The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I

What was with this dull fascination of war, death and slaughter, men on horses, brandishing iron blades, or kneedeep in mud, struggling hard to uphold slipping pikes? How did men pretend to themselves and other men there was anything of glory in this—sitting waiting mud-bespattered on a boggy, rutted and hilly field, one’s jerkin stained, one’s thick shirt soaked to the fibers, one’s very kosh cold and shriveled as any oyster in one’s cod? Waiting and marching. Always one or the other. What was the point of it all, getting a bunch of fools worked up to leave their homes and trades, their wives (for those unlucky enough to have one or several), their chattel, and all to storm off to some foreign kingdom, which was—by looks—little more at the heart of it than a dismal place not worth the taking?

In reality, this was Pret Muttersnog’s first time in Arras, and so he was in no position to adjudge how worthy the land was or wasn’t to take, or, for that matter, taken as a land. In his defense, the present week did not show the kingdom at its best. The spring, which was always delicate in this region—not the hardy, warm and even muggy spring he was accustomed to in his southern native Was—had proved especially so this year. The invaders had only missed the last snowstorm by a fortnight, and in that they were rather fortunate; if not for a day’s thaw their first out of the Fargel Mountains in the west, they would be having to tread and weather more inclement conditions than the mud and the rain.

But the thought of good luck did not stop Pret from sticking his pike-end in the mud with all of the vehemence to suggest that precisely that was his enemy, something he’d much rather “kill”, at any rate, than the morrow’s countless pike-bearing Arrasian peasants, who would have been rounded up and marched, a host of noblemen on horses at their backs, very much the same way he and his fellow guards of Was had been.

“A bit like looking in a mirror,” Pret benefited his few companions with his whimsy, which companions didn’t bother to look up from what they were doing: rolling bones—as in the case of two—dozing off—as in the case of one—and near noiselessly beating his small prodder to a gratuitous spurge—as in the case of at least half a dozen. To be fair, these latter were at least in tents (Was being a prudish kingdom), but they were still present for the colloquy, as evidenced by the occasional abrupt curse or bawdy joke at the occasional speaker’s expense. The occasional speaker, in the current event, was Pret, and he continued, thanks to universal boredom, without interruption: “I mean, battle is, ye hear me? For you’re poling headlong forever into someone whose position always is identical to your own. Never mind, who has the better material, for I grant, that’s we of Was. Arras is a poorer kingdom since the end of Enkit’s reign, the current prince’s father—or is that brother? (I could never keep track of foreign princes . . .)—but all on account of the barbarians on their border with Ur—it’s famous—and so our equals here aren’t given any sort of encumbrance, and often don’t even get a pike . . .”

“I reckon that’s true, that,” spoke up one of the bone rollers, a man with a very prominent sty and a wiry overall presentation. “We’re lucky for ’em. In Lis I seen pitchforks.”

“Yea,” continued Pret, not wishing to lose his train but welcoming the corroboration, as it did imply some few were actively listening. “But we, we are often told as moral buttress by our betters, ought count ourself lucky, as ye say, for the leather jerkins we wear, which we needn’t, for all they care, and how expensive it is to outfit some—what did they say we numbered, last count, Frepp Winestain?”

“Three to four thousang,” the one named Frepp replied, raising his eyes but barely from the small wood board he and the one with the sty used to keep their fowl bones out of the mud. Frepp was a grandiose looking little peon, no doubt as his family had been elevated a generation or two before, for the purpose of serving royal guard in the castle Zukiza, and so, too, his family was granted a last name, an unusual honor for a mere serf; and so Pret’s sometimes habit of calling the man by both names, as a way of flattering him and winning over his audience. To look at, Frepp was a very stupid fellow, but with thoughtful eyes, which suggested the man never let a day elapse without masturbating.

“Aye,” continued Pret, very merrily indeed now he reckoned he had two were listening. “And they have a point, I can say without favoritism, as a tradesman; tis not meet by half to go spending honest copper on swine, as I’m sure they must reckon us, and ’asides, a majority on us is not theirs, is we, that is, not specifically. I’d wager a good third of the guard to be ‘unincorporated’—that is, belonging to no noble in particular.”

“Ye? ’N’ what’s that to you?” the words were grunted up defensively from a half-asleep bear of a man. He was leaned out precariously against his sack of provisions, and what is more, entirely on account of some well-saved, well-nourished Urian rot-gut he’d hidden with him in his march and only that day (the day before battle) drunk entirely on his own, without sharing a drop, never mind so doing had about left him in a cold stupor; and needless to say he had done this, not from the mere joy of getting thoroughly besotted, but from the most creditable spite, as well.

“To do with me?” Pret returned. “But of course—enough! For tis of me alone I speak, ye tooted lyncher!” Pret got a good laugh for this, from both the bone-rollers and one or two in the tents. The man made a forced show of trying to stand and challenge his accuser, but as that was impossible in his current state, he merely thrashed around a little, threw a hand at Pret as if to say “Ye ain’t worth the trouble!” and consequently fell into an even deeper doze. “Y’know as well as I—or at least I told ye when ye was sober—as I was unincorporated myself, and may the gods bless it, for tis a better way to be, the old mages say, though harsher, too, by half, I warrant, than toilin’ for a master.”

“I think so,” chimed in again the scrawnier of the two rollers. “I grew up on a estate. My brothers is still there. I decided to take my chance in Tri-Util as a rough-and-tumble. Hoped to pick up a trade and journeyman, but it came to nuffin, as I’s too old to start. Still, I ain’t had nearly as hard a time on it, since leaving, even without the two square meals and the roof above my head. I often go hungry now but I ain’t been sick as much. Also, there’s a certain kind o’ . . . I don’t have to wake up at any time, y’know, I can stay in bed all day, if I war’nt.”

“Aye, tell ye what this un’d like,” chimed in his partner, with a wave of the bones at the passed out drunkard. “’E’d like to sleep in all day tomorraw. How’d that go, y’thinks, they all callin’ us to war, he snorin’ a streak! Aw—they’ll have ’im up by heels, I wager.”

“Ha! Twould have me in a chortle, that,” replied the one with the sty. “But that’s a wager I’ll take, if your pouch is as good as your tongue, for I met a old acquaintance o’ this one just the other day o’ marchin’, and he says to me, he says, says, ‘He’s a drunkard, no mistake, drank his family outta house and the lot, but,’ here’s what stood, he says, ‘the man ain’t never missed a rise in all his time on the march!’ Something uncanny in his lineage, I don’t nary. Any-on, all’s to say, I suspect it a sign of the goddess, my hearin’ that, and ye wagerin’ he wouldn’t rise—Ha! Tis like the inter-ceasion of Belka, i’n’t it?, from the what’s-it-called, the Duo . . . Duo . . .”

“Y’mean, of course, the DuoDaDaemon,” interjected Pret helpfully here. “A poppilar tome, but one I reckon not as apposite in its worldly usage as the overlooked Triumph of the Swill, by the same scribe, Terisim, in which the wiseman argues for being always drunk, but never too drunk; tis a subtle balance he recommends.”

The bone-roller with the thoughtful eyes whistled through his perfect teeth for whistling—that is to say, very poor teeth—at this information. “How ye know so much on it, then, ye a mage?”

“Na-a-ah!” interjected the man with the sty, after a pause, dismissively. “He’s one o’ them failed sub-scribes, is all. Heric told me that, from Jesiup’s legion. Says he was all set to take the gauntlet but ran outta copper last thing.”

Both men looked at Pret in largely unsuccessful attempts to look both curious and scornful simultaneously. Pret, for his part, neither confirmed nor denied Heric’s story of his past, but merely continued in his occupation of rubbing his pike-end into the mud and chewing on the leather bind of his jerkin, which attached the back of the light armor to the front at the right shoulder.

“Yea, I’ll take yer wager,” breathed Frepp at last to the sty man, turning his attention from the fat Pret. “What ye say to a ha’—cop?”

“I was only getting at,” Pret re-continued, because, as anyone who’s ever been at camp knows, one might as well, even on thoughts not worth re-continuing, because there is little else to do and thoughts, in such environments, even unworthy ones, become precious things, “that it’s more in their interest, the nobles’, to let us fight without outfitting us. For—to the average noble—it must matter rather little if he wins the battle or not, or rather, if his liege do; for there is so little to gain in battles, as everyone knows, and history teaches. Whereas, paying the hefty tithe to outfit three thousand—that’s a sting he’ll feel the same if the morrow’s his. And he never to see us unincorporated again, not even on ’is own estate, and us as like to sell the jerkin for drink as soon as we’re home (never mind they might hang us for it, for tis against the Crown Law; but if everyone does it . . . well, they can’t hang EVERYone), but so the nobleman’s tithe won’t benefit protection of his own house, or serve him spending near as much the next war, at the very least. Which is, I mean, we none of us is like to see each other again, whether or none we outlive the morrow—is we? Our investment in each other’s society—like that of the noble-doop his in our petty shirts—tis naught now but wasted lucre! But does it have to be? List hard, my fellows, for I have a inspiration. If we each of us made of our interaction somewhat worth itself on our own end, we might gain regardless of the lost copper, if y’see what I mean?”

He looked at the bone rollers and saw that they didn’t; they were again absorbed in their game, firmly intent on not betraying any sign they were still listening.

Pret sighed. He did have a tendency to talk around his point. “If we had a worthy endeavor to undertake, here, on the eve of battle, better to take it than to drink ourself stupid, like so-name, over there, if us could rub elbows with the great, could achieve the mythic in our this daytime, and could do this all while dropping our stones on some pretty wench’s pert little clam—what say ye? Wouldn’t THAT be something?”

“Aye!” several voices spoke up together, those of the bone-rollers but also of the conspicuously quiet strokers hid away in their tents; one even poked his head out for the affirmation.

“Well, then,” went on Pret, and he began to relate the full extent and majesty of his mythic plot, some twenty-odd years in the making.

For, despite the fact he had never been to Arras, Pret was not unworldly, in his own parochial way, and certainly was he used to travel. He was, by trade, a smuggler, or, rather, by his own euphemistic re-branding, a “dealer in special goods”. He had done most of his trading along the Western Kingdoms, and some in southern Tet. Arras, though the heart of Maloria, was no “smuggler’s land”, by his estimation, and thus he had never before ventured there, not even for trade. The people were celebrated for their individualism, their distrust of foreigners, and, particularly in the west of that kingdom, which, because it shared some of its border with Was, was about all Pret knew by hearsay of the land, for their rustic asceticism and work ethic. Such a people, Pret’s logic ran, were too offish and humorless to profit much a resourceful man like himself, who vied to make his living indulging people’s proper yearn for silly things. Certainly, the women would be an exception, for, as Pret knew well enough of the breed, and had even had some experience here and there about the warpath, they yearned the same the world over for frivolities, such as, say, that farmer’s whore he’d bartered a pie and a grab of her hods for a mere half-bottle of bitter mead, not even a copper’s worth. But what Pret meant, and which had always kept him from the kingdom, was that, unlike Lis (Arras’s other neighbor on the west), which was equally “undeveloped”, culture-wise, and whose population was even more remote, this land was all surrounded by mountains—and Pret wasn’t much of one to take chances on mountain passes (a Wasian through and through, he subscribed to the belief if man were meant to cross slopes, he’d have horns and the hooves skilled for climbing). Besides, Lisians were great for rare caches and illicit oddities. Eccentric lords lived there in Lis (we’re not talking many, but enough to support a healthy blackmarket in certain “naughtities”); and they had a tradition of retaining, and sometimes forgetting they retained, literature—old tomes of truly ancient scribes and sub-scribes, some of which, importantly, where Pret was concerned, were of that remarkable variety which was called “spid”, or in other words, were very naughty. Arras’s remote lords tended more to farm. But all kingdoms had some of these ancient tomes, apparently, if what Pret had learned in his novice days was true, that during the reign of Great King Lan—whose true legacy was wholly unknown of to such as Pret’s current company (who should have credited him, if they remembered to count him among the Seven, only for relocating Maloria’s ancient capital from Nezba to Zukiza)—several dozen thousands of “spid” tomes were produced, under this bawdier of Great King’s fostering; there were more and more such ancient, lewd tomes being unearthed, or stumbled upon, by the day, it seemed, and all because people were suddenly looking for them in these interesting times during which Pret lived, and they all by and large originated during the reign of Great King Lan, some two-plus millennia ago (as he was with foreign princes, Pret was never good with dates). And these were precisely one of the many goods a reliably witty man, who didn’t scruple too much, might make a nice profit from, provided he could find the obscure tomes in question, and get them to the right wealthy, but educated, audience. And, though all the kingdoms presumably had such tomes, they were inevitably under the holding of the men of Stones, i.e., the men of the seven Orders of Stones; each kingdom had its own Stone Order, and so too its own nominal Stone (Was’s was amber; Arras’s was emerald; Lis’s was turquoise . . .), and just as the prince and his knight and (by force of royal will) his guards were active in the so-called incarn or fleshly world of action, so the men of Stones, or mages, presided over that world of tomes and esoteria, the world of magy and the Arcane Ether. Pret Tuppersnog knew a little more than the average nobody on the differentiations of the castes, for he was no regular cutthroat-cum-guard, nor was he, precisely, a failed sub-scribe, but had been meant to take the robe himself, a mage, but like his critic had averred—he’d run out of money.

