Zar had by that time taken one of the rooms in the Palace itself. He was not always there - there would have been a lot of talk, if he’d been sleeping there constantly while the Princess was away - but he had carefully established a regular presence in that room, so that he had somewhere to work on various occult studies under greater security.

It is recorded by my order that Zar was not a diligent student of our magicks, and also that outside his particular and peculiar specialisation he did not use the power often. Yet he experimented, from time to time, in developing his skills.

Over the course of that campaign season, in fact, he had begun in-depth study on the process to affect a flame without needing to be close to it. Some of you may know we use this technique now in signal towers, as had been done in the days of Llon Llyrith, but it was not commonly known then; as I mentioned earlier, one of the great advances of Zar’s generation and the generation following was the creation of the orders by which, if one of us had recovered an ancient art, we all had access to it.

I digress in this manner simply to satisfy your likely curiosity as to whether Zar achieved his aim in this experiment; he did not, but once the order was founded our first Secretary revealed the secret, which she had painstakingly reconstructed as a means of alerting her nation to the oncoming Erithnean armies, many years before.

Zar was standing with one hand directly above a flame in a small burner on his table, his attention focused on the mirror through which he could study a candleflame in a second room, attempting to affect one through the other, when Princess Aelina flung his door wide, startling him.

This startlement broke the spell; the breaking of the spell burned his hand along the lower palm; as a consequence before he registered who had entered his rooms he had given vent to a heartfelt oath of contempt.

By the time he had turned enough to see on whose head he was calling down anger it was too late. Aelina had the satisfaction of seeing his face grow pale, his body language freeze, and a dozen or more other signs of a man attempting to fight down sudden panic.

She might have paused to interrogate that question further had it not been for the level to which need had built up in her. Instead, she took a step closer, reached out, and placed her hand on his chest, then simply walked forwards.

He had an inch or two of height advantage over her, but she had all the muscle advantage it was possible to have, and Zar found himself stumbling backward, steered by her greater momentum, until the back of his legs hit the edge of his bed and he went over backward, landing on the down-stuffed mattress with the air going out of him.

Zar stared up at Aelina, drinking in the longer hair, the fact it was tidied back, well-managed, the lack of armour and the elegance of the simple, low-cut silk nightgown that Rina had persuaded her into before she set off for Zar’s rooms, but he wondered also what he should expect here. The way she was looking at him, he felt for a moment almost like prey.

Then she was straddling him, bending forward close over him, staring intently into his eyes, in total control of the encounter.

“Zar,” she said with a smile. “I trust you’ve been loyal all this time?”

“Of… course, Highness,” he said slowly, watching her expression, visibly wondering what her intention was.

“Good,” she said. “Right now,” and one by one she took his wrists in her hands and pinned them to the bed above his head, tucking the second one under the first so she could weigh him down one-handed. She felt him start to worry, try to tug a hand free, and fail, and she growled in confident satisfaction. “I’m very glad you’ve stayed loyal. I’m going to need every drop of that pent-up need.” The rest of the sentence, to satisfy my own, went unspoken. Aelina was confident he’d pick up on the most important aspects of it all.

Her other hand found his belt, which he had tied with a complex knot she knew had been the fashion in the city the past few years. To Aelina, it was just something else in the way of getting what she wanted, and she wasn’t willing to waste her time with it.

She braced herself with one knee and her other hand and tore the belt knot open, then caught the waistband of Zar’s trousers and his undergarments together and pulled them both down, out of her way. She was allowing her knees to slide apart, lowering herself closer to him, and she could see the uncertainty in his eyes and it was fuel for the lust burning within her.

“How was the campaign, Highness?” he asked, and she could tell he was hoping to sound nonchalant and recover his dignity.

She didn’t let him. Her hand found his cock, half-erect and uncertain, and with two swift, experienced motions, she took away his uncertainty. “Consider yourself my spoils of war,” she told him simply, and then she was guiding him inside herself and sitting back onto him, listening to his grunt of excited discomfort through having been not quite properly aligned.

She didn’t fix that for him; pinned down as he was if he wanted to correct it for himself his only open was to buck his hips, giving him a little room to manoeuvre, and to shift underneath her, and by that stage it was her experience that even the most uncertain of men would realise that her agenda was the only one to be followed until she was satisfied.

He was inside her and she was on top and had hold of him everywhere she needed to to control it, to set the pace and decide the mood, to force him to be gentle or push him harder as she chose, and as with her various experiments on campaign…

…it proved unsatisfying. The flame of excitement died quickly, just as if nobody had stoked the fire and there was nothing to burn.

