by Hall, Denise
“No, sir.”
Despite her effort to hold still, the first hard snap against her backside made her jump.
“Oh!” Her cry echoed through the empty shower room, reverberating off the cold tile walls. She bit down on her lip in an effort to stay silent as she heard the hiss and felt the sting of the second, then third, then fourth strokes cutting into her soft flesh.
Since her arrival, she had suffered not one day of neglect. Boyden took her across his knee every morning and warmed her thoroughly with the palm of his hand. The rest of the time, she provided him with no shortage of reasons to punish, either because of language lessons, for which she had very little aptitude, or her ineptitude in the skill room, where she showed a lamentable lack of any kind of marketable ability. The only thing she had ever been any good at was keeping Richard’s house, and there wasn’t much need for that here.
Mary jumped beneath each fiery slice of the switch. Though she tried her best to hold still, the cuts pushed her further and further up over the bench, and the squealed out-cries she tried so valiantly to hold back grew higher and higher pitched as the strokes fell hard across the bruises and welts of a good many previous whippings.
Boyden gave her eight fearsome swipes, then stopped. He waited for her to catch her breath and, trailing the switch lovingly through his fingers, said, “And?”
Panting even harder, Mary slowly propped herself back into position. She shifted her legs apart to better her balance and pushed back her hips to offer herself to him for more. “This one is laggardly and dawdled too long in the shower when she should have hurried. This one apologizes for keeping the master waiting.”
There was another hiss, and there was no keeping back her shout as the whippy length burrowed into the tender seam between her bottom and thighs. She shrieked, the lash sinking in with such vehemence that it felt as though it were flaying her skin away. She collapsed on bench, her fingers clawing at the wood as she fought to keep her hips up and her bottom offered back for him to whip.
Her flesh burned. Her whole bottom felt as though it were on fire before he stopped at—eight again? Or was it more? She’d lost count.
Mary blinked back tears. Stifling a groan, she forced herself to stand once more. Forcing her legs farther apart, she fixed her eyes on a spot of the floor and gripped the bench tightly.
“And?” Boyden drawled.
And? Mary felt a flicker of panic. She already hurt so much; she had to swallow hard to bite back her pleas for mercy. What else had she done? As much as she didn’t want to bear another cut from that switch, she knew it would be much, much worse if she couldn’t recount her wrongdoing. He would assume she hadn’t been paying attention. Or worse, that she was attempting deception.
“Blonde,” he warned, and measured the narrow switch menacingly across the lower swell of her bottom. She could already feel a number of welts there already, all pulsing and burning, the skin feeling swollen and stiff.
“Th-this o-one,” she panted and shifted her legs a little further apart, struggling to brace herself to take what he would no doubt give her without moving. “This—” As her weight hit her damaged toes, a jolt of pain shot back through her foot. She gasped, then stammered out, “This one’s carelessness damaged the Master’s Product.”
The switch lashed a rain of absolute agony all across her buttocks. From the clenching base to the juddering summits, it flicked and slapped every inch until the end of it began to fray and bits of the length broke away.
Mary howled, dancing on her tip toes, shrieking into the bench for all she was worth. All the years of her marriage had not prepared her to take the fury of a Judgment master. Compared to Boyden, Richard had been naught but a novice. And as the experienced master took her right to the brink of breaking control, as her hands began to claw the wood, barely able to keep from snapping back, palms up to protect her blazing hinds from the fiery wrath of the switch, an errant thought dashed through her mind. For an instant, two years of neglect didn’t seem quite so bad.
The dam of Mary’s determination broke, and she fell sobbing to her knees. The edge of the bench jabbed into her hips as she heaved herself up over it. Her feet kicked out, her toes scraped the floor behind her.
“I don’t mean it!” she shouted to the floor as the fire of the switch lashed down the backs of her legs. She threw back her head, screaming at the top of her lungs, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Ooowww!”