And the reason for why Pret was sitting with his pike in a muddy field, and not in the well-lit library of an Amber Order catacomb was equally obvious and obscure.

“I must not be a genius,” was Pret’s own explanation of because. For “they”—the Order higher-ups—were supposed to catch you if you were one of them, make sure you didn’t go too dully to rot. And anyway, more to the point, Pret was rather relieved he wasn’t. His goal had always been to eat and not blink too hard when it came time to lie down; he had never dreamed to attain for himself the dubious glories of fabled genius. All-important Rumor held it was they, the geniuses of the Stones, what had ever to work their cods, not merely the respectable amount of four or twelve chimes a day, but always! Compared to them, the insatiable wankers in those tents around him were mere amateurs—that is, true geniuses could never “tarnish their pronger on the taint of a real woman” (and the conveyer here, a callow stick-thin aspiring youth like himself, eyes bulging with disbelief at the information he conveyed), “always keeping himself up hard with what-you-call ‘intellectumum games’, and the like, ne’er lettin’ his wee li’l genie go limp a nonce, but always a-fist-thrumpin’ himself like a third-caste mage” (for some well attested few bad apples this one caste of magedom had been relegated the proverbial wastrels of the overall presentable Orders of Stones). And Pret had never forcefully enough wished yet to give up the royal indulgence of his laziness, never mind he liked a yank of his own cod as much as any man, nay, like as much more, for whatever got it hard was a blessing by Pret’s mind, and why not?

“Tis no honor in pride that leaves a man limp,” was his usual return to his own weak second-guessing, weak, as he was always so well-schooled as to think better of it . . .

But he wasn’t a genius then, but he wasn’t a commoner, neither, for he’d had the education, that was the knob on it—“I read all ’em precious tomes all o’ ’em go on about!” he’d sometimes have recourse to smirk to a friend, or at least one as would stand him a jug at the bawd house he was frequenting of the even. “’N’ they wasn’t as bad as ye’d guess. Some on the stories I might tell ye of ’em, would make yer kosh spark n’ light like a tinder, nay, make yer mind do so, too, yer kosh-mind, as I hear-tell they call it in the Higher Orders. Ne’er made it so high m’self, for, tis true, I ran out of funds to borrow!”

And that was the more obvious reason Pret was no genius, because they always found the money, if not at birth, eventually.

And so life always had done to impoverished Pret, shunted him off into (really, too many) new directions, and all happily enough, to the likes of him, those lucky enough not to be doomed to grow bored, to the poor in other words; and that is precisely why, too, Pret had determined once and for all to be rich, and why he had determined to be a smuggler, though he hadn’t made enough to retire on yet, just enough to say he’d been rather more successful in his quantifiably risky trade than most, and this not because he’d accrued more copper, but because, in all his years, he hadn’t got caught. But then life, as it did, threw another curve: Another war. Pret was wont to curse the inspiration for the present one, and not only on account of the weather, for it had not gone unnoticed by him, that along the current muddy road they were following—Main Road it was called, unimaginatively—there were not even in these parts towns or cities, nor august and well-larded manors; i.e., there was nothing worth even the requisite pillage or the sneak-off before or after a battle to loot, and so, by Pret’s estimation, it really was a waste of a war, on all sides.

He’d be much better served weaving up-down Was’s border with Lis, “collecting spid”, as he called his exploits in that way. Lis, though a backward kingdom he didn’t much like, knew its stuff (though somewhat unconsciously) where concerned that pastime, and so might deliver one ample to profit by. Lis was good for “spid”! There were even rumors Was had its own vast share, but there were also rumors the majority of that was destroyed during the reign of Prince Soppy, the Pious One. At any rate, if Was had it, it was kept under lock and key by some Amber Order first mage or other, and thus nowhere as easy to get as in Lis, where the Order of Turquoise was in such a disarray following some however-many centuries of invasion from warring neighbors north, east, and south, and from the consequent numerous plunderings of its capital Zerp, along with its ancient Turquoise catacombs. “Spid” tomes, and all manner of esoteric scribing, were forever popping up where least expected in South Lis and North Was, everywhere from a humble inn’s cache to a simple serf’s rucksack.

But all this on “spid” was as if only the proverbial “skirts” to the slut’s “bunda-hole” as concerned Pret’s true reason for wishing himself away from the dreary campside that eve of battle in Arras, and he didn’t mind sharing now with his current chums his true reason for preferring that other kingdom, no less remote and treacherous in its roads and ways—nay, more so the both—than the present one they were in, and that reason was: “They do have ’em some mythic sluts in Lis!”

Now, whether or not they were honest-to-Nub sluts, was an ongoing debate. For the sake of his current colloquy, and to win his audience to him and to his purpose the swifter, Pret hedged his narrative bets: “They’re the truest sluts, m’lads, as e’er was born o’ whores!”

Of course, Pret had had his share of Lisian whores, too, as he didn’t stint to relate quite gladly to his audience now (magically more attentive on the topic), as he was accustomed to riding that area along the border with Was where so many houses of the sort were set up to cater to rich Wasian farmers and the burghers of Tri-Util. But he didn’t mean Lisian whores when he spoke of that kingdom’s “mythic sluts”, and that wasn’t to say anything against those fine professionals, either—Why, he remembered one Lisian slut, er, that is, “whore”, all shaved down by her whisper-slot, so that, when she bent over forward and crossed her legs at the knees, she might all but wink at one with her merry slit and hole.

But the whores he had in mind that day on the eve of battle were not strictly whores, by the scholastic sense, of course, and those that were strict, scholastic whores were not really that different, in terms of their proficiencies, than any whores (though, in distinction to the Urian variety, they were far less likely to bite a prod off in the servicing it). Of course, Was really did have the finest whores, for it did have the finest sluts, overall, though one always had to go farther out of the way to find them, and push a little harder to get them as one wanted them, because his native land, it was no secret, was of all the kingdoms the very most rule-bound and womanish in its preoccupation with decorum. Pret was not inclined to dally on this estimation, as his current audience was not inclined to stomach it, battles, and the eves of battles, always culling up the most brutish form of patriotism even of such rubbish as Pret currently kept company with. But if Was hadn’t technically invented chivalry (in fact, an old prince of Arras was given the credit), their native land had taken the idea to its noblest extreme, all would at least agree on that.

And to prove he was an equable and even-handed fellow, and as they were on the topic of sluts, topography, and difference, Pret gave himself over a moment to consideration of the native sluts of the land they were in currently, though he had very little personal experience with them. But he’d heard tale, and let them who had experience confirm or deny it, that the Arrasian sluts were a fine sort, to be sure—though their chests were flatter than Wasian wenches’, their crups, went the old saw, were a good bit more gibbous. Many men, and some Wasians, swore to the eminence of the Arrasian slut’s bunda, and as to how the haunches that supported it could reach such a surfeit of apparent maturity even on the youngest of apparent lasses, an anomaly for which Pret confessed without compunction he had always had a yen. But that’s all Pret knew on it, for the only Arrasian wenches he had met were alike that farmer’s wench he’d encountered four days’ march hence, who was first of all ugly and second of all too border-wise to look much other than exotically Wasian by her derivation, and not at all flatteringly so, and so no Arrasian maid had yet suitably caught his imagination. Nay, he was a Wasian man, through and through, liked his wenches like his firkins, full to bursting about the paps, and though he admired a good crup—what red-blooded Malorian man didn’t?—still, he considered himself, on the point of hods, at least, the truest patriot.

His current audience “here-hered” this conclusion of Pret’s dissertation on sluts, and perhaps Pret had so intended them to do.

But Pret admitted, all the same, to possessing a roving eye, or, in other words, the curiosity of an inveterate smuggler. And his fantasies often strayed to the exotic, therefore, when that premise was sufficiently legendary as to imply significant profit on the effort expended to apprehend it. And of all the sluts Pret had encountered in either life or tome or Rumor, few were quite so legendary, or had caught his imagination quite so much, as that putative mythic slut—the Lisian war-maid!

Now, the Lisians were famously the lone among the Seven Kingdoms’ peoples to recruit by tradition even women into their armed ranks, and this by virtue of their native Cult of Hippa—or was that Huppa?—thrump if Pret could be bothered to remember all the names of foreign gods! The point is there was war-wenches there! Because their goddess commanded it. A nice thing, that, thought Pret aloud; their own Was could do with a good dose of ’em whore goddesses in its pantheon, mayhaps, if THAT was the upshot, fit young sluts wandering around the battlefield dressed in naught save a thong here, a string of beads there—some warrior gear, that! Ah! If only they’d station the harlots closer the guards! The entire Wasian peasantry ogling such “warriors” so exclusively—every merry bend, tilt, and wobble!—the lords would fear the guards wouldn’t keep their hands off their cods long enough to march in a line or hold aloft their pikes—and for good reason! Pret was getting hard just thinking on them. And wasn’t this sufficient verification on the matter of whether they were sluts?

For had any of his colleagues ever heard of chaste maids acting by their attire so brazen, and Rumor was very loud on this point, and in universal agreement with itself (something rather unheard of for Rumor): The sluts, they wore only amazing little leathern loin and teat guards, and some beads, as if to keep as much of their bodies on display at all times as possible, for the reason that . . . well, they were sluts!

And this was precisely the point, in case it went unnoticed, Pret presently wished to emphasize the most to his horny and battle-scared comrades, and so was glad when one of them challenged his illiberal use of ellipsis:

“Nay, they say it makes ’em faster warriors, and that’s all on ’t. For my german-cousin Kang seen one on ’em in the last war,” this was the man with the sty talking. “And he said they was all ugly as gangly boys. ‘Like a bunch o’ unbilked lads,’ he called ’em; ‘almost naked, but nothing much to look at,’ he said.”

For such a devoted votary of Rumor as Pret, tales of the homeliness of the Lisian warmaids were, of course, nothing new. Usually, as they never accorded with his fantasy, he simply ignored such heresies. In the instant, however, he relished the opportunity to speak directly to the point, and so took up his critic’s quibble in a most deft and democratic way.