Aelina growled in frustration, pushing his captured wrists away from her, and she climbed off him with every appearance of real anger. Something had curdled inside her, she was thinking bitterly; it seemed the culmination and fulfilment of desire had been put beyond her, that frustration was her lot from then on.

Her intention from there was to leave, to abandon the field and leave Zar to decide whether he should ever risk broaching it again. But he caught her wrist before she could reach the door.

She turned, haughtily aghast, to face him, and a jolt of heat washed through her again, the fickle desire that had betrayed her now multiple times throbbing back to life.

Their eyes met, and Zar was smirking now, his uncertainty gone. Aelina wondered what had changed so radically in so little time.

“It seems to me, Highness, that your relationship to conquest may be changing,” he said. She opened her mouth to retort but before she could speak he had thrust two of his fingers into her open mouth.

Her eyes widened but the heat inside her seemed to grow, sparks flowing between her pussy and her mouth, as if there were suddenly two sources of arousal for her to be driven uncontrollably by.

Zar’s face was suddenly so close to hers, his eyes on hers, and she had the feeling he was studying her, as well as the certainty that he was enjoying himself. “Let me guess,” he said. “You haven’t gotten laid properly since before you went to war. How am I doing?”

He started to move his fingers as if he were about to withdraw them so she could speak, but as she got ready to answer he plunged them deeper into her mouth again. The fire burning within her sprung up ever higher.

Zar’s other hand found her crotch under her nightgown, and heat spread from her cunt through her thighs, her breasts, her nipples, her hands, and her lips, all of them aching to use or be used in turn.

The Silver Princess moaned around his fingers, her eyes rolling back in her head, as the power of fire magic rolled through the body of a woman attuned and acclimatised to a much colder form of ensorcelment, and her tongue flicked out across the underside of his fingers. Without realising it, she was beginning to suck.

“Highness,” Zar said softly, “taking your pleasure by force is not working. You know this, yes?” By moving his fingers up and down in her mouth he contrived to force her to nod agreement, and Aelina felt herself burn with embarrassed arousal.

“Perhaps it’s time for you to be taken instead…”

He led her back to the bed by his fingers, which she could not seem to stop sucking. Opening a chest near his bed, he extracted a pair of blue silk scarves one-handed, then pushed her down to a seated position on the bed with the hand she was hungrily slurping at.

He rescued his fingers from her reluctant mouth only to take her hands, briefly unresisting, and tie them behind her back at the wrist.

Aelina’s eyes crossed for a moment, moaning in delight, as she found herself restrained, and when Zar put one knee up on the bed and pushed her head down, bringing her lips level with his cock, she did not push back, did not struggle, was not violent; if anything she was meek as she kissed his cocktip and then parted her lips to let him in.

There were butterflies in her stomach and fireworks in her head, with a true delight slowly unfolding through her body as she sucked - no, she corrected herself; a bold warrior was honest with herself, and she wasn’t sucking Zar half so much as he was fucking her mouth.

Why did that feel so good?

One of his hands rested on her hair, the careful construction Rina had worked on that she’d been so worried he wouldn’t like. Somehow as his fingers threaded their way through it she knew he was delighted with it. But he had hold of her head now, and even the pace of her movement and the angle of her throat to his cock was now under his control.

Her hands were tied and her body was not in a position to move easily. Her head moved as his hand directed.

Aelina could not remember having been so powerless to steer her own destiny since before she took the crown.

“You must have been so frustrated this past year,” he said to her, his fingertips the source of thought-melting heat through her scalp. “I really wondered if you’d realise what had changed for you, but it seems not.” He chuckled. “Did you ever wonder what would happen if your army was defeated? If you were conquered in your turn?”

Aelina could not have answered even if her mouth were not busily otherwise occupied. It was a question that would take thought to answer, and with the heat burning through her, thought was an impossibility, or near enough an impossibility.

The fact of the matter was that he had never given the matter any thought; she had known her will, her mystic power, and she had had faith in her combat training and, later, in the proof of that training in the field. She had never gone to war without the full belief that victory would fall to her and, indeed, would have questioned anyone riding out to conquer who wasn’t as certain as she was herself.

In any case, she was sure that any defeat would hinge on her death. She would never have to deal with the results of her failure.

Now, with his cock in her mouth, his magic in his head, his fingers in her hair, she was conquered, and yet it did not feel like failure.

