The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Angela came down into the kitchen the next morning, and saw her queen sitting at the small table usually reserved for the servants to take their meals. The queen’s head was down, as she pushed an omelette across her plate without much interest. The servants were looking at her, awkwardly, giving Her Highness the same sideways glances they might use on an unwelcome houseguest.

I hope you’re laughing, Catherine, wherever you are, Angela thought. All the training you arranged for never prepared me for this.

Angela slid into the opposite chair. “My queen?” she said, keeping her voice low.

“Don’t call me that,” Gabrielle said, not looking up from her food.

Normally, Angela would not have tried humor when Gabrielle was in a mood like this. But she decided to improvise. “I thought you’d make it at least a fortnight before you abdicated,” she said dryly.

“After the way I spoke to you yesterday,“ Gabrielle said, “I have no right to be your queen. I’m terribly cross about it.”

One of the Lady Catherine’s oft-spoken rules was Royalty must never apologize. To get around the forbidden apologies, Gabrielle and Angela had developed codes at a very young age, where I’m cross stood in for I’m sorry.

“I’m quite cross as well,” Angela said, accepting the unspoken apology. “We’ll get past it, I suppose.”

“What about Prudence?” Gabrielle said. “Did she leave?”

“Where would she go?” Angela said. “It’s looking to be a short autumn and a cold winter.”

“I’m sure she could talk her way into someone’s home,” Gabrielle said. “I can’t seem to resist her.”

Angela had no idea what to do with that statement. This bloody hypnosis business was beyond her skills as both Handmaiden and bodyguard. “Prudence is still in the castle, as far as I know,” she said.

Gabrielle said nothing. Angela noticed that she had not even put a dent in the omelet. “What is it, Gabby?” she asked, her voice even softer than before.

“I don’t know,” the queen said. “You’d have to have the dream yourself to understand. Something’s just wrong. Very, very wrong. And I don’t know if it’s something wrong near me, or something wrong with me.“

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Gabby,” Angela said. “You’re better suited to rule here than anyone I’ve ever met. And that includes your mother.”

Angela truly believed those words. She often wondered what sort of woman trained her daughter’s best friend from the toddling age to be a killer, and she often thought that if The Lady of the Fire had lived, she would have eventually called upon Angela to execute her political enemies. For years Angela had understood the difference between bodyguard and assassin, and under no circumstances did she want to become the latter. She knew in her deepest heart that Gabby was not the sort of person who would use such tactics. That was why Angela would follow her anywhere, including the grave and, to the extent that she believed in such things, beyond.

Gabrielle blushed, then smiled. “You’ve lived in this castle too long,” she said. “You haven’t met that many people.”

Angela smiled back. ”What do you have today?” she said.

“The council at mid-morn,” Gabrielle said. “Nothing afterward. I want you to prepare the pauper dress, and something warm to go with it.”

“Again?” Angela said. “I was assuming this would be, I don’t know, once a season. Once a month at most.”

Gabrielle sliced off a decent-sized portion of the omelette and took a bite of it. “Invite Prudence to join me,” she said. “I want to talk with her privately, in a setting where she cannot put me under.”

Angela found the queen’s decisive tone pleasing. She was new to the crown, and obviously something was disturbing her, but still, she was not afraid to give orders. “It will be so, Your Majesty.”

Prudence always preferred to sleep in. Both show business and hypnosis tended to work better at night than during the workday. Plus, there was a certain venal pleasure in not waking at dawn if one did not need to.

Thus, when a knock came at her door the morning after the awkward nudity incident, Prudence took her time. The knocking rose in speed, and then in intensity, but it never turned into a pounding. That was how Prudence knew it was Angela herself on the other side: nothing about the woman suggested she ever reached door-pounding levels of impatience.

Once she was out of bed with her robe well-cinched, Prudence opened the door to see Angela standing there, arms folded but with no other outward signs of hostility. “Good morning,” Angela said. “Not an early riser, I suppose?”

“Show business is different than the business of a kingdom,” Prudence said.