“Ah—so ye trust yer Kang’s eyes to yer own, aye? Ye believe everythin’ yer told of by a bleedin’ nanny? Tis clear he’s ne’er seen ’em, but only as wanted the braggin’ rights of them who has. For I ha’ spoke to a many a man who’s met one, and always what he says is, though a bit raw-hide for all the muscle, they be every bit as much a woo-man as any slut born o’ whore, and that’s simple as fact, that is!”

“Tis true, I never did see ’em m’self,” conceded the sty. “And I daresay I wouldn’t mind seein’ one of my own. Partikiler, if they’re as good bit whorish as ye keep insistin’ they is.”

“Yea! My thoughts exactly, lads! They IS!” Pret’s eyes lit up and he dropped his pike, and in his joy at the prospect of mounting his curious own campaign, he slapped his fat belly good naturedly, and as he always did when happiest and in company of roughians, somewhat as an act of self-parody, to defuse any animosity early on, lest they think, in his inevitably getting his way (as he did nine out of ten times, with such folk as these), that he was of a very bossy sort.

But the meat of the matter was this (which Pret now divulged to his companions in usual prolix terms): Lis was Was’s vassal, ever since Prince Ar-Veld’s “glorious” first campaign, whereby he was now liege there as well as Was. As its liege, Ar-Veld was entitled to a certain number of tribute conscripts in times of war, and who would these be of Lis for the present campaign—Ar-Veld’s second—if not their warmaids? As a question, this was highly rhetorical, and even his current company got that. For Lis had very little to offer in impressive legions besides its mythic “sluts”. Their guards, as intimated, were supremely rustic, and their knights unskilled, uncultivated, and for the most part unhorsed. They had rangers, who had been something to brag of once, apparently, for there was a tome or two relating the exploits of a one-or-two famous ones; but that was ancient history. Lis hadn’t produced a mythic ranger since about the reign of Ar-Buckle, some four centuries before. Nay, it would be their war-maids they sent as tribute, to serve their present liege, all could trust on that, for any else would be an insult, as the war-maids were famed for nothing more, beyond their unorthodox attire, than their matchless battle-craft.

“Though one does wonder,” Pret wondered aloud with a slight rakish smile, “if some of that feck in battle they claim be not the consequence again of their scanty garb, which, if true, is contrived as much to distract as to aid the swiftness of their attack . . .”

And Rumor held it, Pret went on to relate, after the obligatory coarse chuckling (not as much as he’d hoped, but enough to warrant his pre-determined pause), that the war-maids were, indeed, all that while marching left flank with them, though at a distance much too far removed from Pret’s periphery for him, or any other guard, to confirm that—but it only made sense, and where sense and Rumor came together, one was always best served to follow the one and heed the other; for, and Pret mused still aloud for the benefit of persuasion, if HE were a knight, he’d want it no other way, those all but naked hods and bundas jouncing along in the march, delighting the noble’s eye, sparking the imagination, and all within a glance of one’s horse, if not a slap of one’s gauntlet. Pret’s audience muttered their general agreement with this theory.

Though they could not be seen, either, Arrasian forces were just beyond the hilly horizon, by the account of the scouts. The following day promised to be bloody, muddy, and long.

Pret wished to emphasize this last dismal point, in particular, in order to inspire his comrades the faster to seek out his edifying visions of sluts! Who would fear the coming day—not he! Not a single one of them! Not so long as they indulged his longheld curiosity regarding the susceptible nature of Lisian warmaids—now, that was a true campaign!

Pret considered aloud the benefits of taking “a walk” that very moment, before the call of curfew, with those of his present company with stones enough to bare the loss of some buckets-worth of spurge, to the other side of the bivouac, where Rumor (in this case, really, Speculation) once again had it were camped the Lisian woman-warriors.

And if he couldn’t find companions, why, he would just as soon go alone, but . . .

Pret trailed off self-consciously, and in a way he hoped would elicit a verbal response from his fellows. He did not wish to stress this part of his calculations to his audience. He’d entertained the idea at first, only to dispel it later too risky. He was crowded in on all sides by men and tents; everywhere one wandered one was seen. If he went alone in his search, he’d look more suspicious, and it only took that to be questioned, and he reckoned the distance between questioned and being strung up for desertion was a very short one. Nay, much better it was—and all guards knew it—to be in company, particularly if one WERE deserting, for the fellows one passed were less like to turn one in and more like to join one that way, if they saw one in a company. And, too, of course, if he had others with him, a good band, well, there might appear, as it were, inevitably, a means to work his way out of getting the blame, if it happened they were overcome by nobles. And if they weren’t he’d be a hero, because he’d shown his fellows to, at the very least, a merry ogle, so it was win-win.

And so it even might have been—he a hero!—if but his company had let him finish off the Rumor, for it did get rather raunchy in the particulars, the further one got along. For it was said, wasn’t it?, that the Lisian war-wenches needed to “consummate their marriage to their warrior goddess” on the eve of battle. And this “ritual” would make highly entertaining spectacle, as it involved certain ceremonial arts of nonreproductive carnality, which promised to be even for a man of the world both educational and entertaining. And Pret hadn’t wholly invented this stipulation himself; for something of the kind had, indeed, been being rumored about since at least he was a youth at the catacomb of Patter in South Was, whereat he was educated up to a point. But unlike some thousand others who’d heard the rumor (like some of those of his camp now, for instance), Pret had never let this rumor go. It had appealed to something vital in him, piqued an honest curiosity; perhaps—who knows?—it presented to the then adolescent Pret the unlikely avenue by which at fourteen he might lose his unbearable virginity.

Pret had been raised a rather too proper young sort, by his own retrospective assessment, and the idea of visiting a whore had been unthinkable till well after his disastrous marriage. And so, like every fourteen year old lad ever lived, he had spent all his waking hours compiling a compendium of ways his kosh might magically “fall into” a fit lass’s gulch (for how else, at that age, could a well-heeled and shy one reckon that thick thing actually “inside” any?). The tale about the Lisian warmaids thus appeared a rather promising way out, actually, because there seemed not just a logical pretense, but a historical precedence for the thing, that is, assuming there was a lick of truth in it. In Maloria, fourteen year-olds did often go to war, and Lisian war-sluts, too, so was it really so unthinkable . . ?

And strange to say, though it was nearly twenty years now into the future of that awkward age, and Pret was by no means any longer a virgin, nor had any problem, to all evidence, of imagining his thick “thing” into things, but to the contrary, was renowned for naught so much than as a connoisseur of bawds and brothels, yet he entertained the same fantasy with a rigor and devotion the match of any Lisian slut’s putative fidelity to her virgin goddess. And so he really might have elected to hunt the sluts out, even by himself, even risking being strung up for desertion or punched for no apparent reason in the back of the head (as a knight might be wont to do to a guard if he crossed his path); he really might have, but . . .

“Consciousness makes a woman stupid, desire a man something or other . . .” Pret, who could at times be an axiomatic something or other, murmured this thought aloud to the assembly, in a way meant to put an end to his thought, which might otherwise go on digressing to some unfortunate conclusion, and to give the company an opportunity finally to speak up, which they had conspicuously delayed long in doing.

“Which way be the knights?” spoke up at last the one Frepp, excitedly. Pret’s tale had obviously inspired him, and if he had held in check his excitement up to that point, it was only to ascertain that of his fellows. “Aye! They’d be the opposite of the front. And the front’s that way. So they’d be . . . And these Lis wenches ye speak of . . .”

“We wouldn’t want to do disservice to our liege,” the sty said, who that day had indigestion, and though excited by the tale, too, just didn’t feel generally like being convinced to get up and about.

“Aye—the greatest prince Was has e’er known,” affirmed Frepp Winestain, whose loyalty to the crown was as assured as his last name.

“He’ll be a great king before his reign is over, if he keeps doin’ like he does, conquerin’ lands and unitin’ the Kingdoms.”

“Aye, I’d follow ’im into Ur, a liege like that. He’d give even old Alar and his horrid horde a good thrashing . . .”

It was clear by this point a veritable geyser of buried patriotism had been accidentally set off in Pret’s savage companions, a most regrettable obstacle, likely spelling the ruin to his pre-battle mythic scheme. The two peons continued their mythic stories of their liege, their mythic speculation of his future, and all in conspicuous lieu of dwelling longer on the mythic wenches which so interested the enterprising Pret.

To all these panegyrics, Pret scowled, for he was no royalist, and the extreme popularity of “his” liege with such as these simpletons did not endear him anymore to the Prince; it didn’t help his fellows wouldn’t suffer even the slightest off-color quip at the famously square-jawed and unblemished young man’s expense. He’d learned that the hard way (and this was a point of wounded pride, for Pret was of an irreverent character, all in all, as only one with brains who keeps low company ought to be, and though not completely impious in his dealings with the gods, preferred the attitude to royals of very concentrated, if for that reason even lazier, contempt). But better yet, for she was a famously more fecund target, he would have liked to make the delicious Princess Enns, Ar-Veld’s beauteous and beloved young wife, the butt of a thousand joke; it seemed only fair she should be, as, according to a favorite bawdy bard of Pret’s, her fantastic backside even possessed magy-properties, and the sick peasants who touched the oh-so-round, firm, thick, presenting, but not at all wide end (she had a famously petite frame, and it had been so scribed of in secret to such as those recourses as Pret sought out, he could yet see it in his mind without having ever eyed it with his own orb)—the bard was explicit in his simile:

Stuck out like an Arrasian pudding,

Her Tetian skirts couldn’t hide it.

Did cozen the touch of all Was’s

Man-woman-child stood ’side it.

—these same were instantly healed—or, the bard quipped in the song’s final line before the last refrain, at least “no one longer noticed was sick”. But that bard had been (alas) thrown in a dungeon on Sir Dimdum’s estate, and the song wasn’t sung anymore (a shame, for a few of the rhymes were precious), except for around times the debauching hour at certain very disreputable Wasian taverns. Pret would have loved to make her the target of a thousand more well-aimed lines, and not for Enns’s end alone, of course, but more appositely, the royal wench’s truly mythic bust. And this it was, by Rumor—mythic!—never mind the wee slut, and twice mother, was not yet in her second decade. And so it seemed a small miracle, such large hods on one so young (of course Pret, having never seen them, once again relied on Rumor and consequent imagination); she certainly was a riper target for ’em, for the wench had a bosom would, by the same anonymous bawd-poet’s description, “feed an army!”

But he choked back the urge to regale his current rude company with these unmonarchical odes at his Princess’s expense (Pret should have preferred to label it “to his Princess’s glory”); he would save such thoughts for the appropriate, less patriotic time and company, even if that meant waiting till the royal couple had aged out of its people’s adoration, and no longer reflected so much as it did now the hopes and dreams of an insipid generation. Nay, the more he thought on it, Pret wondered if there wouldn’t be a renaissance of bawdy jokes at the expense of these two peerless thick-witted beauties, once they’d inevitably failed to live up to expectation, and with all the genius of the people’s insipid bitterness to inspire them . . .