When he was satisfied he pulled her head off him, her mouth bursting away with a loud pop, and stood, lifting his hand. As it was in her hair, Aelina had to scramble to rise with him and in spite of all her advantages in strength, authority, and power, her cheeks burned and her pussy ached with her helplessness while he had his way with her.

He backed her up against a wall, her hands pinned behind her, and reached down with his free hand. He had caught hold of one of her thighs, lifting it up and pinning it to the side, opening her pussy back up to him, and then he was in and he was fucking her, completely in control, and it felt so good in a way sex hadn’t felt good since she had last gone to war, and she wrapped her thighs around him and clung to him more closely because it was all she could do.

Nobody entered the room to investigate the noises. All royal servants made it their business to know where the Princess was when she wasn’t campaigning, and no matter what the cries sounded like, nor the steady pounding against one wall, none of them would risk entry if it might disturb her.

She came and he came almost together, her powerful body spasming against him, the silken restraints on her wrists tearing but not giving completely. He put his free hand on her belly and she felt a strange warmth, a heat, seeping from his palm into her womb.

Though the Silver Princess did not know it yet, Zar had taken the opportunity to kindle life inside her from his seed.

He smiled into her eyes. “You needed that, didn’t you?” he asked, his tone almost teasing.

Aelina nodded, flushing, and then, embarrassed by her own nervous silence, said “Yes.”

“I’ll visit your rooms tonight. Be ready for me.” She looked back at him steadily, biting her lip, and Zar could tell she was making a decision. He didn’t speak, didn’t try to influence it, waited until it looked like her mind was made up, and then he asked sharply “Won’t you?”

She jumped at that, visibly startled, and she nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Run along.” When she was almost at the door he said “Highness?”

She turned to face him, mute, cheeks flushed. “I very much enjoyed how you look,” he said. “Did you?”

“Yes,” she said, and her voice cracked in the attempt. She blushed deeper, then shook her head and smiled, recovering herself with an effort of will. “Yes, I did,” she said. “Good work, Zar.”

She left the room with her head held high, leaving Zar to wonder whether she’d managed to explain everything to herself as her idea or not.

*

Zar called on Camila almost immediately afterwards. “Does our alliance hold?” he asked.

The look she gave him was as suspicious as it could be. “What alliance?”

“We both want the Princess to set aside her wars, yes?”

“That does not make us allied.”

Zar dropped into the other chair in Camila’s audience room. “I will concede the point,” he said. “All the same, I wanted to let you know - if we can keep her here a month beyond her usual, I don’t think she’ll ride out to campaign this year.

“I can’t say she won’t send her troops out, admittedly - but we need a solution to that in any case, don’t we?”

“Gods, yes,” Camila muttered, immediately distracted. “I barely know how we’re feeding them for now anyway.”

“They’ve been paid.”

“But the city still only has so much food for them to buy.” She looked up. “One of my projects for this year was to improve our logistics enough to be able to store more grain and cure more meat so we could handle this kind of load, I got some of the way there but it’s still going to be a strain.”

Zar drummed his fingers absently on the arm of the chair. “Hm.” He had stopped in for the visit purely in an attempt to keep Camila from badmouthing him to Aelina, so that he could remove one more element slowing down his enchantment of the Silver Princess. He’d figured on some light resistance, but hadn’t expected to run into an interesting (and essential) challenge. “How feasible is it - you’ve looked into this more than I have - for us to feed, say, a third of the army in Glawywen, if we billeted them there?”

The city of Milwyr was, in those days, the town of Glaw Ywen, a name Zar did not have quite right. It was then notable only for being the first town that the Silver Princess’ march to her borders would always go through. Now, of course, it is best known as the home base of our imperial military, with the finest weaponsmiths and trade academies for all specialist roles.

Camila mulled the idea over for some time. She did not like Zar, made no secret of it, but she held her position in no small part because she was not foolish enough to ignore a good idea simply because of its source. “You may have something there. I’ll need to speak with the governors.” She looked up and gave him a thin smile. “Why exactly might the Princess not ride out if we keep her here another month?”

Zar uncrossed his legs and rose. “I’m afraid I have an appointment with her, so I don’t have time for a long tactical discussion,” he said. “We’ll have to catch up tomorrow. I’ll see what I can to to prepare the Princess for this - and any other administrative changes that may need to be made.”

With that he swept out, leaving Camila, it should be noted, more suspicious than she had been before.

*

Aelina was frustratingly difficult for Camila to find private time with at any point over the next week. Compounding her annoyance was that Zar seemed to have no such difficulty, with more than one courtly sitting ending with Zar being asked to stay behind.

