The Boy-Toy Wife (nsfw)

[Gargulec]

Introduction and content warnings

This story is intended to contain a significant density of pornographic material, centered around kinks from the broad D/S and S/M spectrum, as well as humiliation, and forced feminisation fetishes. It is also a story about violence, ethnic and transphobic, legacies of imperial domination, and clashing systems of gender. Themes of relationship neglect, gender dysphoria, and emotional abuse, both intentional, as well as not, will likewise make an appearance. As such, reader's advisory is suggested.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter One: In Which Miria Has Her Measure Taken

On the day Miria was to be sized for a new chastity cage, she was woken shortly after dawn by the politely incessant hands of house-servants. The dull gray visible through a slit between the window curtains, forecasting yet another cold and damp spring day, hardly encouraged her to leave the heavy duvet's warmth – but the stern-faced Hofmeisterin would have none of that.

"Young lady," she demanded, staring half-awake Miria down, "time is of the essence."

That was not wrong. The new cage was Lady Governor's personal order, and so she was almost certainly going to make an appearance at the taking of measures, which in turn meant that Miria would have to be made as presentable as her body would allow. Still, she was not supposed to begrudge the old servant for the fact she did not even wait for Miria's permission to start pulling down the covers and forcing her out of the bed, even if it was doubtful that the other Lady Governor's wives would receive the same treatment.

But she was not the other ones; she was the sixth one. She suppressed a sigh she knew the Hofmeisterin would find unseemly and slid out of her bed, feet finding the warm slippers already waiting on the floor. Her hand moved to wipe the last of sleep away from her eyes, only to receive a stiff slap from the old servant. Instead, she bit down on a bitter must you, and blinked a few times.

Aside from the looming black tower that was the Hofmeisterin—who had a name once, Miria was certain, and would never allow anyone but the Lady Governor herself to use it—a pair of other servants flocked into the bed-chamber. One was a familiar sight: the stocky and perpetually smiling Agnes-the-house-beautician; the other, some yellow-haired maid with a child's face and a nervous glint in her eyes, Miria could not recognize. She had to be new.

"Mariś," the Hofmeisterin ordered, "robe for the young lady."

The girl rushed forward, almost tripping on the hem of her dress; moments later, Miria found herself enveloped in a thick and wonderfully warm fabric, almost soft enough to draw her back to sleep. But, alas, other matters were more pressing.

"The bath should be ready," she continued, her eyes still primed on the Lady Governor's sixth wife. "Take it from here, Agnes. But be prompt. We are expecting Master Glażek before noon."

Though it had been a number of months now—Miria entered the household in the closing days of autumn—she still had to resist the urge to protest being passed from hand to hand like that. Could she not take care of herself? She frowned, reminding herself that no, she could not. That was a part of the point.

That point was that now, she had a bathroom adjoining her bedchambers, tiled with real marbles, and lit by smokeless hellfire lamps, their bright light scintillating in the wall-length mirror opposite of the steaming bath. That point was that there was yet another maid, that slightly hunched one that everyone called Kaś, waiting by the tub, scrubs in hand and a shaving kit at the ready. That point was that once she pulled down her night-gown (which was as much as she was allowed to do on her own), she could spot the awkward, pyramid-shaped breasts slowly budding on the sides of her broad, revoltingly masculine chest.

In spite of her better instincts, she could not help herself, and looked up from that sorry display to where the wide shoulders converged towards a thick neck, where knotted cartilage shifted up and down the thin skin with every breath taken, and then higher still, to the dirty-black plain of young beard-shadow staining her jaw, and the uneven, retreating lines of hair whose length barely concealed that-

"Please cover it," she asked quietly, stepping into the warm bath, and the Kaś' steady hands.

Agnes pulled a curtain down, black cloth veiling the mirror, so that the image would slowly fade from Miria's eyes, or at least try to. She mouthed a quiet thank you to the beautician, as the maid slowly and carefully scrubbed her body pink. Reluctantly, but inevitably, she relaxed.

"So no breakfast for me, hm?" she asked in Agnes' direction, moving her chin up to give Kaś access to her neck.

"I'm sorry young lady," the beautician's voice reached her, warm and apologetic. "But you will have to be epilated and douched and so…"

She did not finish, leaving the implication unstated. It was the one thing Miria could never really get about this house, and the veil of modesty it tried to wrap around her position in it: that of the boy-toy wife. The role assigned to her was to be seen and played with, and nothing else. So why hang the voice, why leave unstated what was to follow the douching, which was also the reason that Miria was not going to see food today until way into the afternoon? Was Agnes trying to protect her from the reality she would have to live through anyway? The reality that Miria offered herself unto willingly?

Again, she had to stop herself from sighing, though this time it was on the account of the straight razor scraping against the skin of her cheeks. It had to be the weather, she conceded, the late March dreariness, that kept clouding her thoughts and drawing them to these kinds of useless wonderings. Had she not been excited for today just last night? Excited enough to steal a moment of privacy for herself and try to masturbate, a furtive pleasure only minimally disturbed by the unfortunate side-effects of the wife-medicine? Even now, she could feel something stir in her groin at the thought of what today was going to entail. And yet…

Fortunately for her melancholy, Kaś' was done with her work soon enough, and instead of languidly lounging in a warm bath, Miria ended up on a nearby gurney, yelping in quick succession as Agnes surely and steadily removed any trace of hair from her lower body.

"You were very brave today," the beautician offered—as she always did.

Miria tried to smile, and then managed to, her consciousness momentarily fading into the cooling, fragrant sensation of experienced hands rubbing expensive balms into her now-smooth skin. They smelled of infernal herbs that she could not name, nor even imagine, and which her father would likely compare to the odour of sin, or at least barbarous spices.

"Now, young lady, please…" an awkward hitch in Agnes' voice informed Miria what she was supposed to do next.

Biting her lip, and feeling that stir of shame and desire one more time, she pulled herself up and to the side slightly, offering Agnes' hands an easy access to her back. The cool probing of a metal nozzle followed seconds later, in a procedure that Miria still could not find routine. Nor, unfortunately, entirely unpleasant—especially with what was to immediately follow it.

"So," the beautician asked, once Miria was thoroughly cleaned down there, "which size were you wearing the last time?"

There was a sound of a wooden box opening somewhere behind Miria, and she could easily imagine both the container itself—ornamented with beautifully carved scenes of demonic hunts in an era long gone—and its contents, arranged from the smallest to the biggest.

"Four."

"And how was it?"

Once, when her life as a boy-toy wife still felt more like a fantasy, or a dream about to be interrupted, than a concrete reality, she answered that question with a lie; it ended up far less pleasant and far more painful than she had anticipated. She had learned since.

"A bit too large."

"Hm," Agnes nodded. "Lady Governor's tastes in this regard are known, but you will have to wear it for most of today, I worry. Will a three slip?"

"It shouldn't?" Miria replied with a hint of uncertainty.

"Very well, then," the words just carried the smile gracing the beautician's face as she picked the ornament from the box. "Please try to relax."

Cool, viscous liquid dripped between Miria's buttocks, shortly ahead those old experienced fingers prying her slightly open to make way for the metal bulb slipping inside. Lady Governor's boy-toy wife made a small gasp, but it hurt less than usual, and the sensation of a foreign body filling her up never failed to deliver on its illicit pleasures. She exhaled, letting Agnes test if the plug sat securely; when the beautician was satisfied, she let Miria back on her feet.

The Hofmeisterin took over from there. To Miria's slight surprise, the uniform prepared for her for the day was mostly an embodiment of modesty. Plain stockings, lacquered black shoes, a simple black dress reaching from the collar-bone past ankles, a wig coiffed into a conservative bun. If there was anything prepared for her that stood out from this common drabness, it was offered as a matter of necessity: a velvet choker topped with a lace rose, to hide the unseemly curvature of Miria's neck, the absence of an undergarment to facilitate easier access for master Glażek, and, obviously, the corset.

"That's better," the Hofmeisterin decided as Mariś finished lacing Miria's waist in a less revolting shape. "Agnes, make her up. But no eccentricity. Make sure it passes muster, no more."

The plug dug uncomfortably, lovingly into Miria's insides as the beautician sat her down before the dresser. She tried not to look at her face, however better it looked now that the toilettes were almost done; instead she returned, once again, to that nagging question of when was she going to be allowed to learn to work with poudres and rouges herself, instead of being a doll under someone else's brush. Perhaps never; the Hofmeisterin had scoffed when Miria last asked this question.

"All done," Agnes reported, offering Miria's face for inspection.

The make-up covered and highlighted enough that Miria could look at herself without wincing, and still left enough exposed that she could not forget what lay beneath. This satisfied the Hofmeisterin, mostly, which left just one more thing for this morning routine.

"Now, young lady," she commanded, her tone whip-sharp. "Your medicine."

The procedure was no different from any other day. The old servant produced a pair of pastilles, one dull green, the other bright red, and had Miria chew on each other thoroughly, watching her for any sign of trickery throughout. When she was satisfied there was no way for the sixth wife to avoid having ingested each pill, she marked it in a special journal. Not long after Miria was married to the Lady Governor, she pleaded with the Hofmeisterin that there was no need for such scrutiny, that she was more than willing to take her wife-medicine, and would not even consider trying to spit it out or otherwise avoid its influence. The old servant saw it as an obvious lie and example of lowlanders' famed duplicity; after all, it was well-known what their opinion of boy-wives and wife-medicine otherwise was.

At long last, it was time to move to see the craftsman, arrived all the way from Tall Pyres in the south to service the Lady Governor's latest wife. All the way to the study, the Hofmeisterin kept reminding Miria of what it took to be a lady. The refrain was familiar. Smaller steps, was one of her demands, or she would notice something wrong about Miria's hands and demand she work better to not draw attention to them and their shape. Some of those words slid right off the sixth wife. Others found purchase.

"And remember, eyes down, and hide your lust!" the old servant whispered, pushing open the oaken door into the sun-filled study.

Asha, by the grace of Her Infernal Majesty appointed the Lady Governor of the Lowland Province, formerly known as the kingdom of Leshia, was the first thing to grab Miria's attention. How could she not? Even seated behind her chestnut deck, even slightly hunched under the weight of her work, she still towered above her wife, and the entire world. Her blood was of pure demonic extraction, belonging to a line of infernal sovereigns that extended unbroken from the time of Azya the Dire Hand, and it showed: in the brick-red of her skin, in the gentle but precise curvature of her horns, in the way her nails tapered to jet-black claws, in the deep glow at the bottom of her dark eyes. When Miria first saw this woman stand a head and a half above her, she was stunned out of speech; when she first felt her heavy hand rest on her shoulder, she could only mewl incoherently; when she first tasted her kiss on the night they were married, she could not let it out of her thoughts for weeks on end.

"Lady wife," she whispered, keeping her voice low, so that its timbre would not betray its truth.

"Miria," the Lady Governor acknowledged her, briefly looking up from the piles of papers littering the desk. "Good."

As always, she sounded tired, her husky voice struggling to reach above a disinterested whisper. But Miria would not be brought before her if the Lady Governor did not want to see her, or at least that's what the sixth wife kept telling herself, trying to push back the rising tide of want and longing threatening to burst from her. A few steady breaths, first, then, look away, across the portraits of the Lady Governor's predecessors, then the bust of Her Infernal Majesty above the desks, along with an ornamental cavalry saber granted for merit in battle and politics, then all the shelves heavy under the weight of ancient books of demonic lore, and… that wiry, balding man in a slightly tattered frock-coat standing next to Miria's wife's desk.

"Do your work, Master Glażek," the Lady Governor commanded, returning to her papers.

The man swallowed nervously, then pointed Miria to a prepared stool, with cut-out left in it for easier access. Against the power of the wife-medicine, she felt herself stiffen, in more sense than one. She exhaled, then lowered herself as commanded, precisely aware of the way each movement of her hips shifted the plug inside her slightly, and how the shape of her arousal was starting to be seen through the fabric of her dress.

"Young lady," the artisan muttered, his stilted voice thick with the half-infernal accent of Tall Pyres workmen, "can I ask you please to pull your skirt up?"

Guided by sharp hope, Miria looked up towards the Lady Governor, scanning the demonic woman for any signs of interest in what was happening in front of her desk; but the papers drew her wife more than her member. The poudres on her cheeks could not hide the scarlet blush of shame that followed, especially not as she exposed the reality of her arousal to Master Glażek.

"Please, hold it up," he muttered again, reaching for the measuring tape. "Can I touch her?"

The question was not directed at Miria, which was yet another stab of frustrated pleasure. She hid her face behind the fold of a pulled-up skirt, doing her level best to keep her breath measured.

"Hm?" the Lady Governor flipped through a letter.

"I apologize," the artisan repeated, "but I asked if I am allowed to touch your wife?"

"Oh," the demonic woman chuckled briefly. "Obviously. Is it not your job?"

Master Glażek's hands skittered between Miria's legs, each scraping of the tape yet another reminder of what was happening to her, of what was being done to her. She struggled with her breath; her heart battered like a drum. Yet, for all that, the touch itself did nothing. The old man's hands were dry and devoid of desire, professionally taking the measurements of her length and width wherever that was needed. A pencil scratched against paper, and a record was being created.

"I have all at full flag," he announced after a moment. "But I need the rest now. And the young lady is very excited."

To his credit, he did not so much as cough out a chuckle, the words falling out of his mouth perfectly calm and professional. It was harder for Miria; she choked on some half-formed plea that ought better to not be voiced. The Lady Governor put the letter she was reading back on the pile, and finally looked again; for a split-second, Miria noticed the deep shadows under her wife's eyes; then, she looked politely away. This did not let her escape the next command, the one she was quietly dreaming of the entire time.