Ar-Veld and Enns, though—there was no ignoring it: They were for the time adored by all Was, “the people’s royals”. They had everything, youth, charm, beauty, health, notable victories, and seemingly infinite potential. They could, evidently, do no wrong and hadn’t yet. But they were yet young, and in many ways, like a weak blade, unproved. Ar-Veld’s father, the late Prince Kas-Purtus, had died on the throne a seven-years before the present war and himself had mounted only one campaign in all his twenty-six-year reign. Thus the son had outstripped the father in his first five years of rule, and those at a precious young age, for his father hadn’t taken the throne till his fourth decade, and Ar-Veld on the cusp of manhood (there had been a brief interregnum period of one year, during which Was was ruled by a joint regency of knights, typical too-pious members all of the late prince’s council, which included two of the present prince’s truest advisors, the aged and trusted veteran Sir Urthan Summery and the hotheaded but good-hearted and unspeakably loyal Sir Morgan Fees). As for Enns, the lady had been as famous extrapolatedly for her piety and kindness as she was rightly for her big bosom, even before her marriage to Ar-Veld, almost prematurely well earning that highest in the kingdom of feminine adjectives, “comely”. It was hard for Pret to imagine the wench growing vapid and corrupt, as all married royal wenches do, particularly the “comely” kind, as they approach middle age—that is, the boring time—but he doubted that this had anything to do with the Princess, but everything to do with the fact he had never met her: Hard to imagine anything much particular about famous people one’s never met, that is, imagine much beyond the requisite grope and gratuitous poke and prod.

Like most good tradesmen, Pret, though he was no revolutionary, suspected the kingdom would do just fine without such pretty figureheads as princes and their royal ilk helming it, and that included Ar-Veld, whom he considered rather the most boring sort of prince, all good looks and dreams of glory, none of the homeliness and quietude of excess that might make a noble at least endearing in what amounted his perennial vouchsafed theft of other people’s freedom and property. But Pret knew of what he spoke here, for his own maternal grandfather had been just such a noble, one of the homely stamp, though his title and right of signeurship had died with the man, and Pret—a bastard—had seen none of it. It was his long-attested wish to buy back his grandfather’s estate in the South-Central part of Was—a bog basically, but a familiar one—to tread again the land around his antecedent’s patrimonial castle, and to regain his noble heritage, but he would have settled (for he was a practical man) for simply getting up enough in his fortune he could afford to bed a higher caste of whore, the kind that dressed like a noblewoman and didn’t burp in her sleep. Pret found his Prince a bore, in other words, but, understandably, not his Princess Enns. He revered her, of course, for he had a thing for noble Wasian wenches, in general (and, needless to say, petite young ones with giant bosoms), and so found her figure just about as interesting, in the imagined sense, as that of the Lisian warmaids he missed so on the march.

Pret’s thoughts, at this juncture, struck even him as widely off topic, as indeed only reflected his ingrained and discursive way of thinking, and though his audience had garnered very little on the matter of his inner musings, and had only gotten his re-asserted notion that they really ought to sneak off before it was too late and see them mythic sluts he mentioned now several times in passing—still this alone was enough for one of them—not an audience famous for its patience—to call him out:

“Why—yer a coward!” the sty hollered up. And his friend at bones quickly corroborated the supposition. “All yer prattlin’ ’bout bundas and gulch, sluts and warmaids—’ warrant, tis all a mask to desert.”

“Aye, I wager ye’re just a-scared to desert on yer own, but want us others to join ye, so as ye might turn us in, if the flight gets too risky.”

That was too close to the mark, the plan the serf named Frepp had just conceived for him. But Pret was an old hand at “dodging the kosh”, as the Was expression held it, and so, rather than refute the harder of the two claims, he took on the easier, the first, that he was a coward.

“Speak that way, if ye will, to any o’ these raw-heeled green-shirts, as march their first war this day and as ask ye to go share with him a site before ye die; say ye that to them have ne’er tasted the sweat of battle, nor the blood of fallen comrades flung in their face. For I marched in the Prince’s first campaign, as well, and on the Nez prong of it. And, unlike the prong in Lis, we actually saw battle, three of ’em, and lost many on the terrible Rinj pass alone before that. Those who marched only to Lis, I’d say, have no place to find fault in courage of those who proved themselves in Nez,” this well spoken defense was also rather rehearsed, as it had long before been made clear to Pret that, of his companions, those awake were either the “green” sort just referenced or had fought in the first prong of the last campaign, the one in Lis, spearheaded by the Prince, not the one in Nez, led by Sir Urthan Summery—and so had none of them (alike their Prince) been tested yet in actual battle!

It was a sore point to the young Prince and a historical novelty, that Ar-Veld had conquered Lis so, without a single battle, the entire kingdom surrendering to him on the very eve of battle, as like marked the present day in Arras, and on account of the mysterious sudden death of that land’s last liege, Prince Zoot.

For the time being, of course, such of his colleagues as sty and Frepp Winestain, and many others, were in good place despite their complete lack of military experience, to feign a bravery beyond their capacities, and he did give them a good opportunity to exercise false bravery in his so publicly airing a controversial plan, for Pret was conspicuously circumspect where they were unremarkably stupid. And besides, all the guards along with all the knights along with dull Prince Ar-Veld himself, presumably, was sure that victory on the following day was theirs. Did they not outnumber the Arrasian force by more than a thousand guards (though Arras had a slight advantage of knights) and, more importantly, was their army not comprised of more war-hardened veterans, such as Pret himself might boast of being, having fought a campaign with battles in recent memory; whereas Arras hadn’t mounted a campaign in at least two decades, not since the reign of Prince Anbar, who, though Pret would be hard pressed to remember it, was the current Prince Mylkin’s father? And then there were the jerkins, already mentioned, the fact that all the guard had a pike, unusual and sure not to be matched by the peasant armory of their enemy.

Though assuredly not a coward, Pret WAS sensible, believed, “Discretion trumps valor nine times out of ten.” Still, he never feared death, perhaps from a tendency never to think too particularly on any future. In other words, he manipulated matters of his imagination generally well enough to reflect a better picture than that at which they presently stood. For instance, he might work a profit in a deal or a game of death’s cod, as he had done on the Fargel, when he cheated those two rogues of footmen of their fallen comrade’s deed of chattel—the fallen friend in question had died of natural causes consequent of the first days’ long march.

But Pret never thought hard on pain, suffering, or death, would rather give that up to someone else to do, for, never to say he had better things to think on, but rather, Wasn’t there ANYONE who knew better than he how to think on such things? He had made his mind up to try a profit in life, and he had learned, to do that, one needed sometimes to be brave—such was, indeed, a given. Bravery, as every bairn knows, is but the self-conditioned ignorance of death and suffering.

For Pret’s aggrandizing account of his service in his Prince’s last campaign was more or less the truth. He had suffered a twisted knee in the notorious climbing of the Rinj, had seen several of his comrades fall to their disappearance down bottomless ravines—by far the most terrifying experience of his life. He had felt the terror consequent of the attack of the Nezian flank guard; in the confusion that followed, he had burrowed himself behind a scarp, so as not to be stabbed or bludgeoned by a panicking countryman. But all this survived! And aside from a nightmare or two he sometimes had, when he might find himself balancing on the banister of an uneven and very down-at-heel staircase of a certain inn he frequented times north of Kazu, with the unspoken assumption that were he merely to let himself (though he was in no danger of falling were he not to let himself, but only that, yes, he could let himself), . . . Or perhaps he was bearing his pike on accident into the lumbar space of a fellow Wasian guard, whose face he never saw and yet whose expression of shocked betrayal he somehow “sensed” . . . Aside from that, the past war didn’t bother him too much, and he never discussed it, except to relate a bawdy tale or a ribald jest he’d heard of a comrade there or just as like invented himself, for at the same time Pret was not forward thinking in respect to his bodily fate, neither was he backwards-looking with respect to his checkered and as is only normal for a man his age and penniless upbringing thoroughly befuddling history.

Concerning our minor hero’s relative courage, it is worth noting as well that the sort of war that took place in Maloria was by and large incredibly low in casualty count. Prince Ar-Veld’s current army, for instance, was at its largest (i.e., before losing men to sickness or desertion along the way) no greater than 5,000 guards and knights and, yes, Lisian war-maids together, and so not including squires, footmen, ministers, whores (for there were some rich guards or knights who were clever enough to plan for their company), or other attendants. And full out casualties, as opposed to a mere passable wound, like a lost eye or arm, say, though they ranged widely in number based on the conditions of a certain battle, were generally confined to the lower triple digits.

For there were no bowsmen. Projectiles were as yet a completely unexplored technology in the Seven Kingdoms—thank the gods—with the exception of very primitive catapults (basically, bent over spry trees) which were deemed impractical in every sort of assault other than a siege—and sieges were very atypical, since all princes were raised by the time-tested ridiculous strict standard of marching to meet one’s enemy on a field of battle: holing oneself up in one’s castle, though it had happened, and indeed, what else were castles made for, when you think about it, still it was not in keeping with noble tradition and viewed mainly as defense against the savage northern hordes, which were themselves infamous for not “playing by the rules” when it came to war. Generally speaking, surrender of one’s kingdom after the categorical defeat of one’s army was considered nobler than hiding or holding out. The victorious army was supposed to be led by a prince, after all; and it was better, the assumption went, that even a foreign prince rule by proxy one’s kingdom than that the kingdom be split by civil war to be ruled in piecemeal. And besides, the ancient ways were generous to the princes of occupied kingdoms—to act as regents to the victorious liege, and then, when a decade or so later, the kingdom returned to native rule (for such was inevitable), everything more or less returned to the way it had been, always some suitable heir or other available, in a nonce, to overtake the “noble” strain of the occupied kingdom. Such was the logic that tended to favor short battles and quick surrenders to any more protracted and more bloody kind of war. And by the long traditions of war, when a prince did lay claim to another prince’s kingdom, it was only with the purpose of exacting tribute from the vanquished and, if there were another war, with the assumption of receiving conscripts from the conquered kingdom, as well. Such arrangements usually lasted no more than the length of one prince’s reign, and indeed often ended before that reign had.

Conquest, despite its immediate fruits, and its mythic appeal, turned out to be, in reality, an expensive, time-consuming, and often thankless undertaking; frequently mighty princes in war would find after a few years of receiving tacit loot from the conquered realm, that it was far easier and more profitable to surrender its claim on the other as soon as occurred the first moderately successful native rebellion. Such had been the case for Prince Ar-Veld’s father, Kas-Purtus, when he conquered Arras following the only campaign he mounted in his lifetime, retaliation for some miniscule matter of trade policy between the kingdoms. The staid Kas-Purtus had eked out a victory in one very convoluted and inglorious battle, and as a consequence had held the throne of both kingdoms, Arras and Was, for upwards of two planting seasons, till trouble from bandits on the Arrasian border with Ur, a serf revolt in his own kingdom, and a successful ousting of the vassal knight and his guard whom he’d appointed to Arrasva in order to exact concessions of the liege there, the current liege’s oldest brother, Enkit—after all this and the late prince of Was reckoned sensibly that holding onto Arras was the least of his priorities.

And this was by far the long tradition where conquest was concerned. Despite the age-old prophecy that it was allotted a special “chosen” prince to conquer all Seven Kingdoms, reclaim the title of Great King, and rule once more a united Maloria, still, in reality, the maxim for war went: If the conquered realm becomes more trouble to keep than to forfeit, forfeit. There were, however, exceptions, it’s worth noting, as warfare in the Seven Kingdoms was as old as the Seven Kingdoms, and though tradition was king, a prince was a prince, and so free in theory to add to, take away from, or augment the inherited tradition as he pleased, though he did so at risk of alienating his fellow nobles, his people, and ally princes.

