Rani woke up with almost no memory of the recent events. Amusingly enough, what made her remember the last day was nothing more than the moonlight coming from the window.
“Night, huh.” The princess blinked slowly. “I know I have gone to sleep in the noon, but it is never comfortable to wake up in the middle of the night.”
She sighed and straightened her back. Her hair was a mess and what she wanted more than anything right now was a bath.
“It has been two days at the palace, three on the road too...” The emir opted to undress and change herself. Surely there would be maids or manservants more than happy to serve her, but she wasn’t in the mood. “We need to depart today, by the time we arrive it will have been over a week, and I do not trust Naila to keep everything in place for that long.”
For better or worse, mostly for worse, Rani had been forced to leave her half-sister Naila in power back in her city of Sadina. Whilst competent in Nurture and martial disciplines, the young sultanzade was far from a competent administrator. Tamara and Nuha, Rani’s personal scribes, were overwatching her. Those two women had a lot of experience running an emirate, both working in their positions before either Rani or Naila were even born, but the regent emir had the power to overrule them.
This visit to Asina had only seeded chaos, only the information Rani got out of the sultanah could be considered useful. It was a minor relief, but she would have preferred not to come here in the first place.
Obviously, that wasn’t an option.
Not only Aaliyah had ordered her personally to come, alongside her scribe of commoners, but she needed to attend the council of sultanzade and emirs. As the name implied, it was a meeting hosted and attended by sultanzade and emirs of Ydaz. It was hosted on a bi-monthly basis and whilst not every sultanzade was forced to participate, the emirs didn’t have the same privilege. In the previous years, Rani and Hassan had substituted the old emir of Sadina, Yusuf, but once Hassan came into power, it was she who assisted most council meetings.
The only person who could substitute Rani in these meetings now was Naila, but that wasn’t an option either. Her half-sister lacked training and understanding, and unfortunately, the meetings weren’t trivial affairs.
Rani went alone to the palace’s bath, at this time of the night it was deserted, yet the water steamed with the same potency. The sultanzade forced a maid prancing around the entrance of the baths and forced her to come inside and assist her. She was too tired to bother cleaning herself, better to leave that to an expert.
Asina maids were in a different league of their own compared to those she had in Sadina. There weren’t many requirements to be a maid in her palace, but Aaliyah was stricter with her workers. There was a whole course the servants had to take to be contracted. The crown paid for these lessons, but the sheer requirement of needing to take classes to cater to every sultanzade’s whims sorted the flimsiest of wills away.
It was mainly for that fact that most servants in the palace were actually men because they knew the perks of the job. Give a man the minimal chance to get laid, and they will grovel at your feet and bark in obedience.
Salary inequality by gender in the palace was a reality, though not in the way most would expect. Women were more coveted by the sultanzade for a myriad of reasons, whether it was carnal, Nurture, or manpower ones. In a way, Rani couldn’t see men. Her eyes ignored the manservants, only laying on the women. Male beauty was mostly limited to their physique and strength, but no common man could be better well-built than a sultanzade. Only the most effeminate and young manservants were of interest to the sultanzade, the rest were just fields ready to be reaped and discarded.
The maid serving her was dexterous with her hands, this was clearly not her first time serving a sultanzade. Nor a woman for that matter. Being sultanzade was synonymous with lecherous, but that didn’t mean every one of her siblings enjoyed sex in the same way. Some didn’t at all. Deviants all of those, but they weren’t treated as lesser because of it. Their hate was better placed in someone else. So as the maid got adventurous with her touches as they closed in erogenous zones, clearly misunderstanding the reason why she was brought, Rani put a finger in her hand.
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“Do not.” The emir stated with power, charm oozing through her body.
Her talent was both a curse and a blessing. Even if her ability – and interest – in Nurture was lacking, her innate talent with the charm stance made her a force to be reckoned with even amongst the older sultanzade. Her innate abilities, something which she didn’t have any control over, defined her hierarchal status and who she was as a person.