The switch broke, but Mary still scrambled against the tiles, fighting herself to hold still while her body struggled to get away from the pain. The respite brought a wave of heat flaring all over her buttocks and her thighs. For a long time, her sobs mingled with his ragged pants of exertion in the otherwise quiet of the shower room.
“Kneel,” he ordered.
Mary more fell off the bench. Gasping for breath, not bothering to wipe the tears from her flushed cheeks, she rolled onto her knees and crawled to his feet. She pressed her forehead to her hands upon the tile floor.
With uncharacteristic gentleness, Boyden asked, “What didn’t you mean?”
Sniffling, her breathing ragged and uneven, Mary felt her face flush as hot as the fire emanating from the pulsing welts along her flanks. “The time before here,” she faltered and her voice softened miserably as she admitted, “it wasn’t better than this. I’m sorry I thought it. I didn’t mean to.”
“No?” He studied her quietly. “How many switches will it take, do you think, before you do mean it?”
Mary stared at the floor in front of her nose as he walked away from her. Then a soft cloth fell over her neck and back.
“Put that on. You’d be a Primary if you were a Lesser. But since you’re not even Product, who knows what we’ll end up calling you.”
Mary sat up slowly, looking down at the tunic that fell to the floor beside her hands. It was green. The color of split pea soup, sleeveless and ugly.
“You’ve got two seconds to get dressed,” Boyden told her. “Tane wants to see you.”
* * * *
The floor of Tane’s personal quarters was covered by a pale, cream-colored carpet. It was soft beneath her knees. Almost comforting, in a way. As she knelt before him, her eyes down, her hands clasped nervously behind her back, Mary couldn’t help but wonder if maybe all the other barracks, except hers of course, had floor coverings as nice as this.
Tane’s black shoes made another pass around her, then he reached down and lifted the skirt of her tunic, flicking it up to the small of her back. “Nice,” he said.
“She marks very well,” Boyden replied. “She hardly makes a peep of trouble; I’m not getting near enough exercise. It’ll be good to get the new batch in. For a while there, I was afraid I might grow too soft to handle them.”
Mary hissed a quick breath and winced as Tane cupped her right buttock, squeezing the line of weals, his fingers seeming to find all the tenderest areas to pinch.
He squatted down beside her, following the ladder line of welts from her bottom to her thighs. “Well, Blonde, you’re through the first part. Pay attention, because I’m going to give you a very rare opportunity. Look at me.” He waited until she’d raised her head and, as her eyes found his, almost gently asked, “Would you like to go home?”
“N-no,” she hastily ducked her head. “No, Master.”
He didn’t move. “Do you think I’ll make this offer again?” His eyebrows rose as he shook his head once. “I won’t. This has been naught but a gentle introduction for you. If you stay, your training will begin in earnest and all these little mistakes you’ve been allowed to coast by with, you’ll now find catch up to you very quickly.”
His words made Mary shiver, but she still shook her head. Staring at the carpet, she whispered, “I want to stay.”
Behind her, Boyden chuckled. She felt his hand lightly touch her back as he lowered himself to her level. He kissed the nape of her neck and his hot breath whispered against her ear, “Bye bye, Blonde.”
She felt a trickle of panic
when he walked out of the room without her. Though she’d known it wasn’t going to last forever, it still felt for a moment as though she’d been cut loose from a firm anchor.
“Rise,” Tane told her.
Mary unclasped her hands and laid them on the floor. She fidgeted with the pale carpet fibers before pushing herself up. Having only had to assume the position once before, she was hesitant as she spread her knees apart. She could feel the strain pulling along the inner slope of her thighs, but remembering the reprimanding snap Tane had laid into China and Mahogany with that wicked Judgment strap, Mary worked to get her knees further apart.
Tane caught her chin in his fingers. “Head straight. Eyes to the floor.” A soft caress of his fingers over her hair was her reward for obeying.
Her breath hitched in her throat as his hand smoothed down the front of her tunic to cup her left breast. He squeezed and she felt a warmth flare within the pit of her belly. It trickled down, as his wandering hand did, to caress her loins. He cupped her there as well, and Mary almost closed her eyes.
