The helms worn by Queen Angela’s Royal Guard covered most of the face, their frontispieces shaped like impassive faces like an idealised, hairless fighter with the same body type as the guardsman or guardswoman, visibility provided by a lattice of holes over the eyes, and only the mouth and chin of the living being exposed to view.

Atop this construction a high and brightly coloured brush of horsehair, the galea, was the final piece of decoration. Their breastplates, shoulder armour, studded leather skirts, bracers and boots were likewise stylised but bland; the circular shield they carried was designed to be worn across the shoulderblades when not in use, and they carried either a bow, spear, or sword.

It was as ideal a mix of mobility and protectiveness as was known at the time; in two hundred years, it would be abandoned by military groups and worn only by adventurers less likely to face advances in bow technology.

When marching through the countryside back to the capital, as Lucia was, they were a powerful symbol, and with their extensive training from childhood, an effective tool of order and (usually) justice.

Holding the rank of Captain-At-Arms, Lucia would sometimes head up a small troop of Guard for some assignment requiring a show of force. Sometimes, though, she would go out on her own, trusting to her armour, her weapon, and her own prowess to resolve issues the Queen needed to be seen to take a hand in but where too much activity would be considered heavy-handed.

She made her way out of the countryside and up the long road to Praetorian Hill, where the royal castle stood, looking down over the city of Erethnis, capital of the Erethnian Empire, a sprawling nation wide enough that the people of the borderlands did not speak the same language as their rulers.

There was much on her mind, but she knew it wouldn’t be spoken of. That wasn’t a service the Queen required from her Royal Guard.

Lucia had been part of the Guard for as long as she could remember, being one of the foundlings brought into the Guard barracks to train as a child; she had been issued her first shield and sword before Angela took the throne, when her father was King and first building the Empire. She had won the rank of Sergeant in the Hynafol campaign, before King Adin’s death.

Under King Adin, the higher-ranked Guard were sometimes asked for insights, holding that strange position somewhere between military and something more subtle. But Angela always knew best.

Lucia accepted this as she had accepted everything else in her lifelong role. Like the rest of the Guard, she was celibate. Like the rest of the Guard, she followed orders from the Queen without hesitation.

Unlike most of the Guard, Lucia had distinguished herself enough that her monarch kept a special eye on her. Indeed, this was why Lucia was climbing Praetorian Hill rather than going straight to the Guard temple-barracks in Erethnis itself; whenever she’d completed a mission, she was under orders to report back to Queen Angela. Often she would turn around, grab a cursory meal, and head right back out on another assignment.

Being the Queen’s Favourite was not always a benefit, but that wasn’t the point; Lucia had been raised from childhood knowing her life was service and sacrifice.

She wouldn’t waver.

*

“Ah, Lucia. Very good,” was the Queen’s greeting once she was admitted to her chamber. “Give me the brief report.”

Lucia shrugged. “No more rebel chieftain,” she said. “And nobody associated with him who has the respect to rally his followers around him.” She made out that the details weren’t important, knowing Queen Angela wasn’t going to be interested enough to ask for them if she did that.

This was how Lucia preferred it; the chieftain might be dead but there’d been someone who might have taken his place, and rather than fight them, she’d arranged for her to find a new home across the seas in the trade city of Calos. It had been easier than keeping on killing all the way down.

“Good.” She nodded. “Well done. I have something a little stranger for you to arrange.”

“Of course, my Queen.” She bowed her head, something she only did when she was being given orders; the only time that Queen Angela didn’t just want to know you knew your place but in fact she needed to.

“As I say, a little stranger. I’m sending you beyond our borders.”

Lucia hesitated for a moment, but nodded again. “As you wish.”

“My spies brought me new intelligence while you were on assignment. I’d be giving this duty to them, if I could rely on them as I rely on you.”

“You distrust your spies, my Queen?”