But these traditions of battle, stodgy as they might seem to today’s cutthroat general, were nothing so conservative compared to the weapons and arms. Despite how old warring and the art of warfare was in Maloria, as a science it remained very crude in even those realms of relative sophistication. All armies boasted only two types of soldier, really (never mind there were sometimes some fancy names for them in this or that particular land): knights and guards. Knights rode horses and wielded blades, guards walked on foot and carried pikes, spears, or sometimes farm equipment or sticks. In Was, knights, and some guards, carried, too, small customary daggers called koshes. And this raises another point of some absurdity: all soldiers were responsible for keeping and maintaining their own weaponry, and there was really no such thing as armor (aside from a tough leather jerkin the knights would wear under their pageantry and that, as mentioned, in Was the nobles had condescended to outfit their peasants with, “unwisely”, in Pret’s humble opinion), nor any training of units, not even a school for knights, to educate them in the theories, or at very least history, of war. Knights and guards learned the craft of warfare by first reading aggrandized and unreal accounts of war and only after that going to war. And they went to war by an incessant mutual egging on to war, by cutting their teeth on tales of conquest and princes, on ancient myths of re-uniting the Seven Kingdoms, ushering in a new Great Reign of Kings.

And this education, as one would only expect, was hectic, bizarre and often self-contradictory. What sufficed as brilliant tactic for one battle, might be wholly out of place in another. Without cogent theories of battle, in other words, without thinkers to denominate and enumerate the KINDS of battle, tactics, redoubts and retreats, war in the Seven Kingdoms had a democratic tendency to seem equally chaotic at times to those leading as to those following (and indeed these were most often more or less the same people, not least as, these days, the peons were in the front, the lords in back). But the guard’s experience of the war was not that different from the knight’s, except the former’s perspective was lower down and he had distinctly better chance of being trampled. Trampling represented by far the highest cause of death and injury in Malorian warfare, and this was almost entirely suffered by the guardsmen. For this reason veteran guards were skilled at naught so much as curling into a ball soon as the first enemy rider broke through the guard ranks, and this fetal defense comprised about the whole of the inherited knowledge of warfare of commoners, if one excluded the looting of dead soldiers (which to be fair, not all commoners indulged in, and anyway, never needed to be “learned”), as it marked the first words of advice out of every experienced guard’s mouth to every raw recruit, so that every guard had practiced the drop-pike-and-curl a hundred or so times before the first encounter with the enemy.

Just as trampling was the preferred mode of death, desertion was the preferred mode of losing the bulk of one’s army, and much greater a threat to sustaining a sizeable campaign than suffering casualties. For this reason, most campaigns consisted of fewer than three or four significant battles; many consisted of just one battle. The reason for this rested on the universal realization that any more than five and the prince’s armies were like to be some one-third their starting size. It was therefore understood between warring and civilized kingdoms (so not Ur, in other words) that they would try to keep the number of battles to a minimum, as both sides inevitably faced the same danger of not having any army left the more battles were waged, and that, given the low number of casualties, was extraordinarily embarrassing to all princes. Contrary to what one might suppose, it made very little difference if the prince were “invading” or “defending”, commonfolk deserted, regardless. Individual princes, if they had special rapport, might keep the commoner from deserting quite so fast as he should otherwise; perhaps this skill of keeping one’s own soldiers from just going home when the spirit moved them constituted the difference between the typical prince and the so-called “great” one. It should be said finally that there were punishments on the books for deserters, and it had been known to happen (though not often, thankfully) that upwards of a thousand guards might be hanged in a single campaign in an effort to control the ranks and keep the other thousand or so in the ranks. But the downsides of such a brutal tack are obvious; indeed, in the historical instance, Prince Weeble (last of the infamous Gorgo line of Tet), having earned the contempt of all including his nobles, soon after that succumbed to a mysterious sickness, as did his heirs apparent.

Like mandatory conscription, then, hanging for desertion was one of those noble’s conceits often fondly resurrected over vociferous and self-congratulatory feasts with other nobles, wherein the party might reminisce upon fantastical early times in the kingdom, when the commonfolk were reputedly less independently-minded; and oft conveniently the noble party forgot these conversations the next day (if not entirely, then perhaps with a subtle shame in the occasional recollection), and for good reason, because the days that the party, holed off in its gentry nest, had evoked so fondly had never existed.

Such nostalgia for “the good old days” of a crueler, more efficient monarchy attested to the fact that, more than tactically debilitating, a prince and his noble sphere viewed such inevitable high desertion rates as humiliating, for it showed up the weighty prelimitations to any liege’s plausible greatness. Although the prince’s campaign might still be victorious even with a diminished army, only provided his enemy’s army stood more diminished, he was in general reluctant to finish out a campaign without a rich supply of superfluous guards—as had sometimes been necessary to do, as guards obviously deserted much more readily than did the vassally bound and fiscally invested knights—viewing going into battle without abundant guards as something analogous to going into Royal Court without leggings.

With such primitive conditions of warfare being the norm for Maloria, there existed conversely ample reservoir for elaboration and exaggeration of the role of the particular soldier or the overseeing prince in the retrospective imaginations of amateur storytellers. Of course, fish-tales where men and war are concerned are as old as ever men and war were joined, which is itself perhaps only as old as man turned plural; but in Maloria such tales easily graduated to the stuff of legend, and once that, received official canonization by the archivers and sub-scribes, priests and archimage, as well as by the veteran peasants and knights in their fond remembrances, till the whole land, all Six Mainland Kingdoms, that is, would ring for decades thereafter with the names of certain great battles, great exploits, great princes.

The pending Battle of Pleshy Moor and its presiding young liege, Prince Ar-Veld of the Kingdom of Was, was just such a stuff for the history tomes, and thus ripe for manly exaggeration. As war was so chaotic on surface, the difference between winning and losing a battle might conspicuously be boiled down to one or two key factors, as helpful a heuristic convenience to the warrior as it was to the sub-scribe recording of the event quite often several years later. In the case of the present battle, Prince Ar-Veld’s legendary leadership skills were well known and well hailed as the stuff of greatness long before he’d evinced any skill there whatsoever. It was quite as though his subjects accorded him a capacity without his ever having had to prove it in the least—how generous! The masses, the knights, the mages—all whispered upon the Prince’s coronation that he would be a great leader and greater prince, and because, in his assumption to the throne of Was, when he, like every legitimate prince, was given the option of choosing an “archimagy gift” from the high mage of his kingdom’s Order of the Stones, Archimage Lambert, high mage of the Amber Order, Prince Ar-Veld had requested the uncanny power of Great Warlord. Such was the common myth now by sacred Rumor from one end of the kingdom to the other, and, nay, well beyond the borders of that, too, till Prince Ar-Veld was revered, even by his future enemies, as a quiescent great one in their midst.

It mattered not, of course, how the prince had derived his powers of leadership, whether by the occult intervention of Stone magy or through the more conventional way of looking good on a horse. The fact he had these powers was incontestable, for any who contested it, as Pret had found out, would like as not get a fist to the face. In Ar-Veld’s glorious First Campaign (now, too, the stuff of legend), he had, true, only presided over that wing of the campaign that had unfortunately not involved any fighting. But even the fact of the uncanny victory over Lis resonated to the young Prince’s claims to greatness, as it seemed to speak of the Wasian patron goddess, Belka’s, intercession, and therefore the true divine right of their liege to conquer and rule.

Not only his victory over Lis reverberated to his good name; even his defeat (or rather, “all but victory”) in Nez did, as well. For Sir Urthan Summery’s role in spearheading the invasion of that mountainous, far-eastern realm had been largely overlooked, a result not at all the subject of bitterness for that quintessential “good soldier” Summery. It was so much more compelling for the battles which had been fought and won in Nez to be credited to Ar-Veld’s arcane ability of leadership than to the abilities of his underling. As said, the victory over Nez should have been as assured as the uncanny one over Lis, and certainly should have proved more “earned”, but for a spate of blizzards on Nez’s bitter plateau, which kept Summery and his army from taking the capital Nezba, and threatened to push the campaign into Sot, first of the summer mooncycles, that is, past Was’s traditional Second Planting. Even the army that would “follow its liege into Ur!” wouldn’t do so at the expense of its own farms and fiefs, losing an entire crop’s profits and so, in some cases, perhaps even casting a household into penury. War was the pastime of princes, but Was was a kingdom of farmers, and no prince could win long at war who didn’t cater to his people’s need to tend their fields. Summery had retreated from Nez, then, in time to make the Second Planting, and the Prince was viewed as “wise beyond his years” when he bestowed honors on his loyal vassal upon the latter’s return, and not chastening him or removing from his inner circle, as might a brash young prince too keen on a fuller victory.

But it did seem Pret’s hopes of organizing a troop to hunt down half-naked foreign women-warriors that day was a no-go. Even the ones beating their koshes in tents weren’t like to elect his company, no matter the myriad obvious merits of his plan, now he’d been publicly outed that worst of villain on the eve of battle—the imperfect patriot—by his own rough company; that is, not at least until after the battle, when the nativist verve of all would be necessarily less. Perhaps he could still convince them, if they still lived, to make an outing of it then, but this seemed, for obvious reasons, a remote hope to the curious and not-cowardly Pret Tuppersnog. That company, he knew well, was of scoundrels, abusers, cut-throats and quibblers, and all-in-all a great deal worse on every point than he; except for this one point: They did believe in chivalry, and all that, were indeed patriotic, and, regardless of that they were the majority incapable of bravery (as are the majority of men, and not men in particular, but just men, for it hadn’t missed Pret that the same man might be brave as might be a coward, depending on what he’d had for breakfast), he felt, they were very proficient, nay, it was ingrained in them, to bluster sentimental of their duty to their prince and land that day.

This was the problem, for Pret, of hobnobbing with the rabble. He’d become better at feigning equanimity, but it always took him aback to conceive again just how gullible, artless, and insipid they were. They believed devoutly in the dull myth of royals, as devoutly as they had, in the brief moment of telling, in his myth of foreign sluts, that it was glorifying to themselves and to their land to march in a war, and not merely some milksop’s weak attempt to make it into the history tomes or keep his serfs from mounting that revolt they had been erstwhile planning for that spring. Wars, Pret understood, were good for bringing the people together, distracting them from their hardships and from their nigh-necessary dissatisfaction with the existing order. He was not a snob; indeed, while smuggling or whoring, he had kept good company with a veritable horde of peasants in his day, but he was aware that if they weren’t drinking together, or there was no woman’s hole to distract them or bring them together round, or if he couldn’t conceive a quick way to make money off them, he found their company largely insufferable, never mind he was always charming enough, and regardless of their words and harsh treatment of him now, Pret continued to smile and pat his stomach at times, a clear indication he would, with expert diplomacy, not push his point farther and so would drop the topic of Lisian war-sluts, though to do so for him then, as he’d set his sights on it, caused him some disappointment. His companions in fact liked him a great deal, because his slightly bookish way, and his lack of pretension, flattered them. It helped, too, though he was cunning and good at exploiting a situation to his profit, he was not tight-fisted with his gains, and usually stood a bottle for the company at some point or other, an “investment cost”, he would privately excuse it to his “numbers” side, but it didn’t make it any the less effective in endearing his company to him, for that it was cynically proffered.

Pret wished he were in a public house in Was the instant; he’d stand a bottle to the riff-raff but to be there, not on this muddy field.

“At the least ye’ll admit,” and he winked and smiled roguishly to his irascible companion, “There ought to be a pact against fighting a war in mud. I wager, after but a few half-slants of a chime wallowin’ it out in this muck, it’ll be as hard to tell enemy from friend—as hard as it was at the Battle of Mount Rikisha with ’em Nezian flankers bearin’ down on us!”

