Lucia had been moved out of the cell into a private room next to Prince Xan’s suite. She still had not been given shoes, but more dresses had been procured for her from somewhere.

Her armour and her weapons were in the stockade somewhere, she was sure. Quite where was less clear to her, and she had not been able to bring herself to ask.

Over the past week since she had been enchanted, life had settled into a routine she was finding more to her liking than any part of her life before.

Every morning she woke when the trumpets sounded to rouse the barracks. She would rise, bathe herself with the basin of fresh, cold water brought by one of the attendants, and don one of the dresses that had been supplied, and she would go through to Prince Xan’s suite to see if he was satisfied.

Usually the Prince was asleep, or at least was feigning sleep, and Lucia would creep as silently as the trained warrior she was across to his bed, slip under his covers, and take his cock in her hand. She had gripped too tightly at first, but she learned under the instruction of her Prince, and she was an enthusiastic student; his pleasure was if anything more important to her than her own.

Lucia could not believe, with the enlightenment of recent experience, that she had ever been willing to forsake her pleasure for duty. She saw clearly now that she had been wrong; that Queen Angela had been using her, cheating her of her own right to a life with pleasure, a life worth living.

As Xan’s new companion, Lucia was able to bring him pleasure constantly, and she found there was a pleasure of its own for her. Whether he had been feigning sleep or actually still dozing, by the time he had hardened in her hand, he was always awake.

Lucia would make a point then to dramatically sweep away the sheets and would straddle him, letting the Prince lie back while she rode him. She was more than happy to do all the work to bring them both pleasure; after all, she was in his service. Unlike Angela, though, he was happy to allow her pleasures of her own.

If she did a particularly good job then before he sent her out of his chambers, he would take the baton and run its tip up and down her inner thighs, blissful pleasure and euphoria rippling through her, powerful waves of delight that broke any thoughts they crashed against.

As the week had gone on, she had had to reach greater and greater heights to receive the reward of the baton. Six days in she had taken a moment, pausing at the door, to ask “Highness… are you training me?”

Xan had just laughed. “Everyone can be trained,” he said. “And everyone is better when they have been. Don’t you agree?”

“Of course, Highness,” she promised readily, and she meant it. The training she had received as a Royal Guard of Erethnis had been essential in making her the warrior who had caught her Prince’s eye. But the training he offered was what would make her a woman.

She joined the soldiers of his stockade in their training in the mornings, wearing only her dress while they bore heavy armour. Prince Xan would watch sometimes, and she knew her martial prowess was one reason he kept her around. Yet he didn’t seem to want her as a front line fighter, and he seemed to like her appearance to match other expectations.

She had been uncomfortable in the first dress he had provided her - she couldn’t say he had given it to her; she had not yet been trained to accept his gifts at that point. The more her Prince and his soldiers admired her long, tan legs below the high hemline of the dresses she wore to train, the more she understood that this was something else Queen Angela and the Royal Guard had denied her.

She wondered sometimes why it was that Prince Xan showed no inclination to return to the Marisal capital. Why it was that he was drilling a decently-sized regiment near the Erethnian border.

She hadn’t asked, though. If her Prince wanted her to know something, he would tell her. In the meantime, she would wait dutifully.

(Even duty was a pleasure now.)

That morning, Lucia had decided to try something new in her continuing quest to earn a pleasure reward. Straddling him, his cock deep inside her, rolling her hips slowly to milk his cock and to stroke his shaft along her sweet spot, she had drawn her hands close along her thighs and then up her belly, drawing the shiftlike dress she was wearing up her body with them until she could lift it free over her head, letting her breasts spill free.

Xan’s cock twitched inside her as he saw the reveal and she knew she was on to something. Her hips rolled faster, more urgently, and she made it a wider, full-body movement, setting her chest swaying as she saw her Prince’s full attention fasten to her.

The two of them were taken by a hungry urgency that came on them both at the same time, a hunger that grew from both of their actions, a shared need and desire. His hands came up to grab her by the buttocks, and where he had often left her to do the work, this time she felt him thrusting away beneath her, participating in their shared pleasure rather than just reaping the benefits of her effort.

Lucia’s head swam with how honoured she was by this. She reached down, bracing against his hips with her hands to better ride him, to better serve him, to coax his reward from his cock, and when it came she cried out, eyes rolling, vision gone, her body throbbing with ecstasy through the pleasure paths that the baton had opened up and enlarged inside her.