“Your name is Mercy,” Tane rumbled, as intimate as any lover. “Know that’s as close to the real thing as you’ll receive from us here.”
He gave her two gentle spanks that nevertheless made her entire body jump. Darkly, ever so slightly, Tane smiled at her, then stood up and leisurely walked away. “You haven’t met Master Shipe yet, have you?”
Hearing the door, Mercy turned her head as a burly, scowling dark-haired man propelled himself into the room on one crutch. Though older than Tane by a good ten years, his upper body was a mass of muscle and sinew. His arms as well as his right leg were thick from constant exercise and looked to her as solid as stone. His left, however, was a stump just above where the knee should have been, as burly as its twin, but ending in a round knob that the adjusted hem of his dark pants hugged. The grey-streaked growth of hair upon his jaw was more the result of avoiding a razor for roughly half a week than any conscious desire to grow a beard. And when he set his hard eyes on Mercy, they narrowed sharply and his frown deepened the lines in his chiseled face.
She had the most insane urge to jerk her legs shut.
“This her?” he growled.
“Mm.” Seating himself at his desk, Tane didn’t so much as glance at her. “Give her six of the best for breaking position.”
Someone in better control might have snapped automatically back into position, head straight, eyes to the floor. But instead Mercy found her eyes lowering, not to the floor, but to Master Shipe’s stump of a left leg.
He noticed, and his eyes narrowed even more. “Well,” he barked. “What the hell are you sitting there for? Get your skinny ass behind me and try not to get lost.”
She scrambled to her feet and hurried after him, barely catching the door before it slammed shut behind him. She glanced back at Tane once, but like a king upon his throne, the Mountain Lord sat at his desk and hoarded his attention for vastly more important things. She had already been dismissed.
Mercy had to run to catch up with Shipe, who swung himself down the hall faster than most people walked, leading her through a maze of staircases and corridors. The walls were all stark stone and unadorned; each new corner came to resemble one which they’d previously turned.
“Mercy,” the one-legged master muttered under his breath. “He’s developing a sense of humor in his old age.”
As he took her deeper into the bowels of the mountain, the sounds of distant feminine voices became more obvious. They were at ease, at play, conversing and not crying out in pain as Mercy had grown accustomed to hearing in Boyden’s empty barracks.
At the end of a long hall, Shipe turned a corner and opened a door. He swung out onto the top of a flight of metal steps that overlooked a mammoth stone corridor of sleeping barracks. His command: “Doors closed!” boomed out over the join of the rooms and every door in the stone hallway slammed shut before they were even halfway down the stairs. The voices hushed, dropping to little more than an occasional whisper. It made the echo of their passing seem obscenely loud to Mercy’s ears.
“This is the Pit,” Shipe told her. “You’ve got no reason to be here. Ever. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
They had almost reached the end of the hall at the end of the Pit when a sharp crack rang out behind them. Mercy jumped at the sound and spun around, but as a second crack and the shrill cry that followed it suggested, the discipline taking place was happening behind one of the closed doors.
Shipe took hold of her ear lobe. “Nothing that happens here is any concern of yours. I thought we were clear on that.”
Mercy muffled a cry of her own as he pinched the tender lobe, dragging her along behind him.
“Had you any sense, you’d be more concerned right now with what I’m going to do to you.” He swung himself down the hall on his crutch, pulling her with him and she still had to hurry to keep pace, even when they came to another set of stairs, this one leading up.
He let go of her sore ear to grab hold of the banister on each side. Hooking his crutch over one brawny shoulder, he scaled up the steps on his arms as easily as though he were walking. The ripple of his biceps and the roll of muscles playing down the plain of his hard back made her catch her breath. He was solid everywhere.
Shipe stopped at the top of the stairs and once more standing with the aid of his crutch, turned to look back at her slower progress behind him. Still scowling, he held out his hand.