II

The pleasure of victory can be best felt, of course, only when it was common wisdom before the test that one would lose. Any victory makes a man’s head swell, brings the flavor back to food, makes the worst wine turn sweet, and makes the coggan grow hard in his cod. The sort of victory Prince Mylkin experienced the previous day, on the battlefield of Pleshy Moor (though, incidentally—a somewhat scandalous thing—he hadn’t been there), was thus absolutely intoxicating to him. He took a sip from his glass of Arrasian brandy; the sweetness lingered in his throat and he felt an immediate surge and, paradoxically, sobriety of thought and command of his body. Such is the narcotic effect of the highest forms of victory, he thought; one is catapulted with them into a different realm of living, as if one were summarily elevated to the Ether, no longer a man, but a god. He had felt good before, obviously; he was a prince. He had felt quite bad before, too; he was a youngest child, frail by comparison of his two now-dead older brothers, and, indeed (a fact he was never wont to overlook in his own internal autobiography), he’d had an unusually evil mother. But it was different, the goodness he felt now. It occurred to him, it was akin to nothing human so much as madness. It had become his custom before taking the throne to court his own consciousness—to nurture a cognizance within himself that might easily backfire. Now, however, it was with a kind of giddy abandon his mind took up this old familiar consciousness, as if there was nothing in there—man’s most treacherous organ—that might hurt him. If a thought turned in a way he didn’t like, like a warrior, he’d impale it with a firm stare, a deliberate throat catch, how he chuckled to himself when he was in company, and the thought would not merely go away; it became a new thought; it became the thought he wanted before he knew what it was. He would chuckle and a thought self-critical would change to one -flattering, and all as if someone else were troubling it out for him, the thought, some furrowed-browed, fist-to-chin, dark-night-of-the-mind thinker, someone not he, and yet he felt him. It was as if his mind were this other one’s template, just as though his mind had been scriber of other men’s minds (or so, at least, he’d felt it) when once he’d scribed his “half-tomes” (i.e., tomes copiously written, and yet never “written”). Such was the empowering and maddening effect his victory over Was and the forces of Ar-Veld had on Mylkin, prince of Arras. He unconsciously reached for his quill, then chuckled outright at his own absence of mind. He hadn’t been at his tower in Vert, and so hadn’t been near his quill or his half-tomes, in nearly nine mooncycles. He did wish for a swift instant he was back there again now, back where he had pursued his studies for those several isolated years and planned the writing of his Great Tome, only that he might record a description of this one feeling now, for he had never in his own readings uncovered anything that adequately got it.

The Prince sat in a made-over dining hall in the biggest inn in the biggest town a few chimes’ ride of the battlefield. The town was called Mewly and it was sat on side of the Naggoc River, around which so many Arrasian myths of plentitude and the fickleness of the gods had been born—for the river that bisected the kingdom north and south gave plenty to the populace its ample waters succored, that is, until it didn’t, when it destroyed life as indiscriminately as once it positively forced it.

The Prince, as said, was in a dining hall, but it had been made up on the present day to act as his proxy hall of royal court. The green gonfalons and banners of the throne of Reks, the current line of Arrasian princes, covered now the homely paintings of awfully proportioned figures conviving in good show, tankards of ale spilling over, and roasted game meats falling from stick-drawn tables. So the rustic central-peoples of his kingdom always decorated their inns, the Prince understood; it had been the same in the east, in fact, where lay both the capital, Arrasva, and that town he had made his home during years of solitary study. As the largest inn of Mewly, the present wayhouse could afford to be gaudier in its displays than many others; and as a central burg of his kingdom, Mewly possessed artists who could afford to be more slapdash in their craft than many others: their meager talent was in too high demand.

The long dining tables, at which usually of an evening like the present one should have sat traders, smugglers, presentable whores, guildsmen and serving wenches, had been pushed to the side or carried to other rooms. The largest chair in the house, an heirloom of the innkeep’s ancient patriarch, was carted out to serve as Mylkin’s incidental throne. But nothing could clear the air of the scent of long boiled meat that permeated from the adjacent kitchen, nor clear ears of the sound of traders’ and scoundrels’ boots scraping on the floor above. These homely touches did not bother the Prince; in fact, he was too caught up in his thoughts of victory, and in some others, too, to notice them.

These “other thoughts” included a replay of a morning thrump he’d had before the march from Arrasva with his witch and “right wench” Vola Bonadea. How he missed her, or rather, missed more especially her immaculate teats, pale, enormous, the only yet he had seen that could swaddle his manhood at all persuasively. And of the Prince’s manhood—his “coggan” it was called by the local vernacular—how strange-large that part of him was, as well, the more so strange, as, a year before, his “prong” he both thought on, and indeed was, so little, he wondered often it hadn’t fallen off.

But all that changed upon his coronation . . .

The present day marked the third since last he’d thrumped, which was something of a record by recent memory. Not only did the sun not set ordinarily without his loosing his stones on Vola’s pert and plucky pale backside, it didn’t set without him doing this same on her bosom, her navel, her face, her tongue, her hair, her legs, and everywhere else he might reach by extension; and that not on account of a pedantic urge to positively cake her in his spurge, but simply as a matter of course, his laden stone-sack, as it were, demanding so voluminous a diurnal drainage. But here he’d been saving up that stone-load for three whole days!

Sitting in his make-do throne, the Prince went about mad in the moment for all his coggan’s impertinent bulging and importunate twitching in his leathern cod. If it weren’t for the preoccupying idea currently catching him up, the victory whose essence he was considering, as well as a visit he was presently expecting from an envoy of Was—the reason for his having made a thronehall of an inn’s dining chamber—the Prince knew himself well enough these days (though in point of fact he knew himself very poorly; he knew not yet, with his coggan so “amassed”, what strange excess he might not commit!) to know he wouldn’t hesitate to rape the chair he was sitting on, if need be—but better yet, he seethed through thoughts drunk on all-imaginable manhood: This was an inn—there had to be a scullery!

Prince Mylkin’s coronation—like that of all true princes—had come with the obligatory ceremony and archimagy gift; though, odd to say, when he had accepted his, he had not been entirely convinced it wasn’t just as much a curse. The gift was “granted” of Sens, the residing potentate of the Emerald Order, a clever, even wise, sycophant who had served the kingdom for over three decades in his current capacity. The performance of the so-called “uncanny rite” had occurred in a public ceremony before the people of his capital, common and noble alike. Here he had inherited the crown he now wore on his bright-faced, dark-haired head—he was not a man of imposing stature—the same his father and two brothers had worn before him. He had thought, then, in a moment of panic kneeling there on the cobblestones before his castle gates, his archimage and what seemed an entire kingdom of gawkers surrounding him—he had thought he could see his brothers’ blood on the crown that was dangled over his temples, but it was just the sunlight glinting red in the bronze. Yea, but how surprising would that be, the blood were real, for, indeed, was it aught other than a crown of death he inherited! And he retained little hope then that in claiming it his own fate might prove less bloody than that of his unlucky kin. How he should have liked to refuse the privilege—How he should have, were such a thing possible! But there was no other one who might assume the throne, for they were all dead but he; that is, there was no other till he, too, was dead, at which point, there might very likely prove far too many others . . .

And so he was persuaded, by the sound reasoning of some high knights and Archimage Sens, as well as by that same immanent threat of death—he was persuaded, that is, to accept the crown. He hoped in assuming it he might lay hold the power needed to resist the death which was slated him quite regardless of if he took the crown. In fact, were he to have stayed in his tower at Vert, whiling his days, as he wished to do, scribing tomes and reading tomes, SHE still would have had him killed; even less than a prince, Mylkin would remain a threat for any who wished to take the throne before all heirs of the previous bloodline were terminated.

On that coronation day in the warm mooncycle of Twoot, he had had little hope he would survive the summer; that woman who manipulated all the royal court from behind the scenes seemed too powerful, too ubiquitous, and too determined a figure. She had spies everywhere—or he didn’t know any better than to suppose she did—and all the knights seemed secretly to conspire to her ascension. In inheriting the throne and all the power of the crown of Arras, Prince Mylkin felt himself inheriting a uniquely powerless role in a perilous game of intrigue, wherein all about him were as like his enemies as his underlings, wherein his worst enemy—the Lady Ova Lave, his mother—might snap her fingers and he might die.

Such had been the terror which both caused the Prince to accept and revile the crown of his land. But this initial terror had not lasted. And no thanks, it seemed to him, to his archimage’s “gift”, but a gift more uncanny and secret still than that of the Stone Order’s magy. He thanked his mysterious witch for it, for, scarcely had she appeared—mysterious, unbidden—in his life, than she discovered to him the glowing green jewel he wore by a medallion now and ever round his neck, and that jewel which had immediately upon donning dispelled from his mind any fears and replaced them with the most unbridled and persistent thoughts of lust he had ever conceived, worse still than any “mad musth” that filled a stripling in first flush of adolescence. The once too thoughtful Prince had become, overnight, a man in thought no better than a letch, and yet this had been, as his witch had foretold to him, exactly the remedy his tenuous reign needed. Acting swiftly now, on instinct, desire, without thought of consequence, he wore that jewel and feared nothing and no one; in the first mooncycles of his reign that followed, he cleverly worked his most unloyal knights against one another, kept them and his mother guessing whether he was their puppet or their adversary, bought himself time, in short, for that was about the best he could hope for while still a stranger in his own royal halls. But now, not yet a year of his reign had passed, and he sat more firmly in his seat (be that seat even in an inn hall in remote Mewly) than ever before. The greatest coup he’d worked thus far was the deposing of his mother’s lover—Sir Wall—from the post of Marshall on the grounds that he wanted the man on the eastern border to fend off the brigands there attacking Arrasian traders. In his place he appointed the equally as traitorous Sir Ocotolin, who had long as well been Sir Wall’s biggest rival for Lady Lave’s affections, for his mother, mark it, was truly Maloria’s biggest ever evil royal whore. Ocotolin ought to have been a fine rather “nothing” knight, but that his head was turned by the royal mother’s poisonous suggestions—he was stalwart and lazy, large and florid; he believed himself a scholar, for his father had been one, and a warrior, for so had been his brother, but he suffered from a stunted imagination (he could not see outside himself) and, as his appetites weren’t anything more than quotidian, this meant his will, too, was stunted; it was a testament to that slut Mylkin’s mum she could inspire in one so intellectually unassuming the boldness of treason. The Prince had elevated Sir Ocotolin to the council position on a mere whim; he felt it would “keep them guessing”. But it turned out a stroke of lucky brilliance. The man was so ill fit to any official high-ranking post, he immediately became both besotted with the vanity of it as well as cowed by the responsibility. He spent whole weeks, then, away from Arrasva, in little inns on the edge of town, or at the peripatetic whoremongers’ caravans, which were hard to miss outside the capital, so that he might “entertain” low men whom one so pithless mightn’t feel cowed by with pointed quips of the sort he thought it the duty of a man of education to make. His new roguish company so enjoyed his humor that in little less than a fortnight he had got himself murdered. Thus, with one fell swoop, the Prince had rid his capital of two of its most treacherous conspirators.

But for this new power—or rather, new ability—he’d had to accept to reign with eternal lust. And it was anything but lust, simply, for it could NEVER be staved. If he thrumped to spurge, he might spurge a hundred times and yet his bulbous stones would still ache to spurge once more. And yet—here was an irony about enough to make him who loved irony so well laugh at the absurdity of his own spot—he mustn’t EVER himself touch it! He couldn’t even brush a finger over his coggan’s enormous outline in his too-tight cod—or so his witch had warned him—for such would drive him instantly into a madness from which: “You shall never return,” so had said Vola, her own hands playing lithely up and down his massive shaft, as between words she licked it; “For once you have picked it up, you shall never again be free to let it go again!” O—but he still wished to! Now, that was a wonderful kind of madness, wouldn’t it be?, that made a man feel like begging but to go there!