She nearly collapsed forward against his bare chest, but some instinct held her back. Instead, lifting herself up slightly off his cock, she reached down and ran her fingertips through her slick folds, her hand coming back up sticky and wet with her own juices and his seed, and holding his eyes with her own, she sucked her fingers clean.

Prince Xan answered with a low growl from somewhere in his throat and a surge of motion. Lucia found herself suddenly on her back, her Prince above her, a surprisingly girlish squeal of excitement escaping her.

He was hard again almost immediately, an excitement and a light in his eyes she hadn’t encountered before, and he took her again, this time setting the pace himself, choosing exactly how hard, how fast, how confident his thrusts would be. Lucia found her vision swimming again, a tidal wave of bliss washing coherent thoughts away.

This time she came before he did, her orgasm entirely her own, not born in part out of the devotion to his pleasure he had created in her.

*

After a slow, lingering stroke of the baton down her spine, she dressed again and went down to train with the soldiers as she always did. Her body was still tingling, not just from the pleasure but from those moments of communion, those precious seconds in which they had combined their desires so perfectly.

She could feel an echo of his fingers on her, as if somehow his touch was still on her. An energy and an enthusiasm fizzed through her as she threw herself into the drills.

Drills were always about the body, not the mind; they were about rote learning, honing skills until the body would do them automatically. Lucia was used to her mind wandering as she trained; usually she would be mentally reviewing the state of the political situation, wondering where her Queen would send her next, what minor frustration would result in the quiet sanction of…

…of…

It was as if something in Lucia’s body and soul snapped, all at once. A cord, tightened for use and left in place for that purpose, which had seen too much use over too long.

She’d spent so long denied the pleasures that Prince Xan used to train her. So long following Queen Angela’s wishes. She’d done so many things because the Queen considered them best for the Empire that Lucia served, and that served Angela in turn.

Prince Xan had showed her how important pleasure and desire were. Now she wanted to show him how important anger could be.

She left her place in the ranks of his regiment and marched toward his seat, just inside the inner wall of the stockade. A hush fell over the training ground and she was more than usually aware of the attention of the other soldiers.

She knew what they had to be thinking. Had Prince Xan been wrong to declare the prisoner safe? She’d tried to kill him once. Would she again?

There was no way that trained soldiers wouldn’t see the fury in the way she was marching across. Lucia knew there were soldiers following, but also that nobody would be willing to run ahead of her, just in case they’d misread the situation. That might lead to discipline from the Prince. None of them wanted that.

Xan himself rose as she approached, and she did wonder what he saw; an avenging angel free of his spell or an angry woman who was part of his retinue. She answered his possible doubts by halting about four feet away and dropping to one knee, her head bowed.

“Something on your mind, lover?” Xan asked, and there was definitely amusement in his voice, even if she wondered if there still would have been had she not knelt first.

“Erethnis must be stopped, Highness,” she said firmly.

Prince Xan tilted his head to look at her, then walked past her. “Come with me,” he said. “And you can explain yourself.”

She turned and followed him without rising from her knees, and his solders watched her go.

*

Her armour didn’t feel nearly so comfortable as it had before.

Riding back toward the beautiful city of Erethnis, Lucia knew her first stop should be to climb up to the Imperial Palace and report to the Queen, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that; she knew she would need to build up to it.

The Royal Guard barracks were in the city proper, and they were her first port of call. Saturnina was standing watch as Lucia rode up - she could tell even through the interchangeable, faceless helms - and she could read the startlement in the other woman’s body language, too.

Lucia dismounted. “It’s good to see you again, sister,” she said; the Royal Guard were not related but, most commonly being foundlings, they often thought of each other that way and addressed each other.

“It’s wonderful to see you, in turn,” Saturnina replied. “Do I look upon a ghost?”

Lucia wasn’t sure how to answer that, so instead she stepped forward and embraced her… friend?

No. Not really. They had worked together, trained together, fought together. Before Prince Xan showed her what pleasure could be, Lucia would have called Saturnina a friend, but they had only truly been allies.

Nobody had taught the Royal Guard what friendship or love truly meant.

“Do I feel like a ghost?”

“You do not. Yet word reached us of an attempt on Prince Xan’s life that failed, and afterwards the Queen told us you must have died in the attempt.”

Lucia had feared something like this. Lying to the Royal Guard was something she had imagined would be all but impossible. Her tongue would surely stumble over the falsehood, and these warriors, all of whom knew her, would notice and seize on it. She wouldn’t be able to keep from betraying herself.