Mercy made a face, but obediently came closer and turned her ear to him. He took hold of her lobe again, once more twisting it sharply as he pulled her along behind him. They passed three doors before he stopped.
“Welcome to your new barrack,” he said almost bitterly. He opened the door and pushed her inside.
It was obviously Shipe’s personal quarters. There was a warm fire in the fireplace, a brown bear skin on the floor, and the most ancient assortment of framed maps hanging around the room. He had a neatly made sleigh-style bed, dark walnut-wood bookcases that lined every free inch of wall space, and the occasional dead thing thrown in for decoration: a ram’s head, an elk’s, two stuffed pheasants and a monster of a fish mounted on a plaque above the oak mantle.
“Get in,” he told her flatly. “This is where you’ll stay when you’re not working.”
The door swung shut behind them and he swung across the room, past the fireplace and the bathroom, to a narrow door in the far wall.
“This is where you’ll sleep,” he said as he flung open the door.
The size of a spacious walk-in closet, it still made for a very small room. There was no window and the light from the ceiling could have in no way been mistaken for anything other than artificial fluorescence. Especially when it flickered, as it was doing now. The only article of furniture was the bed itself, a thin twin mattress that lay on the floor. No worse really than the room Richard had given Mahogany and China.
“Well,” he said when she hesitated at the edge of the door. “You want an engraved invitation?”
Fidgeting with the front of her pea green tunic, Mercy squeezed between him and the threshold and crept into the closet. She looked down at her bed on the floor. There was one pillow and a set of pressed sheets and a blanket folded neatly on the foot of the mattress.
“You’ve got six cuts coming to you,” Shipe said. “You’ll get them first thing after supper. Plus an extra two for your misplaced curiosity in the Pit. Depending on how irritated I am with you by then, I may or may not round the count to twelve. Questions, comments, complaints?”
She blinked back at him and gave a small shake of her head. “No, sir.”
He grunted, then started to close the door. He almost had it latched before abruptly he swung it open again to glare at her again. “Lights out is at ten. I hear so much as a peep from in here and I’ll take a layer of skin off your backside. Got it?”
Mercy attempted a small nod. “Y-yes, sir.”
“You claustrophobic?” h
e asked.
“No, sir.”
He turned his head, looking around him, then reached up to pluck a book from a nearby shelf. Tossing it in the closet onto the foot of her bed, he said, “Here. Try not to be too much of a pain in the ass until supper.”
Then he shut the door.
Mercy sat down on the middle of her mattress on the floor and folded her hands in her lap. Her bare legs stretched out before her, she glanced around at the bare walls, then at the book on the folded up blanket. She reached sideways to pick it up. It was written in German. A brief flip through the pages revealed no illustrations.
She bit her bottom lip, looked at the door, and wondered how long it was until supper. By this time, some of the welts Boyden had given her had disappeared. Others, the thick plum-colored lines where he’s struck her harder and more than once, still stung as she rolled onto her hip and crawled to the end of the mattress. Very hesitantly, she knocked at the bottom of the door.
There was an explosion of curses from the other side. A second or two later, the door swung open. Shipe glared at her.
Very meekly, Mercy held up the book. “I-I can’t read this. Do you have anything in English?”
His eyes narrowed and he growled. Then he took a quick glance at the bookshelves around the door of her closet. He swung a few steps away, then returned with a thick volume, which he dropped on the mattress next to her. The English title read, ‘Basic German’. Shipe shut the door again.
Mercy chewed at her bottom lip for several long minutes. Even more hesitantly than before, she again rapped two knuckles on the bottom of the door, and cringed when she heard the second volley of curses, longer and louder than before.
Shipe yanked the door open and, leaning one broad hand against the threshold, leaned in at her. “What?” he growled.
Mercy rubbed her hands together. “May I please use the bathroom?”
He studied her with hard eyes. “Yeah,” he seethed, exhaling the word as though it were a sigh of sheer annoyance. “I can see right now you’re going to get the full twelve.”
