"Of course I told myself all this was disgusting and beneath me. I should never play such games." He laughed softly, and squeezed Beauty against his chest with his arm, kissed her forehead. "I've played them enough since," he said.

"But now and then, too, Prince Gerald did choose a Princess. This angered the Queen, though only slightly. She had the little girl victim perform some hopeless tasks in the hope of escape, the same game with the slippers, or the getting of a hand mirror or the like, all the while driving her mercilessly with the paddle. Then she would be thrown down on her back and taken by the lusty little Prince for the Queen's amusement. Or she might be doubled and hung as in the Hall of Punishments.

Beauty winced at this. To be taken in such a position hadn't occurred to her. But a Princess would surely be ripe and open for it.

"Ad you can imagine," Alexi went on, "these spectacles became a torture. In my hours alone, I longed for them. As I watched, I could feel the blows on my bu**ocks as if I too were being spanked, and I felt my penis stir against my will at the sight of the little girls being chased, or even Prince Gerald being stroked and sometimes suckled by a Page for the Queen's amusement.

"I should add that Prince Gerald found this hard. He was an anxious Prince, ever striving to please the Queen, and punishing himself in his own mind, dreadfully, for failure. He never seemed to realize that many of the tasks and games were deliberately made too difficult for him. The Queen would have him brush her hair with the brush fixed in his teeth. This is most difficult. And he would be weeping when he could not brush her hair in long enough strokes, nor thoroughly enough. Of course she was annoyed. She'd throw him over her lap, and with a leather-handled brush flail at him. He wept, full of shame and misery, and feared her worst wrath: that he be given over to others for pleasure and chastisement."

"Does she ever give you to others, Alexi?" Beauty asked.

"When she's displeased with me, she gives me to others," he continued. "But I have surrendered and accepted this. It saddens me but I accept it. I am never in the frenzy in which Prince Gerald always found himself. He would beseech the Queen with silent kisses all over her slippers. It was never any use. The more he pleaded, the more she punished him."

"What became of him?"

"The time came for him to be sent back to his Kingdom. That time comes for all slaves. It will come for you, too, though when, no one can say, on account of the Prince's passion for you, and that he awakened you and claimed you. Your Kingdom was a legend here," said Prince Alexi.

"But Prince Gerald went home richly rewarded and I think most relieved to be let go. He was of course beautifully dressed before he left, and received by the Court, and then we were assembled to see him ride out. It's the custom. I think it was as humiliating for him as anything else. It was as if he remembered his nakedness and his subjugation. But other slaves suffer just as much when they are released for many reasons. Who knows, however. Maybe Prince Gerald's endless worries saved him from something worse. It's impossible to tell. Princess Lizetta is saved by her rebellion. It was interesting to Prince Gerald surely..."

Prince Alexi paused to kiss Beauty again and soothe her. "Don't try to understand all I say just now. That is, don't try to find immediate meaning in it," he said. "Merely listen and learn and perhaps what I tell you shall save you some mistakes, give you different paths for the mind later. Ah, you are so tender to me, my secret flower."

He would have embraced her again, perhaps become carried away again by his passion again, but she stopped him with a touch of her fingers to his lips.

"But tell me, when you were shackled to the wall, what did you think of...when you were alone, did you daydream, and what did you dream?"

"What a strange question," he said.

Beauty seemed very serious. "Did you think of your former life, and wish you were free for this or that pleasure?"

"Not really," he said slowly. "I thought rather of what would happen to me next, I suppose. I don't know. Why do you ask this?"

Beauty didn't reply, but she had dreamed three times since she had come and each time of her old life to her had seemed grim and fraught with tiny worries. She remembered hours with her embroidery, and the endless bowing at Court to the Princes who kissed her hand. She remembered sitting quite still for hours at interminable banquets where others talked and drank, and she had felt only boredom.

"Please continue, Alexi," she said gently. "But to whom does the Queen give you when she's displeased?"

"Ah, that is a question with several answers," he said. "But let me proceed. You can well imagine what my existence was, the hours of boredom and solitude broken only by these diversions: the Queen herself, Prince Gerald's punishment, or the fierce paddling from Felix. Well, soon, in spite of myself and my rage, I commenced to show my excitement whenever the Queen came into the chamber. She ridiculed me for it, but she marked it. And now and then, I could not conceal it when I saw Prince Gerald so boldly erect and taking his pleasure of one of the other slaves, or even taking the paddle. The Queen observed all this, and each time she saw that my organ was stiff and beyond my will, she would have Felix at once deliver a hard spanking to me. I struggled, I tried to curse her, and at first these spankings quelled my passion, but very soon they did not quell it. And the Queen added to my misery with her own hands, slapping my penis, stroking it, and then slapping it again at the very moment that Felix was punishing me. I twisted, struggled. It was no use. Very soon, I so craved the Queen's hands that I was moaning aloud and in one of these great tormented states, I did all that I could by gesture and manner to show that I would obey her.

"Of course I had no intention of doing so. I did so only long enough to be rewarded. And I wonder if you can imagine how difficult this was for me. I was put free on my hands and knees, and told to kiss her feet. It was as if I had only just been stripped naked. Never had I obeyed any command; nor been made to obey while free of shackles. And yet so tortured was I for relief, my sex so swollen with desire, that I forced myself to kneel at her feet and kiss her slippers. I shall never forget the magic of her hands when she touched me. I could feel the shock of passion through me, and as soon as she stroked and toyed with my sex, my passion was at once released, which greatly angered her.

"'You have no control,'" she said crossly to me, 'and for this you will be punished. But you have tried to submit and that is something.' But at that moment, I rose up and tried to run from her. I'd never had any intention of submitting to anything.