There was a moment’s silence in which the atmosphere seemed to completely change. “Of course I do, Lucia,” she said when she spoke again, and her voice dripped with contemptuous sarcasm. “They’re spies. They make their business in tricking others into trusting them, so you’re a fool if you do.”

Lucia remained silent rather than risk saying the wrong thing.

“As I was saying,” Queen Angela resumed, “I have received new intelligence, and it concerns a marriage.”

Lucia mulled this over. “This would be between dynasties, my Queen?”

“Exactly. The barony of Coetir and the kingdom of Marisal.” Even together, the two nations wouldn’t be as large or as important as Erethnis, but as bordering countries, their alliance was the sort of thing Angela spent a lot of time considering.

She was quite happy ruling the undisputed power on the continent; anything else would be a more worrisome existence, and worrisome was not something the Queen enjoyed.

Not familiar enough with the other nations’ aristocracy to know the likely players, Lucia just nodded. “What is your wish, my Queen?”

“I want Prince Xan of Marisal dead before any such wedding can take place,” she said simply. “And I don’t care if they know it’s us. If their alliance falls through as a result, neither of them can touch us.” After a moment she added, “I’m probably doing the young man a favour. I’ve seen Lady Prydferth, and I can’t imagine it’s a love-match. People shouldn’t marry for political reasons.”

Perhaps you should, my Queen, Lucia thought but did not say. Or when your time is up, Erethnis will face a power struggle we won’t be prepared for. But she couldn’t blame the Queen for not wanting to yield her power in the country to an outsider.

Male-line descent had a lot to answer for.

“Very good, my Queen,” she said simply. “I should set off immediately.”

“Of course. Go with my blessing, Lucia, and good luck.”

“Thank you, my Queen.”

Lucia found herself smiling as she left the chamber. It wasn’t often that Queen Angela treated her as a person rather than a tool, even to the extent of wishing her luck, and it always made her feel better when it happened.

*

Marisal was to the south, and the Erethnian Empire stretched quite far southward. Lucia accordingly had a long ride with which to think and to gather word of what might lie ahead for her.

There was no point looking for gossip about Prince Xan until she was, at the least, within a days’ ride of the Marisal border, but once she reached that point, Lucia stowed her armour into her saddle bags, put on sturdy but nondescript travelling clothes, and took three days to reach the border itself, not dawdling so much as taking a strange route that allowed her to stop in at several different borderlands taverns where she could listen and ask the occasional question.

Rumours abounded about Xan.

He was a black magician. He was a white magician. He was no kind of magician, but was surrounded by a court of them. He was no kind of magician, merely a scholar, and capable of doing things through knowledge that led fools to assume magic was involved.

He was no scholar, he merely had the money to pay scholars. He was a fool, and the accounts of his great deeds were propaganda engineered by his father.

It seemed to Lucia that the majority opinions were cynical, with a few others being fearful. The fact she was unable to pin down what exactly he was supposed to have done put her in the camp of those who were cynical, not fearful.

Lucia was at this point at peace with the possibility she would never return to Praetorian Hill, that she might die before reaching the border of the nation that had raised her. She had had her time to think about it, but she had also been taught from a very young age that the duty of the Royal Guard was to make whatever sacrifice they might be called on to make if it would help the monarch.

This was why none of the Royal Guard were allowed to form romantic attachments; it might cause them to hesitate at the wrong moment. Instead, they were taught to desire only the best for the Empire as a whole.

*

Prince Xan was a great favourite of the Marisal military, it seemed, and he spent most of his time in a stockade built by one of their most famous regiments, near the Erithnian border. Lucia spent a while lying in hiding outside, watching and studying and planning her approach. Eventually she chose a time when he was at his least protected; when the bulk of the regiment were out on an early patrol and many of those who remained were tending to the stockade itself.

She slipped over the wooden walls of the stockade without being slowed, landing smoothly on the interior, feeling confident and secure in her armour.

