“Now tell me, do you love your master?” I said. “I want to know your secret soul.”

“Oh, yes, Lady Eva,” she said breathlessly. “I never knew such happiness at Court.” And then she let it all slip out again. “I don’t care if the Queen never calls me back to the castle. Please, you must let me remain here. I don’t want the Queen to come back.”

I cradled her bowed head in my hands. “What am I going to have to do, whip you myself here and now? I would never have unsealed your lips if I’d known you were so foolish, so disobedient. You know what is permitted and what is not permitted,” I said. “The Queen decides where slaves live and whom they serve. You can reveal your soul to me with a wiser choice of words, you know that!” I lifted her chin. She bit her lip despairingly as she looked at me. I winked at her. “I’ll do everything,” I whispered, “to see you remain with Tristan.”

She flung her arms around me and I allowed it, pressing her lips against my sex which I felt keenly in spite of the thick fabric of my gown. I gestured for her to rise and I wrapped my arms around her, kissing her deeply. Not all slaves know how to kiss. Some of the most subservient and finely trained simply never acquire the knack of kissing. But Blanche knew how to kiss.

I could feel my own nipples hardening inside my gown and my own sex growing moist. But I couldn’t pull away from her. I covered her eyes with my kisses, licking at her salty tears.

“But Lady Eva, why does the Queen stay away so long?” she whispered in my ear. “There is talk. Slaves are afraid.”

“Tell me what they say,” I coaxed. I smoothed her hair back from her forehead.

“A small group of punished slaves from the village were brought here yesterday by Captain Gordon—to work in my master’s garden. Three women and two men. I don’t remember their names. At feeding time, they were whispering fearfully that the Queen was sorely missed, that even Captain Gordon and Lady Julia could not keep the village entirely in order in the Queen’s absence. They speak of the Queen no longer loving the kingdom. They speak of the Queen abandoning our servitude.”

“That’s idle foolishness.” I sighed. “I’m not surprised, however, that they talk of such things. They miss the Queen’s presence even though they seldom ever caught a glimpse of her. Well, I’ve spent the day in the village. I had at least thirty slaves soundly spanked on the Public Turntable. And I went through the pony stables inspecting every pony for myself. All is well. I suspect those grumbling slaves will sleep well tonight . . . or for the time being. But surely everything will be better when the Queen returns.”

“Yes, if she allows me to remain with Prince Tristan,” she ventured as she kissed my cheek. “Beautiful Lady Eva,” she said.

“Manners, my girl,” I said. I pressed my finger to her lips. “I assure you, when the Queen returns, I’ll do all in my power to make sure you remain with Tristan. Now repeat that to no one, not even your master, and when he punishes you tonight, if he gives you leave to speak, be contrite for your outbursts.”

She nodded gratefully and opened her tender mouth for me to kiss her again, which I did. “But now you let me go, you vixen,” I said. “You’re too sweet and I’m too tired and must go back to the castle.”

I squeezed her warm bottom hard and felt her sigh against me. How hot the flesh was, how deliciously hot.

“Yes, Lady Eva,” she said. And I allowed myself one last slow and deep kiss.

ii

It was a short ride to the castle, on a narrow winding road that skirted the Queen’s Village. The full moon made the homeward journey all the more easy. And tired as I was, I was glad that I’d seen Tristan.

Tristan had been brought to the kingdom decades ago as a young royal naked slave, and all knew the story. The Queen demanded such tributes from all her allies, and many other realms sent their spoilt and unruly royal young ones to serve the Queen as a matter of course, welcoming the enhancement of their young rebels by their strict pleasure training, and the gold purse that always accompanied the return of such slaves to their homeland. Some noble families did the very same thing, but the majority of slaves were princes and princesses. Oh, what I would give to have seen Tristan then, handsome Tristan, naked and standing ready for service.

But I had not yet been born when Tristan was first enslaved. I was twenty years old now, and it was difficult to grasp that he, with his boyish smile and innocent blue eyes, was actually forty. His story was well known to me.