“I was bested the first time,” she said. “And injured. I had to wait until I was recovered enough for a second try, and then I rode like the wind. Word will reach you soon of the Prince’s indisposition, I’m sure.”

Saturnina’s lips, the only visible part of her face below the helm, settled into a smile. “I’m glad to hear it, sister.”

Lucia had been wrong. These were not her family, nor were they her Prince. She was loyal to them, but she was also loyal to her Prince. It was only Queen Angela who was not part of this.

The Royal Guard were not her enemy but they were, potentially, obstacles. Lying to Saturnina was the right thing to do; she had no doubts, and she therefore did not stumble.

“Can you take care of the horse?” she asked. “I took it from a marshalling-post late last night, and will need to return it. I’m going to report to the Queen.”

“Of course.” Saturnina collected the reins and whistled for one of the young trainees of the Guard to come and collect it. Meanwhile, Lucia turned and began the long walk to the path that led up the cliff toward the Palace.

There were a number of others waiting for her there. Xan and four of his men wore loose robes and heavy cowls - Xan had remarked he was glad of this, in Erethnis’ cooler climate - that hid their identities as well as how well armed they were.

“How did it go?”

“Well, the saddle’s going to be in the building,” she reported. “Although I still don’t understand how that’s going to help?”

Prince Xan just laughed, but did not explain.

*

The young Guardswoman who stabled Lucia’s horse, Madiana by name, was a foundling like the woman whose horse she was handling, and she had been brought up with the same understanding of her duty to the Crown and to the Erithnian Royal Family that Lucia had had until just a few scant days before.

She was conscientious, too, and she had a love for horses, the big, powerful animals that moved with such grace, especially at speed. As soon as the horse was properly in the stable, Madiana unbuckled the saddle, lifted it clear, and hung it on the top of the wooden stall half-wall. At no point did she look under the saddle, where she might have seen a number of occult designs picked out in golden stitches.

She turned back to the horse and began to clean and brush it.

For some reason, her eyes kept straying back to the bridle, to the bit between its teeth. This, she knew, was at the heart of controlling a horse; if reins were securely attached to a bit, and the reins held firmly, then where the horse’s head turned was decided by the rider, not the steed. And a horse could only go where it could see.

She wasn’t at all sure why, but she had a taste in her mouth like the metal rod of the bit. Her jaw relaxed, so that even with her mouth closed her teeth had parted enough that one could fit between them.

A tug seemed to turn her from the horse in front of her, and she turned to look out up toward the cliff on which the Palace sat. Moments later, she was wondering why she had done so, and telling herself that the tug had surely been imagined, could not have been real.

She shook her head, and went to fetch food for the horse, but throughout she couldn’t shake the memory of that sudden pull, the one she’d seemed to feel turning her head.

Nor could she close her jaws together past where the bit would rest.

*

Queen Angela kept her waiting for an hour in the anteroom before her chamberlain re-emerged to admit Lucia to the Queen’s quarters. Lucia spent the whole time simmering; this was not a typical tactic of the Queen, or at least not one which Lucia had ever felt before.

She had wondered, as the minutes ticked by and she stared at the opulently decorated blandness of the walls, finding nothing to truly occupy her attention there, whether she might have heard of others in the Royal Guard receiving this treatment before had she ever stopped to talk with any who had failed Queen Angela in significant assignments. But they had been dead to the Queen, and like a good soldier Lucia had considered them therefore dead also to her.

There were so many things about her old service that Lucia had started to regret now that emotions of her own and desires all belonging to him had been trained back into her by Xan.

Eventually, when she was admitted to the Queen’s quarters at last, Lucia had to steel herself not to let any of what she felt show on her face, in her body language.

She made her way close to her former Queen and settled to one knee, head bowed. “I apologise for the delay, my Queen.”

Angela regarded her errant soldier thoughtfully. The goal had not really been for Lucia to succeed in her task; it would have been much better for her to have died in the attempt. She had already arranged for other agents to concoct evidence that Lucia’s armour had been stolen, that its ‘true owner’ had been murdered over the border in Coetir.

Enough information that an intelligent and active crown prince would quickly come to the conclusion that the barony was not willing to lose its own rulership through marriage, and to act accordingly.

All that would have been necessary was for Lucia to be seen and to die either in the attempt or in the pursuit that would surely follow. It had been a wrench to choose one of her best for the assignment, but she had to be sure whoever she sent wouldn’t break if caught and put to question.