She had expected to find herself not the only courtier piqued at this - one problem with the way Aelina kept much of the key authority in the Empire to herself was that any problem Camila wasn’t authorised to resolve had to be decided on by the Princess in the short time between campaigns - but she’d been surprised to find that many of the Princess’ attendees were in favour of her new outlook, simply because it didn’t come packaged in armour.

If Camila had known what a difference it would make to the nobility of Erethnis to be dealt with by a ruler who dressed in the finery they understood, she would have spent longer pushing that idea earlier. As it stood, she would just have to settle for a good I told you so once Aelina acknowledged it had a benefit.

A benefit other than Zar’s obvious pleasure in it, that was.

*

Three weeks exactly after the army had returned home to Erethnis, three days after a third part of that army had marched out to Glaw Ywen under protest, and perhaps a full month faster than the seneschal would have wanted to arrange it, the Royal Palace played host to a grand reception, the first Review of Conquests, in which nobles from Erethnis and the few former nations that had already been part of its borders before Aelina took the crown received nobles representing every nation she had conquered.

For the first time, the Silver Princess wore the full robes and vestments of her office, an ice blue shoulderless gown trimmed with white fur at the neckline, the ornamental sword of the Royal Family sheathed at her side, the thin silver circlet of the Principality of Erethnis, and an elaborately decorated cloak long enough to need a train of three pageboys to hold up as she walked.

Her hair was piled up atop her head in sumptuous waves, her face elegantly made up in a way that showed her aristocratic power but also showcased her femininity in a way the assembled court were not used to. Rina had excelled herself.

And for three hours, the constituent parts of Erethnis met each other formally, with all of them stopping to pay tribute to the Silver Princess and to acknowledge her as ruler.

Finally, with all noble representatives and ambassadors gathered in the chamber, Princess Aelina rose from her throne.

“We thank you all for your attendance,” she said, in spite of the fact this same attendance had been required of them all. “We know we have not done this before.

“It has been pointed out to us that conquest cannot last forever, and that if we should die before the conquests end, an heir undecided, we will not be doing our duty to Erethnis. To any of the people’s of Erethnis.” She looked around the assembled, meeting eyes with many of them.

“We have yet to decide what steps to take to combat this, but we know you all have concerns for your part of our nation. We have allotted two weeks to hear from as many of you as we can before we muster. In that time, we will attempt to find ways to support each of you.” She looked around them all. “And while we will listen to each of you who can be accommodated, our assistants will spend the next year resolving any issues within their power that I cannot initially correct.”

There was murmuring and quiet conversation throughout the throne room now, but Camila wasn’t listening to any of it. Instead her gaze had risen to the Strangers’ Gallery, the upper-floor seating set aside for visitors, for citizens and other subjects who had no title of their own.

She knew she’d find Zar there and when she saw him, she confirmed what she’d expected; he had been watching her, just as she now watched him. He gave her a surprisingly warm smile and a nod, the message clear: I did exactly as I said. We have the same goal, you and I.

Which was all very well, but Camila still didn’t trust him. He definitely had other goals.

The band struck up and one by one the assembled nobility filed out of the room. Camila, having seen the public gallery start to empty long before, left at the point etiquette demanded she leave, where she made her way to Aelina’s quarters to wait for her; this announcement would require them to discuss some things quickly so she could prepare everything she needed to.

Camila then sat and waited. And waited.

An hour, she decided, was too long, and she rose in frustration to go and find her monarch. Aelina’s speech had started the sand flowing in a lot of hourglasses; Camila had a right to a quick audience so she could get ahead of it all.

The Princess proved to be surprisingly difficult to find, but she eventually made her way back to the throne room, pushing the smaller single door set into the much larger doors open very slowly. She heard something before she saw anything, heard a soft, steady wet moaning.

She pushed the door further open and saw that the population of the room had dwindled down to only two.

Zar, outrageously, had seated himself on the throne. His silken pants were down around his ankles, the robe he wore was parted, showing his bare chest and thighs; the only reason Camila couldn’t also see his cock was that the Silver Princess’ elaborately-coiffeured head was in the way, the circlet crown of Erethnis flashing in the light of the chandeliers as she bobbed up and down on his cock in her gown of state, one hand steadying herself on his thigh (long nails, she noticed, stroking and scratching teasingly at the flesh of his inner thigh) while the other was placed behind her back. The cloak had been removed, but from where it was positioned, only once she already knelt at her feet.