He’d proved rebellious with his young master, Lord Stefan, the Queen’s cousin—a former lover who could not master him—and been packed off to the Queen’s Village for harsh punishment for his disobedience. There he’d been bought and trained as a pony boy by my uncle Nicholas, the Queen’s Chronicler. Uncle Nicholas had loved Tristan. And all might have gone well from that time onward, given Nicholas’s penchant for taming those he loved, if soldiers of the Sultan hadn’t raided the kingdom, kidnapping some of the finest slaves for the sultanate.

Tristan had been one of those taken off with the famous princesses Beauty and Rosalynd and Elena and Princes Laurent and Dmitri.

Now the Sultan, long gone from the world, had been a close ally of Queen Eleanor. Her ancestors and his had started the custom of naked pleasure slavery over a century before that time. But in Queen Eleanor’s realm it had fallen into decline, and when she mounted the throne, emissaries from the Sultan had come to help the Queen revive it and make Bellavalten once more the talk of the world.

Occasional slave raids were part of a game played by the Queen and the Sultan from time to time. And any slave of Bellavalten learned much under the customs of the Sultan’s pleasure gardens. So nobody would have thought much of this latest raid had not it ensnared the fabled Sleeping Beauty. Her parents demanded that Queen Eleanor rescue their daughter and return her to them at once. Servitude to the Queen and her son, the Crown Prince, they could approve but not the loss of Princess Beauty to a foreign lord.

So Captain Gordon was sent with a few handpicked soldiers to reclaim Beauty and what other slaves he might rescue easily with her. Alas, scandal followed. Beauty, and her companions Tristan and Laurent, had not wanted to be brought back; indeed the three of them had fussed, rebelled, and all but kicked and screamed as they were recaptured.

And the beautiful and irresistible Laurent, one of the worst of the rebels, had even been so bold as to kidnap one of the Sultan’s most devoted stewards, Lexius, and insist that Captain Gordon bring him back as a trophy to serve Queen Eleanor.

Queen Eleanor had been furious with her recalcitrant brats. Beauty she could not punish further, as she was at once freed to go home to her parents’ kingdom. But Laurent and Tristan the Queen condemned to a year in the village stables—to the hardest labor a slave can know: perpetual servitude as a pony. As for the mysterious and seductive Lexius, the Queen was outraged that any slave should presume to offer himself to her as Lexius proceeded to do. Yet she had relented, later making him a favorite as dear to her as her own Prince Alexi, whom she’d famously broken in harsh ways.

Before the end of that year, Laurent had been freed due to the death of his father. Home he had gone to become the King of his realm, and no sooner had he received the crown than he had ridden out to the home of Princess Beauty, who had served naked beside him under Queen Eleanor, to make Beauty his queen.

Ah, it had been another great scandal in Bellavalten as word spread that two former naked slaves were now married and ruling the most powerful house in Europe. Queen Eleanor had thought them brazen and disgraceful, but what could she do? King Laurent was a proud and able ally; and Queen Beauty became the jewel of his Court.

“I will not tolerate talk of them ever,” the Queen had famously declared, “and their names must never be mentioned to me.” Royal slaves, when freed by her, should return with heads bowed to their kingdoms, never speaking of their naked servitude in her opinion, quick to slip into the demands of royal life. But here were a pair of legendary incorrigibles married to each other and presiding over a glamorous kingdom.

My uncle Nicholas told me that the story of King Laurent and Queen Beauty had not been easy to suppress. Indeed, it spread wildly amongst the slaves of the castle and the village who were heard to comment that it served Queen Eleanor’s son, the Crown Prince, right for bringing the awakened Sleeping Beauty here as a slave in the first place and not making her his bride.

Cursed by a wise woman to sleep for a hundred years with her entire family and Court, Princess Beauty had been awakened by the kiss of the Crown Prince—who had brought Beauty naked and submissive to his mother’s feet.

The Queen had boldly disregarded the legend, and her son’s remarkable achievement, treating Beauty like any other abject erotic toy of the Court, and exiling her to the village for her first real disobedience.

But once King Laurent had taken Beauty as his bride, the Queen sang another song. “If anyone should be the husband of the wench,” said the Queen, “it should be my son, not that impudent and unruly Laurent. How did such a thing ever happen with those two disobedient and rebellious slaves! I tell you I am confounded.”