"Miria," the Lady Governor said, voice neutral and ostensibly disinterested. "Help master Glażek, and put yourself at rest."

This time, she could not help herself but to gasp.

"Here?" she asked, hoping to sound more shy than excited.

"If you can do it in your bedroom," the demonic woman picked up a handkerchief from a drawer, and passed it to her wife, "you can do it here, where at least I get to watch."

Of course someone saw her; of course she did not hide her small attempts at pleasure well enough. But if this was the reward, all the better. Half-excited, half-terrified, she reached underneath her hiked-up skirt, hand closing around her dick. Master Glażek shrugged, turning his attention away, to the contents of the shelves.

"Go slow."

Each movement she made—up and down—was a burning sting of shame. Her breath caught; her muscles seized up. She went slow because she was commanded to, and because she wanted this to never end, she wanted to stay in this mire of humiliation forever.

"Stop looking away," the Lady Governor's voice slapped her across her face. "Look at me."

Lifting her eyes up felt impossible, until she finally did and let the hunger hiding at the bottom of her wife's gaze pinion her in place. For a moment, she paused working herself, too terrified, or perhaps too excited.

"I want to be the only thing you can think of when you please yourself, or anyone," the Lady Governor's voice dropped to a predatory whisper, each word a barb meant to pierce through skin and reel the body and the want in. "Now fast-"

The door to the study banged open like a pistol-shot. In an instant, Miria startled, hand almost slipping free from her member; against the grain of her desire, she looked away from her wife's face, only to see Visza, the second wife, barge in with fury on her face.

"Asha!" she burst, eyes primed on the Lady Governor, arms thrown wide apart. "I am done wa-"

The second wife's eyes followed the Lady Governor's own gaze, from the desk to Miria, and then to Miria's hand, and what it was wound around. Mid-word, the shout withered on her lips. A brief, unfortunate silence took over the study, interrupted only by Master Glażek's dry cough; the sixth wife could not figure out where to put her hands, or her eyes, and so remained frozen in place, the weight of Visza's stare resting heavily on her. The air refused to flow into a corset-cinched chest; the crest of pleasure, seemingly so close mere moments ago curdled instantly.

"You are interrupting," the Lady Governor exhaled, putting her hands on the desk, and pulling herself up to her whole height, the tips of her horns close to scratching the blackened wood beams of the ceiling above.

Fear was only a natural response; Miria had received sufficient warning as to what lurked behind the Lady Governor's calm, and what should never be provoked. For a split second, she imagined fury, she imagined harm, she imagined Visza hurt. No such thing came to pass. Transfixed, Miria watched her wife expand, filling the room with her presence, with the smell of smoke and resin which followed whenever the great demonic heart stirred. And yet, the cloven feet did not smash against the floor; the claws did not swipe through the air to mark cheeks red and blood. In two steps, the Lady Governor moved before her second wife, grabbing her hands into her own and lifting the smaller woman slightly off the floor.

"I'm sorry," Visza whispered as the two met in a warm embrace.

"Don't be," the Lady Governor whispered back, resting her again securely down. "You're upset."

Whatever worry remained in Miria dissipated, replaced by an altogether more familiar, though no less unpleasant feeling. When Visza spoke, her voice was like her body: perfectly shaped and trained, no longer bearing any tells that could betray the truth and origin. Maybe, if Miria was to stress all of her senses, she could still pick some details here and there: those outside knuckles, for example, though still positively dainty when interwoven with the Lady Governor's great claws. Or the way her jawline curved, so perfect it had to be sculpted by hand, for nature alone would never produce a beauty so precise. Jealousy, so small and so ugly, speared Miria across the heart as she watched the Lady Governor give an adoring kiss to an unruly wife, a wife in the proper sense of the word, and not some boy-toy to be played with like a cheap doll.

The Lady Governor's attention now fully away from her, Miria let her skirt fall back in place, and wiped her hand in the handkerchief, some bizarre and useless part of her suddenly wishing to sniff that piece of cloth, as if that could serve as an ersatz of the closeness and intimacy now playing out in front of her.

"Of course I am upset," Visza muttered nuzzling the Lady Governor's shoulder, before slipping away from her, only to be pulled back into yet another embrace. "I want to talk."

Something difficult flashed through the Lady Governor's face; she threw an aside-glance towards Miria, in a sense almost apologetic. She let Visza go, her lips pulling into a taut, troubled line.

"Can it wait? I am almost done here, and we can…"

"The service is in an hour," Visza cut in. "I need to be in the temple by then."

That alone would be enough to make Miria wince, let alone the mention of the temple. That the Lady Governor's second wife refused to give up the lowlander religion, in spite of its well-known hostility to the crown of Her Imperial Majesty, and more specifically to customs and traditions so close to the Lady Governor's own heart, was often gossiped about in the house, and well-known outside of it. Long before her marriage, Miria would hear it discussed at her family's table, Visza's insistence on showing up to pray to the Holy, while sitting among women no less, brought up as a sign of either depravity, or defiance. She had always imagined it, therefore, as something shameful, like her occasional visit's to her family's home: that is something frowned upon, and never mentioned openly before the Lady Governor herself. Yet again, it seemed that the rules she was to live by were not the ones that bound Visza. Yet again, jealousy made her stomach twist.

"Afterwards, then," the Lady Governor sighed, tone so clearly suffused with apology that Miria could scarcely believe it came out of her wife's mouth. "Please."

The second wife threw a stray lock of her golden hair away, let the perfect red of her lips' paint render her pout vivid and proud. She stood her ground.

"Do you not think she," a single claw indicated Miria, the single she spoken emptily and without heat, "deserves some attention too?"

Visza threw another glance in Miria's direction, and the sixth wife did not have to strain herself to imagine what she was seeing—the same thing that Miria saw in the mirror, back in the bathroom.

"A dinner for us two only," the Lady Governor whispered, the first time her sixth wife has ever heard her plead. "And you can stay for the night."

Only once had Miria been given the privilege of sharing a meal in private with her lady wife: on the night of their marriage. Only once had she been allowed to stay for the night in her wife's bed and embrace. And here, this gift, this dream, was being bartered and scoffed at by a woman so perfectly beautiful that even looking at her was a blow to the stomach, that sharp reminder of everything Miria was not, and was never going to become. In that moment she decided, unprompted, but also without doubt, that she really did hate Visza.

"Fine," the second wife shrugged. "But get yourself properly prepared this time."

The Lady Governor did not respond, merely glanced aside, a strange shade of purple briefly painting her cheeks. When she straightened moments later, Visza was gone, the clicking of her heels fading into the distance of the corridor outside. Another stretch of unfortunate silence opened, Miria passing time squishing the handkerchief between her fingers.

"Ahem," Master Glażek coughed again, finally finishing his investigation of the Lady Governor's bookshelf.

The demonic woman muttered an ugly word under her breath, collapsing into her chair once more.

"My apologies," she said, swiping a pile of papers aside. "To the both of you. Visza can be difficult, sometimes. Difficult to placate."

Neither Miria, nor the artisan, said anything.

"Do you have everything, Master Glażak?" the next question rang out into the awkward silence.

"I," the man tapped his foot a few times, lingering on the word, "I still need her measurements when soft."

"Right," the Lady Governor waved her hand, as if to capture some straight thought. "Miria?"

"This will not be a problem, lady wife," she replied, and that was no lie.

Whatever arousal was there before, whatever lust or desire, had all vanished. She held her skirt up for Master Glaźak's professional measurement, the procedure as banal and uninteresting as being inspected by the Hofmeisterin for signs of self-harm. At least it went quickly, marked by the final scratching of the pencil.

"All done," the man announced, hiding the notebook in his bag. "Now I will just have to ask what sort of a cage are we looking for here? Permanent, semi-permanent? Play? Punishment?"

The Lady Governor rubbed her temples, claws brushing between the clumped, spike-like hair. Nothing on her face seemed inviting, or happy.

"I will write you a letter with the specification later," she declared, dismissing the matter. "You can go."

Some unpleasant part of Miria realized that there would be no new chastity cage for her; that Visza spoiled that fancy, too. She deflated, as much as the corset would allow her. The artisan left, shutting the door tight behind himself, and leaving her alone with her wife. In some ways, it was everything that Miria had wanted out of today, or almost everything. In most others, it felt merely wretched. She avoided the Lady Governor's eyes, staring into the thick rug carpeting the floor and thinking of nothing but returning to her quarters, being rid of the plug, maybe allowed to eat finally, and-

"I'm sorry," the Lady Governor muttered, heavy and sad. "I had plans for us. But Vi-," she stuttered on the name, and left it out. "But now I only have a headache."

The words were nothing more but further confirmation of what Miria had already known.

"Of course, lady wife," she responded automatically.

Papers rustled as the demonic woman rearranged them around the desk into new, equally unruly piles. There was personal correspondence among them, and morning papers, and official records: a sea of ink and paper enough to drown anyone. It was no small task, governing a province. Especially one as resistant as the Lowlands.

"I promise," the Lady Governor evened out a block of papers, her hand pressing them tightly together, "I promise I will make it up to you, some time soon."

One more noxious pause followed, filled with questioning glances, and the mounting sense of waste. Miria skipped from one leg to another, though it was one of those habits the Hofmeisterin would have slapped out of her as inappropriate. If the Lady Governor noticed, she did not let it be known. In any case something else was taking her attention.

"You are jealous?" she asked in a way that was more of a statement of a fact.

"Of course not, lady wife," Miria lied.

It was not a very good lie, and some deeply frustrated side of her would love nothing more but to be called out on it, perhaps brought to heel for such misbehaviour, or at least acknowledged in some more solid, substantial way. The word for this desire was petulance, and as always, it did not go rewarded.

"That is good," the Lady Governor exhaled, far too exhausted—by things boy-toys like Miria were not privy to know—to be able to care for petty, empty lies. "Keep it up. You can go."

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Two: In Which a Lesson is Rendered

"And where do you think you're going, young lady?"

The Hofmeisterin crossed into Miria's path before the door to the Lady Governor's study even managed to shut. In spite of the fact that it was her duty to oversee all the dozens of servants who provided for the household, she'd apparently made time to lurk in wait at her mistress' doorstep. Miria shot her a dour look, but ground to a halt.

"I have been dismissed," she replied, trying to affect a steady voice, while still shifting into the higher pitch that the Hofmeisterin demanded. "I was going to find Agnes, and then return to my room."

The expression on the old woman's face turned from stern to severe—expectedly so. She shook her head in open disapproval, yet again reminding Miria of how it seemed to make no difference whether she was being honest or not. The presumption was always the same: the duplicitous lowlander, looking to shirk from her wifely duties.

"And why were you intending on seeking Agnes?" she asked, the set-up blatantly obvious in the question.

Miria fixed her eyes on a yellowed oil painting visible above and past the Hofmeisterin's shoulder. Some baby-faced aristocrat of the old kingdom sat pensive in it, focusing on the inevitable passing of the golden age. As with most decorations that the Lady Governor inherited after the previous owners of the palace, it buckled under the weight of overaffected, sentimental detail. The mannerist style damned the entire work to remain little more than a testament to history's bad taste.

"To return the plug to her?" she tried an answer that felt least likely to confirm prior biases. "For cleaning."

"Hm. Absolutely not."

On any other day—well, on most other days, at least—this response, spat at her with lightly disdainful fury, would likely make Miria squirm with excitement. She would think of being forced to wear that metal bulb up her ass as she hid in her own boy-toy wife's bedroom, one hand gripping the medicine-shrunk dick, the other pushing on the plug to feel it press against the innermost parts of her pleasure. Moments like these were why she offered herself for marriage, were they not? Why else would she accept it if not for the want of this heady mix of lust, shame, and subservience? But today, she was just tired and sore, and wanted that damn lump out of her, so that she could eat a normal meal, take a normal shit, and then lock herself in her room and cry a little bit into a trusted comfort pillow.

"That the Lady Governor dismissed you does not liberate you from the duty to prepare your body for servicing her, should she ever…"

Miria's lips twitched at the mention of that ever. A bitter smile flashed through her face, before she suppressed it lest the Hofmeisterin notice. Fortunately, she was too caught up in her own tirade to pay sufficient attention.

"...decide to make use out of you. At that point, you need to be able to receive the fullness of her attention, without a whimper of a complaint! This is the sole duty you have in this house, the core of your vows, and you will not neglect it, even if the Lady Governor is otherwise occupied. Are we understood?"

"Yes, Hofmeisterin."

"You will stay as you are until dinner," the old servant continued, spitting out each word like a whip-strike, "and until then, do you know what you will be doing?"

Miria did not know, although she could suspect. She peeled her eyes away from that terrible painting to meet the Hofmeisterin's merciless stare. The joke was, of course, that technically, she was not supposed to take orders here; even as a sixth-wife, and a boy-toy one at that, she still stood above servants in the hierarchy of this household. But the Hofmeisterin, though pure human, was of the infernal lands, five decades of service impressing the wrinkled, taut face with an authority that a lowlander girlthing would not be allowed to gainsay. Assuming, that is, she would even want to: on any other day, it would be exactly the kind of a subjugation she not-so-secretly longed for. But today hurt differently.

"Remind me," the Hofmeisterin continued, "what should a boy-toy wife do, if she has failed to satisfy her wife?"

The pronouns, so clearly uttered, were a barb, meant to cut, to remind the lowlander of what she was being made to be. This time, however, even Miria couldn't help herself from giving a pale smile. The books she read long ago—the books directly responsible for spoiling her once-innocent mind—articulated that in stark clarity: in the infernal heartlands, a boy-toy wife who failed in her duties would be addressed as a he, to remind her of the precarity of her status. But the Hofmeisterin could never allow herself to do that, lest the boy-toy wife think disobedience an escape route.