She had waited for news, eagerly, and had been steadily more disappointed by the day, until finally word leaked out of a confrontation at a stockade.

There would certainly have been more news had the Prince died, and so Angela had congratulated herself on a perfect plan and moved on.

Now she found herself looking down on her subject and wondering how best to approach the problem.

“You were successful?”

“Yes, my Queen.” There was an edge to Lucia’s tone that wasn’t normally there, Angela thought. Or perhaps she was imagining it.

Had she hurt the trust of a soldier even more capable than she’d realised? Or was this guilt? Was the gap between them something she was imagining, something she’d created with her own doubts and suspicions?

She had to assume, she decided, that it was all in her head, that she was reading too much into this. If she did that, then she wouldn’t damage Lucia’s trust now, and she might be able to bluff the woman if she’d realised.

“Rise, then,” she said, and forced a smile. “I cannot ask a hero to kneel before me.”

Lucia stood slowly, then lifted her head. Their eyes met, and there was a coldness in Lucia’s gaze that made Angela wonder if she had chosen wisely, not in talking to Lucia, but in allowing Lucia to speak with her at all.

For all her power and confidence, it was Angela who broke their gaze first, her eyes flickering down and away and-

- and -

She looked back to Lucia slowly and studied her face.

“Is that… lipstick?” she blurted. It wasn’t what she’d intended to ask, but it was perhaps the single thought uppermost in her head. Lucia never wore lipstick; none of the Royal Guard did. They were taught from an early age not to value beauty or vanity, so neither could turn them against the Crown.

Lucia looked back at her and the stony expression became something else, a snarl, a mask of deep-seated distaste and passionate drive, and the warrior woman lunged at her Queen.

Unlike her father, Angela had never been a combatant, had always been told by both parents that combat might be a woman’s work but could not be a royal woman’s work. Her reflexes, when someone moved toward her quickly, told her to panic, and she shied away, but Lucia was faster.

She felt the fighter’s hand clamp around the back of her neck, the other seizing Angela’s own arm, and a moment of pure, heartstopping fear enveloped her before her head had been pulled in against Lucia’s and their lips met in a kiss that muffled Angela’s cry of alert before it could start.

She tasted, Angela thought with some bemusement, vaguely herbal; a crisp, outdoorsy, earthy taste quite unlike anything she’d expected, and their lips seemed to tingle against each other.

Lucia adjusted her grip, moving her arm so that Angela’s neck was trapped in the crook of her elbow. The hand holding the Queen’s arm let it go, slipped down and around her waist, pulled her body in close against her own, started groping the royal posterior.

Queen Angela’s mind was racing, whirling, as she tried to make any of this make sense.

Whatever else, it was an outrage. She tensed herself and tried to shove free, but Lucia was ready for that, and her arm around Angela’s neck kept her from getting far - and her lips seemed stuck to Lucia’s somehow.

She felt the fighter’s tongue flick out, probing between her lips, prising open a jaw that didn’t seem to want to follow Angela’s own directions.

The hand of the arm that had her head secured slid down and inside her dress, finding her breast. Angela tried to squirm away but, rough and ready though Lucia’s treatment was, it was surprisingly simulating.

This didn’t make any sense, she told herself again, more firmly this time. It made sense for Lucia to be angry, if she’d realised. It made sense for Lucia to be Lucia, if she hadn’t.

No sense at all was made by the idea of Lucia taking out her own lusts on her Queen. It had not been a mission that would make love grow, would urge someone to make desire real. But though her hands tried to push her Guardswoman away, she was too strong; Angela was trapped in her embrace, even as the other hand crept around from a buttock to gather together some of the cloth of the Queen’s dress, balling it up and using it as a firm bump to grind against Angela’s thighs and her groin.

Gasps escaped their lips - just barely; the kiss was almost sealing them together, and the tingling on Queen Angela’s lips had now spread out across her face, where it was halfway between an uncomfortable itch and a delightful, pleasant ache.

And by all the gods it was feeling good; feeling better than it should. It was a violation, but a delicious violation, and that paradox seemed to set her head tingling too. As Lucia’s tongue invaded her unresisting mouth, Angela found that it did not resist because it simply did not move; nor was she blinking, and nor did she feel she had any control over where her gaze fell. Her head was a dull lump of sensation, incapable of action.