“I suppose so,” Angela said. “I came by to tell you: the queen requests your presence at mid-day. She wants to take a trip. A similar sort of trip to that on which you first met her.”

Prudence cocked an eyebrow. “You’re comfortable with those trips? You’re not coming with us?“

Angela shrugged. “I can’t lock her in the castle and watch her every hour of every day,” she said. “We’d drive each other mad. But I do ask that you keep to public places. The fewer people around you, the more dangerous it becomes.”

“Of course,” Prudence said. When Angela turned to leave, she pressed forward. “May I ask a personal question of you, Angela?”

Angela shifted her feet uncomfortably, but she said, “Proceed.”

“You are like her sister. Her equal. But you don’t rule and you don’t want to. How did you come to this life?”

Angela’s face changed only slightly, around her eyes. But it told Prudence almost everything she needed to know. The younger woman was steeling herself against a particularly painful memory.

“I might as well tell you,” Angela said. “Some ridiculous versions of the story can be heard from the servants. Better to get the truth from me.”

“My mother died giving birth to me,” Angela said. “My father was destroyed by it. Everyone needs someone to blame for the horrors of the world. He blamed me.”

She took a deep breath. There was no waver in her voice, no shudder in her breathing. Prudence admired her self-control.

“He was a superstitious man,” Angela went on. “I remember him telling me I was a cursed child. A daughter of Satan.”

Another deep breath. Still the voice did not waver, and her eyes were dry. “I was lucky the lady Catherine found me.”

Prudence waited, but Angela did not continue. Prudence, despite having seen her share of horrors in the less enlightened parts of Europe, did not want her to.

“I’m so very sorry,” Prudence said.

They looked at each other. Eventually Angela nodded, turned, and walked away.

Nothing in particular had come of the council meeting. Specifically, no news came from the German border. The various Germanic tribes had made no aggressive moves and sent no communications.

“Odd news indeed,” Gabrielle said to Angela, as they both gnawed on salads for their lunch. “I would not expect the Captain of the Guard to be misinformed.”

“It seems to me, this is a time when no news is good news,” Angela said.

“Perhaps,” Gabrielle said, “but it’s important to remember that the battalion we sent has to be fed and paid. Putting all of those resources in play, with no idea of what the end-point is, is a dangerous game indeed.”

“Yes, my Lady,” Angela said. “For you to have that thought first, it’s why you are queen and I am not.”

“No need for flattery,” Gabrielle said, wiping her mouth with a cloth. “I’ll get enough of that the next time I meet the Seers.”

“Seers,” Angela said with palpable disgust. “You want to feel better, you could do worse than getting rid of those bloody imbeciles.”

Gabrielle shrugged. “It’s tradition. They’re harmless.”

“Are they?” Angela countered. “It’s a poor look for a queen who received her crown from a priest, in the eyes of God, to get advice from the stars, the bones, and who knows what else. It looks like witchcraft.”

“So does Prudence’s work,” Gabrielle said. “We still think she can help me, but we also give her a fair amount of suspicion. It’s the same with the Seers. Their advice may be rubbish, but it’s harmless rubbish.”

Cian’s plan had been to draw the Seers into Gabrielle’s trust slowly, over years, by planting doubts in her mind while she was entranced and offering solutions while she was awake. In order to play their game so slowly, their disguise had involved convincing the then-princess on a conscious level that their fortune-telling techniques were useless.

That part of the plan had worked brilliantly. Angela had heard some variant of they’re rubbish, but harmless rubbish many times from Gabrielle, and with deep conviction. These days merely anticipating Gabrielle saying the phrase triggered a reflexive eye-roll from Angela. Her response was so predictable, it was as if they had hypnotized her right alongside the queen.

Angela rolled her eyes and said, “As you say.”

Prudence wore her normal black dress, beneath a coat given to her years ago by Rolf, which he claimed was made from the pelt of the most fierce bear in all of Germany. It did look rather majestic, and Rolf was a poor liar, so she often referred to it as her Bear-King Coat.