"Your smirks do you no service," she boomed, "though your silence speaks to a degree of reason. You will take incense and go to the shrine to meditate on how better you can please. And if I hear of you fiddling…"

***

The gardens surrounding the Lady Governor's palace had changed little from their original design. They were a gift, once, delivered by the old king's uncle to his favourite niece, a decade or so before the kingdom of Leshia was dissolved on the negotiation table in the distant Tall Pyres. Expensive marbles and mildly tasteless follies dotted the expansive greenery. So much work went into growing an actual forest among the gently-rolling landscape, into planting exotic flowers and arranging winding, gravel paths, perfectly attuned to the then-latest trends. Miria's father had loved to complain about it, saying that if the king had cared as much about his real subjects as his family cared for its landscaping, then perhaps Leshia would still stand firm. Now the kingdom was no more, and the garden remained, folly-strewn testament to folly itself. Among the wives, the rumour was that the Lady Governor let it remain as it was out of a certain, shameful appreciation for kitsch.

But some changes had been made, if only for formal reasons. Miria took a left turn at an intersection of gravel paths, disappearing into a dense birch grove. With the season still early, leaves were yet to bud, letting the sixth wife glimpse the shrine before she crossed past the tree-line.

Erected out of basalt, squat and unostentatious, it was a fair cry from the grand, bleak basilicas to Want that dominated the skyline of the infernal cities. But these were still the lowlands, and the shrine meant to serve only the Lady Governor's house. She had it hidden from view for that reason, unwilling to wage yet another war with the local temple episcopacy, so violently opposed to everything the cult of Want was meant to represent. Perhaps it was cowardice to not uproot them root-and-branch, as the first wife kept claiming, but the Lady Governor had more taste for stability than proselytism.

Miria folded her parasol and propped it against the metal door before squeezing into the empty inside. Vermillion hellfire overflowed from the brazier in the middle, radiating labile light and inviting heat. As inappropriate as it was, Miria could not help herself but to shift closer to warm her hands by the fire. Tongues of red and pink extended up from the fire-bowl to lick at the tips of her fingers, the infernal essence reaching out to those who would accept it. It was as in the opening lines of that little sacrament book she received upon rendering her marriage vows:

The flames of Want are ever burning, and all-accepting.

Shadows played around her, writhing amidst the bas-relief mass of writhing bodies knotted together into a braid of entwined limbs and orifices. None of those depictions seemed entirely real, and in the unsteady light, none could be clearly read, nor easily described—not even the human-sized sculpture dominating the wall opposite to the door, towering over the metal pillory from which it was to be rendered worship. As the fire shifted and shadows bent, the effigy appeared at once a woman, or a man, vested in silks, or bountifully nude. Sometimes, its horns bent demon-like, but then one could see it as a statue of a plain man. The temple episcopacy warned that the infernal realm worshiped a great devil of all lusts, but they were wrong; the statue stood for no single being, mortal or divine, but for Want itself. That was, perhaps, the reason why when Miria looked at its face, it seemed to be the Lady Governor's.

The hellfire caught on the tip of the incense stick; Miria withdrew it from the brazier, briefly giving in to the child-like wonder of watching a single point of light dance through the dark. Truth be told, she did not exactly understand this cult, nor the reason why demons would solemnly light fires in celebration of their want. But the ritual was easier to perform than faith was to internalize, so she set the incense stick in the holder at the statue's feet, then bowed to it thrice, as was proper. The rest was a matter of waiting. She retreated to the pews, trying to sit down so that neither plug nor corset would poke too much at her insides or her outsides. It took some shifting around and wriggling, but finally she managed to settle into a kind of comfort, head rested on folded hands. Outside, the rain picked up, drumming steadily at the bronze-tiled roof; but the fire kept all cold at bay, and the visages of lust surrounding Miria dissolved into an indistinct movement of light and dark, meaningless, and therefore soothing.

At some point she dozed off into indistinct dreams. Before she got to enjoy them, or let them pass into more familiar nightmares, something sharp poked her into her cheek. She startled like an uncoiling spring, shooting up from the pew and almost slipping on the edge of her own dress.

"Silly girlthing." A familiar voice reached from the side. "This is no place for napping!"

Forgetting not to rub her eyes, Miria turned to where it was coming for; once there, she faced Luna, the first wife, immaculate as always. Of all the Lady Governor's wives, she alone carried demonic blood, only minutely altered by intermarriage with the fey courts of the Lily Isles. To them she owed her horns, spreading antler-like from her temples, their twisting branches ornamented with gold talismans chiming with each motion of her head. Though shorter than her wife, she still towered above petty humans; the tip of Miria's wig could brush Luna's chin; maybe nose, if the sixth wife was to climb to her toes. But where the Lady Governor was sturdy and strong in her build, army muscle braided around a warrior's frame, Luna stood lithe under her layered muslin dress, the pale lilac tint of her skin peering through the fabric like a dream behind a fog. As Miria cleared the daze from her eyes, she watched the needle-point of Luna's tail disappear into the folded cloth.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, unsure what to do with her hands, or her body.

"Don't be," Luna shrugged, passing by her and towards the brazier. She too held a handful of incense sticks in her slender fingers. "This is also no place for judging."

As far as Miria could remember, this was the first time she and Luna had shared a private moment like this. The first wife lived apart from the rest. Oh, of course, they ate at the same table, and showed up to the same functions, but aside from household formalities, the lilac-skinned demoness kept her distance, spending days in her suite of rooms in the palace's upper floors. The third and fourth, in particular, loved to gossip about her; but for Miria, she was even less tangible of a presence than the Lady Governor had turned out to be. No less beautiful, though. An unfortunate tug of desire pulled at her heart, finally managing to divert her thoughts from the bitter morning she had just endured.

"If I had to guess," Luna continued, lighting each incense stick in turn, but not yet placing them in their stands, "Agatha sent you here, didn't she?"

It took Miria a second to remember that Agatha was the Hofmeisterin's secret, forbidden name. As it turned out, the Lady Governor was not the only one to use it. Eagerly, she nodded.

"Typical," the demoness shared the nod, then offered the incense to the statue. Once she was done with the necessary oblations, she turned back to Miria, sliding into a pew in front of her, making sure to sit so that she could face both Want and the sixth wife at the same time. From up close, she carried an ozone fragrance; whether a perfume, or a demoness' natural musk, Miria could not tell.

"She has a good hand for breaking boy-toys in," Luna said, "which is why Asha keeps her. But she's only human, and doesn't really get why we come to stand before Them and make our offerings."

There was a small golden ring threaded through her nostril. It drank the red hellfire's light, glimmering as if itself molten, and Miria could not bring herself to look away from it. Old dreams stirred once more, reminding her how much she would love the same, how much she…

"She probably made a point out of you having to meditate on your failures or something like that, no?"

She smiled as she asked, briefly letting her rows of pointed teeth show; again, Miria only nodded, her imagination caught elsewhere. It was a good thing she had come here, to this warmth and quiet.

"This is what happens when humans get to talk about Want too much," Luna scoffed. "You make a temple out of this place, and some wrathful goddess out of Them, who punishes those who fail to embody the perfect desire. But, I suppose that in this dull country of overcast skies and principled men, sin is easier to believe in than imperfection."

The smile did not fade from Luna's lips as she said that, but nonetheless something seemed to shift in her tone and stance; perhaps it was a flicker in the back of her eyes that hinted at frustration, maybe rage. Or maybe, and Miria preferred to believe this, it was how longing had to sound, it was the shape the yearning took. Ultimately, it didn't matter all that much: the voice alone was sweet enough for the sixth wife to listen to it gladly, whether she could follow the argument's course or not.

"You probably don't understand," Luna sighed. "I wouldn't hold it against you. Ignorance is preferable to obstinance, anyway. Especially in boy-toys."

Once more, her tail peeked from under the dress. It climbed the side of the pew, before delicately wrapping itself around Miria's wrist. The sixth wife inhaled sharply, but made no protest against the touch.

"Do you even know what the purpose of this thing is?" she asked, pointing at the pillory. "I suppose no one was there to teach you."

In truth, Miria did know—or at least knew a variant of the explanation, described in a language of lurid horror by the episcopalian missionaries relaying the revolting tales of what happened in the infernal temples of Want. She'd grown up with those stories; they remained close to her heart. But she kept her mouth shut, and let a twist of Luna's tail guide her up from her seat. Besides, to hear her own voice right now would be just unpleasant—like catching her own reflection at the wrong time.

"It should have been my duty, really," Luna continued, leading Miria between the pews and towards the statue. "Am I not the first wife, and so the shrine-keeper, and so the priestess of Want? But alas, we have gotten far from home and tradition."

A small padlock secured the pillory shut; the key to it hung like a charm from the first wife's antlers, both to ornament, and to mark her duties. Cupping it in hand as if a sacred relic, she unlocked the restraint, then hinged it open. In the back of Miria's head, she quickly reviewed her marriage vows, and the education that preceded them: but no, wives were allowed to be together, if they so desired. This was not wrong, if it was what she was now hoping it was going to be.

"In the old country, there is a custom," her voice dropped a pitch, and in so, grew stronger, "for what should be done the night before a boy-toy is wed and made a wife."

The tail pulled at Miria's wrist, making her turn around and face away from Luna, so that the demoness could reach the tight laces on the sixth wife's back. Miria's mouth moved wordlessly as they were one by one undone; she was ready to complain, to ask so the corset could stay, so that she could remain true to the Hofmeisterin's commands, and so that her waist could remain cinched and shaped.

She made no voice.

"The he that is soon to be made she," Luna explained, folding the corset on a pew, "is stripped of all pretense."

The dress came down next; through the haze of desire Miria could hardly tell if the priestess of Want unlaced it too, or simply tore it from her body. The warmth of the shrine intoxicated, seeping past skin and into flesh; if the sixth wife's body quavered, it was not for cold.

"Is laid bare to see for what he really is."

Distantly, Miria knew she probably ought to say something; not when her useless bra (what was it really holding up? those little jokes?) was piled with the crumpled dress, but rather when Luna's hand slipped underneath the choker on neck and squeezed the clump cartilage hidden beneath. She didn't speak then; neither did she speak when her wig was pulled down. She stayed silent even as her face was being wiped with her dress, smearing the makeup away. Her eyes were looking down now, at another part of her body attesting to the fact that she was enjoying it, so it had to be right.

Right?

"And then, he is made to face Want…"

The plug came out last, popped out one sharp motion; the gasp of pain died on Miria's lips as Luna pulled her now-limp body down into the ready embrace of the pillory. No discomfort awaited her there. Velvet lined the insides of the shackle, so comfortable, so curiously absent of wear. The restraint locked around her wrist and neck, leaving her bent, legs already quaking under the weight of the body, and the desire. The tail unspooled from her arm; instead, she felt the long, lilac fingers crawl towards her mouth and prop it open.

"...and offer himself to it wholesale."

A metal ring came between her teeth, forcing the jaw open as a strap secured the device behind her neck. Drool began to pool in the bottom of her mouth almost instantly, and dripped out in long strings after. Ahead of her, the grand statue stood, and shifted, and danced between forms and shapes. Even closing her eyes did not take the sight away. Maybe the day wasn't going to be so bad after all. Her groin burned.

"Anyone can then use him," the keeper of this shrine carried on preaching, now hidden somewhere outside of Miria's restrained field of view. "They make an offering to the shrine…"

A small golden thaler thunked to the basalt floor, showing the mounted portrait of Her Infernal Majesty's atop her draconic steed.

"...and then do with the flesh as they please."

A sharp wheezing sound was all the warning Miria got before a clawed hand raked her across her buttocks. She screamed out in pain and surprise, and something else, deeper still. Her legs buckled, so Luna had to pull her up by hand before the next blow. Because there was a next blow coming.

"Do you know why?" the priestess of Want repeated her favourite pedagogical question.

Even if she'd wanted to speak, Miria could only moan, and sink deeper into the embrace of the statue ahead of her, her face now both the Lady Governor's and Luna's. She was about to start crying, and welcomed that—even as she also wanted so much for the demoness behind her to stop striking, and instead…

"First and foremost," Luna said, her voice now a far-away rolling sea, "so that they never forget what they really are. What they exist to be."

The sixth wife braced herself for more strikes; and there was one or two, but nowhere near as fierce. They stung more for how tender the flesh already was, rather than for their force.

"But alas, this is the old country's custom. Not fit for the lowlands, and for the lowlanders. The Lady Governor said so, and it is our duty, as her wives, to treat it as law. A shame, isn't it? Wouldn't you want to be given to a whole basilica, hm?"

That she could not scream an audible yes! and was only allowed to groan some ugly half-sound in the shape of that word made her burn, and want. The statue's shadow-hands extended to embrace her and accept her into the fold.

"Well then, have a taste!"

There was a rustle of muslin, and then the sound of cloven feet shifting closer, of warm flesh pressing against her own exposed skin. Miria inhaled and exhaled, excited and terrified, waiting to be made open by force and to scream—

The sound was of a hand slipping around something wet; it went on for a few ragged breaths, and then a spurt of hot liquid sprinkled over Miria's bare back. She whimpered in protest; Luna wiped her sticky hand on the girl's thigh, and took a step back.

"This is why I like you," the priestess of Want laughed. "You know what you are, and make no attempt to pass yourself as anything but that."

