It turned out that the first thing Cass needed to learn was how to read. Sarius Hall had questioned Cass only briefly before discovering this and declared it useless to go further until Cass could read, write, and perform arithmetic. He had stormed off, and the guards had escorted her back to her room, only for a rather small, middle-aged man to show up at the door a few hours later.

This man was her tutor for language and math, as apparently Hall felt it was beneath him to teach a commoner these things. But the mage did not leave Cass alone during this. As an ‘incentive’ to work hard and not waste his time, Sarius Hall had the tutor report any mistakes Cass made during the day.

And on the next morning she was shackled to a wall and whipped for each one.

“You should be thanking me for being so merciful,” Hall said one morning, as he rested his arm for a moment. “Were I less kind, I would be using my magic, but I believe mundane lessons should only require mundane punishment.”

“Yes my lord,” Each breath hurt her raw throat as she gasped for air after screaming and crying. “Thank you for your mercy!”

Cass had thought that Hall was simply angry and blustry, dangerous to be sure, but a lesser threat compared to the old mage and his horrible emptiness. As she was forced to count out the lashes, Cass had realized that she was wrong. There was something broken in Hall, broken to a degree that wouldn’t even be seen from the most viscous of street thugs.

To make everything worse, the “Glyph” they had placed on her back was not only unbroken by the lashes, but healed her back by the time she received her second meal. So every day she would have to endure the pain from the morning, and then she was ready to be hurt again.

Terrified, Cass threw herself into her studies, desperately working to avoid the brutal treatment in the mornings. It took her two weeks to learn the basics of reading and writing, amazing the tutor who thought it was a pity that her results could not be duplicated without using a whip. Admittedly, Cass was hardly proficient and most noble born children would receive further education, but the tutor said that with practice she would one day be as fully capable as them. Though he did say that would likely take many years to achieve without a tutor, if it was achieved at all.

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Her reward for learning to read and write? The tutor started to teach her math, and the horror began again. As Cass had become more proficient, she had received less lashes each day, but as they began math it began again in full force.

At first, Cass had been grateful for the meals she had received. At the time she had thought she would do anything to enjoy such food again. Now Cass only wished she could eat those words, because even that had been a trap in a way.

Four weeks after starting the brutal teaching regimen, Cass had been thrown into the chair behind the desk she studied at. She was desperately trying to shake off the daze that had come with the morning lashing, when she felt a hand on her breast.

Instinctively, she jerked away, causing the chair to fall over and smash her flayed back on to the floor. She screamed in pain, and looked up through tear filled eyes to see the tutor with a look of disappointment on his face.

“You filled out nicely,” the tutor was frowning. “But unlike some people I’d rather not deal with screams and blood. What a waste…”

Cass did not realize the changes in her own body. With regular meals and bathing, not to mention fresh clothes, she was quite pretty. As her body recovered from years of starvation and abuse on the streets, she would likely even become beautiful. Before she had been somewhat protected from such advances, because only the sickest of people would even want her, and at the very least she could try and run.

Now she was a slave, without protection or any where to run, and no one would bat an eye if someone took advantage of that.

This turned out to be an even worse torture than before, to avoid being taken advantage of by the tutor Cass had to make certain to get enough wrong to be whipped bloody. In effect, she was being forced to ask to be tortured.

Three more weeks passed, and the harrowing experience finally came to an end. But that terrified Cass even more. In this place, every time something seemed to be good or something bad ended, whatever came next was worse. And Cass had first hand experience with Sarius Hall’s sadism.

As she was escorted to a new room where she would begin to learn magic from him, Cass found herself shaking so much that the guards had to help her walk.