic.

“Wenet,” she asked, “did you not want to see what summer would be like?”

Wenet looked up at her. “You will not see summer, warrior. You will not see sunrise.

“You wanted put the queen’s heart at rest. You did. Even we could see that she felt the realm would be safe.” Wenet swallowed. “But her heart was not at rest about you.”

Eshwe’s bones were going soft, to hold someone this desirable and feel no will but the girl’s own to heat her. Now she heard she had been part of what kept Queen Keris awake.

“She sent . . . I asked if I could bring you . . .” Wenet closed her eyes.

“This is hers,” she whispered, and reached up. She took Eshwe’s mouth in a kiss that made Eshwe forget, for a moment, every other she’d tasted. Wenet gave herself to it, and when they parted the dancer seemed as lightheaded as Eshwe felt.

When her eyes opened Eshwe looked into them in wonder. “Yes,” the girl said, grinning impishly. “She gave it to me herself.”

Eshwe suddenly hurt for this soft little court woman, who was going to die to have given her—this.

Wenet smiled. “More than that, warrior Eshwe. It pained my Queen—our Queen—that after all this, you would be alone. This was what I could do, for both of you.

“You are not the only Jinsaia who loves the Queen more than herself.” She smiled at the look on Eshwe’s face.

Then she kissed Eshwe, and it was different, lighter but no less passionate than what she brought from the Queen. “That,” she said, “is from me.”

Eshwe rested her head against Wenet’s for a moment. Wenet let her, and then stirred. “There is something else.” She raised her arms, and on each was a circlet of smooth bronze above the wrist that widened into a dark, faceted garnet. “She put them on me with her own hands, and told me one was for you.”

Eshwe had only heard of them but she was amazed a woman of the court, even a dancing girl, wore two of them with such unconcern. “Do you know what they are, Wenet?”

Wenet’s eyes went vague for a moment, and then she shook her head. “Jewelry from the Queen,” she said. Eshwe thought of the seeress trancing the girl just now, and realized Wenet had probably slept several times to the wisewoman’s voice, brushing knowledge of these deadly things from her thoughts.

Eshwe considered what she’d heard in that voice. Her Majesty’s gift is release from anguish.

Wenet’s eyes were clear now as she slid one of the bracelets off and onto Eshwe’s wrist. “I wish,” she said softly, not looking away from the jewel, “that there was time, and I could do more for you. What I was taught, and what I learned from my lovers—”

Eshwe kissed her to silence and Wenet pressed against her. “You know this is what I need, Wenet. More than I dreamed I could have.” The girl seemed for a moment to melt into her. Eshwe felt something warm trickle along her collarbone, but Wenet made no sound. When she looked up, her eyes were dry.

“Eshwe? Will the arrow hurt?”

Eshwe looked at her. She thought about a frontier fort the Third Century had taken, and the sounds a woman next to her had made when the Olerohese archer struck home. She thought about Wenet, who had no thought of anything but being shot, now that she had greeted Eshwe. She saw the Jinsaia archers, waiting for Tavteia’s order. The dancing girl was between them and Eshwe. A proper shot would hit her first. A proper warrior could not hide behind what she lived to protect.

Eshwe looked deep into her eyes. “You will not hurt, Wenet.” She saw trust there, and sighed to feel things were as they should be—the gentle could trust the strong.

She took hold of Wenet’s arm, her hand on the bracelet, her finger over what looked like a garnet.

“This is mine,” she said, and kissed Wenet. She held the girl tight and Wenet responded, pressing against her and drinking her kiss like an unquenchable thirst. Eshwe pressed the jewel and felt the inner side break.

Wenet shook almost too slightly to feel, and then sagged against Eshwe. Eshwe raised her head from the warm, tempting mouth, and Wenet’s eyes were still open, her face still filled with trust. She’d died knowing only the kiss, not the poison.

She sighed a little but it was just a breath she no longer had use for.

Her arm dropped when Eshwe let it go, and Eshwe lowered her tenderly to the grass. Wenet seemed to kneel, her whole body relaxed. Eshwe held her carefully until she was lying on her side, curled slightly as though asleep. Eshwe closed the dead girl’s eyes and kissed her once more.

“Do not wander far,” she whispered.

She stood, and looked at the seeress. “My Lady, please tell the Queen . . .” She stopped.

Taking the bracelet from her own arm, she knelt and put it beside Wenet, then stood again. She reached to undo the light armor, and in her head something said If the evil one had bent your will to her command you would not even be able to think of this. You would have let them examine you and purify you. You would feel that rain and know what summer brought and you could live!

Eshwe’s fingers worked the familiar fastenings on their own. She thought the way Queen Keris might, the subtlety of how being sure there was no compulsion to obey Lirytas might be the surest sign that she truly was bound to the other queen’s magic. It did not even make her head hurt.

A curious breeze nosed past her. She saw it blow some of Wenet’s hair over her face, and then back. Wenet kept smiling slightly, as though dreaming of something that pleased her.

That was simpler than the logic of compulsions and signs. Wenet had given up the rain and the summer and being near the Queen. She was waiting now, and Eshwe owed her loyalty as pure as her own. Eshwe dropped the armor behind her, away from where Wenet lay, but left the doeskin tunic on.

“My Lady, please tell the Queen that her warrior would do this again for her.”

Tavteia had her bow now, and her eyes as she looked past it at Eshwe were bruised. Eshwe bowed to her, and then looked up. The sky was still blue, the storm still far off. She raised her arms and spread them. There was a little fear that Lirytas might have left some last trap in her, just to keep her from dying clean and free, but it would not matter.

She heard the sound of the bow as Tavteia drew it back, and this once she hoped the archer would not miss.

The arrow did hurt, but only for the heartbeat it halved.

14.

Autumn came late and cold at this latitude, and the herders were still moving their flocks to the winter pasturage. Patrols of Jinsaia cavalry were as frequent as the Akymi movements on the other side, but there had been no incidents. Southeastward, the border with Olerohe was even quieter. Olerohe’s new young Witch Queen kept her distance from her country’s unlikely saviors in Jinsai, but she had accepted the truce. It was too soon to tell whether she would be more cautious than her cousin when it came to the divining crystals.

Here near Akym, there were often hoofbeats heard, but seldom horses seen.

One Jinsaia unit came to a hilltop, deploying loosely as a few of the riders rode to the flat ground beyond it. There was a cairn there. At first, it had been loose rocks over the ashes of the pyre there, but after the harvest, when there would clearly be no war with Akym, a squadron of the Queen’s guard had ridden back and put dressed stone to it.

One rider dismounted and walked to the cairn, ignoring the one-eyed glare of another rider who stayed close to her. That argument was already lost. The woman on foot knelt by the pile and put her hand to it.

She did not weep. She thought of what one of the women who died here had told her.

My Queen . . . you have thousands like me.

“I wish I could have met you again, Eshwe,” she said quietly to the stones. “I think she left you clean. I think a true heart was more than she could understand.”

She stood and looked at the hill between her and Akym, raising her eyes to the sky over Akym. She wondered if Akym’s queen were looking into that sky now, scheming for a way to use it to reach down again to steal Jinsaia minds, even if she were too wise to try to invade the mind of Jinsai’s queen.

“Thousands like you, Eshwe?” She rose and stepped back once, feeling for her horse without turning away. “Perhaps. Perhaps the Goddesses love me that much.”

She mounted and looked around at the world she might have to end. “I will,” she said in the direction of Akym. “Women gave their lives for that spell. I cannot fail where they did not.

“And I have a warrior and a dancing girl of my own to answer to.”