Chapter Nine: Damsels in Distress

The raiders had attacked in force, laying in wait and ambushing our caravan where there was a rocky ridge on one side of the road, so we couldn't flee, and deep forest on the other side for them to hide in. They'd numbered close to thirty and had the element of surprise, but our group still managed to half their number, and they were none to happy about that. They killed the other three functionaries in Meliswe's carriage, deeming them to be of no value. They didn't kill them quickly, either - they had some anger to let out after seeing fifteen of their comrades slaughtered and wanted to vent. So they killed the poor people while Meliswe and Becounia looked on. I was lucky to be zonked out. They tortured them for half an hour… later, I asked Becounia how, but she just cried. When their scout up on the ridge spotted a merchant caravan coming in from Vernal, the raiders left a ransom note in one of the carriages and carried the three of us and all of the best valuables off into the woods.

I awoke with a splitting headache, draped over a brawny faun's shoulder like a burlap sack. I flailed and punched at him, which didn't do much beyond make him angry. He set me down, bound my hands, and told me he'd gut me like a pig if I did anything but walk in front of him and do whatever I was told. So I walked in front of him and did what I was told, the sticks and stumps and thorn bushes of the forest bruising my heels and scraping up my shins as I walked. He had hooves and the other raiders had thick boots like I'd had as a soldier. A princess's silken slippers weren't exactly well-suited for wandering the wooded wilderness.

We walked for another hour - it wasn't easy going, considering that it was hilly, rocky wilderness, and fae aren't renowned for their endurance. We passed camp sites, none of them inhabited. In one case, there were a few fresh bodies scattered around. Presumably, the raiders had got those poor folks on their way out to get us. Anybody with a lick of sense scattered when the raiders came through and let them take whatever they liked. I'd been under the impression that things were pretty safe if you stuck to the trade road, but that impression had been dead wrong. A convoy with a hundred soldiers was pretty safe. Twenty? Not so much. Not when you had a princess as a prize.

And that princess? They thought she was Meliswe.

"I guess something happened to her magic… word is she was once as powerful as any mage… could've licked our lot clean," one of them said.

"She can lick my lot clean!" another said. That got a laugh. I almost laughed. I guess soldiers everywhere have pretty much the same sense of humor.

"Plenty of loot in the wagon, and the bitch is worth more'n her weight in gold," their leader said. "Fifteen dead, though…"

"More to go around," another said. "What about the other two?"

"They're lookers - they go to the harem," the leader said.

"Any chance we can get a go at them before they get cloistered?"

"Not if you want to keep your cock. There's whores aplenty at the fort to wet your 'lot'."

It was nearly evening when we got to their encampment - an ancient fort in the middle of the wilderness. It looked like some of the castles I'd seen in France, ruined relics of a forgotten world a thousand years or more ago. It was dark stone with moss and ivy covering most of the north side. Where the outer wall had crumbled, it had either been replaced with more recent stone or a sturdy wooden palisade. A small village of a dozen buildings had been built around it, and my keen fae ears could pick up the clang of a smith's hammer from the moment we entered the valley. I'd known we were getting close because the trails were well-maintained for a few miles out from the fortress.

Past the little strip of town was a rusted iron portcullis, which raised with plenty of creaking and groaning when the guards recognized our party. The faun prodded my back and we marched right in. Curious onlookers ambled out to greet us, two men for every woman, most of them well-armed and looking like they were used to a life of rough living. A few of them tossed half-eaten fruits at us, and whenever one hit me, everybody thought it was great sport. The leader of our party jogged up to a little platform as the rest of us were marched by.

"Gentlemen and ladies, please be on your very best behavior! We got ourselves a real, live fae princess! And if that bitch Alathea pays us more than that bastard in the south, she just might stay that way! In either case, please pay your respects, because it means a shitload of gold for us!"

The crowd cheered and more fruits and vegetables flew through the air. By the end of our march of public spectacle, you could've made a salad with what as stuck in my hair. Fortunately, most of it was just half-eaten and not rotten, so some of my fellow captives got a little snack out of my ordeal. They marched Becounia and me through a series of doors and into a large, pillow-strewn room that had surely once been the armory of the fortress. Now, though, it was the harem.

The faun unbound my wrists, and my hands were free for about three seconds before he clicked loose chains over my wrist and sealed the end link to a little iron loop on the floor. He handed both Becounia and me bowls with a sharp-smelling green liquid and told us to drink. Not having much other choice, I did - it was alchemical and fairly strong. My head swam and I lost all sense of the passage of time for… well, I'm not sure how long. Probably half a day or so.

