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CHAPTER TWO: SUICIDE MISSION
Alana was careful to keep her face showing nothing but fear, but inside she was rejoicing that the first part of their plan had succeeded. This part of the southern border was notorious for its frequent procurement of “maids” for the palace. The enslaved peasants in this district were known for both the beauty and the virtue of their women, and both were necessary in a woman taken to the palace as a “maid.” The mages there liked their women pretty and fresh. It was said that one in ten women in the southern district were arrested and taken away before their twenty-first birthday, never to be seen again.
Ivan, her handler, had thought this would be the best place for insertion. It was close to the border between the Lightrealms and Darklands, so it would be easy for her to cross the border unseen. And it was a location where the Darklands authorities she might come in contact with would be well versed in spotting and submitting women for approval as “maids.”
They were called “maids,” but everyone in the Darklands and the Lightrealms knew what they really were: sex slaves. What went on in the palace was supposed to be strictly confidential, but servants talked. Butlers, guards, grooms, lower level mages . . . all brought out whispered stories of horrific rapes and tortures inflicted on helpless girls for the sadistic pleasure of the high-level mages and their cohorts. It had been a program initiated by King Orven himself, who was himself a consummate sexual sadist, and supported by his queen, Sweetness. If the Queen had a real name, no one knew what it was. Everyone just called her Sweetness. She was rumored to be crazier than her son, which was saying something.
Alana’s mind went back to the months of training she had gone through with Ivan, the training in withstanding rough sex, perverted sex, every kind of sex they could imagine, and then some; and the training in pain, bearing pain, not surrendering before it, being able to think and function in spite of it. They had known that when she became a maid, she would have to undergo unspeakable torments, and be able to maintain her cover in spite of it all.
The hardest part had been getting through these kinds of encounters without using any of her magic. As a half elf, Alana was one of those few mages blessed with not one, but two, kinds of distinct magic. She had healing magic from her human father, and death magic from her elvish mother. She could either heal, or kill, with a touch. It was one of the reasons she had rarely suffered from serious pain in her life—her magic healed her too fast for that—and had made her training in pain very difficult.
But the training had been necessary. Because once she entered the Darklands, she would have to appear as magicless as the most unmagical mortal. Mages in the Darklands either worked for the king, or they were killed. No mage was allowed to be a maid in the palace. Once in the Darklands, for her magic to be discovered would mean an instant death sentence for her, probably on the spot without a trial. So they had worked on teaching her to live, and to suffer, without her magic.
And then, in the last week before insertion, there had been the Ward. Ivan and a team of his best mages had worked on it for over twelve hours, gathering up every last shred of magic inside of her and wrapping it up inside a psychic sphere, wrapping it small and tight with charms and spells, making it smaller and smaller until it was nearly invisible, and tucking that miniscule sphere away in a far, far corner of her self. When it had been done, her magic had been gone, as if it had never been there. She had never felt so naked in her life. She had instantly wanted to bring that sphere back out from its hiding place and break it back open.
That was the temptation: that she could, at any time. That she would be able to, once she had worked her way up to her target, and was in position to strike: in that moment she would reclaim her magic, and kill, and her mission would be complete. But until then, no matter what they did to her, she had to remain magicless. Helpless. Because to reveal herself was to die.
It was a simple plan, really: become a maid, seduce her way up the ranks of mages until she reached the king, bed him, and then kill him. It was a plan born of desperation, born out of the knowledge that the Lightlands had no chance of winning this war unless King Orven died, and even then, their chances would be slim.
Everyone had known from the start that this was a suicide mission: once she had killed Orven, if the very effort of killing him didn’t kill her—Orven was one of the most powerful mages who had ever lived, and he wouldn’t go down without a fight—she would immediately be torn apart by the dark mages in the palace. This was a mission she wouldn’t be coming back from. But she had volunteered for it. Because there was no other hope.
Alana was jolted out of her thoughts as she tripped on a root and fell. She tried to catch herself with her hands, but the soldier yanked on the rope, jerking her wrists up over her head, leaving her chest to take the full brunt of her impact. She cried out as her bare breasts slammed into the hard pebbled ground, and the soldiers laughed, the one with the rope coming around to grab her by the hair and yank her to her feet. “Keep walking, bitch.” His fingers surreptitiously came around to grab her bare nipple and twist it. She cried out again, tears in her eyes.
“Farlone!”
The soldier jerked his hand away. “Yes sir!”
“Keep your fucking hands off her!”
“Yes sir!”
They kept walking.
Alana smiled inside. It hadn’t hurt much, given what Ivan had gotten her used to, but the palace liked their maids innocent, fresh, and sensitive to a T. The perfect victim. She would give them what they wanted.
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