This much was true, without a doubt. Miria tried to imagine how she looked now, a half-formed boy-wife body, dripping from mouth and shallow cuts, and from her own dick, and from Luna's filth slowly making its way to the side of the chest to also follow to the basalt floor. The image was revolting, and she was glad for it, even as she had to stifle a sob.

"If only the others were the same…" the demoness whispered, words no longer directed at the sixth wife. "But you must be right, Asha, this is a country of temples, not shrines."

As if to underscore her point, a distant booming of bells broke through the silence of the shrine, announcing a moment of high prayer in the many holy houses of the city below the hill. Absurdly, Miria wondered if her parents were in one, right now, asking the many faces of the Holy for grace and forgiveness for their son who sins for their sake. Maybe this was why the tolling was so intense and so loud today; maybe the enormity of the boy's sacrifice moved the city's thousand bells to an unison wail.

"As for you," Luna picked up after a quiet moment, "you do as Agatha asked, and meditate on want. I'll pick you up later."

Before the full ramification of that statement could make its way through Miria's clouded mind, the sound of the steel door shutting announced that Luna was not staying to listen to any further complaints.

In a way, it was everything the sixth wife could have asked for on this day. She sagged, dropping into a kneeling position, and stopped holding the unfulfilled sobs back.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Three: In Which Something Dear is Lost

Not long after the wedding night, when Miria had first started taking the wife-medicine, she'd been pulled aside by Mażin, the third wife. Then, over a few glasses of sickeningly sweet coffee liqueur, the older women had quickly explained to the newly-wed what effects the medicine would have. At first, it had been mostly a cordial attempt to dispel some common, lowland superstitions, but it had not taken Mażin long to notice that the sixth wife needed no such reassurances. Instead, Miria showed disappointment when Mażin informed her that many of the changes would not be the instantaneous transformation that lowland broadsheets warned against, but rather be subtle at first, and take long to fully manifest. And so what was meant to be a consolation quickly turned into more matter-of-fact advice: warnings that Miria's muscles would weaken, that she would get strange cravings and new kinds of morning sickness, and that she should probably accept the fact that some days, she was going to find herself crying for no good reason at all.

Today was one such day. The boy-toy wife stood bent and stuck in a pillory, unable to look away from the statue of Want filling her vision. Blood, drool, and someone else's ejaculate dripped from the sides of her body, now joined by her tears.

Miria could not entirely explain why she was also sobbing. Was she unhappy? Unfulfilled, perhaps. Or just plain unfilled—she'd wanted Luna to drive into her, to make her squeal and moan like when the Lady Governor took her in possession on the night of their marriage. But the frustration did not hurt; it knotted her insides and made her try to rub her thighs together around her nethers, so warm and flushed. There was nothing she could do that could bring her past the peak and relieve the desire, and to realize how much this pleased her made her wince in shame and bite down on the gag, which only made it feel better.

When she closed her eyes, she imagined a hydra of hands reaching from the braided wall of limbs that ringed the shrine. They captured her, pried her open, and made such use of her—and each left a coin in gratitude, until Miria's feet sank into gold. Far away, the city's bells sang praise of this sacrifice.

Were the tears streaming down her cheeks joy, then? She did as she was told, and let the great, formless want fill her thoughts. The heat of the shrine, the play of shadows, desperate, helpless arousal all invited the same thing: surrender. This had to be the lesson Luna left her to learn, and she was so very grateful for the shrine-keeper's wicked pedagogy.

Metal scraped behind her; a cold gust blew as the door opened. For a split second, Miria wished for nothing but to see another piece of gold roll next to the lonesome thaler. Someone would come and grip her by her hips, no matter how unfeminine, and then make use of them as if of a wife. Her mouth tensed around the metal ring, face burning scarlet with eager shame.

But it was not to be.

"Young lady?"

Miria recognized the voice—it was Mariś, one of her chamber-maids. Nervous footsteps clacked on the basalt floor, way outside her field of vision; she tried to twist her head to see the woman approach, and got only to look at a hand nervously approach the padlock keeping the pillory shut, then withdraw. But the boy-toy wife did not need more to feel the weight of someone's gaze settle on the drying pattern sprayed over the small of her back. Shame curdled into sheer humiliation; without meaning to, Miria strained against her bonds; her reward was the sound of a woman stepping away.

"Uh," Mariś hitched audibly. "The Hofmeisterin, uh—says you have to—I'm so sorry! I didn't meant to—The Hofmeisterin says you need to return to the palace immediately!"

What rang in the maid's voice was neither desire, nor admiration, but sharp embarrassment. A tension lifted off Miria's back as the illicit stare moved aside; Mariś was looking away, trying desperately not to see the sorry display in front of her. Of course. What else could the sixth wife have expected?

"Ah," she tried to speak through the gag, "han't fhee myhelf."

"Young lady?" the maid asked, clearly and desperately wishing to be anywhere else but here.

"Ah!" Miria chewed on the metal ring, "Han't! Fhee! Myhelf!"

"I'll get the Hofmeisterin!" Mariś cried out in panic, and bolted, running away fast enough to forget to close the door behind her.

The warnings that the third wife had delivered to Miria, punctuated by quick sips of a tar-like drink, went into great detail. She did not limit herself to letting Miria know that she should be ready for unexpected tears. Mażin had made sure that the newly-wed, newly-wifed girl was also aware of the fact that the medicine would sometimes also lead to times when everything abruptly started tasting of shit.

The cold weather seeped past the ajar door, pushing past the hellfire's heat and setting Miria to a shiver. Moments ago, she'd fancied herself everyone's desire, and now was forced to reckon with what really stood bound before the effigy of Want: an unfinished, patsy body, stripped of everything that could make it passable. If she had been laid bare it was not to be admired, but rather so that she would never forget what anyone with a pair of eyes could see her for. Those thoughts were, of course, nothing but another hysteric bout, a spasm of a body slowly morphing into a new shape: but knowing was a small reprieve at best. Besides, she was no longer crying, and quite clear-eyed about the matter.

The banging of rushed steps snapped her out of the spiraling train of thought. Before she could realize what was happening, the pillory's lock clicked open. Careful hands wrapped a thick blanket around her chest, and helped her up, the light and dark staging a brief dance before her eyes. Through a nauseating vertigo, the sixth wife glimpsed Mariś, trying to be tender, and the towering lilac shape of Luna. Without thinking, she reached out, trying to come into an embrace; she desperately longed to be reassured in the demoness' warmth.

"Not now," the priestess of Want pushed her back, voice vibrating a wire about to snap.

Mira stumbled; Mariś caught her under the arms, then quickly brought up a handkerchief to wipe drool from her lips. The sixth wife blinked, feeling another tremble go through her. Luna was already disappearing in the door, taking great, unfeminine steps. The bells of the city had not stopped ringing.

"I—" Mariś muttered, guiding Miria down onto a pew, "I brought you fresh clothes. It's—"

Her voice faded briefly; the young woman let herself be vested, limp in the maid's experienced hands. Consciousness, in the full sense of the word, was slow to return.

"The Hofmeisterin?" she finally managed to ask.

Mariś did not look up from the floor, fingers struggling with the laces on the freshly-lacquered shoes fitted to the sixth wife's oversized feet.

"Tending to matters," the maid replied, quivering ever so slightly. "She said, only the shrine-keeper can touch…"

She threw an uneasy glance at the restraint, trying not to look at the statue beneath. Miria felt bad for the girl. The Lady Governor made a point of taking lowlanders into service, and not interfering with their worship of the Holy. But they rarely ever returned that grace and tried to see what the infernals brought as anything but filth and defilement. Miria thought back to her brother, pounding the table back home, because he believed that no amount of occupier's favour could justify sacrificing his brother to the monstrous Want. She thought of how she'd looked away then, so that he would not have to see into her eyes, and realize how the marriage was nothing how he had thought it like.

The truth, of course, would have only made it worse.

"Let me wash your face."

With a damp cloth, Mariś wiped away the last of makeup from Miria. And then they were done; the sixth wife, in a fresh white dress, and the shrine in disarray. There was no reason to torture the maid by forcing her to stay here any longer; and besides, there was a clear urgency to whatever matter had made the Hofmeisterin summon her so far ahead of the schedule.

Or maybe it was not urgency, but something far worse. Each step Miria took through the rainy afternoon, towards the pillared front of the Lady Governor's palace, seemed to suggest as much. The place was out of joint. An unfamiliar cart, covered in stained canvas, stood parked near the front door. Servants rushed through spring mud, heedless of the dirt staining the once-spotless white of their liveries. They were not alone; house soldiers, in their blood-red jackets, flocked to the courtyard, rifles at the ready.

"What's going on?" Miria asked the maid, feeling a terrible, shapeless worry swell in her stomach.

Mariś waved her shoulders in helpless confusion. But what the girl did not know, other things betrayed. They entered into the palace's great hall, and passed by its previous owners' pride: a great, free-standing clock, ornamented with gold leaf and ivory. Now, a pair of servants worked to stop it. One held the pendulum still, the other set the hour to a motionless twelve. White splashed the walls; white veils and white blindfolds to install over the eyes of the old aristocrats staring from countless portraits. The time was to be stilled, and the eyes of the dead turned away from the living. The furious tolling of hundreds of bells no longer penetrated past the thick walls, but Miria knew they had not stopped. Though the wailing was yet to start, it was only a matter of time. Death had come to her wife's home. The question remained: for whom? In its wake, there was fear.

Please, don't let it be my wife.

They met the Hofmeisterin on the stairs up. The old servant caught a glimpse of Miria and approached, for once without a reproach. There were no comments about Miria's gait, and not even a demand that she should be ashamed of the way her beard shadow peered from under the removed poudres. In fact, the Hofmeisterin herself seemed ashamed, constantly picking at the sides of her black dress, standing out like an ink-spill against the backdrop of mourning white. Before she spoke, her hands opened and closed a few times, struggling to catch a semblance of collected calm.

"Young lady. The Lady Governor is in the Star Chamber," she announced finally, grief drowning everything else her voice might have carried. "Make haste."

Her mouth moved as if to add something. Miria pushed past her, and to the stairs, almost tripping over her feet, only holding herself up by a hand clutching the railing. Each half-run, half-rush carried her two, maybe three steps up, until she found herself in the wide hall that had once served as an audience room for generations of magnates. Now, white cloth blinded the gallery of their portraits so that they would not look at the bier erected in the center. Its sight drew a stifled sigh of relief from Miria. A shape of a body unmistakably peered from under the snow-white shroud—but of a body too small to be Asha. The Star Chamber waited beyond; she rushed forward. If not the Lady Governor, then who?

Luna, the first? Visza, the second? Mażin, the third? Czewa, the fourth? Stava, the fifth?

The ceiling turned blue and studded with gold. The scent of incense filled the Star Chamber, mixed into the overpowering warmth of hellfire cupped in Luna's hand. The first wife sat alone at the side, at some distance from the short, stout Mażin, appearing even smaller for the oversized saber she clutched in her hands. To see her perform the role of the third, of the arms-bearer, was rare, and an awful omen for what was to come. Czewa and Stava stood not far, hands and fingers wound tightly together. In mourning whites, they seemed older than usual, their faces icons of rough-hewn handsomeness, as if taken from the stained-glass portraits of episcopal holy men.

A few eyes turned at Miria's entrance, but all the wives remained focused on the demonic women in the center of them—the only one wearing not the white of lamentation, but the red of war. Silver medals glinted from the Lady Governor's chest, her colonel's uniform giving a new sharpness to her silhouette. She acknowledged her sixth wife's entrance with a tip of her head, and motion at the third.

In a slow, careful motion, Mażin came closer, and knelt before her wife, offering the sword and the scabbard up. In that moment, watching the Lady Governor's hand close around the hilt, Miria realized that her wife came not to grieve, but to avenge.

"They," she announced, "murdered Visza."

***

It would take Miria hours and days to patch together—from hushed gossip, aborted half-statements, and overheard shreds of conversation—an explanation of what had happened, even if only an incomplete one. There were certain facts, however, that she could establish beyond dispute.

On the day of her killing, Visza attended a service in the Overwhelming Grace. It was a temple her great-grandfather had founded, during the last flowering of the late kingdom of Leshia. To sit in its front pews, among the aristocrats of the old realm, was therefore more than a privilege for her: it was her birthright. As always, she had a seat reserved to the left of the altar, among women. It was a minor holy day, and the temple was packed, especially since a famous itinerant preacher was visiting to address the congregation. According to ritual order, Bużan, the city's old episcopal, administered the first rites, and yielded the pulpit when it was time for the sermon.

The visiting preacher—a man by the name of Striczyk, distantly related to the cadet branch of one of the Leshian royal houses—based his sermon on the popular parable: that of two medicines. He followed its beats faithfully, telling of a physician who had two powerful medicines, one to cure plague, and one to cure cholera. Unfortunately, his foolish wife assumed that if the medicines were each strong on their own, then they would become even stronger when mixed. But they turned into a deadly poison, and brought great misery to people instead.

Striczyk needed not to explain much further, for the point had to be clear to all in attendance. Morbidly, Miria could not help but to wonder what Visza had made out of it; how she had felt as the eyes of holy men turned to her, and the beautiful dress she wore, a gift from the Lady Governor's own hands.

As ever, when the sermon finished, so came the time to administer blessings. Visza had put herself in line with other women, waiting patiently for the old episcopal to lay his hands on her. It was at that point when some man shouted—from the back pews, from among the young noble sons—a question. Allegedly, he wore the colours of the old kingdom on him, and a brooch with the Leshian griffon. "Who," he asked, "is trying to poison us?". The second wife had shouted back, calling on the provocateur to stay silent. No one would repeat his response to Miria, and she was glad for it. The old episcopal had asked for peace. His voice went unheard.