When she met Gabrielle outside the kitchen’s back door, both women immediately realized their problem: Prudence was massively overdressed. Angela was shorter than the queen; the only clothes they could share were run-down from age. The Bear-King Coat looked like it could purchase Gabrielle’s incognito outfit a thousand times over.

“How is it that I know more about being inconspicuous than you?” Gabrielle said.

“I’m a performer,” Prudence said. “It’s necessary that I stand out.”

Neither of them said as much aloud, but they both knew that Prudence would have to pretend to be some sort of landed gentry, and Gabrielle would play as her servant. Prudence noted that this caused no end of dismay in Gabrielle.

“My lady, I must apologize again,” Prudence said, as they crossed the square between the castle and the city proper. The air was chill, unusually so for autumn, and Prudence was thankful for the Bear-King Coat.

“Don’t call me that while we’re dressed like this,” Gabrielle muttered.

“I swear to you, I meant neither offense nor scandal,” Prudence said. “You respond to my suggestions in a way that no one has ever done before. It throws me off as much as you.”

“I doubt that,” the queen said. “You remained clothed. Stop here, on the left.”

They paused in front of a tailor, who tried to draw eyes to his shop with a replica of Queen Gabrielle’s coronation dress. “I can’t tell the difference,” Gabrielle said.

“It’s in the seams and the hems,” Prudence said. “That dress will be falling apart inside of a month.”

“Do you see how it is for me?” Gabrielle asked. “I’ve not been queen a week. Already people want to wear my dresses.”

“Do you see how it is for me?” Prudence countered. “This city is full of tailors. They probably have their own bloody guild. I’ve only met one other person who does what I do, and he never had to worry about being accused of witchcraft.”

Prudence moved on from the tailor shop, knowing that Gabrielle, chagrined, was forced to follow.

“May I ask a personal question?” Gabrielle said, after she had caught up.

“Ask as you will,” Prudence said.

“Have you been in prison?”

Prudence shrugged. “Not in a dungeon, if that’s what you mean. I’ve been arrested. I’ve spent nights in jail cells. But never held in a serious prison.”

“And what were you arrested for?”

“Some people I worked with did not understand what I do. They thought me to be a witch, or a thief, or both.”

“‘Worked with,’” Gabrielle said pointedly. “You mean, you hypnotized them.”

“You think I’m hiding something behind weaselly words?” Prudence said, though her tone made clear that she took no offense.

“I don’t wish to be rude,” Gabrielle said, in the way that royalty do when they are about to be rude, “but how can I know that your intentions are honest? I’m dead to the world during our sessions; I need Angela to tell me what happened.”

“You shouldn’t be, as you say, dead to the world,” Prudence said. “You should be alert enough to understand real dangers, but so relaxed that you don’t care about most other things.”

“But you can’t prove that to me,” Gabrielle said.

Prudence sighed with obvious frustration. “No.”

“You can’t be shocked that people would accuse you,” Gabrielle said. “You’re a traveling performer. It’s a life of poverty, or so I’m told.”

“It’s never the subject who accuses me,” Prudence said. “It’s always the family and friends who have the least trust. If the subject didn’t trust me, I couldn’t put them under in the first place.”

“So I must necessarily trust you,” Gabrielle said, “else I would not have gone to sleep during that show, the first time.”

“On some level, yes,” Prudence said. “Do you feel like you don’t trust me?”

“I feel…” Gabrielle stopped, and turned away to look at a display of exotic birds. She hoped Prudence could not see the start of a blush on her cheeks. I feel shy. I feel eager. I feel aroused. “Uncertain. I think that perhaps I shouldn’t trust you, because I’ve known you for such a short time. But when you look at me in that way, and put that tone in your voice…”

Prudence moved around her, stood close to her left shoulder. Gabrielle looked to her left. Their faces were just a foot or two distant.

“What is it, my queen?” Prudence said quietly. Her tone was neither commanding nor soothing. She seemed genuinely moved by the moment. “You’re not in a trance. I’m trusting you to tell me the truth.”

“The crown is heavy,” Gabrielle whispered. “I’ve known this for years before I had to wear it. I need someone to share the weight.”

“You have Angela,” Prudence said.

