The little bells on her wrists sound the alarm and the Queen’s strong guards pull her hands away. They twist her arms. She keeps bucking the air. She could cum from their firm embrace. The strong hands of those shield-maidens had become so familiar to her that she would long for them just as she would long to cum. She bucks so hard against the air, her eyes fixed on her Queen. Her foot slips and she falls to her knees. The tickle of the Princess’s giggle is almost enough.
“Oh, take pity on her!” says the Princess, but she doesn’t mean it.
The Queen doesn’t hear her. She sits on her throne, haunched forward, staring at the servant as her wrist-bells tinkle. She runs her many-ringed fingers over her mouth, breathing fast and shallow breaths. Whenever her servant fails a trial she becomes like a woman possessed, inflamed by the punishments she might inflict. Castrate her!, she thinks, but soon cools herself. Leave her on the gallows where the ravens might pick at her! Break her on the wheel! Draw her by a draft horse! If only she could take such punishment.
“Whatever will we do with her?” she says, affecting cool and dominant pose, but she goes on hunching forward, staring at her servant, watching her dick bounce in the air with her empty thrusts, watching her breasts bounce in the struggle as the shield-maidens try to quiet her. “Those sinful hands can’t keep well enough away, even faced by my order.”
The Queen stands up. Her many red-gold and ivory necklaces fall against her bosom, her bangles, beads and fine chains fall about her wrists and hips and ankles. Despite the nakedness of her breasts, her strong arms, her soft thighs and her supple feet, all of which the servant spends many sleepless nights picturing, the girl cannot tear her eyes from her Queen’s face, for the effects of that black spell the Queen wears; all who look on her face are transfixed, obsessed by her beauty, and from then on forever charmed. All who see her act as thralls, damaging themselves to gaze on her face and abandon their dignity. The spell reveals its victims true nature: the bravest try to embrace her, the foolish whatever soft thing is nearest, and the lowest creatures, the cowardly, fall down and embrace themselves.
It delighted the Queen to test the mettle of her subjects. Long ago she promised wealth and status to whosoever could withstand the spell. Her shield-maidens, their gaze protected by heavy garnet visors, brought in each challenger and guarded them closely. Each one, in turn, would succumb and be dragged off, each enduring the Princesses’ laughter and the Queen’s inflamed growls. She constructed cloisters to inter them where they could be tamed with frescoes of her image. She evaluated each challenger, observing how quickly they succumbed and how degraded they became, for she sought a creature of most perfect weakness.
A woman of delusional ambition came to this trial. She was a woman of low birth, young and inexperienced, but sure of her will and temerity; she was sure that she could meet the Queen’s gaze and leave with the riches and fame she knew she deserved. But the moment she looked on the Queen’s gaze she fell faster than any other, and just so soon as she had raised her skirts to reveal her dick, she came. It shot all over the floor, and kept shooting, though she had never laid her hand on it. The Princess’s laughter was piercing, but the Queen was ecstatic: she knew she had found the weakest creature.
“Give me those hands,” she says, approaching the girl. The shield-maidens release their grip and, though she wishes, prays, begs herself to reach out to her Queen, the girl can do no other but instantly grab her dick and begin her work. The mead-hall is filled with her laments. Terrible howls and piercing wails, and the vigorous chime of her wrist-bells.
“Let my eyes be gouged by fork-tines,” she says. She feels like hell-fire runs through her, even as fingers of ice arrest her back, her hand pumping like a bellows. “Let me be impaled on fish-spears for my treachery.”
The Queen bites her lip. She begins to drool, purr, and heave, her breast rising with trembling breaths. “Go on, weakling,” she says. “Tell the court what you deserve.” She puts a necklace in her mouth, chewing on its beads.
“Let my name be a curse in the mouths of wise women,” she says. “Let them display my remains at the gates to lighten the hearts of travellers.”
The Queen fights to keep her voice from trembling. “Yes,” she says, “you know your heart by these words.” She reaches her hand out to the girl’s grimacing face, wiping the sweat from her brow and caressing her cheek. Her hand feels like samite, gossamer, gold-cloth. Her wrists smell like rosemary, cinnabar, saffron. The girl can endure no more and feels the waters break.
The shield-maidens, trained to recognize her whimpers and wriggles, seize her arms and twist away her hands. They pull her back and her buttocks hit the floor. The chime of her wrist-bells abrupty ends its song. She feels it on her body: one heavy load, hot and deep, batters her chest. The Queen gazes on her floundering, chewing her nails and drooling, purring. She feels the second spurt hit her body. She strains her neck to keep her eyes on her Queen’s face, shuddering at her gaze which is so fixed, deliberate, intense. Her dick continues to spurt and dribble, covering her stomach and her waist and spilling onto the floor.