+++++

When I came to my senses, it was almost pitch black in the 'harem'. Everybody but me was asleep, sprawled out on the big pillows that covered most of the floor. I hadn't been asleep the whole time, not exactly, but it was like I'd been too intoxicated to register much of anything that had transpired. And, since there wasn't much that transpired in a room full of doped-up sex slaves, I might as well have been asleep for the duration. I sought out Becounia, passed out on a lumpy green pillow that, assuming it hadn't always smelled of sweat and piss, had seen better days. I could barely reach her - my chains gave me about twelve feet of leeway - so I used all my meager strength to pull the pillow a bit closer to where I could shake her awake.

It didn't work so well. She woke up all right, but her eyes just lolled around in a barely-focused way, and she passed right out again. This happened a few times, until I whispered:

"Becounia! Wake up!"

Then she did, almost immediately. Whatever drug she was under… whatever drug I'd been under… made her suggestible, like a person under the sway of an expert hypnotist. Why had the potion only worked half as well on me? I've had time to put a lot of speculation to it, but I can't give you a definitive answer. I think Laeanna's almost-pure magic gives me some degree of resistance to potions and magic. That's probably why the 'accursed potions' given to Calivar and me didn't quite off us when your average fae would have been dead as a doornail.

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"Are you all right?"

Becounia looked at me with empty eyes, as if she was staring at something a thousand yards away. "I… am… unharmed," she said, her words slow and artificial, like a person trying to speak over a bad telephone connection.

"Do you have any clue what they've given us?"

"A… potion…"

I figured pretty quickly that she wasn't going to be much help. As smart and engaged as she'd been in the carriage, now she was like an opium fiend chasing the dragon. I presume they kept the women like that most of the time, kept them pliant and doped up, able to follow simple commands to satisfy whatever depraved whim our captors had, but too out of it to attack the bastards or formulate a plan to escape. In the near-darkness, I scrounged around for anything in the room that could help me. There were pillows, of course, and our clothes. Most of the women wore only underclothes, and one or two slept in the nude. There was a vanity and a washtub at the far corner of the room, out of everybody's reach, and certainly well away from where I was, close the entrance. And the chains that leashed us into place… oh! And a loose chain. Somebody had overlooked it, three or four yards of medium gauge iron chain in decent shape. I probably couldn't have broken the chains before and I definitely couldn't now, but maybe I could do something with that. I stuffed it under my pillow and listened and waited.

Not long after I came to, there was shuffling and mumbled talking in the room outside our little cell. I presumed that meant it was morning. One or two minutes later, a big bald bastard, a human with tattoos all over his body, unlocked the door and swaggered in, a lantern in one hand and a stick in the other. I thought it might be a rod at first, something to beat us, but he used the stick to light all the little candles in the chandelier that hung above our cell. He looked over the women with a lecherous smile.

"Rise and shine, girls! Breakfast time!"

All of the women - all except for Becounia and me - awoke at once and assumed kneeling positions upon their pillows. I was pretending to be asleep, lying upon 'my' pillow with the uncomfortable knot of balled-up chain beneath it. Becounia just sat there with her eyes lolling listlessly about the room.

"Oh, right… new girls. Lysair hasn't taught you the commands yet." He snapped his fingers in front of Becounia's face. "You! Look at the girl next to you… now kneel just like she'd doing." Then he swaggered over to me and prodded me with his foot. "Wake up, my pretty… oh… you… oh…"

I looked up at the man, trying to imitate the blank stares that the other women gave. The man was taken aback for a moment, just staring at my face. I couldn't blame him - I'd never seen a woman as beautiful as that until I'd met the original Laeanna in limbo, and it could throw a man's brain for a loop if he wasn't expecting it. He started to reach for me, and I ran through my options in my head… I didn't have many. Maybe I could bite the guy's hand?

"Girl… look at the girl next to you and kneel like she's kneeling."