“Not like that,” Gabrielle said. “I need to be able to share my deepest heart.”

They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment that went on forever. Each woman knew that what she wanted to do — kiss the other woman so deeply and for so long that it would feel like they were becoming one person — could not happen in public. The Church did not have as much sway in Vessia as it did in Rome, but the kingdom had just enough scolds and prudes that public shaming was always a risk.

Gabrielle looked at those incredible blue eyes and thought, I am awake. I want to get lost in those eyes even when I’m awake, and she felt a shiver move down into the deep well between her legs.

Prudence looked into the gray eyes of de Vess and saw them clouded with the uncertainty that the queen had described. She remembered those eyes twinkling as “Amanda Darling” had said I was born at night, but not last night. She wanted to make a joke and see this young queen laugh at it.

“Ladies!” the bird-seller cried, apparently oblivious to the moment he was shattering. “Which birds of paradise have captured your fancy this fine day? I have birds so rare that their beauty very nearly matches your own!”

For a second or two Prudence forgot that she was the higher-class woman under their little ruse. “Ah, your pardon, sir,” she sputtered. “I’m not sure I can afford these lovely creatures.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised at the fairness of my prices,” the bird-seller said. As he came to close to them, both Prudence and Gabrielle felt obliged to look at him, breaking the eye contact that still rang in their secret places. “There’s no deal I will not make to share these aviary wonders with all of Vessia!”

“Your pardon, my lady,” Gabrielle said. She was a poor actress, Prudence thought; it seemed obvious she had never taken a subservient tone with anyone in her entire life. “I don’t handle bird feathers well. I sneeze and sneeze.”

“Ah,” Prudence said. “We should move on, then.”

They said their pleasantries and moved on down the street. As he watched them go, the bird-seller thought, You know what they say about Vessia. All the daughters of Lesbos came here when they moved inland.

Gabrielle had thought they would return to the castle, but instead Prudence took them deeper into the city.

After a right turn and a left turn, Prudence paused in the middle of the street. “Here, we go off the path,” she said to Gabrielle. “Angela would prefer we didn’t do this. Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” Gabrielle said quietly.

Prudence took her hand and pulled her into an alley, between buildings. Around a corner, down a corridor, then another corner, and the queen was pulled into the back door of a large wooden structure. The room they entered on was dark, and Gabrielle smelled hay. “A stable?” she whispered.

“No questions yet,” Prudence said. “Follow me!”

She began climbing a ladder. Gabrielle had time to think, Have I ever climbed a ladder before? In my life? and then she was climbing too, the sanded rungs of the ladder as smooth as steel under her palms.

They were in a hayloft. “A stable?” Gabrielle said again.

Prudence nodded, her head barely more than a silhouette in the poorly-lit space.

“I expected a stable to smell worse,” Gabrielle said.

“The troupe kept our horses here,” Prudence said. “It was empty except for us. I gambled that it would be still.”

Gabrielle smiled. “And what if you were wrong? We return to the castle reeking of horse shit?”

“All of life is a gamble,” Prudence said quietly. “We are ever in danger of being wrong.“

“If I’m wrong about you, I gamble the crown,” Gabrielle said. “If you’re wrong about me, you gamble your life.”

They looked at each other for another long moment, Gabrielle not quite able to make out Prudence’s eyes in the gloom. Then the hypnotist moved, throwing both arms around the queen’s neck and kissing her deeply.

Gabrielle had no idea what to do. The sensation was akin to learning to ride on the most violent mustang in the field. The queen had never been kissed before (that she remembered), by man or woman, yet here she was, having a tongue explore her lips and mouth in ways that she did not even know were possible.

She made a tiny moan of pleasure and reached out for Prudence’s breasts, but at that moment Prudence broke the kiss, catching Gabrielle’s hands in her own.

“That alone was worth the gamble,” Prudence whispered. Their faces were inches apart in the dark.

“God, yes,” Gabrielle said, and fairly leapt onto the other woman, driving her down onto her back in the hay.

Prudence was only six years older than Gabrielle, but it felt like much more when they first embraced. The virgin queen showed a level of inexperience that Prudence had discarded a decade before.

