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The couple entered the room behind Genette. I shook my head slightly and stood as they came in.
Rod still wore what I saw him in last, his military uniform, as pressed and polished as always. His golden blond hair was, as always, neatly combed. My fiancé is never anything but a perfectly dapper clotheshorse, following in the footsteps of his father and elder brother.
Mireia’s qipao was also still neat and unruffled, without any sign of disarray, and her neatly-styled pink coiffure also remained unchanged from the last time I saw it.
I looked at Genette, who had stepped aside once she was in the room, and requested, “Some tea for my guests, please.”
“At once, My Lady,” she answered, and quickly busied herself with that.
Gesturing to the couch on the opposite side of the low table from my chair, I requested, “Make yourselves comfortable.”
As they sat down, I was reminded of a couple of misbehaving grade-schoolers in the principal’s office. As I suspected, they had not finished their assignment.
Once my lady’s maid had poured the tea and retreated, I contemplated them for just a bit, then commented, “I actually meant for just you to come at this hour, Mir.”
Her eyes dropped down to her teacup, then roamed around as she began coloring.
Rod gave me an explanation instead. “When she noticed it was time for her appointment with you, I insisted upon tagging along, Ti. I need to apologize, after all.”
I was pretty sure this wasn’t a case of performance anxiety. I felt confident that they had never removed their clothing, so he could not have had the opportunity to encounter that sort of difficulty. And Mir, a slave girl long accustomed to servicing a master in bed, could never be the problem. So I could see only one remaining possibility.
As gently as I could, I stated, “Rod, my mother can’t wait on your guilty conscience.”
That drew an instant scowl, but no retort. Instead, a nod. He understood.
Then I admitted, “Weirdly, I know exactly how you feel.”
His scowl turned instantly into an expression of doubt.
With care, he explained, “Ti, it’s because of the magic technique used to enforce enslavement in our country. I just can’t… making her do that when she doesn’t have a true choice is just wrong. Slavery is very rare in the North, so perhaps you aren’t aware of what the slave seal does to a person.”
Stanley the Fifth, Rod’s grandfather, had normal slave trading completely banned in all territories under the King’s rule. The two Northern duchies had already banned it, so only the three Southern duchies still allowed it by the end of his time. Of course, Mother had banned it in Pendor as well, once she took over as Duchess, because Stanley’s son Owen, a supporter of his father’s goal, had insisted. So with people only able to buy and sell slaves in Parna and Fiorene, the magic slave seals that control them are indeed very rare in the North.
But in Royal Knight training, we have to learn about them, because Orestania does not have a large-scale penitentiary system like the US. Instead, felons are given slave seals and sent to work camps.
Until Stanley’s reign, felons were sold to private owners, and lifting the seal at the end of the sentence depended upon a bureaucracy that was often corrupt. A well-placed bribe from a slave owner could cause a convict’s term of enslavement to double or triple before they at last regained their freedom. So Stanley also concentrated on reforming convict bondage. His solution was to have the Crown take direct ownership of them and put them to work on public works and in the royal mines, eliminating corruption by eliminating the owners who were paying the bribes.
The magic behind a slave seal is completely different from the magic behind blood bondage, but because I’m familiar with that magic, I know how similar it is in effect.
“Your Highness,” I answered with a sad smile, “A vampire would understand better than anyone else. But…”
Shifting my gaze to Mireia, I continued, “I have a feeling that, with the enchantment that was preventing her from controlling her magic broken, Mir actually has the power to override the slave seal.”
I continued staring at her and she couldn’t keep her eyes facing me. She dropped her head slightly to look at her teacup.
Rod frowned. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
Without moving my eyes from the pink-haired girl sitting next to him, I answered, “It isn’t as powerful as blood bondage, and she is overriding that. I told you about that, remember?”
“But she has the blood slave bracelet to help her with that,” he noted.
“Because I insisted, as insurance,” I said. “But even before I gave the bracelet to her, she was overcoming the bond so well, I didn’t realize we had formed it at first.”
At last, Mireia was no longer able to stand my stare. She nodded meekly. “Now that my old master’s mind control is broken, I can block out the slave seal.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Rod asked, baffled.
Mireia hung her head further and didn’t reply, but I already had guessed the answer.
“She was afraid you would send her away, ” I said. Mireia’s head sprang up, and she stared wide-eyed at me. I added, “She didn’t want that.”
“How…” she asked in a whisper. As in, How did you know?
“It’s pretty easy to figure out,” I assure her with a smile.