Past that point, the exact sequence of events became harder to reconstruct. It also didn't, exactly, matter. The stories Miria received grew scattered and incomplete, comprising mostly of sudden silences and voices breaking on single word shoals. But she learned enough: that Visza had made an attempt to defend herself, that it had not worked, that it was hard to say exactly who did what, and how much, and that the Lady Governor would not allow anyone to see what they had done to the body.

But the temple and the crime were not the first place Miria's thoughts went to when she learned of the murder.

***

"In cold blood, in broad daylight, they murdered my Visza."

Desperately, Miria tried not to think on the way that a part of her felt a sudden burst of relief that it was the second that died, and not anyone closer to her heart. She could only pray to the Holy—for one ought not to implore Want for such things—that the emotion did not show on her face, that nothing betrayed her.

Around her, the Star Chamber erupted into words. There were a lot of them, and most failed to find purchase in the sixth wife's memory, being meant to offer shallow consolation or express the still inchoate grief. What she did remember was more scattered, a series of images and sounds impressed themselves into her memories as dim snap-shots.

She remembered the first wife's free hand gripping an edge of a table tightly enough for her claws to dig deep trenches in the polished walnut. She remembered her refusal to join the explosion of voices, and her mouth instead moving to the shape of a question—how could they?—and a curse—episcopal brutes.

She remembered the third wife offering her a hug, her large hand and spacious body drinking each other's sadness. She remembered feeling vaguely sick as she heard a "no need to hold back tears" whispered into her ear, for she was more startled and terrified, rather than desolate.

She remembered the fourth and the fifth wife holding together, arguing quickly, their voices low and burdened by all the different kinds of fear. She remembered seeing the fourth push herself away from the fifth's forceful hold, and approach the Lady Governor in utmost deference, to beg her for mercy for the city of Karsz.

But most of all she remembered hearing her wife's claws grind around the steel of her saber's scabbard, before her words cut through the cacophony to announce:

"The fault is with me. I should have protected her."

Miria remembered that most of all, because it was when she realized that something was out of joint.

***

Years before Miria's marriage was even a consideration, her father had been working to raise her the way a burgher's son ought to be raised. He'd made her accompany him to the smoke-filled coffee-houses of Karsz, to there learn the twinned patterns of commerce and politics. It was in one of those dark, loud rooms that she had first heard of Visza. Of course, her father and his allies—doctors, lawyers, professors, distinguished burghers all—referred to her by another name, and with ruder words. But their concern was always her safety.

A lawyer complained how the episcopacy was badgering him to find a law to bar Visza from the temple, and stop the scandal of her sitting with women. In response, her father banged the table, spilling the coffee all over. The myopia of his fellows frustrated him to no end. So what, he kept asking, that she—he did not use that word—provokes the faithful? So what that the old clerics complain? He made them remember what the infernal guns could do, and how much they all owed to the regrettable overthrow of the old order. And so, word by word, they came to an agreement that there should always be a handful of broad-shouldered and small-minded men not far from where Visza sat in the temple, just so that they would be insured against the youth's folly.

Where were those men, when a dozen cruel arms dragged Visza away?

***

Eventually, the first wave of shock and grief receded, and a choking quiet settled over the Star Chamber. Only then did the Lady Governor speak at more length, in clipped words that each fell like a piece of flint.

"You will hear soon," she announced, "that the men who did this have claimed sanctuary, and that this puts them out of my reach."

All the wives but the first startled at that. The episcopacy had long mandated that the grounds of their temples were supposed to be sacred beyond the reach of any temporal power. Any and all could find shelter within them, no matter the severity of their crimes. As long as they were ready to renounce their life and remand themselves into the care of the episcopacy, they were supposed to be immune from prosecution. Every child in the lowlands knew that the name of King Piszan the Apostate was to be spoken as a curse, for he had dared to violate the holy custom.

"I will not allow it for long."

The pronouncement carried a terrifying implication, and Miria shuddered. The Lady Governor had carried her rule with a soft hand, and her soft hand was what kept the lowlanders at peace. There was no way a sacrilege of such proportion would not shatter it all and vindicate everything the old aristocrats suggested about Her Infernal Majesty's purported true nature. If Miria had been braver, and not a boy-toy wife, she would have opened her mouth to protest. Thankfully, someone else did it instead.

"Please," Stava whimpered, again close to falling to her knees. "Lady wife. Don't."

"I will tear the walls of the Overwhelming Grace with my bare hands, if it is what justice takes," she replied without reproach, and without reprieve.

"You must not act in a rush," Mażin joined the voice of protest. "Consider what you have built!"

"Consider what she has lost," Luna snarled behind her, the table coming apart under the tension of her touch. "Do you really think that those brutes," the word was a slur, was a curse, "would show you the same kind of loyalty that you still pile at them?"

"Enough!"

The saber smashed into the floor, loud enough to make the window-panes ring in their frames. The Lady Governor's voice cut through the noise, and silenced everyone.

"This is not for you to debate! This will be done."

Everyone in the chamber had to understand what that meant. Miria could only bow her head in shame that it made her stomach twist more than the murder itself did.

"Until then, I will mourn as the Want demands."

Miria bit her lip; the other three human wives froze in place, giving the Lady Governor troubled looks. Only Luna seemed to relax at the announcement, shaking stray splinters away from her claws.

"I make no demand that you join me," the Lady Governor continued, "but leave the door to my chamber open, if you so wish."

The blob of hellfire dissipated as Luna closed her hand around it. She pushed herself up from her chair, and then across the floor, next to where Stava had knelt.

"I offer my body to our grief, lady wife."

Another knotted thought wound itself around Miria's throat, making it hard to breathe. So it was true, what they said about how demons grieved for their dead. She should be appalled—and a part of her was. And yet, what she felt more as she looked at the lilac demoness offering herself for this task was not revulsion, but the familiar tug of desire. How had she herself longed for those mighty red hands.

Before she could join Luna in supplication, the Lady Governor looked down at her first wife, and a brief shadow flitted through her face.

"Visza will be buried according to her rites."

The first wife's head shot up in shock. She bit down on a word. The other wives sighed in something akin to relief.

"Thank you," Stava whispered, returning to Czewa's embrace.

"Finally," exhaustion seeped into the Lady Governor's voice, softening its edge, "I have to ask you not to leave the palace grounds. Not until justice is served."

Her eyes stopped on Miria as she said that, and the sixth wife knew exactly why. Her visits to her family had not gotten unnoticed.

"Leave now. Only Miria stays."

For a moment, as the other wives passed her in a flurry of white cloth, Miria found herself choked by panic. Had the Lady Governor noticed her absence of tears? Had she remembered the lie from earlier today? Was she about to blame her for not loving Visza enough? Was…

"There is something you must know," the demonic woman whispered, trying for softness.

She put a hand on Miria's shoulder, and guided her to a chair, so that she could sit. It was a warm gesture, and in spite of everything, the boy-toy wife found reassurance in it—reassurance and comfort. She waited until her wife also settled into a chair, deflating ever so slightly. Fury took its toll on even the fiercest of infernal flames.

"Sixteen men," she began to explain, "scurried to the Overwhelming Grace. They were the… the mob."

Miria nodded slowly, not sure where this was headed, and trying not to imagine what the pious mob had done, with a hymn of worship on their lips. They were the kind of people she grew up learning to fear, for more reason than one. The moment she thought of that, an awful premonition speared her straight through her heart. She desperately did not want it to come true.

"Your brother was among them."

Come true it did.

"Did you know anything about it?"

"No," Miria replied, blunt and automatic.

Something softened in the Lady Governor's face. She extended a hand, then withdrew it, strange awkwardness guiding the gesture.

"I'm sorry," she said, not insincerely.

In a way, it was lovely to be addressed like that, to be seen, to be cared for. Had she not asked for this earlier today? But it was only one way, and the others led to blunt pain.

"Was he the one who…?" Miria asked, unsure if she wanted to learn.

"I don't know. It doesn't matter. There are no degrees of guilt here."

For a moment, Miria could only dwell on that new, throbbing hurt. It took the shape of the memory of her father's pen, shaking as he signed her marriage contract, the first document to bear the name "Miria" on it. It sounded of her mother's promise that she would always be welcome back home, no matter what the demons did to her. It was not the truth, of course—Miria knew what lay at the limits of that love—but an honest lie at least. And her parents deserved better than to lose both their children.

But then, a sharp realization pierced through the thick haze surrounding Miria's mind. What had her brother even been doing in the Overwhelming Grace? It was not a burgher's temple; for him to show up there would be a scandal to say the least. The aristocrats loathed Her Infernal Majesty's power the most, but they were never short on contempt for their old inferiors. Even the thugs Miria's father hired—the thugs that for some reason remained absent from all the mentions of the crime—belonged not to the criminal order, but to the ranks of the dispossessed nobles who clung to their titles and privileges all the more fiercely as their wealth was bled from them.

For a moment, she readied herself to ask the question; but her lady wife seemed so exhausted, and so filled with fire, that the words burnt out on her tongue, though she greedily allowed herself to receive a few more moments of the Lady Governor's comfort. But when she finally left the Star Chamber, leaving the demonic woman alone, her mind was already starting to wander. Something was out of joint, and if her parents were to be spared the grief the palace groaned under, then she would have to find out what it was.

For the first time since she was married, Mira started to consider a way to disobey her wife's commands.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Four: In Which the Fifth Wife's Secret is Revealed

The seat at the top of the dining table stood empty.

So too did the one to its right.

So, too, did the one to its left.

The absences stood out all the more for the cold silence that gripped the room—white-liveried servants shuffled around, setting dishes to prepare a dinner just for four, and Miria could hear their each and every step. The quiet, culled of any idle chatter that once might have filled it, set so vastly across her ears that even the delicate ring of plate-on-wood or the sweet slosh of wine-into-glass became an unexpected reprieve.

Above it all, the heavy fragrances of infernal spices—the real ones, too, not the mild imitations that some burghers pretended to enjoy—wafted around the hall. They should have roused her stomach and reminded her of the hunger that had been plaguing her since the morning. They did not.

She tried to swallow, only to discover her throat had clenched so tight she wondered, for a moment, how she was even able to draw a breath.

Up the table from Miria, Mażin kept glancing at the empty chairs. The eyes of all the remaining wives were fixed on her, expectant. It had been a long time since they had to sit down to eat without either Asha or Visza to say the blessings, whether infernal or divine.

The third wife waited for the first course to arrive, and stood up.

"Let us eat," she said simply.

Across the table from her, Czewa bent her head forward, hiding a quick movement of her lips between folded fingers. Miria could hardly blame her; it would not do to speak a temple grace with Visza's body just a few flights of stairs away. She looked down into the bowl of rich sesame soup before her, and dipped a spoon in. It took some effort to bring it back to her mouth.

It was only the thought of her little, budding defiance that kept Miria from getting crushed under the suffocating weight of wifely grief. Her mind kept racing out of the palace grounds, down the hill and into the city proper, to a luxuriously modest house by the Lesser City Square. It was not difficult at all to imagine her family sitting together, terrified of what would become of their sole remaining son. A part of her wished she could be there to console them; a part of her worried her presence would only make it worse.

The taste of sesame and spices bloomed on her tongue, intense enough to undo the knot in her stomach. She moved to take another sip, but slowed down; around her, the remaining wives continued to struggle to eat. Mażin did not so much as touch her bowl before a servant quietly took it away. Czewa took a few sips, but mostly focused on unabashedly tearing strips of bread and pushing them to Stava, not unlike a lowland husband would be expected to. The fifth wife accepted them, only to take hardly a bite and lay them down by her plate. Miria tried to not make her appetite overly conspicuous.

It was not just for sympathy that she kept mentally reaching out towards her family. If her father had been the one to arrange Visza's security, then it held that he ought to know something about its absence. Or, at least, the reason why his son had somehow managed to find himself a part of a noble mob. That alone should make for a good starting point for Miria's little truth-finding exercise.

Assuming, of course, she could manage to get that far in the first place; she had not yet done anything, and second thoughts were already worming their way into her mind—especially in the face of what she was going to do next. But first, she needed the dinner to be over, and a chance to get a moment alone with Stava.

"I used to have a seat in the Overwhelming Grace too," Mażin muttered, her voice barely rising above a whisper.

Still, the sound was enough to break the spell of silence. The third wife sighed heavily, reached for the flat-breads, and broke one loudly in half. Czewa took the remaining half, and dripped the end of it in soup. They ate.

"I keep forgetting that you are a Kaszabi," the fourth wife said after a moment.

It was not something Miria had heard about before; Mażin loved to talk about others, but rarely herself. It did make sense, however; the House of Kaszabi was one of those aristocratic families that had most readily embraced Her Infernal Majesty's scepter. For Miria's brother that had made them traitors; for her father, it marked them as reasonable.

"If I could forget about that myself," the third wife replied, "I would."

Czewa frowned at the response, but said nothing. The second course was served, and for a time only the scraping of cutlery broke the dining room's quiet.

"I do envy you sometimes, Mażin," Czewa set her fork and knife down. "You and your giving up on everything that you were. Name. Faith. Even family."

Stava reached above the table, her hand landing over the fourth wife's wrist and gently holding it down. Miria instead pretended to focus entirely on boning the bream on her plate. The conversation pulled her back into the present, and into the unfixed tangle of her emotions, too flushed with shame over how she had felt towards Visza earlier to make much sense in the now.

"And I thought you had given up on your little provocations." The third wife's voice did not budge. She put a small bite of the fish in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "You could have chosen a better day to return to that habit."

