Presenting Professor Bingham’s findings to Stuart was more difficult than Judi had expected it would be. The explanation for his sudden shift in mood was so obvious, so clear. She knew that she wasn’t the only one to see that, because she’d spoken to Reanne about it.

But, when she had the opportunity to approach Stuart with it, bubbling with excitement, and told him that the court was missing some roles that needed to be filled, he looked at her from behind what had been the campus dean’s desk, before he too had been brought into Stuart’s kingdom, with a glower from under his lashes and asked “Are you questioning my rule?”

She was shocked, not just by the question but by his tone. “I - no, it’s-”

“I don’t have time for the insights of a guard, Judi,” he said. As much as her cheeks burned blushing from this criticism, the rest of her went cold at that. There was nothing in his tone or the way he was looking at her which suggested he was aware of the irony of his words. It was pure dismissal.

And since her King had dismissed her, there it must stop. She gave a half-bow and retreated from the room, mind racing, a whirl of dread and uncertainty, which was interrupted at the threshold when he said “Stop.”

She stopped. Of course she did. It was right to stop. Right to follow his wishes.

“Turn around.”

She turned back to face him, composing her face as best she could as she did so. Perhaps it was not composed as well as it needed to be.

“Smile.”

Judi smiled, and Stuart smiled in his turn, his own showing grim satisfaction. “No,” he said. “Smile like you mean it.”

Judi’s smile widened and - she knew this would be happening; she’d seen it in others - her eyes even brightened. She was smiling as if he’d never dismissed her so harshly, or at least as if it hadn’t felt like a knife when he did.

“Now mean it,” Stuart said.

“Of course,” Judi said. She was perfectly content. It was easy to mean whatever her king wanted her to, considering.

“Better,” he told her. Judi understood intellectually that things had changed since he told her to stop, but it was hard to connect emotionally with the idea of how she’d felt beforehand. In turn that meant this extra feedback was more confusing than helpful. “That deserves a reward,” he said.

Judi continued to smile. Obedience to the crown never required a reward, of course, but she had been told clearly that Stuart had no interest in her perspective, so she would say nothing to contradict him. That meant all she could do was wait for him to offer her a reward.

“Take off your jacket,” he told her. She complied, walking back properly into the office so she could hang it delicately over the back of a visitors’ chair.

“Now your shirt.” Wordlessly, still smiling at him with the genuine warmth she had been commanded to feel, she unbuttoned her blouse, shimmied out of it - not actually necessary with this blouse as the sleeves were a little wider than usual, but she’d seen how much the mannerism affected her king some months ago and by now it was second nature, engraved in muscle memory - and hung it up in turn over the jacket.

She straightened up without being told to. Stuart liked it when tits were on display, she thought; she’d stopped wearing a bra some time ago, and when she was topless, she knew standing straight was the best way to achieve the effect she always wanted to present him with.

Maybe, she thought idly, she should have stripped down like this before she took him what she’d learned from Bingham. It hadn’t seemed like a dignified way of passing on the news, somehow…

“Turn around,” he told her again. She did so again, only then realising that she’d left the office door open.

It didn’t matter. In fact, it was probably for the best, as Stuart seemed to enjoy a particular subtle exhibitionism, if by subtle exhibitionism you meant everyone being able to hear him fucking someone without them necessarily being in a position to watch.

Nobody made it onto the admin floor these days who wasn’t part of the hierarchy, although several of them didn’t yet have runes of their own; Stuart’s cuts now being immortalised with ink seemed to be sustaining his effect on people very well, so long as he wasn’t too far away.

Judi had wondered about how to handle the first big holiday. It didn’t seem plausible that they could have none of the unmarked students go home without someone noticing; on the other hand, if the marked students went home, at least some of the marks they bore would be discovered, in spite of their position.

“You know, I think sometimes the tattoo is a little darker when I’ve had to be… corrective… to someone,” Stuart said.

His tone of voice suggested he wanted a reply, but after his corrective she knew now he wouldn’t value her insight. As a middle ground, she said “Indeed, sire?”

Stuart snorted with amusement. “Alright, be that way,” he said. It felt like a command, but Judi, who had not intended to be any type of way, did not know how to obey it, which set up a strange ache all of its own. “Hike up your skirt.”

She obeyed wordlessly, still smiling. Still happy, in hopes that being happy was the way he wanted her to be.

“Drop your panties.”

As always, she complied, working them down under her skirt until she could let them drop to the floor entirely and stepping out of them quickly. She was feeling excited again. She couldn’t help herself. She would probably have felt excited even without Stuart resolving her worries.

“You’ve been working on your arse.”