Neither as Tiana nor as Robert had I experienced a serious romantic relationship, but a few of my previous incarnations did. Young love is mostly a massive onslaught of insecurities. Do they love me too? Will they stay with me if they learn about my faults? Do I really deserve their affection? Will they throw me away when they get tired of me?
In the paranoid logic of love, Mireia might think Rod would conclude she could no longer be recaptured by Parna’s people if the slave seal had no hold over her. Fearing that he then would feel okay with sending her to some safe location rather than dragging her around the kingdom so he could personally protect her, she naturally kept that information to herself.
“I’m not going to send you away, Mir,” he told her firmly. “You don’t have to worry about something like that. Besides, Parna might still kidnap you by force, without relying on the slave seal, so that doesn’t even make sense. But even without that, you…”
He broke off, frowning, his eyes flicking toward me.
A momentary chuckle escaped me, and I said, “Your Royal Highness, if you were about to say something like ‘you belong with me’ to her, then you should say it.”
His brow bunched up. “I’m supposed to say something like that in front of you?”
I let out a ‘pfft’, then admitted, “Yeah, that might be too embarrassing. But if it’s true, you should tell her.”
He didn’t reply, but he put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed slightly.
“Next time you’re in private then,” I said, then contemplated them while tapping my finger on my teacup. “But now we have a problem, you two. How do we solve it?”
After a very awkward silence, Rod turned his head very slightly toward Mireia and muttered, “We should go back to the guest room.”
I sighed. “Where you can be a couple of awkward teenagers together again? I’m actually not comfortable with that.”
He glowered at me. “I’ll take care of it!”
I retorted, “The last thing I want you to do is ‘take care of it’, with an attitude like that! This ought to be a precious time, not a chore! I don’t want…”
I cut off and pinched the bridge of my nose, wincing. Then I wondered, “We are going about this entirely the wrong way, aren’t we? Let me think.”
The practice of deciding things by committee was becoming a bit too much of a habit, I know, but I expanded my spiritual vessel and woke up several incarnations once again.
Kwelabi was the first to nope out of it.
– Human sexuality is beyond me.
Well, yes, he wasn’t human. Then Daq also ruled himself out.
– I depended upon my wife on these matters.
But Fan Li was surprisingly helpful. At least, she put her thumb on the problem.
– His Highness’s concern about the slave seal possibly making sex with the young lady constitute rape is quite commendable, but it is also a surface excuse for his real problem. More to the point, he wants to make her first time that isn’t rape a special thing, and he doesn’t know how to do it.
That jolted me a bit. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Of course the fact that Mireia had been through all of that while she belonged to the Parnas was a bigger deal than the concern that her time with Rod might not be voluntary due to the seal. But was Fan Li right, and Rod had thought about it to this extent?
Fan Li sounded amused when she replied.
– A young man like him would normally have convinced himself by now that he was different from the others, that he could overcome his lover’s problem just through his care and attentiveness. The power of what Robert calls ‘hormones’ over a man’s mind are quite strong at His Highness’s age. The fact that he is still holding back means that he has thought through things so thoroughly that he has reached the point of paralysis. He knows what he wants to accomplish and doesn’t know how to accomplish it.
Although I didn’t think she could state these things with one hundred percent certainty, I did agree that it made sense. And even if the real reason was a bit different, it was likely to be something along these lines.
– Logically, Mireia, who understands what she needs to do, could have overcome the problem simply by becoming the aggressor, but it is very likely that a woman with no sexual experience before coming to this world and only her experience as a rape victim since her arrival has no idea what to do, either.
A raucous laugh burst into my thoughts from a different part of my spiritual vessel. The baudy thoughts of an aerial mariner with absolutely no filter soon followed.
– So we got two shrinking violets and no sex? You just have to help them out, Princess!
The details behind her thoughts began coming through. The perfectly reasonable (to Sirth) solution to this situation instantly caused my cheeks, my neck and my ear tips all color simultaneously. I lodged an immediate protest.
… which she shot down without hesitation.
– You always claim you should wait ‘til marriage, but you have no intention of sleeping with yer fiancé, right? You’re just waitin’ until he puts a ring on it before steppin’ out to play with the girlies. Forget it! This situation here is more important than your silly rules, Princess!
I dropped my hand and looked at my two visitors, who were still watching me with curiosity. Not wanting to meet their eyes anymore, I looked over at Genette instead. I blushed deeper as I uttered my next words, but the situation was dire and I couldn’t back down.
