§
As I watched Mireia drowse, clad only in a thin layer of moisture, with Rod’s arm draped over her from where he lay on her opposite side, it felt a bit surreal. Even weirder to me was her hand still firmly clutching mine as the pair quietly slept in my bed. I think it was the juxtaposition of the two, my eyes viewing a scene which I felt I was intruding upon but Mir’s hand insisting, No, you belong here too.
One simple fact thwarted my original plan to get the two together and then slip away. I forgot that Mir was my Servant, and currently luxuriating in the bond she normally blocks out. She wasn’t about to let this opportunity for intimacy with her Mistress slip away. Thus, my plan to, if I may be blunt, apply lubrication and depart failed at the outset.
Due to knowledge from my prior lives, I had a much better understanding of what to do, but she was a fast learner. Our intimacy was by no means a one-way street, and was by no means limited to foreplay. And for her part, Mireia made up for her inexperience with considerable enthusiasm.
She wanted to keep going after we gave one another our attention for one round, but after our time together, I looked over at the man whose presence I had been doing my best to ignore and beckoned with authority.
“Your turn,” I said, sliding behind Mireia and propping her up to face him. For Mir’s sake, I will turn the rest over to the canvas of imagination.
Surprisingly, even though Mireia made me stay, Rod respected my boundaries and concentrated on the girl he was supposed to mind. I honestly thought I would have to fend him off.
Now, as they rested, I sent a prayer into the Immortal Realm.
Rhea, are you watching us? We should be ready for the next step now.
After a few heartbeats, the response came, The young thing is still enjoying her time in her man’s arms, Little Sen. Why would you rush things?
She looked awfully asleep to me, but I suppose that didn’t mean she wasn’t having a warm, snuggly dream. It would count, I guess. So I left things as they were for a while, reflecting on the day behind us.
My evening had largely consisted of a visit from Colonel Morgas to brief me on the latest news from the Sabellian Pass and the Suldor front, which we would have to find a new name for soon, since we now held nearly all of Suldor and the front actually ran through the counties north of it.
I devoted the remainder of the time to a proper soak in the bath, which had started with a cat diving into it, much to the alarm of my maids. Naturally, that cat morphed into a pixie, once in the water, and no cat hair got into the bathwater, but she gave the maids quite a fright. Once she had paddled around the tub to her satisfaction, she took up her customary resting spot in my cleavage and we chatted. Before I knew it, it was the Evening hour and time to meet Mireia.
So only now, while the other two napped, did I get around to reviewing a report from Sirth. She had alerted me that Gyges was entering Beretin’s interrogation room while I was with the colonel, but I left it to her to listen through the [Blood Tracker] as the Hekatoncheir skillfully grilled the man.
Naturally the intelligence she could gather was thin. If he had been dealing in smuggling and other covert activities, he likely had layers of magic protection shielding his mind, and her aim in this first session was more to determine the nature and quality of those rather than to get at the actual information.
But during his responses, although they were always evasive as to what he had done and who he was working with, he revealed his motivations, and those motivations were shocking to me.
Turns out, many nobles had a very different view of my father than the commoners had. The Beretin family were his loyalists, and their motives for illegally stealing and exporting Pendorian technology had been an act of defiance against Mother, or ‘The Witch’ as they were calling her, whom they considered a usurper.
Witches have a slightly different vibe on Huade from the various versions that I remember from Earth. Forget about the cartoonish women in peaked, wide-brimmed hats riding a broom, or the followers of Satanism or Wicca, or the female students at Hogwarts.
The term corresponds better with the image that Puritans and others held in Early Modern times, and Church teachings from the Medieval era. The residents of Salem and their contemporaries in England and elsewhere believed that evil women consorted with the Devil to gain mystical powers, and here on Huade, with local variations depending upon local religion, the similar idea is that someone might gain powers through dealing with demons.
It’s local superstition. The Royal Knights are unaware of any real-world ‘witches’. They are as mythical as vampire ‘thralls’. Demons might possess humans to control them on occasion, and might practice commerce of the mundane variety to obtain goods from humans, but they reap no benefit from granting humans powers. They would just as soon kill or enslave them, and demonic possession is a very different condition than being a ‘witch’.
But it seems that Duke Egon’s secret loyalists believed that Owen and his sons, and possibly me and Mother (meaning Princess Deharè) were the helpless puppets of the ‘Witch’ Sasara, who secretly controlled all of Orestania, not just the Duchy of Pendor.
Father, partially under the control of Astaroth, had probably exhibited some signs of mind control to his vassals before Mother killed him. This jibed well with Beretin’s belief that Mother had first attempted to enslave Father with her powers, then killed him when she found controlling him too difficult.
And since Father, during his decline into insanity, had friendly relations with Parna and Fiorene and had supported Crown Prince Cullen before his crimes were exposed, House Beretin chose to support the Southern side in the impending conflict. And horrifyingly, they believed that I, once I broke from the Witch’s control, would align with my father’s allies as well, and condone what his family and their allies had done.
In fact, he insisted that he was, and always had been, my loyal vassal.
This had all spilled out of the man’s mouth easily, since he clearly believed he should have sympathetic ears among his captors. He never said anything to incriminate himself of any specific crimes, be it weapon smuggling, war material hoarding, or slave smuggling, but he fiercely professed his loyalty to me, the ‘true Duchess’ as his fanaticism spilled out. It seems I had been the real duchess in his eyes from birth.
It might seem strange that he accepted that I was Father’s daughter without question, not some demonic substitute, but this was probably because the Dorian Temple in Tëan Tír and the Ostish Temple in Atius had both confirmed my parentage. Actually, people rarely question such things on Huade. Birthright magic just makes it too easy to check.