As much as it almost sounded wrong not said in the American style, this needed some kind of response, she knew. “Yes, sire.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you enjoy my arse, sire.”

“Hah! Good. See, this sort of behaviour is what I want out of you.”

Judi was not sure if this was something she should respond to or not.

“Come on around here,” Stuart said, and as she obeyed, she decided that not saying anything had been the right thing to do, even though it had only happened because she hadn’t been sure of her choice.

He rarely stripped her down fully when he wanted to have sex with her, she’d noticed. It was usually her skirts that she was encouraged to keep. He’d liked her tights, too, but had in consequence torn the crotch out of so many that it had ceased being practical for her to wear them.

It was always something that marked her out as one of the professionals on campus. When he fucked her, he wanted to be fucking a teacher, and she was of course happy to oblige. In fact, at that moment she might have been even happier to oblige than she ever had been before.

She paused just in front of his chair, within easy reach it he wanted to reach out and grope her, and she smiled like she meant it, because she meant it.

Stuart smiled back at her and this time there was nothing grim about it; he was sunny, satisfied. Any insult he might have felt had been forgotten, she thought, but then of course so would the lesson have been, and it wasn’t often that people learned from lessons they’d dismissed like that.

He put out his hand and cupped her crotch, his fingers pulling her a little closer and forcing her onto her toes, while the ball of his thumb pressed firmly against her slit and ground. She bit down on the sound, but some amount of a surprised squeak was always going to escape.

His eyes shone with the delight of conquest. She was, then, the spoils of war, and she could not regret it.

“You definitely deserve a reward,” he growled out. “I just haven’t decided what your reward will be to do.”

“Thank you, sire,” she said, because the first part had been a compliment, and because he did not need her opinion on the second part. He reached out his hand, running his fingertips up and down her thigh, and she enjoyed the light in his eye.

“So,” he said. “Do I put your mouth to better use, or do I bend you over this desk?”

It was a rhetorical question, of course, but sometimes rhetorical questions needed to be addressed even if they weren’t designed to be answered. “However you wish, sire,” she said. An ache in her loins might have been her own desire and might have been the spell understanding that the king had not yet secured an heir.

Some old crowns had not been passed down a family line, with succession being claimed instead by the most worthy at the time. She didn’t know if the enchantment had come from a culture which followed that thinking, which would at least have told her which it was, though at the disadvantage of confirming something in her own desires she’d rather not know about.

“Then by all means,” he answered, his voice a dangerous growl that sent shivers down her spine, “let’s wash out the effrontery from your mouth.”

“Just as you desire, sire,” she answered readily, settling to her knees, hands on her thighs. She opened her mouth as he fumbled his belt open, leaning back, and looked up at him with sparkling eyes.

In answer he took hold of her head by the hair, guiding her down onto him, and held her there, setting her pace, listening to the noises she could not help but make around his shaft.

The more she bobbed up and down, the better she felt, the less she worried about the king’s aggression and the likely explanation of its cause. She wondered, absently, whether or not this concern would return over time.

*

“Well, that’s troubling,” Bingham said thoughtfully. This was a more positive reaction to the news than he perhaps would have offered the day before, when he hadn’t been exposed to the king-rune; now he at least understood how important this was, and that the king was to be served and not opposed.

Reanne, also listening, frowned. “That’s an understatement,” she said. “We should already have done something.”

“But what?” Judi asked.

All three were quiet for a few moments. Then Bingham said “Well, there was nothing we could do before. He was going to read you both as guards, and he can’t listen to guards. But I can talk to him. I haven’t been given that mark yet. I can suggest another set, and-”

“No,” Reanne said. Both Professors looked at her in surprise, but her jaw was set. “It won’t work,” she said. “Not because he thinks you’re a guard. Because we just conquered you, and you are the fallen leader.”

Bingham’s jaw dropped. Judi blinked, thinking it over slowly. “I think she’s right,” she said in the end. “If the spell follows the logic we assume, our opinion is irrelevant because we’re guards. Yours must be ignored because you’re a vanquished foe.”

“I don’t… like to think of myself that way,” Bingham said slowly. The look of horror on his face might have been comical if Judi wasn’t worried.

She hadn’t been when she answered the Professor’s inquiry about how useful his runic research had been; the enchantment, plus her king’s commands, had set her mind fully at ease on that score. It was now, after the reactions of the others, that unease was taking a firm hold once again. “Perhaps you don’t,” Reanne said. “I can’t imagine I’d be happy about it. But I’m right, all the same.”

“Then… what do we do?” he asked.

The others sat there still, in gloomy silence.

