Tell Me a Story

PROLOGUE

Once my granddaughter asked me to tell her a story.  And this was the story I told her.

You will never find the name Alana Sardothien in a textbook.  Or the name Dante Ashnor.  No, in the history books it says that the Great War was brought to an end by the mysterious illness and death of the Darklands ruler, King Orven, in the year 1364.  The version they tell to children says that no one knows for certain what kind of illness killed him.  Perhaps it was a blessing sent by Or, a stroke of good fortune, a case of a wicked man getting his comeuppance.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

King Orven’s death was paid for in blood, paid for in blood and in pain by two of the bravest lovers the world has ever known.

It began with a girl, alone in the woods, one night along the southernmost border of the Darklands....

CHAPTER ONE: CAPTURED

       “You there!  Halt!”

       Alana took one look over her shoulder and ran.  Her thin cotton dress, wet with dew, clung to her body as she ran, hampering her movements, catching at her thighs.  She had been trekking through this forest all day and all night and she was exhausted, but she forced new strength into her limbs, knowing what would happen if she was captured.

       Behind her, she could hear the soldiers yelling and cursing her as they ran through the trees in pursuit.  She had only seen two in the clearing, but now there were at least four men running after her, judging by the sound of their voices and clanking chain mail.

       She swerved around the trunk of a colossal oak, glancing back at her pursuers, and ran straight into the hard steel cuirass of the soldier who had suddenly risen up in front of her.  The force of the impact temporarily knocked the breath from her, and she struggled to breathe as the soldier wrapped his burly arms around her, trapping her.

       “Got her!” he called to his companions as they came running up.  “Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”

       She tried to bite his fingers, struggling wildly as he grabbed her wrists, his grip like iron, hard enough to bruise.

       They laughed at her, their eyes roved freely over her body.  The wet piece of brown cotton covering her curves did little to hide them, and their eyes drank in her full, bulging breasts, the twisting, writhing line of her hips.  Her breasts were unusually full and seemed to invite groping, but the rest of her body was lithe, combining the lean grace of a girl with the soft voluptuousness of a woman.  She was of average height for a woman, brown haired, perhaps twenty or hard.  The captain grabbed one of her full breasts and squeezed it hard, and she screamed.

       “Looks like we’ll be having ourselves a little fun tonight, boys.”  There was a ripple of hoots and laughter as he grabbed her by the back of her dress and threw her to the ground, ripping the dress off her body as she fell.  The thin material tore easily, and he yanked the garment up, kicking her onto her side so he could pull the shreds of the sleeves up over her arms.  He threw the wet garment aside.  She was wearing nothing underneath, as peasant women usually did, and there was a low growl of appreciation as her nakedness met their eyes.  In the faint moonlight, her naked body glistened wetly, covered in dew and sweat.

       “Fuck, what a sexy peasant bitch!”  “Look at those tits!  Like ripe apples!”   “Let’s see that ass, baby!  Stick it out for me!  You peasant whore!”

One of her arms went to cover her breasts as she started to draw her knees under her, trying to get away.  The captain kicked her in the belly viciously, knocking her flat again.  This time she lay still on the hard-packed earth, slightly curled onto on her side, still covering her breasts with one arm.  She might have been sobbing, but they couldn’t see if she was, with her hair falling over her face, and they didn’t really care.

       “Hold the bitch.”  Three men moved forward obligingly at their captain’s order, one moving behind her to grab her wrists and hold them to the ground, the other two moving to spread her legs.  They’d done this before, more times than they could remember.  They knew how Captain Vone liked his women held.

       The captain was undoing his belt when the woman spoke for her first time, her voice husky with tears.  “Please—I’m a virgin.”

       There was a sudden silence.

       The captain reached over and grabbed her by the throat, the head of his cock poking out of his trousers, fully red, throbbing and erect.  “You’re no fucking virgin, you little peasant cunt.  Probably been had by every cock in the village, little whore like you.”

       “No, please, I swear!”

       “Captain, can’t we do her anyways?” one of the men holding her pleaded.

       “Shut the fuck up,” his officer snapped at him.  “Spread her fucking legs.  Let me see.”

       They pried her knees open and held her down as the captain bent over, swearing under his breath, and tried to peer at her pussy.  It was too dark to see anything, the moon only half full, so he reached down with his fingers, groping her, making her whimper as he prodded her folds gingerly.  He tried to insert one fingertip into her pussy.  She squealed, hips jerking.

       He managed to get the very tip of his finger in, but pressing further made her yelp in discomfort, knees trying to close on him.  “Damn, she’s tight.”  He pushed again, testing her, and then withdrew his hand and got to his feet.  His erection was still out, jutting up, hard as a rock.

       “Captain, c’mon, just this once!”

       “I said to shut the fuck up!” he said, whirling on the complaining soldier.  “I can’t see a fucking thing in this darkness.”  The officer wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand.  He could feel his men’s eyes on him, waiting for his decision.

       “Tie her up,” he said.  “We’re taking her back to camp.”

       There were groans of protest.

       “Shut your fucking mouths, or I will have every motherfucker of you stuck through the balls with a burning poker when we get back.  You think I don’t want to fuck her too, you asses?  I’d like to fuck her!  I’d like to fuck her till she bleeds red, till she can’t walk for a week.  But if this bitch really is a virgin, and I’m betting that she fucking is, she’s gonna bring us at least a million gold when we turn her over to the palace.  That’ll be enough to keep us in bitches, any bitches we want, for a decade or more.”  His eyes roved over her with mild regret.  “So, morons, we’re taking her back, and in the morning we’ll have a look-see to see if she’s really a virgin.  And if she isn’t. . . .”  The look in his eyes was enough.  The men all knew what kind of tortures would await the girl if she had lied.

       “Tie her up.”

       This time the men obeyed.  Her arms were tied in front of her, wrists crudely but efficiently bound together with hemp, and she was dragged through the forest behind them like a dog, still naked.

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.