Neither of them were looking at her; Aelina’s attention, obviously, was fully spoken for and Camila doubted her eyes were even open. Zar had tilted his head back on the throne, his eyes closed, giving voice to his satisfaction in long exhalations that added a musical counterpoint to Aelina’s muffled, wet, steady moaning.

Camila felt the fury well up inside her. This was an outrage; this was a complete inversion of the way power was supposed to flow between the Princess and her lovers.

She closed the door to the throne room behind her, as silently as possible, wanting absolute certainty nobody else would see this.

Gathering her mental strength and rallying herself for what was to come, she turned to confront them to find that Zar was, now, looking directly at her.

She had a moment of panic, before the thought that he had tried and failed to enchant her before gave her strength.

“Highness,” she began, uncertain what to say next, “this man is a threat to you, not a friend.”

There was a sloppy wet sound as the Silver Princess lifted her head clear of Zar’s cock, and she saw the hand which had rested on her pommel lifted to her head, knew her friend and monarch was wiping away the drool and the seed that must adorn her lips and chin before turning to speak to her, and while it was surely going to be a struggle, Camila felt that she had a chance; that Aelina might listen to her and muster the same determined will that had made her a conqueror in the first place, and would throw off his influence.

“What are you doing?” Zar said with a smile, looking down at her. “Get back to it, my dear. I will let you know when you can stop.”

Aelina gave a surprisingly happy-sounding moan in response. “Of course, Zar,” she said, and Camila watched her head lower to Zar’s cocktip again.

Her heart sank; they were too close, she was too affectionate. His words of a couple of weeks earlier floated through her head. If we can keep her here a month beyond her usual, I don’t think she’ll ride out to campaign this year.

Zar had avoided telling her what he meant by that, and she had been unsure, but something in the atmosphere here told her exactly what he’d meant. In another month, the Princess’ pregnancy would be showing, and everything would change in days…

Zar was looking directly at her, and as she looked, a curious frown crossed his face. He tilted his head to one side, studying her thoughtfully, and the frown gradually became a smile.

Camila was by now thoroughly regretting her choice to act - but what else, she asked herself, could she have done?

“Oh,” he said with more than a little satisfaction. “So that’s it.”

When all else fails, she thought, bluster. It was a rule that had served her well many times before. Sometimes you could persuade people that you had more authority than you actually did.

All else had decidedly failed here, she thought.

“This can’t be allowed to stand,” she said. “When the noble houses know you plan to graft a bastard onto the royal line-“

Zar laughed with disdain. “What do you take me for?”

“A conniving schemer who thinks he’s won,” she said. “But there are enough of us, like me, loyal to her Highness to make your plan very dangerous for you. And there’s still time for you to take some money and run.”

He looked down at the busy head slurping at his crotch. “Aelina, my dear, would you tell Camila whether I’m imposing a bastard on you?”

Again her head came back up. “Of course, Zar,” she said, and she turned her head to face Camila this time without wiping her chin, his juices and her own saliva mingling and shining on her lips and jawline. “There will be no bastard in the royal line, Camila,” she said. “I have decided to take Zar as my consort. We will announce the betrothal soon.”

“Highness,” Camila blurted, “this cannot be. Please-“

“Princess,” Zar cut in, “Would you tall Camila to approach us and kneel?”

“Approach the throne, Camila,” Aelina said, “and kneel.”

Camila’s lips set in a firm, disapproving line, but there was, suddenly, heat in her cheeks, heat in her loins, heat in her very thoughts.

She took first one step forward, then another. A third followed quickly, and the remaining four steps to the throne seemed to take no time at all. She found herself kneeling on the discarded royal cloak.

Zar cackled. “That was it the whole time,” he said softly, wonderingly. “She’s so loyal to you, my dear, that it acts as a magic bond of its own.

To Camila’s mounting horror he continued, “I would never have seen it if I wasn’t in you. Something about that showed me your own elemental links.” He beamed to Camila. “It also allowed me in with them.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Camila. I’ve never had to begin the work when someone suspected me before, and I think I’m going to have to use my power much more heavily to make it work.

“You’re not going to leave our sides until I’m sure you’re as loyal to me as you are to her. Although… My dear, would you oblige me?”

“Of course, Zar,” Aelina said, her eyes on Zar’s erection, her intentions obvious. But first she said “Camila? If you are loyal to me, you are loyal to Zar.”

She could feel her own objections melting under the head of the enchantment, softening enough that the idea in Aelina’s words slipped much more easily into place.

Camila knew she would fight. Knew she would protest.

But she suspected already that it was too late.