*

In the end it was Reanne who found the solution, and she would insist later (much to the skepticism of everyone else in the circle) that it happened more or less by chance.

The first Judi knew of it was when the door to the room she was working in flew open and Reanne marched in. The tattoos along her muscular arms were fully visible, as was the web of them running across the sides of her torso and coming together just under her breasts, due to her being topless.

All she wore was a pair of large-gauge fishnet tights, a shiny black pair of booty shorts made of some plastic material or other, and her heavy New Rock boots extending up to just below the knees.

Judi realised that what she was seeing must be Reanne’s equivalent look to the hiked-up business skirt for her; the style Stuart preferred to keep her in when she had his full attention, which was more or less always guaranteed to be before, during, and just after use.

Her perspective on Reanne was very different, but looking at the way she appeared as she stood there, Judi could fully understand the appeal. This was a strong woman. To have her devoted to you, she could well believe, must be intoxicating.

“Right,” Reanne said. “I don’t want to take my time about this. Take off your shirt.”

Instead, Judi took her hands away from the keyboard and sat back in her chair, staring at the other woman. “What?”

“Take off your shirt,” Reanne said. “I don’t think he’ll overrule himself but he might, so the sooner we figure this out, the better.” Judi noticed for the first time that Reanne had, clutched in one hand, a small handful of notebook pages and a heavy marker pen.

“Does that - what’s going on?” Judi asked. Infected by Reanne’s urgency, she had begun to unbutton her blouse ahead of finding out. Afterwards, she would wonder if she had somehow realised what Reanne meant when she saw the pen.

“Well,” Reanne said, “the long and the short of it is that this might be a way that you can talk to the king again, but this time not as a guard but as an advisor.”

Judi turned away from Reanne in her chair. Her blouse was open enough that she could fold down one corner of it enough to show off her shoulder. “You’re going to put the rune on me,” she said.

“I’m going to put the rune on you,” Reanne said, “and then you go before him and we hope the fact you’ve got a guard rune on you doesn’t interfere.”

“Does that pen write on skin properly?” This was not actually the question Judi wanted to know the answer to the most, nor the one she thought was most important. It was, however, one she found much easier to ask.

“It does according to my tattooist.”

Judi nodded. Then she asked the question she thought was most important. “How are you doing this? It doesn’t seem like you should be allowed.”

“Right,” Reanne said. “It’s a stretch, even with what I was told. But with what i was told it is, just barely, inside the range of options. At least… kind of.” The pen was cold against Judi’s skin. She hadn’t expected that, and should have done; a chill where its line passed, which might have been magical in some way or might just have been heat leaching into the ink to evaporate away.

“Kind of?”

“Well, we’d just had some fun,” Reanne said briskly. “Spoils of war and such, and afterwards in the afterglow I asked how I could serve him.”

“And he told you…” Judi wasn’t seeing the connection. It was actually an effort of will to continue the conversation instead of trying to visualise Reanne and the King together. So much of this, she thought wistfully, could be herself or could be magic.

It would make sense to her, if she was trying to design the rune spells, to identify the king with the land as much as with his people, to use his own virility to empower the fertility of the land itself. There were already enough legends of mystic kingships out there where this was said to be part of the magic; perhaps the same was true here, and her own desire for the king, as well as her desire to imagine the king with strong young women, were all aspects of the enchantment.

Perhaps that was just her lying to herself. Perhaps she just wanted Stuart. She could remember always wanting him, but she didn’t know if she’d always wanted him before the runes were discovered.

“He told me he was worried about keeping order in the kingdom,” Reanne said. “That the other Professor and his people might be a problem, and so might the Dean.”

People, Judi thought, who had been at the top of their hierarchies, before he took over those hierarchies himself. That was, she supposed, a thing a king should properly concern himself with, conflict was still a problem. And it was, too, a problem where he might want a guard’s perspective. “And this means you’re marking me up?”

“Well, I said I’d be happy to deal with it, all he had to do was tell me what he wanted doing,” Reanne told her briskly. The path of the pen against her skin had stopped, and perhaps that meant the rune was complete. Judi didn’t feel different in herself, but then the problem had never been that she suddenly felt different; her confusion had mostly come from noticing that the order of things must have changed, however natural it had seemed.

“Right.”

“And then the King told me to use my own initiative and just deal with the problem,” Reanne said. “So I left, of course, and all I was originally planning to do was figure out how to imprison Bingham and the Dean and wondering whether either of them might have favourite students who would take up the banner afterwards.”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” Judi said, ignoring the fact that moments before she’d been nodding along to Reanne’s logic.