But he didn’t—he hadn’t yet!—this he reminded himself with a sobering shake of his head. There HAD to be a scullery on staff! But first—he held himself back, physically clutching the arm of his throne till he thought he might break it off—Where was that Wasian envoy, already?

As if on cue the figure entered, escorted to the doorway by two Arrasian guards and one Wasian, a short ugly haggard middle-aged fellow, obviously the ambassador’s lackey.

A clicking immediately arose from the Prince’s throat at the sight of the ambassador. He was surprised to hear himself betray his levity—it was so uncourtly—but the irony, for such a lover of irony, was too rich. He, who had just been about desperate for a scullery, saw now before him Was’s ambassador—a woman!

And a fine woman she was to look at! A Southlander lass, through-and-through. She had the characteristic full blonde hair of Southland noblewomen, pulled up with decorative headdress of spangles, chains, and gossamer in traditional warrior’s bun. And she was tall, taller than the Prince or the average Arrasian woman. Also, she was a good deal paler than the native wenches of Arras, her skin almost colorless. Finally, though not as thick from behind as his native women, the ambassador’s body appeared sturdy and her flesh yet suggestible, despite her shiny breastplate and unflattering military apparel. For even all this couldn’t hide the woman’s birthright as a Wasian wench, those finest “hods” of all in Maloria.

“Good day, your liege. I have come to ask your audience and your patience in bending ear to my Prince’s request. I thank you for granting me . . .”

The Prince was once again surprised to hear his hollow, humorless chuckling break from his lips like breath from a diver on his rise from the deep. This was not his “public chuckle”, the mere catch in his throat, but a distinct, audible and, what is more, distinctly audibly derisive chuckle. He was surprised, but he was not knocked off his guard to hear it; rather, it amused him the more he knew not precisely what he might do from moment to moment. Perhaps it was the always present threat of death this last year that instilled in him the reckless quality.

“I beg your pardon, your liegeship,” the ambassador, whose voice had broken at the audible chuckle, spoke these words in a way that indicated well her wounded pride. It was a thankless job to negotiate after a defeat, but she humored herself she was dealing with princes for the present one, not some Urian warlord; but to be treated THIS way, laughed at for unspecified reasons—most uncalled for! “I know not what ye find amusing. Like, it is your victory which impels you to make jolly, while today marks one of mourning for those lost of my kingdom. I do not wish to keep you from your celebrating, but come on strict business, of which, if your liegeship will disguise his mirth for but a quarter chime, should be in that span or less dispensed, that I may leave and he return to his prior amusement.”

The Prince found himself at these words grown not merely serious but absolutely scornful of his visitor. He couldn’t say where this new feeling had come from, and how come so quickly on the heels of a very different feeling; but it pervaded his sense with such certitude he didn’t for an instant doubt his earnestness in feeling it. She seemed to him all at once like a little girl putting on a show for her beloved daddy, a farce meant to rile the Prince; this impression was so unshakable it mattered not, he fully realized, by that very instant, that so would be just about anyone, man or woman, in her place. The breadth of his consciousness could no longer foreswear him against self-empowering convictions.

He despised her completely that moment for her self-apparent weakness, and it was no surprise to him, then, to find himself, the same moment, erotically drawn to her, and she—he thought he felt it—to him. He merely had to stare dauntless into her eyes and watch her soul in them until, realizing her place or feeling daunted herself, she lowered them. His coggan “pricked” up a notch; he thought he saw the good ambassador squirm. Such a battle-ready, well-ridden ambassador—he would love to ride her, heheh . . .

The chuckle once again arose and broke the ambassador off in whatever words she was presently speaking. The Prince had a sense of them, though he was consumed of his own thoughts and hadn’t been consciously listening to her express hers.

The ambassador shot the Prince an at once naively susceptible and wounded look, which made the Prince squirm a bit, though in a gladder way than just had the ambassador, for that cod of his was sure too tight.

“Surely, you didn’t summon me here to laugh at me, your liegeship,” the ambassador let these words escape her in her discomfort. She was a hotheaded sort, that was clear.

“I didn’t summon you,” the Prince replied, again with infinite coolness, and showing no sign of his previous jollity. “But you came all the same. But I take your meaning, for I have not been a good host to you yet, and have not even asked you your name, Ambassador . . .”

“I am Palma Dobry, my liege’s Minister of Foreign Kingdoms.”

“A lofty title, but you Wasians were always experts at titles. Suffice it that you are here to negotiate the terms of your Prince’s retreat, am I right?”

“You are, your liegeship . . .” Minister of Foreign Kingdoms, Palma Dobry, had to clench her teeth at the end of this; she couldn’t say why or how exactly, but the audience was not going at all as she wished it.

Minister Palma put a hand to her head, why was she slightly dizzy all of a sudden? The medallion Prince Byshkin was wearing . . . Why was it distracting her like it was, commanding her attention?

“Are you not well, Minister Dobry?”

“Um . . . I am,” Palma shook her head to clear her thoughts of that annoying medallion. “If you will agree to grant passage of our knights and Prince Ar-Veld’s army back to Was, we shall agree to sign a pact, promising a five year armistice along the Was-Arras border . . .”

“I hardly see how that helps me. Your Prince Ar-Veld has a longstanding truce with Winnow the Prince of Tet, has he not? As you of all people should know well enough by your travels, Minister, Arras shares its southern border with that country. What’s to stop your Prince from mounting a campaign, if not from the west, then from the south, at any point he pleases in the next five years?”

“Come now, your liegeship,” and Palma attempted here a goading incredulity of the Prince, with a slight smile of her lips and lowering her eyelids a hair; she thought she was moderately successful in pulling this off. “You do not expect me to think you so naïve. You know as well as I that another affront by Was on your own southern mountains, the Heln, would likely as much decimate your forces as ours. You promise us very little in agreeing to allow us safe passage out of your land, that you do not at the same time promise yourself. You know as well my lordship is in no position to mount another campaign against his lordship in the immediate future. You indeed have no reason not to sign the pact, as not doing so only assures you the permit to attack our retreating Wasian forces, which, as said, would be very unwise of you to do. Finally, in not signing the pact and choosing to attack my lordship Prince Ar-Veld, it is possible you would succeed in neutralizing one threat; but your own Eastern Border would in the aftermath of such a hard won victory stand all but defenseless against a sudden attack by the Regent Alar of Ur, whom, as surely your intelligence tells you, is in the midst of planning an ambitious campaign. Really, my lordship is only requesting his lordship look out for his own interest. And you get a signed pact in return, assuring you of no campaign waged for the next five yearlongs along your Western border; at the very least, that would secure you some much needed battalions to be requisitioned at your pleasure elsewhere along your borders.”

“At my pleasure? Interesting choice of words, Minister. But, howbeit, you overplay a bit the threat of war by Ur, as though what you say is ostensibly true, it is also true that Alar has been planning such a campaign all twenty years of his interminable regency, and yet is held back. And the reason he is held back is well known, that, as a regent, mounting a campaign of aggression against any of his neighbors would violate the Right of Princes as set out by the men of Stones. He would, in other words, alienate himself from his most powerful domestic ally, the Ruby Order, and his kingdom in the wake of such an unwise campaign would run the risk of descending into chaos, as it is said by many who observe these things that, but for the Order and its influence in local affairs, the kingdom would do by virtue of its leader’s savagery and the untethered methods of the horde. But that is not to say your proposal is without merit, as it at least promises the end of a war, and moreover, the attitude of war between two neighboring kingdoms, which is a boon in and of itself. But the issue stands: can I TRUST your liege to honor his own agreement, for he has shown himself a very enterprising Prince, this being his second campaign in as few as five years of his reign. Is your Prince a man of his word, Minister, a man of honor . . ?”

This provocative question, coming from a prince but one year into his reign (but notably older by a decade than the Prince of Was), proved too much for the hot-headed Southlander: “I won’t even deign reply to such a question!”

“I see. Good . . .”

Palma didn’t at all see. What was “good”? Why was “at my pleasure” an “interesting choice of words”? And not only that, why was it so hot in here in general? She had always regretted visiting Arras in the past precisely as it was such a cold, drafty country three-fourths of the year. But that was certainly not her feeling now.

“I see you admire my medallion . . .”

“Admire?” Palma repeated the word for some reason. His having brought up the object had brought it back to her immediate attention—but, had she been staring at it all this time! There WAS no ignoring it . . . Still, she didn’t “admire” it, exactly; more like, she was frustrated by it. She didn’t say that, though, just eyed the as if glowing green stone around Prince Byshkin’s neck even more conspicuously the more she tried to look away to anything else.

“Yes. It is an heirloom, my ancient forefather, Prince Mamporc of the line of Gans, was the last to wear it. It went missing following his reign, rumored to have been traded to a dame of Rin back when that kingdom was Arras’s greatest ally, so before the Quake, obviously. Only came back into possession of our dynasty following my coronation . . .”

Why was he regaling her with all this trivia about some stupid pendant? As if she cared! And yet (Palma licked her dry hot lips), it was rather . . . Well, it was a nice enough looking . . . VERY nice looking . . .

“If you don’t mind, Prince, I’m feeling a little fagged—fatigued from the ride. I’ll leave you to consider my Prince’s offer . . .”

“I don’t mind at all your leaving, Minister Dobry, but perhaps you yourself mind . . .”

“I! I mind leaving this drafty castle of yours to return to my Prince!” She was overdoing it, she realized immediately she said it, not to mention her flushed features doubtless gave the lie to her comment about the draftiness . . .

Prince Mylkin didn’t miss the opportunity to mock her apparent hypocrisy: “I’m sorry it’s drafty, as you say, I suppose we here are used to the central climes. One, such as yourself, used to the storied warm southern shores of Was, doubtless is hard pressed not to shiver in such drafty company as I present you . . .” The irony was unmistakable, no more mistakable, incidentally, than the sweat gathering on Minister Dobry’s brow.

“Spare me . . .” she began but Prince Mylkin, showing an astonishing and sudden lack of courtly civility, interrupted her.

“Spare ME, Minister. I know that you have no intention of leaving. Not without touching my jewel. That’s been the one thing on your mind since you entered here. If you agree to change your tone, I shall allow it.”

Palma was struck dumb. How had he known, just as she was protesting most, the one thought in her clouded mind was touching that wondrous gem!

“Y-yea,” to her own amazement she heard herself stammer. “I-I will do . . . as you say . . .”

“Good. Come here then. I will let you touch it.”

Palma did as this enemy Prince told her. She approached him, and not slowly; no sooner was she close enough to do so, she bent over to him, reached out, and touched the gem.

“O . . .” a gasp escaped her. What was this strange new emotion ?

“And so you have touched it, as I knew you would; but it is how you have touched it that I could not have foreseen and decides the matter; for you have touched it, Minister Dobry, with impure thoughts!”

“What!” What was he talking about! She, a Minister of the high crown of Was—impure thoughts!

“Do not deny it. That sound you made indicates the shape your thoughts have taken, and indicates as well therefore the direction of our current ‘negotiations’, if we may still call them that. You see, Minister, the jewel has special, magy, properties. The jewel holds a strange fascination for the fairer sex, in particular, so much so that if a woman touch it with a thought not entirely chaste, the medallion knows—it will brand you, my dear, Minister; you are about to be branded.”

“But . . . Impossible!”

“Your lips say one thing, your body another. But never mind. Soon you will confess nothing less yourself; there is no need to rush. In fact, if you must know, this is my favorite part. For you still have the option of resisting the stone’s allure. You have only touched it once; it has laid claim on you, but were you to leave this castle this instant, its draw such as it is now, would not be enough to control you forever. You would be free, my dear, Minister, in time, though it will be a painful time for the first week, I imagine; you’ll experience an agonizing-delightful week of self-pleasure; but if you stay . . .”