The first guard she encountered didn’t even see her before she was done with him and penetrating deeper into the stockade. The second saw her, but she was on him before the alarm could be raised.

And then she had a clear run at Xan. Her shield on one arm, her sword in the other, she broke cover and changed.

He moved with almost elven swiftness. Watching the way he seemed to blur as he drew his weapons, afterimages of his previous stance still visible, Lucia thought even as she drew back her swordarm that perhaps she should have taken the charges of magical ability more seriously, as this was no kind of natural response.

He held a swordbreaker dagger in his off-hand, glinting orichalcum in the light; what he drew into the other hand was a thin black baton inlaid with bands of carved and gilded designs, too thin to be called a maul or a mace. A blackwood weapon, Lucia guessed.

Her swing was caught by the swordbreaker, but she was moving her own blade back before Xan could catch, twist, and try to disarm her. She raised her shield against his counter-swing with the baton, blocking it, and used her momentum to slide smoothly past him, already turning to face him. Odd, she was thinking, the baton barely registered against the shield. How light is that? It can’t be much of-

The baton caught her on one thigh, so light that Xan could rebalance and strike again in heartbeats, and her thought was interrupted by a sudden shock of blinding pain that flashed and flooded through her, erupting from her thigh but not a physical response to damage.

It hurt too much to be a physical response to damage. It hurt in too many places. It was a flare of agony followed by a lasting cramp in all four limbs that set her spasming, effectively incapacitated.

Xan kicked the wrist of her swordarm and her blade dropped from nerveless fingers. She sagged to her knees as the cramps faded, only for him to reverse his grip on the baton.

He rested the tip of it just under her chin, lifting her head as she gasped in flaring, enchanted pain, on all fours. All her strength and determination seemed to have gone out of her.

She expected he would take the opportunity to open her throat with his blade, but as she shivered in pain on the end of his weapon, he sheathed the blade and took a handful of the horsehair galea, lifting her helm from her head.

Her eyes were forcibly lifted to meet his, and she got to see the surprise in his eyes which softened to a smile.

One of the soldiers still there, having finally had the chance to recover, raised his axe, and Xan took the baton away from her, allowing her to crumple to the ground, shivering with the shock of what she’d just experienced.

“No,” she heard him say. “We don’t kill this one.”

“Highness?” It was the same tone Lucia had used with Queen Angela so many times, one which said I can’t tell you how fucking stupid you’re being right now or even let you know I know, but please change your mind.

“Find a place for her in the stockade,” he said. “Confiscate her armour. Give her a dress in its place. And keep her armour and her sword in good condition.”

Even as two more soldiers converged on the odd gathering, lifting her from the floor by unresisting, quivering shoulders, the man who had nearly executed her sounded no more comfortable with the situation. “As you say, Highness.”

Lucia decided she liked her would-be executioner, unsure if that was really what she thought or if she were simply delirious. She could at least understand his point of view. She felt that if they’d met in a camp of war, they would have been able to understand and help one another.

*

Without the baton to drive it, the pain dissipated quickly, but the echoes of the cramp remained. Lucia lay where she was, the dress she’d been given used more as a covering, for the first couple of hours, while she mentally rehearsed what had happened, how she should feel about it, and where she might go from there.

When she could move again the dress went onto her body grudgingly, a case of preserving what dignity she could more than anything else. Once dressed she got up and began to pace the length and breadth of her cell, head down, listening hard for whatever sounds of the camp she could pick out.

Capture was failure, but it was not a final failure; there was still the chance to accomplish her goals, if she could work out how. And accomplish her goals she intended to do.

Pacing meant making noise of her own, the soft shuffling of bare feet on old straw, the slightly louder breathing of someone exerting herself (if not much), but it was, all the same, surprisingly reassuring. It underlined for her that pain or not, cramp or not, her body still functioned as it should.

