“Please, Master, punish me instead. I love her.”
His regard was curious. “She has told me of this trait in you,” he acknowledged meditatively. “It is quite charming and clutches at the heart. I believe you truly would follow and exchange places?”
“Yes Master. Please give me permission.”
“If you were of Jedrah you would know the absurdity of your request. By our standards it has a certain impropriety meriting its own penalty.”
“I will accept the penalty, Master, if I may ease my Lady.” Yasin laughed at her solemnity. “You had best halt your submissiveness before it provokes me into erotically desiring to whip you myself. You exude an astounding sexuality. Cease your talk of punishments.”
She sighed in defeat. “I am not happy, Master. I am fearful for my Lady.”
“You are not supposed to be happy this day. Let it not concern you.”
“Master, may I speak of myself?”
“Of course, child, you are concerned with your torture?”
“Yes, Master. Has . . . what has been done to me sufficed?”
“If you are petitioning, come kneel before me as a slave girl should.”
Awkwardly in her new chains Stacie obeyed. Yasin turned his chair to face her. “Why do you call me ‘child’, Master? I am a woman.”
Again she had aroused him. “You are many times woman, your blood is hot, your breasts are ripe.” His voice gained tenderness, “But there is in you an eternal child, an endearing quality by which you defeat us all. Cherish it.”
She could not know. Jedrah taught a girl strange things about herself. If this masculine male saw her as a little girl she felt no affront. “Would you torture a child, Master?” she asked slyly.
“In the same way I whip a daughter,” he acknowledged. Jedrah held her captive too, not this man alone. Jedrah rationalized the unbelievable. She looked up, hoping he found her lovely. “Must I go on being tortured, Master? Are there not enough pictures?”
“If the tortures and the pictures are done, what should I do with you?”
“Send me back to my father’s house, Master.” Her suggestion was delicately tentative.
The atmosphere was charged. She hoped he could not see her tremble. Stacie knew how easily she could trespass on his tolerance.
“I had intended to torture you for months or years.” It was as though he was speaking to himself.
She kept a prudent silence.
He shook his head in wonder and amusement. “You have seduced us both with your witchery. Perhaps I should have a stake planted in the ground, tie you to it and have you burned.”
“Yes, Master.”
He slapped his leg in delight. “The way you say that I could believe you mean it. This submissiveness of yours is a menace. You subvert us all.”
His pleasure infected her with mischief. “I have not known I was a witch, Master.”
“Well, know it now.” Thoughtfully he tossed her a key and watched her face. She examined it, unsure, doubting. “For what, Master?”
“Your shackles. Unlock yourself and go.”
He was not jesting, she could tell. She looked at the small key within her hand. It had the weight of all the world. She looked up piteously. “I cannot.”
“There will be clothes and money.”
She examined the impossible and found a woman’s solution. “I will not go without, Rannah, Master.”
“Rannah is bound, awaiting punishment.”
“Yes, Master. I cannot leave her.”
“You quibble terms, child! I offer you freedom.” She twisted in misery. “I love her.”
“But you would leave me and my house?”
It was as though she saw him for the first time. Memory of the two nights was etched deep. It erased Yousef and his whip. She knew herself in the grip of some deeper slavery she could not name. She cast aside the word love as trite and unsatisfying. Here was something rich and wanton and darkly completing, it was of Jedrah. Stacie Blair had no weapons with which to combat it.
“Forgive me, Master, I cannot. Nor do I know why.” She held out the key.
He gestured it away. “You would curse yourself in other months and other years.”
She nodded. “Perhaps. I do not know.”
“I said you were no slave, but I was wrong. Rannah saw you for what you are.”
“I am a slave, Master. Don’t ask me why.”
“You are one of the richest heiresses in the world.” Stacie shrugged.
“It is gone . . . past.”
“Your father . . . what of your love for him, and his for you?”
“Fathers lose their daughters. It is the nature of life.”
“You choose slavery . . . knowingly?”
She nodded, without hesitation she again proffered the key. Once more he swept it aside.
“Those wounds in your flesh and beneath your feet? They are slavery.”
“They were of my torture, Master.”
Yasin waved an impatient hand. “As a slave you would be constantly whipped: if not for disobedience then because of the stirring in the loins your sensuality provokes in those who own you.”
The thought was new to Stacie Blair. She examined it and found it no more than curiously exciting. “A slave is a slave,” she said demurely, eyes glinting.
“And have no mercy on your parent! Condoning my revenge?”
The captive had thought of it, but females are equal to such contretemps. She took a deep breath and challenged him: “We can tell him jointly I have entered your harem of my own will. It has the garment of respectability, he would accept it.”
“You are presumptuous beyond what any slave would be.”
“Then punish me.”
“If you keep harping on that tune I shall do so.”
“I would gladly tell my father I am slave. But that he would not accept. He could never understand. No one in that other world could understand. If you wish to be kind we can concoct a letter. He need never know that while I use the pen I wear your chains.” Hesitantly she extended the key.
Yasin’s features wore a strange mixture of incredulity and adoration. “No, child, go to him now or remain lost. It is best.”
“As you wish, Master.”
He surveyed his kneeling slave girl soberly. “Have you no idea what today brings you?”
“No master. Not beyond the . . . the whipping I must watch.”
“You are to be ringed.”
He saw her tense, her face shadow. She said no word, but looked up at him with the wide eyed innocence of a small girl. “As a punishment, Master?”
“No. You will be doubly exquisite,” Yasin laughed in retrospect. “I had cherished a dream of returning you years hence fully ringed and well marked by the whip as one final gesture of my vengeance.”
“These rings . . . ? In Jedrah they are considered beautiful?”
“They are beautiful, they are potently female.” In silence Stacie Blair envisioned herself.
“You need never wear them. The key is in your hand.” She looked at it, startled. Without further thought she tossed it in his lap.
Quietly he tucked it away. “You will always wear chains. If, from this moment on, you seek to change your mind or to escape you will be forcibly dealt with and punished.”
“Of course.”
“The whip will never be distant.”
“I have known other things here than pain, Master.” They looked at each other and smiled. They had made a pact.
It was a strange journey and a strange command. Stacie was glad there was none to hear the thumping of her heart as she traversed the now familiar passages. The servants who passed her on the way pretended not to see her shackled feet or to hear the clinking of her chain. She had learned again to walk with fettered feet. It took longer, that was all. She wondered whimsically if she would ever run again. Each step she took was a hurting reminder of Yousef and his cane.
On that score she was happy. Unless she foolishly erred with a thoughtless stupidity she need never be tortured again. Whipped yes! But in no worse ways than the one she was about to witness, terrible as she suspected it would be. Yet it would mark a limit to the pain that she might earn, there should be no more of Yousef’s sexually cruel ingenuities.