As she had done in the alley on that first evening, Gabrielle kissed her enthusiastically, but chastely, her eagerness keeping her from properly caressing the other woman’s lips. Prudence tolerated it at first, as inexperienced enthusiasm can be sexy in its own way. But when Gabrielle clumsily palmed Prudence’s breasts through the dress, Prudence placed her hands on the younger woman’s cheeks, gently creating space between them.

“What?” Gabrielle said, immediately looking alarmed. “Did I—“

“Shhhhh,” Prudence said. “Gently. Patiently.”

She slid her hands downward, until they covered the queen’s hands. Prudence carefully guided Gabrielle’s hands under the black dress, until the queen was touching her breasts skin-to-skin.

“Don’t just touch me,” Prudence said. “Explore me. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Gabrielle whispered. The gray eyes of de Vess were glassy, seeming to look directly through Prudence’s head. Her hands made no move toward any exploration. Her breathing had slowed considerably from just thirty seconds before.

What on earth, Prudence thought. I wasn’t trying to put her under. I didn’t WANT to put her under. She could not resist the urge to learn. “Gabrielle, what are you feeling right now?”

“I want you so badly,” Gabrielle said. Her voice was an empty monotone that Prudence knew well.

“Are you awake right now, Gabrielle?”

“Awake,” the queen said remotely. “Want to stay awake. Don’t want to forget.”

“I want you to stay awake, Gabrielle,” Prudence said. “When I snap my fingers, you will feel your mind return, awake and alert, and you will discover my breasts with patience and passion. When you kiss me, you will use your tongue, as I did. Do you understand?”

Gabrielle’s head moved up and down. Prudence caressed her cheek with her fingertips. “You are loved here,” she said quietly, knowing the queen could hear. “You are wanted here. You are beyond shyness, beyond inhibition. Do you understand?”

Gabrielle nodded again, exactly the same as she had done before. Prudence removed her hand from the queen’s cheek, raising it until it was near the queen’s ear. The fingers pressed together, then snapped; in the quiet stable, the sound was as loud as a sword striking a shield.

Gabrielle’s eyes fluttered briefly, then she looked into Prudence’s face with real passion. She showed no sign of understanding that she had been in a trance. Her hands began to move, sliding the pads of her fingers over the flesh, finding the soft spots, testing the muscles, feeling for resistance and understanding how Prudence’s body was different than her own.

Prudence tried to control her breathing, guessing that the younger woman would not be able to, knowing how erotic it would be for Gabrielle to feel that Prudence’s breathing was in rhythm with hers. But when Gabrielle closed her index and middle fingers like blades of a pair of scissors over Prudence’s left nipple, Prudence gasped and felt a shiver move from her nipple though her entire body in the space of a second.

“God, that’s g—“ she started to moan. Gabrielle leaned down, using her palms on Prudence’s breasts for balance, and cut her off with a kiss. The tongue moved as though the queen had been doing this her entire life, exploring the Prudence’s lips and sliding up against the hypnotist’s tongue.

They reached an equilibrium, Gabrielle straddling Prudence’s body, pushing either with her hands on Prudence’s breasts or with her lips on Prudence’s lips, but never with both. In all areas of life, Prudence played at being experienced, but she had never experienced anything like this. She moaned uncontrollably, clenching her hands into the folds of the Bear-King Coat, until finally she knew it was time.

Prudence shifted under the pressure of Gabrielle’s hands on her breasts, until she could slide two fingers into the royal vagina. “Oh!” Gabrielle cried, and broke the kiss. Her back began to arch, the queen wanting to toss her head back in the throes of passion, but Prudence reached out with her other hand and caught the nape of Gabrielle’s neck.

“Stay with me,” she whispered, her fingers caressing the queen’s skull through the dark blonde hair. “Move with me.”