She had examined the spot on her thigh where Xan’s blow had caught her, and there was no mark, no bruising, nothing to indicate impact. Lucia had already known the effect had to be magical, but extra confirmation seemed to be what the back of her mind needed to accept it.

Food was brought for her after a couple of hours; it was nothing special, but then military fare was what Lucia had been raised on. The bowl of game stew and accompanying hunk of bread was no better nor worse than what she’d have had in the Royal Guard barracks.

Lucia was rather used to suppressing her tastes, her wants, and her needs in favour of her duty and her Queen. This was no different.

In the afternoon Prince Xan came to visit her. A guard was clearly waiting just outside her cell, but Xan made a point to keep him outside.

Lucia had weighed her chances, but he was already holding the baton loosely in one hand, and for all that she’d promised herself that, given half an opportunity, she would throw herself on him and die trying to fulfil her assignment, when she saw the baton the idea died in infancy.

She stood awkwardly, wanting to back away from him but unwilling to back down, and he stood with easy confidence, looking at her.

“I know who you appear to be,” he said eventually. “Who are you really?”

Lucia was silent.

Xan sighed. “Look at this from my point of view,” he said. “I’m going to find out. The process can be quick or slow, but you’re going to tell me. If someone wants to tell my father I was killed by an Erethnian Guard, I have to know who’s really behind it.”

She flushed. It wasn’t so much that it hadn’t occurred to her that being so blatant about being Erethnian would act as its own confusion factor; it was that she realised suddenly it must have been why Queen Angela had arranged matters this way. Kill Xan, end a potential alliance, and turn Marisal’s anger and reprisals against someone else.

And she hadn’t been willing to tell Lucia that. She’d lied to her instead.

It was rare that she found herself angry with her monarch, who after all could rightly do whatever she wanted. But at that moment, Lucia was furious.

But she held to her duty and remained silent.

“Alright,” Xan said. “Let’s see.” He lifted his baton, handling it with a gloved hand, and he made an adjustment to one of the gilded rings. Remembering the pain she’d felt from it before, it was all she could do to stand defiant rather than shrink away.

He didn’t swing with any force, or move with any speed. It was a leisurely flick of his wrist sending it toward the outside of her lower thigh, where it bounced lightly and, even tensed against the pain, her knees buckled convulsively and gave way beneath her, sending her crashing to a kneeling position as - as -

The ache that throbbed through her was a welcome one, a need and a lust, her skin tingling in a way she’d never experienced before, her pussy sending pulses of pleasure through her. She’d been completely unprepared.

She was making strange burbling noises, she suddenly realised. She had no idea where they came from.

“Tell me,” Xan said. “Who sent you?”

She opened her traitorous mouth to answer before she caught herself, clamping her lips shut in a thin line. She stared up at him defiantly, and he brought the tip of the baton up and stroked it down the curve of her cheek.

The sensation was so good, so thrilling, and it filled her entire body, seeming to take root most deeply in her groin and her breasts. It was everything her training in the Royal Guard had taught her should be immediately and determinedly rejected.

“I’m waiting,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice, a firmness mixed with an amusement, that seemed to amplify what she felt. “You should see by now that you are going to tell me. So make it easy on yourself.”

She bowed her head away so he wouldn’t see her shame and bit her lip to keep her mouth from opening and betraying her.

Xan gave an exasperated sigh, a small victory for Lucia, but even as she was holding that victory to her proudly he moved behind where she rested on all fours and the tip of his baton slid under her dress between her legs, the pleasurespells bound into it making contact with her soft, yielding inner thighs and pouring their magicks into her.

Lucia cried out in shocked, embarrassed delight and her vision swam. Holding the baton where it had been, he reached down and took a handful of her hair, lifting her up by it, her hands leaving the floor, pulled back against him, throbbing enchanted lust and pleasure pouring into her as she started, almost instinctively, to grind against his baton.

