“Up over my knee, little faun,” said Lady Eva. “And put that pretty chin in my left hand. The Queen wants to see your face. And don’t try to hide it.” A pause. I could feel and hear the paddle in my mind, but in fact all was silence.

I lay across her skirts, over her knee, hands pressing into my neck with feverish pressure, and waited. Her skirts tickled my cock, tortured it.

“Your Majesty, don’t you want to enjoy this little repast yourself?” Lady Eva said.

“I do, but I’ll enjoy it even more,” said the Queen, “if you do it. You do it better than I do, Eva.”

“Your Majesty!”

“No, truly you do.”

“Well, this precious little porkling hasn’t been spanked over the knee yet,” said Lady Eva, as though reflecting. “And I do so love doing it. Brenn, I want perfection now, little boy, do you hear me? Lips sealed, hands clamped to your neck as if they were bound.”

“Yes, madam,” I said, and this unleashed a sob in my throat but my lips didn’t release it. The tears rose in my eyes. This was infinitely more humiliating than standing for a beating with a belt, more humiliating somehow even than being walked on a leash, puppy-style, in the gardens. When my groom, Fane, had done it earlier, it had not registered with me so intensely. It had been abrupt, simple, brief. But now in this perfumed parlor with the Queen herself to watch what was happening, it seemed the greatest test of submission I had yet to endure. Yet it never occurred to me to beg, plead, or try to move away, or to protest in any way. I was delivered utterly to the moment, helpless as if I were bound hand and foot.

Though my eyes were half closed I looked at the fire and wished with all my heart I could see the Queen, at least see her slippers.

It was a paddle, not a belt as I expected it would be.

“Count the spanks, little goatling,” sang Lady Eva.

“Yes, madam, three, four, five, six . . .”

The delicious simmering pain spread through the skin and then deep into my backside, or so it seemed.

“Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .”

Soon with all my might, I was struggling to lie still, my arms tensing, my fingers rigid as I struggled not to move, not to reach back like a helpless child to shield myself, and I knew my legs and bottom were moving.

At last, Lady Eva stopped. She gave a great sigh.

I lay waiting, my backside so hot surely it must glow in the shadows, my thighs blazing. I had counted some thirty spanks. I was coughing and shivering with sobs. And lips closed or not, I couldn’t keep quiet. It was impossible. My body was spasming with my sobs.

I heard the fire crackling loudly. Suddenly the pain in my sore hindquarters increased. Then softened and spread out all through me in a warm, delicious way. And my tears flowed even more freely.

I belong to you, my queen, I was thinking. If only I could say it, and to you, Lady Eva, who lifted me from the new applicants and brought me here. I only want to please.

“Kneel up now, Brenn, over here, before me,” said the Queen.

At once I obeyed, struggling to withdraw from Lady Eva’s lap without touching her in any disrespectful way. The sensation in my cock doubled and kicked, and throbbed.

I moved forward towards the Queen’s skirts on my hands and knees.

“Closer,” said the Queen. There was the long delicate hand again, with its shining nails, and a lovely perfume rose from her skirts as though they’d been washed in rosewater.

I struggled closer. I was almost touching her.

Her fingers examined my erect cock, and my pubic hair again.

“I’d love to see this all brushed with gold,” she said. “Yet I like the blackness of it, so very black.” She felt of my thigh, inside, and pulled gently at the hair. “Brenn, my precious faun,” she said. “My little satyr.”

She rose suddenly, her skirts sweeping over my face and form, blinding me, and then I watched furtively as she walked to the far wall. She stood against it beside a sideboard with silver candles on it. How shapely and young she appeared with her small waist and her bright yellow hair.

“Come here, on your hands and knees,” she said.

I obeyed, and as I came up before her, she lifted her skirts gracefully to reveal her long wonderfully curved white legs and the golden triangle of her pubic hair. Such a delicate sex, such a sweet tender-looking sex.

“Stand up and take me, little faun!” she said.

I rose up at once. If I had stopped to think, I would have lost my nerve in disbelief.

“Put your arms around my neck and your lips on mine,” she said.