The eyes were a deep but lively blue, cobalt shot through with starlight, and Gabrielle fell into them. The two women began to move in time, the massage of Prudence’s breasts and the pressure on Gabrielle’s sex, back and forth in tempo. Prudence was no longer able to control her breathing, but their breathing was in rhythm anyway, their hearts drumming against their chests like an army on double-time march. The rhythm was quite similar to what Gabrielle had dreamed it would be, but as she fell deeper and deeper into cobalt twilight, she lost her grip on the memory of that dream and let the pleasure overwhelm her.

One of the cobalt stars exploded into supernova, Gabrielle moaning softly only because she was too deeply relaxed to scream, and she came with such force that her hips would be sore twenty-four hours later. As the passion waned, the darkness between the stars beckoned her, and her mind passed into a state that psychologists three hundred years later would have begged to study.

After the lovemaking had ended, Prudence did her best to fold them both into the Bear-King Coat, only realizing that Gabrielle was in a trance when she had tried to get the younger woman to move. Gabby’s eyes had not opened and her breathing remained slow and steady.

There were suggestions Prudence could make now, suggestions worth more in gold and silver than she made in a year with the traveling players. She had done it before. Indeed, the sapphire pendant that she sometimes swung back and forth before her volunteers in the show had come from a Belgian noblewoman who would never remember exactly how she had parted with it.

Yet.

The other nobles had always treated her like a servant. As though she should be taking orders, not making suggestions. None of the others had ever looked so vulnerable, so worried that they did not remember what had happened during their lost time. None of the others had ever needed her like this one. And, of course, Prudence had never slept with any of the others. None of the others had ever wanted her like this one.

This one loved her, and Prudence was surprised to find that the feeling was mutual.

Gabrielle shifted, her breathing changing. The queen felt like she was waking up in the morning, after the best night’s sleep she’d ever had. Her hips felt strange, but the soreness would not settle in for a few hours. She spent a full minute climbing out of the darkness before she smelled hay, felt warm flesh, and recalled what had happened.

“Mmmmmm,” Gabrielle said. “That was wonderful.”

“Are you sure?” Prudence said, trying to keep her tone playful but also probing for information. “How much do you remember?”

Gabrielle smiled, stretching her body and starting to feel her hips stiffen up. “You said, Explore me. I did, and it was wonderful.”

“I thought you might not remember,” Prudence said softly. “You seemed like you were in a trance for most of it.”

“Maybe I was,” Gabrielle said, still smiling. “It does feel rather like a blur. But a wonderful blur.”

“I wasn’t trying to hypnotize you,” Prudence said. “I wanted you to be awake for that.”

“I couldn’t care less,” Gabrielle said. “Whatever you did, it was wonderful.”

Couldn’t care less, Prudence thought. She cared quite a bit yesterday, now she couldn’t care less. Something nagged at her about that, but she was feeling a warm afterglow not unlike the one Gabrielle was feeling, and she allowed it to wash her away.

There was no further lovemaking. The two women lay together as spoons lie in a drawer, until the shadows got so long that there could be no doubt it was time to return to the castle.

Gabrielle had planned on telling her best friend in the next day or two, but she should have figured that Angela would be way ahead of her.

“I thought it was just one of those strange quips Catherine liked,” Angela said, once the queen was back in her bedroom, changing out of the peasant clothes. “I didn’t know people actually rolled in the hay.”

Gabrielle gave her a look. “Is this how it will be with all my suitors?”

“I’m not judging you, nor her,” Angela said. “But she is not a suitor. Suitors to the Crown do not need to hide in stables.”

Gabrielle stopped short in her undressing. That hadn’t occurred to her, and Angela saw that it hadn’t. “You know I have no choice,” the queen said at last. “The Church does not understand.”

“I agree,” Angela said, “and I hope she makes you happy. I’m just telling you that you can never treat this as a simple roll in the hay. Too much is at stake.”

“You’ll make the jokes, so that I remain serious?” Gabrielle said, as she resumed changing.

Angela shrugged. “Something like that.”

Neither of them spoke as Gabrielle put on a simple evening robe. Finally Angela asked, “Will there be another session with Prudence tonight?”

“No,” Gabrielle said. “We’re both quite tired.”

“I would hope so,” Angela said. “Else you did it wrong.”