And that enraged her.
The maid obeyed her mistress’ orders and proceeded with the bathing as normal, not trying to please the princess again. Though Rani could tell the woman was far from intimidated. She could tell it with her enhanced senses. The coquetry of the caresses, the accelerated beating of her heart, the rugged breath, and the drenched sex. The act of nonchalant domination had only made the maid horny.
That was another truth of the palace.
Sure, her charm may have influenced her, even if it was a shallow uncontrolled burst, but the reality was that the ethics of the palace of Asina only attracted the utmost deviants to its halls. No servant was ever assaulted here regardless of their gender, if anything, they looked forward to it. That of course, was only limited to servants.
Every servant knew what would wait for them once they signed for the job, even if a select few broke down midway after discovering the sex wasn’t as free as it seemed. Some were even purposely broken, a certain woman enjoyed that a bit too much.
Rani enjoyed her bath for a long while. Not only cleaning every corner of her body with the most expensive beauty products of the world – even if she didn’t need them – but also enjoying the massages of the maid, who unsurprisingly, was an experienced masseuse.
The watery eyes of the maid – brimming with unadulterated desire – rubbed her wrongly, so with a sigh, the emir grabbed the young woman’s neck and pushed her. She would know better than implicitly requesting a sultanzade for satisfaction in the future.
By the time she got out of the bath, the sun was threatening to come out. Before sunlight made its apparition, Rani readied her documents from the council and alerted her soldiers to be ready to leave. But before doing so, she needed to see someone else first.
It wasn’t hard to find the room where they had stationed her scribe of commoners; the servants were happy to oblige her after all. She found out her location was in the main palace, which irony of the situation almost made her chuckle.
Rani knocked on the door once, but as no one answered, she barged into the room. She didn’t have to ask for permission in the first place as a sultanzade, but she wasn’t a mannerless barbarian.
The room was lit by a single candle and was mostly devoid of furniture for its size. The biggest piece of the room was the bed, which was inhabited by a woman facing up as she lay.
“Ah~” Rani moaned. Fate had been cruel to the scribe, she had lost her mother barely a few weeks ago – apparently her grandfather too – and now she had been deflowered against her will by the most vile person Rani knew of. And that was without taking into consideration the whole bone-breaking thing. And despite all that cruelty, the princess couldn’t help herself but feel intoxicated.
There was a beauty to it.
Rani didn’t consider herself a cruel person, but much like her mother, she knew how to appreciate the subtleties of pain. She repulsed pain with all her might but seeing that amount of inflicted pain felt like a waste if it went unused.
“I know you are awake.” The emir whispered, her stance revealing the wakefulness of her scribe. “I do not care if you do not respond to me, but I came here to tell you that I will leave Asina soon. You are to remain here until you recover. And do not fret about your position, I will not let you go easily.” The last words rang with charm.
That got a reaction from Aloe, who still faked her sleep, even if she had opened her eyes. They shone in a paradox of life and death. The young scribe wouldn’t allow herself to die, but she didn’t possess many wishes to continue with her life. It was that glint in her emerald eyes that Rani found succulent.
That brewing hate.
Hate moved countries, shifted borders, and toppled empires.
The same emotion emerged in Rani as she looked into those despoiled eyes. It wasn’t because Aloe had been battered in such a horrifying way. It wasn’t because it had been her toy her mother had stolen.
The sultanzade stepped backward to appreciate the broken beauty of the petite woman. She inspected her body in detail. At least I have the certainty she has not been impregnated with her bastard. Rani pondered recalling the lesson Aaliyah had taught her the previous morning. As much the maid who had cleaned the scribe tried to remove the stench, the smell of blood, menstrual blood lingered in the air. No child would spawn from that womb that day.
As Rani’s hand lay on the frame of the door, she realized where the true hate came from. I wanted to be the one to do that. Being beaten by her mother only reinforced her existing hate. The emir left for Sadina.