Miria glanced up from her fish, and allowed herself to look at the arguing wives. How different they were, seated across from each other. Mażin's body had grown soft and round after years of wife-medicine, which to Miria's eyes seemed to render her less feminine so much as beyond such terms altogether. Or maybe that was not the matter of appearance, but rather of the absence of pride, of that famed haughtiness of lowland wives which Visza had sought to embody. Then again, the third wife was all gentle lights and quiet words, with nary a suggestion of masculine hardness left in her.

In contrast, Czewa—tall and gaunt—seemed mostly immune to the results of the medicine she was supposed to be taking, the old contours of her body only marginally softened. It did not detract from her beauty. If anything, it highlighted it further. Masculinity had left little bite on her, in any case; Miria's eyes surveyed the fourth's hairline, producing little stabs of envy in the process. Even with Czewa's unwifely's gestures, she still wore the mourning white better than Miria could. Some bodies, it seemed, were just more fortunately born—and tended to attract more attention, as the fifth wife's tight hold on the fourth's wrist attested.

"If you want to talk about provocations," the fourth wife growled, the faint veneer of voice training giving way to the basso beneath. Miria scowled; it was not something she should have noticed, even if Czewa made little effort to hide it, "consider how happy the First has to be, now that our wife has a reason to burn the Overwhelming Grace to the ground."

The third wife raised a hand; a servant rushed in to pour her a glass of ruby-red wine. She sipped quickly, seeking something else than taste, and said nothing.

"But that is not something you care about anymore," Czewa pushed on. "Is it?"

All that she managed to get out of Mażin was an extended, whistling sigh, and a very pale and unhappy smile.

"What do you want me to say, 'Wa?" she said finally. "Visza's corpse is still warm. She died because she refused to stop caring. She died because the pious temple-going folk you are so concerned about hate us."

It was not the first time Miria had heard such arguments at the table, especially when the Lady Governor was not present; but in evenings past, Visza would be already intervening. She had never had much patience for others questioning her choices; pointedly, this had applied to Czewa as much as to Mażin.

"They hate what's been done to us," the fourth wife snapped back.

"You know that you do not have to stay if you hate it so." Mażin shook her head, and took another bite of the bream. "Ask for a divorce. Put the pants on again. You are a wife, not a slave."

The fourth wife's only response was a bitter, brittle laugh.

Mażin was not wrong; the infernal marriage vows under which they had all been wed were renounceable. Want, Luna was fond of reminding them, was not meant to be a prison. The Lady Governor herself had made it explicit that she would not bar her consent from any wife seeking a dissolution of their union. But there were also good reasons for why none of them would ever seek a divorce.

Miria looked more closely at Czewa, trying to divine from the contortions of her face if she too had been sacrificed by her family at the altar of political exigency. The idea that one could be sentenced to such a fate without having Miria's desire made the boy-toy wife shudder.

Desserts and fragrant coffee arrived, breaking up the argument for a time. Stava leaned over towards Czewa, quickly whispering something into her ears, still refusing to release her grip on the fourth wife's hand. A servant tried to offer a slice of cake to Miria; she refused politely.

It was not the infernal way to mark mourning with restraint, but the idea of having sweets on the day of her fellow wife's murder still made her queasy, no matter how much they made her mouth water. She was not the only one at the table to display such sentiment—though, of course, no wife turned the coffee back.

"I am sorry," Czewa announced at last, slackening in her chair.

The fifth wife smiled imperceptibly at her and finally let go of the hand. It was to be expected. No lowlander wished to stand up from a meal in anger; it never boded well. Those who apologize over bread do not die over swords, the saying went, harkening back to darker times of blood-feuds and barely restrained violence.

"Apology accepted," Mażin nodded, not ungratefully.

"I am just afraid," the fourth wife continued quietly. "If our lady wife does not…"

She left her voice hanging on a minor, stifled note.

"She will," the third wife reassured. "She always does. And even if, by some miracle, she does not, the matter is far beyond our reach anyway. Like it or not, we are wives now, and there is nothing that we can do but wait. Let us not add to our grief by pretending otherwise."

There was no reason for Mażin to look at Miria as she said that, and she did not. The admonition was for Czewa, and evoked a pained wince that the fourth wife ineptly tried to hide behind a sideways glance. None of them could count on being able to change the Lady Governor's mind—but it was Czewa alone who had never had her wife's ear, for reasons only indirectly alluded to in conversations and gossip. Still, the boy-toy wife could not help but to feel her cheeks flush at Mażin's words, as if they were aimed at the plans she had been quietly nursing.

"Is this really what being a wife means?" she caught herself asking, before she had the good sense to bite down on her own tongue. The unease she felt at the notion came as a surprise.

"Yes," Mażin said softly, a motherly smile on her face.

"Especially for you," Czewa added, earning a sharp stare from Stava.

"It also means you don't have to worry so much," Mażin added. "It's not in your hands, anyway."

Miria did not respond. A part of her wanted to—maybe needed to—feel a sharper kind of guilt, because what the other wives said was indisputably true. After all, had she not entertained the dreams of being so stripped of choice and responsibility, back in those nether days of failing to live the life a son should? Now, not half a year had passed since she had managed to win her chance to be held in hand, and she was already starting to turn her back on it? And out of what—a lingering sense of filial duty?

Czewa was right; the way Mażin cut herself from her past was worthy of envy.

The conversation moved, and promptly floundered, without ever reaching the usual rounds of gossip and small, quotidian complaints. Mażin—who on any other day would love nothing but to lead the wives in their casual chit-chat—left first, excusing herself with exhaustion.

Surprisingly, Czewa followed moments later; in response to Stava's puzzled look, she claimed she needed to be alone for the night. The fifth wife did not protest, as saddened as she clearly was—but for Miria, it offered a slight, lucky break. She had not been looking forward to the embarrassment of having to knock on Stava's door later, only to find her occupied with someone else.

"Would you mind," she asked, finishing her coffee, "if I visited you after?"

Stava, as usual reluctant to make a use of her voice, gave her a curious look.

"There is something I need to borrow," Miria explained.

***

The fifth wife's rooms were just next door to Miria's. If there was a difference between them, it lay not in size, nor luxury, but in how lived-in Stava's seemed in comparison. She came from the far west, and had brought the distant ocean with her to the lowlands. Nautical maps of the warm seas adorned her walls, alongside sentimental but capable paintings of ships sailing the spice routes. Most of it had been her dowry; the rest the Lady Governor's generous gifts, including a spectacular panorama of the Bay of Dis, its waters turned red by the fluttering sails of Her Infernal Majesty's grand war fleet.

Those gifts did not limit themselves to decorations, however. A great bed of exotic redwood took up most of the chamber, easily twice, if not thrice as big as the one Miria slept in. The purpose behind its size was not hard to divine; in stifled moans and cries of pleasure, it penetrated into the sixth wife's room every time Czewa visited Stava for the night. The fifth wife had received it for her anniversary, and Miria recalled being puzzled at why Czewa, usually so reserved and reluctant, was the one to offer the Lady Governor effusive thanks for it. Then again, those were the first weeks of her marriage, and back then, she'd barely understood what the relationship between the wives was supposed to be like.

"If it is what I think you mean," Stava whispered, sitting down before her dresser, and starting to clean her makeup, "it'll be in the wardrobe. Lowest shelf."

Miria envied the fifth wife a little for her bed, but mostly for her voice. In a twist of cruel irony, Stava never seemed to fully realize just how beautiful her slightly husky, but nonetheless soft and sweet whisper sounded. In fact, she spoke up only rarely when surrounded by others, out of concern for the supposedly unwifely tenor. This little shame was one of the many reasons why of all the Lady Governor's wives, Miria had ended up liking Stava the best and desiring her the least: she could recognize herself in her, for better or worse.

Admittedly, it was usually the latter.

The fifth wife removed her silver earring loops, then the crystal-studded choker; her gestures were slight, as was her frame. When fingers brushed her body, they did so overly carefully, as if she was a fragile thing, likely to crack under pressure. It was this grace that made Miria, a poor reflection; they were both lean, they were both sharp-featured, but unlike the boy-toy wife, Stava inhabited her flesh without any mannish impetus.

Miria looked away from the fifth wife before the sight started to hurt too deeply, turning to the paneled wardrobe doors and what hid behind them. For all her fondness for jewels and precious metals, Stava's tastes ran plain and modest when it came to dress. Though Miria had never had a good opportunity to ask, she suspected that whatever family Stava had left behind had to be of those pious burghers who matched a deep suspicion of opulence with a subtle taste for luxury.

The package Miria was looking for lay hidden under layers of folded kerchiefs in autumnal reds and yellows. It was a bag made out of brown, waxed paper; when the boy-toy wife reached inside she was rewarded with the overly familiar touch of rough fabric and old leather. She did not need to see to know what her hands found: a white shirt, and a black vest. A sword-belt, riding trousers of the kind that had been fashionable a few years ago, and boots to match. In other words, a complete outfit of the kind one would expect to see worn by a young burgher man in Karsz's streets.

A month and a half into her marriage, Miria had experienced the misfortune of running into the Hofmeisterin while returning from a visit in her family's home back in the town below. The clothes she'd worn then were not unlike the ones in the brown bag; the boy-toy wife had not yet had a chance to change back into a dress. The old servant did not receive it well; she had Miria dragged before the other wives and viciously scolded for her refusal of wifely obedience. Then, the Hofmeisterin ordered Mariś to go through all of Miria's wardrobe, pack anything in it which could pass for boy's clothing, and burn it all in the palace's central furnace.

If Miria had been braver, she would have tried to argue: maybe explain that it was not a refusal of femininity—not that she could refuse something she barely held, anyway—but rather a familial matter, and one of personal comfort. After all, she had no intention to try to offend the Lady Governor by wearing men's clothes inside the palace, and in fact relished the opportunity to not do so. But to mount such a defense would be difficult for her even today, let alone in her first, confusing, lonesome weeks.

A few days later, Stava had found a private moment alone with Miria and offered the boy-toy wife that, if she ever needed to again, she should feel free to make use of her old outfits. They were, after all, similar in size, and should fit well. Miria's next few jaunts into the city had confirmed that theory, even if hurriedly changing inside a carriage climbing back the palace hill was always a sharp shot of stress.

"Can you even leave?" Stava asked upon hearing the rustle of paper. "The Lady Governor forbade it."

The sixth wife nodded. Somewhere in the back of her head, an idea percolated that she should just try to sneak out, but truth be told, she had no idea how she was going to accomplish that. She pursed her lips at the thought that she had concerned herself more with what to wear in front of her family than with how to get to them in the first place, but eventually decided that, in any case, now was not the time to get wound up over that.

She tugged at the bag to free it from its hiding place. As the package came out, it was followed by a slender, metal tube which had apparently been tucked on top of it. It tumbled quietly to the floor, resting in the thick, southern carpet covering the floor. Mindful of how curiosity was a bad habit in girls, Miria carefully picked it up.

Husband-medicine poultice, the label read. Strong formula! Produced in Dis, for use infernal & mortal. Not for sale to wives. A ragged tear marked where the paper seal holding the cap in place had been torn. It took Miria a second to understand what it was exactly that she was holding. Did Stava really hate being made a wife so much?

She glanced up at the woman in front of the mirror, finishing with wipe the rouge from her cheeks; there seemed to be no rush in her gestures, no desperate need to come clean. Nothing in her suggested that femininity was a mask she loathed to wear. The boy-toy wife turned the tube in her fingers. So if it was not defiance against the Lady Governor, then what? And, more importantly, how had the fifth wife managed to smuggle this highly illicit medicine past the Hofmeisterin? That question contained within itself a kernel of an idea.

Miria swallowed, bracing herself for the thing she had to do next.

"Hey," she asked, looking up. "Where did you get that?"

Stava's reaction was gracefully temperate. She followed the boy-toy wife's look, and upon noticing the tube in her hand, rewarded Miria with a disapproving look. Immediately, the boy-toy wife had to suppress an urge to apologize.

"It just fell out," she mumbled, withering under the gaze. "It was an accident."

The embarrassment had to be plainly visible, because Stava exhaled lightly and tempered her scowl.

"Look," she said, "if you want to try it, feel free. But it won't make the changes go away. It doesn't work like that."

At first, Miria raised her hand to protest the notion; but she had a bag of illicit men's clothing sitting on her lap, and so it was difficult to blame Stava for the assumption.

"No, that's not…" she started, half-heartedly. "Why do you even have it, then?"

Stava turned away, looking back into the mirror. With most of the makeup gone, Miria could clearly see the dark lines marking where she still had not had her facial hair burned off.

"It," she began, turning faintly red, "is for me and Czewa. For when we're together. Right?"

The sixth-wife blinked, then quickly stashed the tube back in its hiding place. For a moment, all she could feel was that disastrously stupid and horrendously embarrassing surprise at finding out that it was the fifth wife who was the husband between her and the fourth.

"Right," she murmured instead.

"It's an old wife trick. I learned it from Visza."

The fact that it was Visza, that supremely beautiful ideal of femininity, who had taught Stava how to use the husband-medicine briefly registered as a little bit odd. But thinking about the late second wife was not something Miria particularly wanted to do. She shook the notion away, and focused on the thing that mattered the most in the moment.

"But how did you even manage to get it? Isn't it forbidden?"

The tension—and the blush—left Stava. Whatever she had been briefly worried about ceased to weigh on her. She put down her wipes, and turned around to face Miria, a bit curious, a bit pensive.

"What are you up to, Miria?"

The only response that the sixth wife managed was a slightly anxious twitch. It was not just that she did not want others to know about her planned escapades—she herself was not entirely sure of what her intentions really were. Thankfully, Stava did not push.