Gyges withdrew after about an hour of interrogation, setting plans to return for more rounds in the upcoming days, so that’s all she got out of the man. She promised me a briefing at mid-morning and signed off, then dispersed my [Blood Tracker] herself. No wonder she didn’t mind me putting it on her.
§
About a half-hour after my exchange with Rhea, Mireia rolled over and glommed onto me, pressing her bare bosom into my arm while kissing my cheek.
“Thank you, Mistress,” she said with a genuine smile.
I did my best not to wince. I have no doubt she used the term ‘Mistress’ with Lady Sasie’s mother or some other female authority figure in the Parna household when she was their slave. I didn’t feel good about being the recipient of it now, no matter how similar it was to the ‘Young Mistress’ honorific I used to receive.
But I liked these clear, bright eyes better than the slightly guilt-tinged eyes she had previously looked at me with. Her visible happiness stopped me from saying anything.
“I’m glad you liked it,” I told her, giving her cheek a light return kiss.
A bit of shyness entered her voice. “But I spent more time with him than with you. Shall we even things up?”
I giggled and gave her a longer kiss, then a brief one on her lips, then told her, “Later. It’s time to restart your technique.”
“I… actually kind of like it this way, Mistress,” she noted, demurring a bit.
“That’s a problem for me,” I answered. “It affects how you think and act too much. I like it when you’re my friend Mireia, and not a dutiful slave.”
Earlier, when I got free and slipped away from the very busy couple with the intention to leave the room, Mireia had immediately demanded I return. I had covered by saying I was just fetching her bracelet, and did so. When I returned, she grabbed my hand, and even pulled me in for a kiss, determined to keep me part of things.
I tried for a short while to put the bracelet back on her then, but her wrist was too much of a moving target, so I gave up and just set it on my nightstand. I reached for it now, then showed it to her.
“Now,” I told her firmly. She pouted again, but took it and put it on. Then she stuck her tongue out at me and glommed onto me again, this time ending up partially on top of me, with one paw on my breast.
“You still didn’t get a fair share tonight,” she insisted, her fingers fiddling with me a bit.
We kissed again, and I let it go on for a while, but finally broke loose in order to tell her, “We have something more important to take care of. Is Rhea with you?”
She nodded. “She came back to wake me. She’s still here.”
“Came back?”
“It didn’t seem right to participate, Little Sen,” she replied, with a slightly different tone that told me Rhea was speaking. “I left so you three could have privacy. Take the amulet off and put it on this child now.”
Instead of complying, I worried, “Is it safe to do that?”
The amulet was using my Elder pneuma, much denser than Mireia’s human pneuma, to sustain the souls within. Because it was reaching the end of its capacity, Immortal Mother had warned me not to take it off anymore, for any reason.
“Gaia is assisting me right now, Little Sen,” Rhea replied. “It will be a heavy drain on a mortal, but it won’t be for long enough to be dangerous, with her controlling it directly. Skin contact between her and it will make it safer to transfer the souls to her womb.”
I nodded, then worked behind my neck to open the latch. The pendant had been adhering to my skin by the magic that the gods had added to keep it in contact with the wearer, but it peeled away without difficulty. I put it on Mireia and the spell kicked in again as it took up residence on her chest.
“That feels a little weird,” Mireia giggled.
“I know, right?” I answered. It had taken time for me to get used to it, as well.
With the tone that meant Rhea, she said, “This child has already declined to become pregnant as well, even though she has a goddess of fertility aiding her at the moment. Even though it’s such a great opportunity for her.”
“Can’t you give her a blessing she can use later or something?” I wondered. “She’s still very young by this society’s standards.”
“I will be using the Immortal technique [Blessing of the Fertility Goddess] on both of you, Little Sen. But it’s not something that can be kept in one’s back pocket for later use.”
“Then teach me the technique later,” I suggested. “If it’s a spiritual technique, I’ll bet Fan Li could do it.”
Mireia’s, or rather, Rhea’s expression looked uncertain, but then she shrugged. “Then there is the question of exactly how far along in your pregnancy you want to be?”
“I thought we agreed on one month, in the manner this world measures it?”
Which would mean only a couple weeks since fertilization.
“That’s the minimum. That’s about when there is enough development to securely attach the souls. But we are accelerating the processes in your body in order to do this. Once the souls are attached, we can accelerate a little longer. No more than two additional months, though. It’s important for mental development to experience the womb properly. Neurons begin forming at six weeks after fertilization or so.”
So she was inviting me to hurry it along? But there was a problem and I shook my head.
“It isn’t feasible to make it longer. Too much time elapsed between when Rod and I saw each other in the Tabad and the previous time, at school.”
“That would only be eight weeks, though,” she rebutted. “Right before the war started.”
“Only…”
I blinked. Seriously?
My compressed time in my mountain had really messed with my sense of time.
“I can safely accelerate your pregnancy that far, Little Sen,” Rhea told me. “Gaia agrees.”
Fairies and vampires are pregnant for ten Huadean months. Nearly an Earth year. Knocking it down to eight months was seriously tempting.
But Tiana’s sense of decency kicked in, with a vengeance. “I was already in that prison when we did the betrothal ceremony. Such intimacy would have had to happen before our vows. So, no.”
Rhea sighed, then nodded.
“Very well. Now embrace,” she commanded. “Maintain as much frontal skin contact as you can manage.”
Mireia complied enthusiastically, and we hugged and wriggled around a bit to find comfortable positions. It wasn’t actually very easy to do.
Mireia’s eyes rolled. “Little Sen, would it not work better to be on your knees, or standing?”
We gave each other wry smiles, then got up on our knees, hugging each other, chest to chest.
“Can I kiss her?” I wondered.
Mireia responded by kissing me first. We continued smooching while the Immortals did their work.