Her body, on the other hand, was starting to betray her in spite of herself. It wasn’t a sign of any satisfaction with the situation; at some point Lucia evidently had learned what a woman’s body enjoys, presumably violating the direct instruction of her teachers in the Royal Guard to do so.

She just didn’t know why she was being treated like this, and Lucia was giving her no chance to break free and ask why, let alone to demand she stop.

She tried to say something, but it came out as a muffled, needy groan.

Angela felt her struggles slowing. It wasn’t that she was struggling any the less; it was that her efforts were less and less effective. Her joints seemed to be stiffening, her muscles slowing, refusing to work as hard just because her mind insisted. And everywhere that was failing here was tingling, was throbbing, the way her lips had started.

It had to be the lipstick, she decided. Magic. A curse. Betrayal in a kiss.

Her cheeks burned not just with excitement and arousal but with embarrassment for not realising the moment she noticed the lipstick that things were truly, badly wrong.

If only she knew, she thought, her hips humping back frantically against the ball of pressure Lucia was skilfully grinding against her crotch. If only she’d realised with certainty. If she’d just called out for her guards, for her chamberlain…

But the idea of that now brought ever more horror. To be discovered in this state would be an embarrassment she surely could not contemplate.

And, it occurred to her, it wouldn’t be too long before her handmaiden made an appearance offering wine, which was usually required around this time of day.

Queen Angela came, a shuddering, resentful, needy, blissful orgasm, and as the last juddering motion of her pleasure echoed through each joint and each muscle it locked, paralysed, into place.

*

Lucia untangled herself from the form of her former Queen, now statuesque in more than one way, and stepped back for a moment, hands raised just in case Angela was unbalanced enough that she might start to slowly fall.

Satisfied, she started moving across to the inner chamber door, unbuckling the fastenings of her breastplate as she did so. She let it fall only slowly, not wanting a huge noise, and eased the door open before grabbing Angela’s handmaiden and pulling her into a second kiss.

Whatever enchanted stain her Prince had anointed her lips with, she thought, it worked surprisingly well. As soon as their pleasure opened up their resistance, they found themselves locked firmly into place, and the mechanism of lips on lips meant there was no crying out in the meantime.

She dragged the second bewildered, paralysed woman back into Angela’s chamber, propping her against a chair so her former Queen could see her, and she shot Angela a very thin smile as she began to unwind the rope that had been concealed under her breastplate from around her body, coiling it with the other hand to have it ready.

“My Prince sends his regards,” she told the Erithnian monarch. “He is detained with other work, but he will receive you shortly.”

Angela made a noise that would best be described as an indignant gurgle as Lucia hung the coil of rope over the handmaiden’s neck for safekeeping and made her way back across to the monarch, where she began the systematic process of stripping her body of all that regal attire.

In other circumstances, she might have been tempted to cut it off, flaunting her skill with a knife in the face of the woman who had cast her aside. In this case she had plans, and was relieved to find that the mystic paralysis was only something the affected experienced; she could manipulate her Queen’s body as easily as a child playing with a doll. She left the woman wearing only the thin linen underwear that concealed her crotch from inspection.

She repeated the process with the handmaiden, then took the coil of rope back. A long piece was cut from the coil, then tied to two candelabra mounted to opposite walls, with just enough slack to hang down to around waist-height for most of the arc between them,

Returning to Angela’s frozen body, Lucia took her by the hips and ‘walked’ her across to the rope, then lifted one leg until she could straddle the former queen on the coarse fibre, her cunt resting against it.

She repeated the process again with the handmaiden, in whose ear she breathed softly, “We are the same, you and I, but you don’t yet know it. This woman has denied you your pleasure too long. Now, you’re going to show each other the rutting animals you deserve to be.”

Another length of rope was cut from the coil, and she secured both womens’ arms together behind their backs, then tied their lashed wrists to the ropes they straddled and ran more rope down to each ankle.

Now they were both firmly secured to the line and, once they were able to move again, any effort on either woman’s part to escape or to do anything but maintain their stance would set the ropes grinding against their crotches.

Lastly, she took up each woman’s basque, one at a time, and balled them up. The handmaiden’s basque, redolent with the natural scents of a hard-working woman, was used to gag Queen Angela, while Angela’s more expensive, more comfortable garment went to silence the handmaiden.

Lucia took a moment to admire her handiwork. Her Prince had told her only to restrain them while paralysed and make them ready for his treatment; she had devised the rest of her actions, and looked forward to his reaction when they were presented to him.