“Tell me,” Xan said again, and Lucia knew she was babbling, knew words were spilling from her lips, but the pleasure flooding her was too much for her to know what she had and had not said or whether it was a lie or the truth, and in any case her breathing was ever more ragged, her words coming out in needy, unsure bursts, their pitch rising until she wasn’t speaking but shrieking her arousal and her need and the pleasure coursing through her, unheeding of the waiting guards beyond the door as an audience.

Xan held the pleasure against her until it overwhelmed her and she passed out.

*

When Lucia next opened her eyes, she was still in the cell, but a blanket had been put over her, and a tray of food was waiting for her not too far from the door. It worried her; the blanket felt like a concession, perhaps a reward. And if she was being rewarded, had she betrayed her Queen?

She didn’t think Queen Angela would accept “I felt too good to think of your wishes” as an explanation if she had.

She ate her dinner suspiciously and mentally reviewed the day she’d had. The weapon Prince Xan carried, whether one he’d been gifted or one he’d made himself, was not the weapon of a warlord; it was something more subtle than that. He was perfectly happy to incapacitate without killing.

That worried Lucia. She lived in a world where if you offended someone, they might be your enemy soon even if they hadn’t been. You didn’t leave them to get revenge; that way lay trouble. There was a reason that some malcontents within Erethnis called the Royal Guard the Queen’s Vengeance.

Xan was clearly not worried she’d exact vengeance on him. He also clearly didn’t feel the need to execute her.

She wasn’t at all sure what he wanted, because those two ideas didn’t go together terribly well.

A pair of guards collected the tray, not giving her any opportunity to jump either one of them or to dash for the door, and Lucia felt it better to bide her time; every time she even thought about trying her luck she remembered the twin effects that baton could have, not just remembered but felt them.

So instead of rushing into combat Lucia, Captain-at-Arms of the Erethnian Royal Guard, stood awkwardly and demurely in the dress she had been given and watched, and embarrassment burned inside her. It seemed to mesh and combine well with the memory of the pleasure the baton had given her.

The memory remained even after the guards had left. By her reckoning, it was evening; the small sense she had of the stockade from the sounds that reached her cell was that it was winding down for the night. Generally that meant peace even for prisoners.

She looked around her cell and found the corner least visible from the door, then collected her blanket and made her way over there. Sitting down in the corner, she drew the blanket over her to further cover her modesty, then parted her thighs and lifted the hem of her dress.

Her pussy still remembered how good the pleasure of the baton had felt, and while her fingers were a pale shadow of the pleasure she had experienced, it was something. She had to choke down a feeling of shame to enjoy it, however; the Royal Guard were not supposed to yield to pleasure. Even this surrender was mortifying.

It was, at least, enough of a pleasant distraction to calm her whirling thoughts, and in time Lucia slept.

*

She was provided with breakfast before Prince Xan visited her the following morning; breakfast and a stool to eat it on. She was even given privacy and time while she ate; Xan did not appear for another half an hour.

He looked, she found herself thinking, impeccable; a handsome young man who kept himself fit, his skin bore none of the signs of ravaging that often came from long use of dark magic. More and more, reliving the speed with which he had responded to her attack yesterday, Lucia was convinced the baton was his own design. As it had been used on her and doubtless would be again, she was glad it wasn’t wrought in darkness and occult shadow.

She had resumed standing, rather than stay on the stool, concerned that her captors might consider it a sign of weakness; when Prince Xan seated himself on it, leaning forward with one elbow on his thigh, she felt wrongfooted, as if there was a battle going on that she was not aware of.

“I’d like to speak with you a little more openly than we did yesterday,” Xan said. “But that does mean you being more willing to speak for yourself. Can you agree that?”

Her lips thinned as her expression set into refusal.

"So, you’re Erethnian,” he continued. “Sent by your queen.”

He fell silent, and the silence stretched until Lucia found herself feeling the need to speak just to fill it. “I won’t admit anything.”