That was easy then, Minister Dobry snorted; she stood up (she had leaned over to the sitting Prince to touch the medallion) and just about left the room without a further word.

“Stay?” she heard herself ask. That didn’t sound so . . . Wait! Why was she still here talking to this enemy prince!

“Yes, my south-blooded Minister, if you stay you will be my slave forever. You will continue to carry out your official function as before, ever loyal to your beloved Prince Ar-Veld, except where his interests contradict my own: you will be, as I believe the innkeepers of Arrasva call their serving girls, my right good wench, my dear Minister Dobry. Do not be mistaken, either, there is much to be said in favor of the position. I am good to my wenches—so far I have very few, for even as a Prince I loath the idea of owning too many slaves, almost as much as I have for owning too few; you will be my third. But I have it on authority of those other two that there is no pleasure that compares to what you will experience in my employ. Even away from me you will receive certain favors from me and my stone’s essence (for the stone is worthless if it be separated from me) which will sustain you mysteriously, be the marrow of your existence . . . And rest assured that is no hollow boast.”

Palma heard out the Prince’s words, scarcely knowing what to make of them, but understanding somehow she was called upon to “choose” something or other. Choose what, though?—she couldn’t think, perhaps as the truth was she had already made her choice. Though to Palma it felt like a veritable eternity of hesitation on her part, a supreme battle of will, in fact, it was no more than an instant before she was again touching the green stone hanging from Prince Mylkin’s neck, rubbing it, even, so that its “essence”, as the Prince had said, positively made her fingers tingle. The same “new sensation” shot through her again, and she was at once frightened and glad of it, but this time the sensation did not taper off slightly immediately following her rub: for—she discovered to her by no means slight though growing bemusement—she found her errant hand would not remove itself this time from the source of its new pleasure—the stone.

“Good. Now it begins . . . I hope you don’t mind my making note of the ‘branding’; it happens slightly differently with every wench, of course, and for a man in my position, it really is rather interesting. For instance, some significant physical changes must manifest in you. As a loyal and upstanding Wasian minister, you are no doubt used to perceiving your body primarily as a tool, a coarse means to an end. That will no longer be sufficient for my purpose. Now, you will discover in its every inch a pleasure wholly delightful and frivolous, unlike anything you have felt by it before . . . Though you must have had an inkling of such pleasure, incidentally, even before, for your thoughts were impure . . .”

“No . . .” Palma iterated emptily, for she knew, to the contrary and with certainty she would have much rather been saying the opposite. “What’s this . . . Is it?”

“It IS!” the Prince returned, he was eyeing her heaving chest. “Your bosom, my dear Minister. It must be pressing awfully now against your hard breastplate. A first stage of the branding. Your body re-fits itself, as it were, to better facilitate pleasure and bring pleasure to me, your new Prince and Master . . . Your bosom will grow many breastplate sizes before you’ve left this castle, my dear Minister, or should I say, my dear Wench Dobry . . .”

“Wench . . .”

“Ha-ha!” the Prince positively laughed outright at the Minister’s word. “It is almost worth the priceless jewel itself to hear such bawdy language escape your prudish Wasian lips. Though incidentally those too are being re-fitted, if I am not mistaken?”

Yes, Palma felt them, too, painfully swelling and pouting out, painfully, she thought, not for the process itself, but that all they did would be so until they found something—something big!—to wrap around . . . Her hands were about all of herself she could control; wobbly, her body felt like at any moment it might topple over; she lay one hand on her expanding right bosom, and felt immediately a shockwave of pure pleasure shoot down to her loins . . . She wished to steady her head with her other hand (in her delirium, she thought it was only her head wobbling, not her entire re-maturing form), and so at last let go the amulet.

“O . . .” she moaned, despite herself licentiously, as another surge of ecstatic expectation shot through her at the release of the stone, as if the surge had only been awaiting her letting go the medallion, her performing some kind of sudden action—any action—to take effect: “Impossible! My—buh-ZOOMS . . . ” (Where had that word come from: “buh-zooms”? Palma Dobry blushed in addle-brained confusion. She had only ever overheard that word used once and by a vulgar guardsman, no less, regaling friends with the fine points of his night in a Lisian whorehouse, and it came back to her now with truly strange self-determination, as she struggled with the new form her body was assuming and the strange new exciting thoughts this form brought to her undersexed, if overwrought, brain. In defense of her new designation, she immediately liked the new word in reference to her parts; her body seemed to like it, too, and responded with another welcome surge of pleasure; so much better, “buh-zooms”, more fitting than the sterile by comparison “bosom”; at least in its plurality the new word implied an appropriate plentitude . . .)

The Prince laughed good naturedly: “Your ‘buh-zooms’ beg to differ it appears, my dear Minister. But that’s not all of you to be branded . . .”

He hardly had to narrate the process for Palma any longer; she was more and more arousingly self-aware of the additional changes going on within her and without her, “branding her” as Prince Mylkin had called it. Take her bottom—“Nay,” her mind whispered, “Crup . . .”—that superfluous padding on the back of her, used to sitting on a saddle or standing her guard in a downhill attack, say, in Nez—for the first time in known memory she could feel it, really, really feel it! And it felt so good! Hearty, firm and fit and . . . as if ready for something, too—But what?—“Anything!” her mind seemed to shout out to her.

Another moan escaped her; that wasn’t all, the entire length of her sturdy yet elegant, Southlander’s form, called out to her anew with untoward desires.

For the Wasian Minister of Foreign Kingdoms, Palma Dobry, was as Southlander a wench as was ever made to burst her breastplate. Her healthy chest had grown in ridiculous proportion to itself in the five easy slants she had spent with the Prince: in breastplates, she had worn to begin with a mighty busty one, but if she were to continue to carry out her office in any respectable capacity, she would need to size up redundantly in the future.

“This . . . this can’t be happening,” Minister Dobry gasped stupidly, a supremely anticipative and confused look augmenting her flushed, presently rather coarse face.

“O,” Mylkin replied, unperturbed. “That’s easy, then. Give my best to Prince Ar-Veld, your liege. Good day to you, Minister.” He stood up from the chair, his erection now quite visible to her beneath his cod (to be fair, this didn’t inspire the woman to cease rubbing her buh-zooms; strange, but on seeing the scandalous bulge, she seemed to rub them harder); the Prince scanned her satirically.

“You want me . . . to GO!” She could barely conceive. How could he ask her—Now! After . . . ! And wait—“What about . . ?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to finish your sentences for yourself, my dear Minister. If you are unaffected by the stone’s branding, as you protest, and nothing has happened to you, what might I do for you that you cannot do for yourself. You have my good wishes and may rejoin your countrymen at the Wasian bivouac. Inform your Prince, in light of his offer, that I accept the pact under the specified conditions. He may send someone with the papers, and I’ll sign them, or, if he likes, we may meet and make one of those dull official ceremonies out of it. He is free to choose. However, you, I suspect, have little choice: You couldn’t leave now if you wanted to. Certainly not without first having your clothing refitted to accord with your refitted body, or else you might have trouble explaining . . . Well, my dear unaffected Minister, you’ll have enough trouble explaining yourself to your Prince in your current . . . uh, shape, without returning half exposed. But all that’s as you like it.”

He waved a careless hand at her swollen chest, which had meanwhile completely surmounted her breastplate—this insufficient bit of armor worked little any longer to its purpose, only agonizingly constraining that lowermost part of her bosom. Her swelling had likewise hopelessly torn apart the dark stamin-cloth under-smock she wore beneath that. Her left nipple was now fully exposed, not to mention fully erect; her right nipple had somehow managed to get stuck under the enclosing upper lip of her breastplate: though three-fourths of her breast flesh was exposed, yet the good Minister’s reluctant nipple remained pinched in its armor.

“UNH!” she groaned, heeding the Prince’s words, trying to make sense of each of them, as she unthinkingly tugged, with one hand at the exposed nipple, with the other at the concealed one. She couldn’t stand any more of this, without . . .: “Please . . . I know not what I need, but . . . Help!”

“That’s better, my good right wench. How’s that, shall I call you my Wench Palma from now on?”

“Y-yes . . . Anything . . . What in Nub’s name have you done to me!” she could scarcely believe herself, pulling and teasing away at her breasts right before this vile Prince’s eyes . . . only, “vile” . . ? That didn’t sound at all like the right word to use to describe him . . . maybe “interesting” or . . . something like that.

At last there was a loud clank from the floor and an unprintable groan of relief from the changed woman’s mouth, as the breastplate broke from its overbearing task. Her right bosom sprang up and positively bounded in its sudden welcome release. Palma grinned vapidly at this trouncing of her ministerial uniform—the struggle was over, she could now toy with both “buh-zooms” unhindered.

“Belka’s breath!”

Prince Mylkin re-examined the randy Minister, who found herself (she didn’t remember how, when), on her knees on the floor before him, the vacant grin refusing to leave her lips, though a look of fearful perplexity on the rest of her flushed face. He said nothing, as if awaiting her standing, leaving.

“P-Please . . .” the Minister heard herself say, though where were the words coming from? “P-Prince . . . Your liegeship-MY liegeship’s . . . O, Belka’s garter! I w-want IT! Y-Your k-kosh, my lord, p-please . . .” She took a moment to pause and a laugh escaped her unexpectedly, a laugh directed at herself and communicating her disbelief and, yes, relief at the words she was saying. But she couldn’t stop: “Though I’ve never had one before, nay, never seen ’em but on a horse, I . . . I need to see y-yours! O gods how it bulges!”

“Really, the name of your precious goddess, and invoking the gods in general, used in such obscene terms, Minister!” Prince Mylkin did seem honestly taken aback by the Minister’s horny zeal. “Not to mention using such a word—‘kosh’?—Sounds like Wasian tavern parlance? I’ve really never heard it used that way. Isn’t it some kind of primitive weapon? At any rate, I doubt it’s the sort of word ministers use when carrying out negotiations in time of war.”

Minister Dobry blushed crimson in what she felt well-earned embarrassment, but she was too happily excited to be slowed down by her utter humiliation before her Prince’s enemy.

“O Belka’s gash!” Strangely, a flood of pleasure filled her at this airing of the most profane of oaths she knew, an oath even a vulgar guardsman might hesitate from expressing: “Fill me, my liegeship-m-my MASTER, let me feel you, your KOSH!”

The Prince looked somberly a moment at the woman kneeling before him, her hands still furiously fumbling her free and ample teats. Then all at once the pall lifted: Prince Mylkin laughed, not his condescending chuckle of earlier, but a candid, free and as if magnanimous laugh.

He undid his red leather cod at the waist, and Palma’s eyes at once took in a truly hulking “kosh”—just as she’d anticipated, her “Master” was hung like the mythic Gorr of Rin! His terrific member waited only to be released to reach full erection.

“When I was crowned by the emerald archimage the gift I chose of his Order (of those truly few that are allotted one) was the secret to certain arcane Nymphomantic powers, one of which is embodied in the ridiculous bodkin you now see erect before you. I am quite literally always ‘big’ and ‘hard’, as you yourself implied, Wench Palma. Is it not wonderful?” Though Palma clearly thought so (she even nodded in automatic gulping affirmation of the opinion), it was clear as well there was some intended irony, or perhaps just weariness, in the Prince’s question.

“Nub’s handle!—I’ve ne’er seen nothing so . . .” words escaped her, which was fine, as that instant Palma would have much rather filled her mouth with something quite else besides. “(Glmph!)”