“Maybe not,” Reanne said. “But that was what I was thinking. But then I realised that the reason it’s a problem is everything you and the other Professor have been talking about. And then I wondered whether there was a way to have you explain that to him that he’d listen to. And since I’m using my own initiative… this was the solution I chose.” She sounded fiercely, exultantly proud of her own brainwave, and Judi thought that was probably completely reasonable.

Especially under the circumstances.

“Right,” Reanne said. “The rune is on. This is all yours to do now.”

Judi stood up and started buttoning her blouse back up. Reanne clucked her tongue. “You sure?” she asked.

Judi stared back at her. “What do you mean?”

“Is he going to listen to you more clearly if you’re wearing your shirt or if you aren’t?”

That wasn’t a calculation Judi had even thought about. Her focus had been entirely on the fact she’d have to walk through the main campus building to reach him. And anyone could watch, and while everyone in the building was also one of the king’s subjects, Judi couldn’t easily dismiss the shame she felt when others saw her like that; Reanne evidently was made of sterner stuff.

…But that being said, she was right. Judi set her blouse aside, stood up, and took a deep breath. Her former student gave her a lopsided smile. “You’ve got this,” she said. “You look pretty great. Don’t worry about it.”

Judi flashed her a smile and walked tall out of the room, trying to believe the younger woman’s words of encouragement. She felt quite lightheaded.

*

The difference between her two attempts to explain was like night and day. Stuart sat back in his chair and listened to her, and he was only staring at her tits for about half of the time she was speaking. Even then, he was nodding along at the right moments, not giving the vibe of impatience but of genuine interest.

At the end, he leaned back in his chair and looked up at her. “You’ve told me all this before,” he said. “At least, I think so. A lot of it sounded familiar. Right?”

“Yes, sire.”

“Why didn’t I listen?”

Now was the moment of truth. She rose from her seat and turned away from him. She’d read somewhere that nobody was supposed to turn their back on the British monarch while in their presence, but that felt like a self-important addition to the rules of etiquette imposed later, so she hoped it wasn’t a part of the enchantment. “Do you see the markings over my shoulderblade?” she asked.

“Yes,” Stuart said, and then again, “Yes. Hah. So that’s the advisor rune, is it?”

“Yes, sire. Temporary, but with your permission I’d like to have it made permanent.” She had turned back to face him, and sat again. His eyes weren’t on her chest now, nor her face; he was staring, she imagined, at the point on her front level with the place the marking he’d seen was drawn.

“I’m not sure I like this,” Stuart said. “Being influenced by the spell and everything.”

“With respect, sire,” Judi said, “The only thing this changes is what influences you’re listening to. Reanne and I, we’ve noticed a change in you. It fits the dig team’s theory,” carefully avoiding Bingham’s name, so that this wouldn’t appear to Stuart like a threat from another leader, “rather perfectly. You are already being influenced. I would think we need to complete the set.”

“Because at least then the influences are balanced.” He nodded, eyes distant, and Judi didn’t think the original Stuart would have moved so quickly to that insight. As with so much else in the enchantment, it was difficult to tell. She held her tongue.

“I have a further theory,” she said, “for filling out your court. Reanne as a guard and myself as an advisor came first. Nobody else was affected as strongly until you started to push your power.” She waited for him to nod. “Reanne is an excellent choice for security. I flatter myself I make a reasonable selection as royal advisor. I recognise, obviously, sire, that you haven’t confirmed that yet, but still.”

“So your theory must be…” Stuart was, she thought, enjoying himself. “That the spell attempts to select the different people needed as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, sire.”

“In which case it wasn’t just chance that Rebecca was the woman in the corridor,” he said. “The spell was already manipulating things to ensure I’d find her next.”

He was definitely getting quicker. “It’s only a theory, sire.”

“Mm. Well.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Make the necessary preparations to get that tattoo made permanently. Find Rebecca on your way and send her in here. I want to talk to her, and we’ll see if I believe it too.”

“Yes, sire.”

She left, flushed and excited, and was not surprised to find Reanne loitering outside. “Did it work?” Reanne asked.

“We don’t even know for sure that the theory is right,” Judi said. “He listened this time, but I did also have my tits out. Maybe that was the real tipping point. I’m not sure, but we’ll have to try.”

“And if not?”

Judi gave Reanne a look. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about why a dynasty with that kind of magical support isn’t here today. The conclusion I came to is that at some point, a ruler must have pushed their court until a coup took place.”

Reanne nodded slowly, looking back at her. “You think that’s possible?”

“I think I don’t want to find out. I have orders to follow now, Reanne.”

“Yes, of course.”

And the two women parted company, going their separate ways, and hoped that their theories were correct.