“I think you’ll find you will,” Xan returned. “You’ll be happy to.” His eyes flicked up to hers, and it was a jolt through her; a sudden shiver passed down her spine and she could feel her body’s craving for the magical pleasure he wielded again. Against her own better judgement, she took an abrupt, jerky step forward.

Xan’s smile became a knowing smirk, and he unhooked the baton from his belt, hefted it thoughtfully. “Are you asking me for another dose?” His voice was as amused as his smile, and Lucia knew it for mockery, but she was not willing to fully defy him. Instead she fell silent again.

“So wilful,” he said. “So stubborn. I imagine your employer must like your determined dedication to duty.”

Lucia unbent far enough to give a thoughtful nod.

“As do I,” Xan continued. “You seem a useful warrior. I would like you on my side.”

Lucia said nothing again. She wasn’t sure where this was going, but she knew she didn’t like it.

He suddenly lunged forward from the waist, keeping his seated position, and his baton caught her on the bare upper arm. There was a crack of bliss flashing through her head, shivering up and down her body, and Xan stood, pressing the baton firmly against her skin.

The harder it pressed against her the more constant and intense the pleasure, she was discovering, but she couldn’t have expressed that at the time. The effect was too powerful for her to complete a thought.

Xan had his other hand against her cheek and she almost seemed to melt, the pleasure seeming to arc between his baton and his hand. And then he had his thumb against her forehead, muttering something in syllables that sounded like they didn’t belong in human mouths, his thumb jerking around from point to point, tracing something, etching a design not into her forehead, not into her skull, but directly into the brain beneath, and her fragmentary thoughts crackled with energy and potential and something, but she felt too good, waves of need and bliss shuddering through her, to think, to act, to change anything, to do anything.

She could feel the magic flowing through her, not just the pleasure from the baton but a spell, one being worked on and against her.

“So wilful,” Prince Xan said again. “But even the strongest will can crumble when overwhelmed.” He smiled. Floating in her cloud of magical pleasure, his smile was all Xan could see, and it seemed to be twining itself into her brain.

“Don’t worry. We’ll rebuild your crumbled will. Just in a new shape,” Xan continued. “After all, free will is expensive. But a yoked, obedient will…”

He took his thumb from her forehead with a flourish, and Lucia could feel the spell hanging in her head, ready to complete itself, but she couldn’t do anything else. Not until the baton fell away too and she collapsed, whimpering, to the ground, as the loops of magic in her head drew tight to bind her mind into the shape that Prince Xan had designed.

She rose back to all fours, panting shallowly, echoes of that overwhelming pleasure throbbing through her, and then sat back on her heels, kneeling, and looked up at Prince Xan.

She wasn’t shy. She wasn’t nervous. She knew exactly who she was and what she was. She was a warrior. The right hand woman of royalty. She was a tool to be used, and she knew her duty.

“Well,” Prince Xan said, returning her expression. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Is there anything you need me to say, Highness?”

He laughed again, and his hand went back to cup her cheek. She tilted her head into it, instinctively nuzzling against it, and wondering with some vagueness why she had that instinct, where this desire to please and feel pleasure had come from.

His thumb brushed against her lips, and without thinking she opened her mouth and let it in, eyes wide as she gazed up at him, her head bobbing on the tip of his thumb as she sucked and teased.

Lucia didn’t know why she was doing this; her upbringing in the Royal Guard had not included any idea of anything but the most basic, procreative sex acts. The idea to suck itself came from something in the way her mind was now bound, not from herself.

She didn’t know why she was doing it, but she knew it made her thighs clench with the same pleasure her Prince’s magic had exposed her to over her captivity. She hoped it gave him pleasure in turn; after all, wasn’t that one of the things she existed to do? One of the uses of the tool that she was?

“Oh, there are a few things I want to hear from you,” Xan said. “In time. Before then, we have other things to do.”

“Of course, Highness.”