I did as she told me, her high round breasts warm against my chest through the fabric of her gown, her face against mine, soft and tender as a fresh peach. Her mouth tasted of honey.

My cock rammed clumsily at her little cleft, but then I felt her fingers there, parting her lips, guiding me. Such a girlish sex. So shy.

“Bad little boy!” she said. Then the hot sheath had descended on me, wet and small like the sex of a girl.

Her hand clenched my sore backside. I could feel her little crypt throbbing against the whole length of my shaft.

“Kiss me and take me hard, hard as if you’d found me in the street of a besieged town,” she said.

I thrust into her blindly and madly, as hard and as fast as I could, while my lips closed over her, tasting her sweetness, my eyes looking down at her closed eyelids. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, harder, my little woodland god. Come and carry me away with you.”

I rammed her against the wall. I bucked and rode her hard until I suddenly spent, unable to keep back a loud moan, and then she rode the wave with me.

At last I stood, still holding her.

“All right, little boy,” said Lady Eva. “Down on your hands and knees. You’re going to eat your supper now from the little bowl on the hearth. Come.”

The Queen smiled at me. I looked full at her, into her enchanting blue eyes, such pure blue eyes, so trusting, so loving, and then I looked down, bashfully. She kissed me.

I dropped to the floor to obey.

I was so delightfully tired, my head swam. I could smell the food suddenly, beef and gravy.

I crawled towards the steaming dish.

“With your mouth only, piglet,” said Lady Eva. “Every morsel.”

I wrestled with the first few bites and then thought, Why am I holding back, and for whom, and then I began to eat faster.

“That’s it, Brenn. I tell you, Your Majesty, this is the finest little postulant to come through the gates.”

“Yes,” said the Queen, “but I think His Majesty is quite delighted as well with the girl who came with him.”

So the King was with Sybil? I went on eating until I was licking the empty dish. My face was smeared with gravy. But my heart leapt at the thought of Sybil pleasing, Sybil being with the King, Sybil being accepted as I’d been.

Lady Eva pulled me up and wiped at my mouth and chin a little roughly with a napkin. “You will learn to do all this just a little bit better,” she said holding me by a lock of my hair on the top of my head. “But you are a nonpareil.”

vii

I lay in a small bedchamber with no furnishings. A great brawny attendant had carried me back to the Postulants’ Hall, and there a sleepy groom I did not know had bathed me and oiled me with amazing tenderness. He’d stopped to kiss me many times, rubbing oil into my fingers and my toes, and spreading some thick healing compound over my sore backside.

He was so gentle he seemed some sort of spirit in the drowsy quiet night in which all slept.

Then I was placed in this bedroom.

No restraints, no holes in the bed, just Chinese cushions and incense, and a tiny silver lamp with a little shivering flame sending shadows leaping along the low ceiling.

Of course I didn’t dare to touch myself, to try to relive what had happened and use my own hand to relive the pleasure I felt.

When the door opened, I woke with a start, realizing that somehow I must have been sleeping.

Sybil stood in the door. Naked.

Her long black hair hung down covering her breasts. Her pubic hair was a perfect little heart, it seemed, and her face was glowing. She beamed at me.

“You can’t be here. This isn’t real,” I said.

“Oh, I’m here all right,” she said. She dropped down on her hands and knees and crawled into the bed next to me. A sweet fragrance came from her skin and her hair. “Queen Beauty has sent me. She says we’re to have our recreation together until tomorrow.”

“You mean it?” I sat up. “But I thought they would never allow such a thing.”

“Well, in the old days the kingdom did not,” said Sybil. She turned to me, resting on her elbow, and ran her fingers through my hair. She had a glow to her. “Brenn, she adores you.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Her face was animated and flushed and she spoke excitedly, as though she’d traveled to distant lands of the mind since I’d last seen her, as if time itself was meaningless here.

“She says slaves must have time to be with their fellows, as she puts it. She says in the old days they stole such time but she will not have such deceitfulness. She grants many slaves a respite with others. And as we came together, she says we may take our recreation together.”

She went on, her eyes wide, and her lips glistening.