"Fine," she said, a delicate tension building somewhere in her slight voice. "None of my business. But you have to promise me something first."

She paused. Miria waited.

"Be kind to Czewa," she said, a raw note bleeding through her words. "Even if she isn't always too kind to you. Or others. She has given up on much for the sake of others. Much more," she hesitated before continuing, "than she should have had to."

If Miria could be sure of the meaning behind those words, she would love nothing more than to share that she understood such a sacrifice, having made one herself. But it would also have to be a lie; if Czewa resented her marriage, then her fate was nothing like the boy-toy's wife, no matter how similar their histories could be made to look. She nodded, and received a pale smile in return.

"Well then. Do you know Mihasz? The groundskeeper?"

***

Only a few quick steps separated Stava's door from the one to Miria's own room. Still, the boy-toy wife held her breath the entire way, crossing the distance in lunges as long as her dress would allow. This time, however, the Hofmeisterin did not lurk in an ambush; as the familiar dark of her bed-chamber welcomed her, Miria finally allowed herself an exhale—but not to put the light on. Not yet.

Stumbling around, she found her bed by touch and memory alone, and knelt down by it to push the bag of men's clothing deep underneath. A cursory search would not find it there, and as long as she did not give the Hofmeisterin any reason to investigate more thoroughly, she should be safe. She could only hope no one would notice her planned visit to the groundskeeper's hut, or find it suspicious.

It was not hard to believe that, of all the servants, it was the wrinkled, cantankerous Mihasz who specialized in supplying the household with everything that should not cross the front gate. It was not hard to believe, just as it was not obvious to suspect; the man had been tending to the palace grounds for as long as anyone could remember, his presence long since faded into the scenery. It did, however, sting a little that no other wife had thought it appropriate to tell Miria about the groundskeeper's trade.

As the excitement of her little transgression against the household's order faded away, the sixth-wife found herself swamped with a sticky wave of exhaustion. It had been a long day, and she preferred not to think too much about a lot of what had happened. In its own small way, the plans she was drawing for tomorrow, the plans that would maybe let her find out what it was, exactly, that felt so out of joint about Visza's murder, helped her to think less of the murder itself, of the body beginning to rot under the snow-white shroud, and of the formless, suffocating grief even she was not immune to.

Grudgingly, she removed the blinds from the hellfire lamp at her bed-stand. Orange and gold light flooded the dark room, taking her briefly back to the shrine of Want, and those bitter-sweet moments in the pillory there, before things had gotten so sour and so complicated. It was with that thought on her mind that she noticed the little surprise waiting for her.

Someone had left it on her bed, just so that she would not miss it, and still she'd been too caught up in her own head to notice it immediately—even though it was obviously meant to draw her attention. It was a small, wooden box, minimally carved with the simplest fire motifs. Miria's heart skipped a beat: this was how the Lady Governor preferred to offer gifts to her wives.

With her fingers shaking ever so slightly, she popped the lid open, revealing a card written in the familiar, sharp hand.

Dear Miria, it read, my beloved boy-toy wife.

The letter was a hand that wrapped itself around her throat, and held tight. Of all the things she had taught herself to expect, this was not one of them. She read on, stumbling over each word.

Please forgive me for the absence of my attention. If you must, put the blame on me, not Visza, and accept this gift as an apology and a promise.

That was all; no more writing, nothing. There was no mention of grief, of death, of mourning. The Lady Governor must have had this sent in those few hours between Miria being sized and Visza's murder.

Underneath the card, a sardonyx cameo waited for Miria on a velvet bed. Reverently, she picked it up by its silver setting, and brought it closer to the flame. The scene cut into the stone was not hard to recognize: a hydra of braided limbs, all reaching to bury a pilloried body standing atop a mountain of coin.

And on the other side, the one that would be always pressed into Miria's throat, should she ever wear the jewel, a single-word waited:

Mine.

 

[Squirtodyle]

if you're coming here to report this story Please be aware that this is not prima facie against Rule 6: Acceptable Content on SV.

We have received several reports for this story with the concern that it is running afoul of Rule 6, and we've decided to make an informational post specifically to cut down on the number of those reports.

While this is not to say that the story cannot be reported now or in the future, please be aware that any report made with a generic, non-specific reporting reason of "Rule 6" or "obscenity" and the like will be rejected.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Five: In Which There are Memories

A nagging fear of being followed dragged behind Miria. There was little reason why she should be; as a boy-toy wife the only time anyone in the household would pay any close attention to her was the Hofmeisterin's morning inspection. Once she was put into the correct dress, made up, and fed the wife-medicine, she usually was left alone to drift through the hours, unless an improbable whim struck the Lady Governor to request her use and presence. On most days, Miria felt invisible—and yet today, her eyes kept darting around the palace gardens' budding greenery, as if expecting to see some Mariś or Kaś watching and reporting on her.

But of course, no white splash of mourning livery interrupted the drab brown of leafless trees and barren flowerbeds. Only occasionally would a patrolling soldier in his red jacket pass her by, gravel crunching under the steel-toed boots; but even then, his eyes would be turned away from Miria, scanning the palace fence for signs of a breach or an assault. The sixth wife was no intruder, and was not doing anything untoward: merely taking an opportunity in the end of the last week's incessant drizzles to finally enjoy a morning walk through the winding garden paths. The worst she could be accused of was getting mud on her lacquered boots and the spotless white of her dress' hem. Which, granted, would be a waste: it was a very nice dress.

She paused her stroll, and let her gloved hand wander up the row of silver buttons running all the way up to her neck, coming to a rest at the sardonyx cameo clasped around it. The stone was indisputably still there, remaining as a tangible proof of the Lady Governor's attention that Miria still could not entirely believe in. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, little warning noises rose like tin trumpets, poisoning the pleasure with the cold awareness that if the Lady Governor had decided to reward her with such an unexpected gift—such a welcome promise—then something had to be wrong, had to be headed towards a catastrophe.

It was around that sense of imminent danger that Miria's guilt coiled. It only made sense that she would receive a token of the Lady Governor's want—even if only as an afterthought of a consolation—just as she was getting ready to break with her trust. If she had really been deserving of the stone and the word carved into it, she would be staying in the palace, being as a boy-toy wife should be: an unnoticed, unheard piece of the scenery.

The groundskeeper made himself heard before he could be seen. His voice reached Miria over a thick hedge, not so much in individual words, but rather in a general melody of a frustrated tirade. She followed after it, until it led her to opening in the hedge, and into a small, secluded clearing hiding behind.

Mihasz lived in one of the old king's follies—a rather fanciful recreation of a highland shepherd's hut, built back in that brief period of time when pastoral motifs were the height of fashion. The fad had lasted but a few years, and aristocrats quickly got bored of putting embroidered highlanders' pants and pretending to tend to a handful of confused sheep. A few mutton-laden feasts dispensed with the flock, but the hut itself remained, eventually passing to the groundskeeper to serve as his new home and tool-shed. And now, the old man stood under the garlands of holly carved into the door-frame and jabbed his crooked finger at the overcast sky. A pair of contrite gardeners stood before him, receiving a berating oratory with bent heads.

What the verbal lashing was all about, Miria could scarcely understand. Insults rained from Mihasz's mouth at a rapid-fire pace, delivered in curling, country dialect too thick for the sixth wife to understand. Thankfully, she did not have to wait long. With a furious sweep of his arm, the groundskeeper sent the gardeners away. The moment he noticed Miria lurking at the entrance to his little glade, the furious expression contorting his wrinkled face dissolved immediately into a look of warm delight.

"Oh, what joyful surprise!" he exclaimed.

He swiped the feathered hat from his head, and went into a deep bow, sweeping the ground at his feet. No hint of dialect remained in his voice; he spoke clearly, as if he had been born and raised in a burgher's home.

"To what does the old man owe the pleasure? What can he do for you?"

Tentatively, Miria navigated closer, careful to step between the many puddles where the gravel had grown sparse. By the time she reached the door, Mihasz had already invited her inside, into a dusky chamber lit only by an orange glow from a low-burning stove.

"Please, sit, sit," he implored, dusting off a fireside stool for her.

A heavy smell of burnt resin permeated the air; tongues of smoke curled around bundles of sage, parsley, and wild garlic dangled from every beam. More and stranger herbs slowly infused in rows of glass jars stacked by the chamber's lone window. Mihasz picked one, seemingly at random, and poured a generous serving for his guest, releasing a sharp, alcoholic tang.

"For your constitution," he offered, pressing the stoneware cup into Miria's hands and waiting expectantly.

She drank out of reflex more than desire, and immediately regretted it. A minty coolness spread through her mouth before igniting into a cold firestorm rolling all the way down into her stomach. She coughed, barely holding onto the cup.

"Th-thank you," she managed to mutter, hoping to not sound too insincere.

Mihasz poured for himself, too, just as generously—but where Miria had merely wetted her lips in the liquor, he downed his entire glass in two quick gulps. He wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand and tossed the hat onto a nearby table, but did not sit down himself.

"First time you visit," he noted, "young lady."

There was something in the way he said those words that made Miria's shoulders instinctively pull closer together, though it took her a second to realize why: the old man sounded as if they were both in on a joke. Without wanting to, the sixth wife found herself looking away from him, a sour, familiar feeling building up somewhere from the back of her throat.

"Don't be coy," he continued, holding back a dry chuckle, "and just tell the old man what is that you need. You wives don't come to this geezer for nothing."

In a way, she appreciated his candor. It spared her from having to ask. And yet, when she tried to speak, she found her throat dry, the cameo clamping it down like a vice. There were still so many ways she could pull out of this plan, withdraw back to her room, and validate the gift. What need was for her to play the grand inquisitor, out for the truth, if the entire purpose of her life—the purpose she had begged for—was to be an irrelevant boy-toy wife?

"So…" the man leaned in, "what it is that you need old Mihasz to fix you? Holy books? Poultices? A cutlass or a pistol, maybe? Do you need a love letter delivered? You can trust those wizened hands. They have never broken with a man's trust," he paused to shrug, "or a woman's."

The list sobered her up. Of course, she was not the only wife to betray the Lady Governor like that. She winced at the mention of love letters, and for a moment faces of the third, the fourth, and the fifth danced before her eyes, to the tune of a mean doubt: so which was the unfaithful one? At least her crime would not be out of the errancies of her heart, but rather down to obligations older than her marriage, or her sex. For courage, she took another sip of the icy fire, and found it opening her throat.

"I need to sneak out," she announced, louder than she would have wanted to. "For the night."

"Ah," Mihasz wheezed. "That's simply arranged!"
From a hook by the door, the groundskeeper picked up a cane, and with its crooked end reached into the bundles of herbs, drawing from them a clinking ring of bent and blackened keys. They rang like a series of tin bells as his gnarled fingers picked through them, before finally picking one: a simple, single-bitted chunk of soot-stained iron.

"You know the belcher's cave?"

Miria nodded: he was referring to a pile of pink granite built around a one-armed statue, supposedly of the city's eponymous hero Karsz. With his mouth wide open and sole remaining hand pressed to his belly, he was meant to seem as if uttering a great war-shout, but everyone called him 'the belcher' instead, or more uncouth terms.

"Past it," the groundskeeper explained, "there's that dwarf pine thicket. You make it all the way through it to the fence, and you find a gate. No one remembers it's there anymore. The path outside is overgrown and too steep for an old fart like me, but for a young… lady like you? It'll take you to the town no problem, and with none the wiser."

He extended the key towards her, only to pull it out of her reach the moment she moved to grab it.

"Now, now," he smiled at her, a row of gold teeth at proud display, "young lady, don't be hasty. Don't you have a thaler to spare for old Mihasz?"

Of course. How foolish it had been of Miria to assume that the groundskeeper helped the wives out of the goodness of his heart. She closed herself even further, because in truth, she did not have a single thaler to her name; she was a wife, and all her possessions were the Lady Governor's, and she had never felt the need to ask for purse money.

"The demons, you see, are not like the good old king," Mihasz added, pouring himself another round, "may his soul be hallowed. The old Mihasz may not be going hungry, but would the demons build him a home like that?"

He raised a toast to the rafters to the shepherd's hut.

"It's not out of greed, young lady," he mused, "but a man thinks to himself: you wish to go out into the city. Have some fun with a girl maybe, so what they've done to you stings less? Old Mihasz won't judge, but he teeter's at a tomb's brink, and wouldn't it be just if your fun sweetened his final days too, don't you think?"

Miria did not notice the moment when her fingers closed around the jewel on her neck, as if to protect it. True enough, his stare locked onto the gem, too, and an encouraging nod followed her gesture. Was he really expecting her to toss it away like a petty bauble? A frustrated exhale left her chest. He knew so little about her, and already she could tell he was assuming much. So many people did. Maybe there was a use in it.

"Groundskeeper," she whispered, gritting her teeth at what she was about to say next. "My father is waiting for his son."

Her voice had never been properly trained; every week, the Hofmeisterin would give her a few lessons to make it more wifely, but the progress she was making felt, at best, torturous. Now, as she spoke, she strove to forget even the few basic principles she had managed to pick up, speaking from the bottom of her chest, in a man's grating grumble.

"But the son can't come. The red-coated soldiers won't let him leave the Overwhelming Grace. And his other child?" she spoke, watching for signs of pity in Mihasz's face. "They put his other child in this…"

Instead of finishing, she let her voice hang, and her hand awkwardly point at her dress. She made sure that the groundskeeper's eyes would follow her gesture towards the bulge between her legs, and all the implications it carried. It made for an unhappy surprise to find out just how easily those lies came to her—and how smoothly they seemed to reel Mihasz in. Biting her lip, she pressed on.