He recovered a bit and adjusted his trousers - it wasn't the first time that had happened to me, either. Then he gave us breakfast - stale bread, water, and a greasy porridge that nearly made me vomit - instructing us when to eat. Then he ordered the other women to do their daily cleaning and grooming technique, telling Becounia and me to watch what they were doing and then repeat what they'd done when it was our turn. He'd unclip the chains of a pair of women, lead them to the vanity and washbasin, and look on lasciviously as they stripped, sponged one another down, and went through a five-minute beauty routine. Seven pairs of women (myself and Becounia included) staggered by seven or eight minutes meant the whole thing took about an hour to complete. Afterward, the bald bastard strutted up to me and cupped my breasts, squeezing them hard enough that I wanted to wince. I wanted to do more than that - I felt humiliated and violated. I wanted to strangle the bastard and choke every last bit of air out of his lungs. But I just stared forward and pretended I was as doped up as everybody else. He tapped the tip of my nose with his finger.

"Lord Kurzalvik gets first dibs on new girls, but I think I'll be testing you out as soon as I get the chance. I bet you ride like a stallion." He placed a stinking, stubbly kiss right on my lips and then swaggered from the room.

He returned a minute later with a tray full of little bowls of the green alchemical liquid that had put me in a hypnotic state the evening before. The jailor told us to drink the stuff, paying special attention to me, but I managed to dump the contents of mine onto my pillow the moment he was turned away, covering the little green puddle with my knee. I also reached out and pushed Becaounia's hand, spilling maybe half of the stuff. I mimed drinking my bowl of drug, tasting a few drops of the remaining residue dribbling into my mouth - I spat it out as soon as I got the chance. Our jailor then picked one of the women, a dainty half-sylvast with her flowers all brown and wilted from lack of sunlight, little bruises running up and down her small body from months of abuse, and led her off for his personal use. I stared daggers at him as he swaggered out, my small fists shaking with rage. I'd never wanted to kill anybody as much as I did then, not even the dancer who'd tried to poison me - at least death by accursed poison would have been a quick death.

Throughout the day, more men came into the harem - the lieutenants of 'Lord' Kurzalvik, who occupied the fort - to take out the women, one or two at a time. They'd bring the women back an hour or so later, just as entranced as when they'd left, but sometimes sporting new bruises or red marks from where they'd been struck, slapped, or choked. And I remembered the face of every man who came in, remembered their faces and imagined them squealing for mercy as I extracted revenge on behalf of all the women who'd been abused. But Becounia and I were off-limits because we were new and Lord Kurzalvik always got first crack at the new arrivals.

"Wh… where are we?" Becounia muttered. This was an hour before our evening meal of more bread, a slightly-rotten pear, and more water.

I rushed over and clasped her hands in mine. "Captives. We're in some sort of sex-slave dungeon way out in the wilderness. Do you remember being captured?"

She nodded and began to weep uncontrollably. I pushed my hand over her mouth and shook my head. "They can't hear you crying or they'll know the drug's worn off. We have to pretend that we're entranced until we've got a chance to blow this hootenanny."

"Hmphnph?" She asked. I uncovered her mouth. "Hootenanny?"

"A rustic party - figure of speech. Do you understand?"

"Yes, princess." Tears streaked down her face, but her eyes were steely and, looking from woman to woman among our friends in the harem, her lips tightened into a thin line. She was just as angry as I was. "What can we do?"

"Well…" I showed her the chain I'd scrounged. "I've got half a plan. With any luck, the other half will come to me when the need arises. But, for you, my most important, really urgent royal order is this: don't freeze. I noticed that you froze back when our caravan got attacked. And, believe me, I understand the reaction. I've seen grown men shit themselves at the minute of an unexpected attack, and I had little bouts of freezing the first few times I saw real combat. So here's the deal: you can be scared all you want. That's natural. But the moment I order you to do something, you do it. Any questions?"

"Um…" Becounia puzzled over it for a minute. "When were you in combat, princess?"

Right - Becounia didn't know about the whole Larry Born bit. "Not real real combat," I clarified. "The queen has me train with the guard sometimes… you know, because things like this might arise. A princess has to be prepared."

"I…" the pretty forestry bureaucrat stared at me with something like awe. "I watched you render a man twice your size to ash with the very forces of nature, my lady. I… I swear I won't let you down."

The bald bastard came in with our evening meal not long after that, and Becounia and I played along with his commands. I weathered yet another bout of cruel groping, this time to my behind as he pressed into me, my face nestled near his stinking armpit. When I returned to my pillow, Becounia was gripping our length of chain, her knuckles white from the force of her grip. I had to calm her down, assuring her that our time for vengeance would come soon enough. What I didn't tell her was that I had serious doubts that it was going to work.