“Perfect imbecile,” the Queen says, once she is certain all of the sop has run out of it. “How many years of work did you ruin in one moment?” Her eyes stare into the girl, running her through. “We’ll have to start all over with you,” she says.
The girl clenches her fists, her arms still held stiff by the shield-maidens, wishing for her shame that she could look anywhere but her Queen’s radiant face and avoid her gaze.
“Every punishment,” she says. The girl winces. “Every trial.” The girl sets her teeth. “Until every drop you spilled is restored.”
“Yes my Queen!” her servant says, shivering and quaking.
“Every drop,” says the Queen, her voice a tremolo, her eyes lit like censers, “every punishment, my weakling’s every suffereing renewed…” She tears off her skirt. Underneath is the figure of an erect penis made from stuffed leather tied around her waist. Her servant, unable to look away from her Queen’s face, wiggles and squirms.
The Princess senses her mood. “One ought fetch the Queen her oils,” she says. A shield-maiden approaches with a sachel and the queen removes a corked bottle. She pours the oil, which smells sweetly of clove and corriander, over the leather and rubs it down with her hand. Drawing close to her servant’s outstretched legs she reaches an oily finger into her asshole.
“I want you to tell me every dream,” she says, rotating her finger. “Every hope… every prayer… that I took from you.”
The Queen thrusts her leather dick into the girl’s asshole, cradling her face, tucking her nose into her servant’s neck. Her servant bucks against her thighs, gasping, straining. The shield-maidens fight to hold her in place. The Princess’s laugh tickles the servant’s ears, but she barely hears her for her Queen’s purrs and growls.
Between her whimpers the girl whispers every pretension she ever held into her Queen’s ear, recalling every loss and lamenting them anew. Her Queen snarls, purrs, roars sweetly in her ear. Goosebumps raise along her flesh where her breath touches.
As the Queen’s teeth rake along her neck the mist comes down on her. She falls asleep.
The Princess would often ride out to the cloisters where the charmed were kept. Each doomed soul was held in a small cell the size of their person, stacked one on the other as bodies in a mausoleum. Each had a little space cut away from the stone, the size of a finger, which they might peer through, and on the other wall was a fresco of their Queen’s face. Inside their hands were bound to prevent sin. The whole tower resounded with their shuffling and moaning.
The Princess would walk through the halls to hear their moans and see their desperate gazes. Her delicate laughter would echo throughout the tower; but on this day she could not hear her echo through the din. One of the charmed ones was howling and wailing, and the culprit not hard to find.
“Poor thing, poor thing,” the Princess said, kneeling down by its repository. “Whatever is the matter with it?”
“Mistress, please hear my woe. I am too short for this cell. When they placed me I could look out and see my Queen, but in my shuffling I have moved out of place. No matter how much I shuffle I only end up further away. Please move me up an inch so that I might see my Queen.”
The Princess laughs, covering her mouth with her hand. “Oh poor thing, poor thing. Don’t you know you are in a house of the Lord? You must turn your thoughts to contemplation, then you will appreciate the solitude.”
“No, Mistress! Please, hear me! I contemplate the Lord, but I am loyal to my Queen!”
“You are so loyal to your Queen you make the Lord jealous. Oh, Sister! You must give this one a sermon on Idolatry, for it has come under that sin’s domination.”
“Mistress, please! I ask only an inch!”
The nun comes to the repository and begins a dull and moralizing sermon, scarecely audible over the creature’s wailing. The Princess goes and kneels down at the other end and produces a feather from under her peplos. It belongs to a strange and legendary bird, its down very soft but hardy and its stem very long. She faces away from the nun and slides the feather into the crevice of the wretch’s stone cell, closing her eyes and feeling around until she is sure she has located its penis. It’s soaked through and throbbing.
“Poor thing,” she whispers into the recepticle. “You’re about to burst.”
She wiggles the feather so that it just touches the creature’s head. It recoils, as if struck by lightning, so sensitive from years in the cell.
“Oh,” the creature moans, “is that your touch, my Queen? Every night have I prayed for it!”
The nun scolds it again for interrupting. “Once more will earn you a flogging, little sinner,” she says.
“Poor thing, listen carefully! Reflect on your sins!”
She hears its breathing, rapid and sharp like an animal in pain. “One more ought to do it,” she says. She wiggles the feather.
“Oh, my Queen! I’m about to…”
“That’s it!” says the nun, opening the cell and dragging the creature to the floor. Its hands and legs are tightly bound and its feminine body shivers and convulses. The Princess laughs and laughs as she watches the poor thing be flogged. Its dick begins spurting cum all over its shuddering body.
“My Queen!” it says, its eyes fixed on the fresco. “I knew you had come for me!”
The cane cracks on its skin, leaving a band of red flesh.
“Oh you poor, stupid thing!” The Princess laughs. “You poor, stupid thing, there’s your Queen after all.”