"I'm just a wife," she tried to give the word the same poisonous weight she could recall from when her brother spat it into the air, "but I still want to just be a good…"

The groundskeeper shook his head slowly. He put the key into Miria's hand, and closed her fingers around it.

"Son, yes," he said, without any of his previous cheer. "Bless your heart."

She left his hut not long thereafter, the cool metal of the key digging into her flesh where she hid it under her dress. On her way back to the palace, she could only think of everything others expected her to be, and how much she was disappointing all of them.

***

Stava's old clothes fit Miria unpleasantly well. The short span of her marriage was not nearly enough to shake the coarse fabric's familiarity from her skin. She hid her dress among the dwarf pines, and unlocked the gate, careful not to let the rusted hinges scream too loudly.

Above, the southern winds were blowing, scattering the clouds to reveal a crescent moon set against a bed of cold, blue stars. Under their dubious light, Miria followed a steep path down the overgrown hillside, through the messy, tangled brush that surrounded the palace. By the time she'd slid all the way down, she had managed to get dark streaks of mud all over her trousers and shirt. And maybe for the better: there was a certain rough-and-tumble look to it, as if she had just returned from a long horse ride. If she could only grow her hair out a bit longer, she could almost play for that fey highwayman's look that the young rakes so cherished.

It was how she once used to fit into the city of Karsz that sprawled ahead of her, dark, but never asleep.

Maybe she could do it again.

Ever since Her Infernal Majesty had demanded the city's walls be demolished—long before she formally put the kingdom of Leshia under the imperial scepter—Karsz had chosen to spill its old bounds, spreading over both banks of the Neuma River into an ever-expanding patchwork of winding streets and eclectic architecture, overlooked by the hilltop palaces and their vast gardens. In the spring, the city's air grew thick with pollen and the scent of flowers. Thus they called it the Orchard of the Lowlands and the Flower of Neuma. Even while Leshia withered, even while surrounding powers devoured it one small bite after another, its capital never ceased to bloom.

Or so they said.

Spring rains had turned the unpaved streets into a swamp, only traversable with the help of rickety wooden walkways, shifting under the weight of many bodies stepping across at once. Already slippery, they were all the more treacherous in the dark; the episcopacy continued to refuse to let hellfire lanterns be installed, and so the only light remained a handful of flickering lanterns hanging from burgher's windows. And yet, the night scarcely seemed to trouble the drivers of collection carts, their vehicle careening through the narrow streets, racing to dump the city's gathered filth foaming into the Neuma.

Someone bumped shoulders with Miria, and she almost lost her footing.

"Don't slip," they called after her, their voice already disappearing into the dark.

"I won't!" she shouted back the traditional hail of Karsz's nightcrawlers.

With the sun down, no room remained on the streets for stately burghers or the black-cassoked episcopal priests; ornamented aristocratic carriages retreated into the carriage houses, and women of good morals tucked themselves to sleep. Instead, a tribe of rowdy youth took the city into possession with their shouts and laughter, and for the time being, Miria was just one of them, again. No one paid any attention to her, offering her an invisibility far greater than just the dark of the night could afford; she moved freely towards the Lesser City Square, yet another errant man in the streets out there to enjoy the spring of his life. Every so often, a keen-eyed prostitute would call after her in a hoarse voice, adding to the nightlife melody of Karsz she knew so well.

And yet, not all was she had remembered; though the melody stayed the same, it had been shifted in pitch. The call-and-response of rakes and harlots came in sharp bursts and barks; nighttime greets were uttered in a hurry, and prayers to the Holy, once unheard past sundown, now cut in between laughs and shouts. There was a new rush on the streets of Karsz, at once hungry and fearful, unfolding under a sign yet inchoate, but already dreadful. She picked up her pace, an uncertain sense of threat driving her to a half-jog.

When the wood under her soles gave way to smoothed stone, Miria knew she had reached her destination. She let herself breathe out, and looked up to see the Lesser City square opening ahead of her, so much more vast in the dark than it would appear under the light of the sun. A bright light burned high above, at the top of the Enduring Virtue's spire, the black outline of the temple looming over the surrounding townhouses. In the past it alone had claimed dominion over the night, but those days were long gone.

A new theater had opened alongside the square's edge, a massive brazier filled with hellfire illuminating its front. Sharp music from drunk violins flooded out of its open doors, spilling into the plaza in an open challenge to high spire. Colourful, unquiet folk congregated in the light, enjoying a break in their festivities, their dress and shouts intoxicatingly foreign. Only a pair of red-jacketed soldiers posted at the door seemed distant from the revelry, instead squinting at the night, and the dangers it may present. Against her better judgement, the boy-toy let herself be lured closer.

She stopped just outside the ring of light, close enough to read the colored letters on the great posters advertising tonight's play: Prince Miko's Desires Unrewarded: A Comedy in Three Acts. The names underneath were decidedly infernal, as were the faces of the two actresses leaning out of the theater's balcony and smoking from their long, wooden pipes. They shimmered in the hellfire's orange-and-red glow, for they wore more gold and silver than cloth. Twisting white tattoos crossed their dark skin, and whenever a sliver of their flesh emerged from under cascading velvets and silks, Miria felt her heart clench. One of them noticed the boy-toy wife lurking in the dark, and with a shrill laugh, blew a circle of smoke her way.

"Leshite brother," she called in an icy voice, "you here to cause trouble?"

Before the soldiers took notice, Miria ran. The infernal theater was a spectacle of flesh, its players little more than objects of the audience's want. She remembered the first time a troupe like that had made its way into Karsz, remembered the fury that seized the respectable people of the city that such things were being allowed, and most of all, remembered the image of a demonic girl in chains, waving to men crowding to behold the display of her humiliation. Even now, years hence, the image was still burned into her mind, stirring a desperate, impossible hunger. She expected the image of the two actresses to join it, and remain with her for days, or maybe forever.

The townhouse her family had moved into was just on the opposite side of the square, hidden behind the bulk of the Enduring Virtue. Lights flickered in its windows; burghers seldom slept early. Still chased by the actress' laugh, Miria found the sculpted door-knocker, and banged it a few times, the sound louder than she would have wanted.

One of her father's apprentices—a tired-eyed youth with a mop of red hair and purple ink-stains under his fingernails—opened for her. He had been at the workshop for years now, and recognized her promptly. Without a word, he led her among the quiet printing presses, and upstairs, to her parent's rooms. Miria felt bad for the boy. Back in the old workshop by the northern riverside, they'd all lived side by side, apprentices sharing the master's home and table. But different rules controlled a townhouse opposite of the Enduring Virtue, large enough to have a cellar where the apprentices could sleep without having to worry about disturbing the master printer and his wife.

"Son!"

Her mother's voice was hoarse and small; Miria startled at the sound, but followed it, entering into a brightly lit drawing room. Gone were the days of counting every candle; now Petrasz Benedek, master printer, was the sole provider of services to the Lady Governor's household, and as such, beyond the need for petty savings.

"Has something happened?"

Evidence of new wealth surrounded Miria on all sides. The paintings of western masters lined the walls, the stately eyes of burghers from the Marine Republics all turned towards the center of the room. Miria liked to imagine that they disapproved of the expensive furniture, of those gilded oak chairs and tables cluttered around, imported from workshops as far east as Drinzo, where snakes hold court. Or perhaps instead they did not scowl, but rather admired, however pensively, the collection of porcelain tiles in the cupboards around, blue paint on white shell depicting ships at full sail and grain-heavy fields. Some of the specimens Miria's mother had brought from the west were no less valuable than the oils above.

"Is it about Ambros?"

She had to look at her parents eventually; they were the reason why she came. Still, she delayed, taking in the decor, letting her eyes linger and catch on each and every proof of fresh success. When she was little, her father taught her modesty above all, a good burgher's frugality and distaste for aristocratic ostentatiousness. She balked at those lessons then, her dreams reveling instead in the cautionary tales of infernal splendour and the seductive flames of Dis. It was bittersweet to find out, finally and beyond dispute, that she had not been the only one hungering for more.

"Yes, mother," she replied, finally forcing herself to face the center of the room. "It's about Ambros."

Her parents had changed less than their home did. For all of Petrasz's need to prove, before the world and himself, that he had made it, he continued to wear solely black and white, the fashion of the portraits he adorned the walls with. Old severity became him. Even now, she struggled to see his face for anything but the look of concern and disapproval. And how could she blame him for it? Death awaited his son; loss plagued his family.

And then, there was her mother, eyes glazed over with tears. She sat by her husband's side, hands clasped tightly together, as if for prayer. A book of litanies lay open on the table before her, one that the sixth wife knew intimately. She had been read from it often as a child, receiving from her mother's lips a plea after plea that the Holy would bring consolation, reprieve, and absolution. Then as now, it struck her how much her mother made herself look as one of those doleful old ladies, whose wooden sculptures adorned the wings of episcopal temples, polychromy peeling away year after year, leaving behind a harsh and bare face of petrified wood.

"Please tell me she'll have mercy," the older woman sobbed, bloodshot eyes drilling straight through Miria. "Please tell me you'll make her!"

Careful not to make too much noise, Miria pulled back a chair and sat down, trying to decide whether folding her hands on her lap would not be seen as too feminine for the circumstances.

"I will try," she said. "But he—"

"He did nothing," her father cut in, fingers snapping against the table. "Ambros is a victim."

The usually quiescent part of Miria, the one she had spent years restraining and burying, jolted at those words, and reminded the sixth wife of the body under the pristine white shroud. But Visza's murder was not the matter of contention here, if it mattered for her father at all. She tried to shake the thought away, but it resisted, persisting as a small pinprick of anger somewhere under the layers of old guilt.

"I believe you," she lied. "But the Lady Governor is…" she hesitated on the choice of the next word; none that came to her mind seemed to fit what her father wanted to hear. "She is furious. She will ignore sanctuary, if she needs to."

The book of litanies snapped shut, the sound ringing off like a musket-shot.

"She wouldn't!" her mother whispered, pale on the face. "Even she wouldn't dare."

Petrasz's hand clasped over his wife's wrist.

"Marina," he said, "you should rest. Let the men talk this over."

Miria avoided looking at the older woman as she nodded and left. She had never been the one to offer her mother consolation, and especially not in her wedding's wake. But it was not just the guilt that made her eyes turn away; she did not want to see just how heavy the look of expectation was in Marina's face as she put all her hopes again on her child's shoulders.

"Tell me how bad it is," Petrasz asked when the bedroom doors closed.

She obliged, leaving out only the part where she had been forbidden from leaving the palace grounds. It was better that he did not know she'd disobeyed her wife to be here; he had enough worries already without having to add to them the risks his child was taking.

Somewhere towards the end of her explanation, as she moved from the facts of the matter to her own suspicions, he rang for a servant, and spoke again only after a pair of steaming mint infusions landed on the table between them. The sharp smell drilled into Miria's nostrils with the strength of a hundred half-entombed memories.

"You were right to be suspicious about the security," he sighed, waving off a puff of fragrant steam. "They've been paid off."

The story her father proceeded to tell was familiar in places, and entirely new in others. It started in the weeks after Miria's marriage, when Ambros, distraught over his brother being peddled like a demon's whore, started to turn his back on the family, and instead sought new company. He found it among young, pious men who called themselves the Veznian Sodality, after the third king of Leshia, Vezna the Saintly, famed for fighting his way out of a devil's den with nothing but a broken spear and a prayer on his lips. There was scarcely a young boy to be found in the lowlands who had not, at some point, fancied himself a future Vezna. Most grew out of it; as it turned out, Ambros did not.

"This nonsense," Petrasz exhaled, drained and disappointed, "reeled him in. Thoroughly."

In the end, Miria's brother barely made appearances at their parents' home, and when he did, he was even worse. He clad himself in zealotry, denouncing all who dealt with demons, who trampled over the legacy of the faith and kingdom. Eventually, they only saw him across the pews, during the weekly services at the Enduring Virtue—until, one fateful afternoon, he failed to make an appearance there, too.

Before Petrasz could get properly worried about his son's absence, the city's bells exploded in alarm, soon followed by the bloody news. The first thing Miria's father did after hearing of the events at the Overwhelming Grace was to send a runner for the man responsible for Visza's protection. He was not hard to find; while the Veznian Sodality massacred the Lady Governor's wife, he and his comrades celebrated their new payout with drinks and music, laughing uproariously at how easy their work had become.

"Do you know who bribed them?" Miria asked into the quiet that followed.

"How would I?" her father shrugged. "I haven't had a chance to ask, or find out. But…"

He made this almost apologetic face that Miria immediately recognized as a sign of him being about to add to her burdens. She leaned into her chair, as if by making herself smaller she could avoid whatever idea he was about to propose.

"I'm told they're still there, partying at the Three Crowns."

It was the coffeehouse of choice for thugs with coats of arms, and their countless followers. In the sour stench of wine and tobacco, they made a house there for themselves, those men who would rather live loud than long. It was a place for shouts and broken bones, for music which went right under your skin until a stray pistol-shot interrupted it, for air that always tasted of gunpowder and liquor you should not be able to afford. Miria could not say she was familiar with the place, but it would be a lie to claim she did not know it at all.

"Your old sword is in the chest," Petrasz indicated a carved box under one of the display cabinets. "If that's what you are thinking about."

She was thinking about it, yes. For all the months of the wife-medicine, for all the training that the Hofmeisterin imposed, some things were the dress she wore, and others had long set into bone. The cheap spade slipped easily into its place at her belt, the weight another memory she had not expected to be revisiting tonight. There was no need for a mirror to know the way she looked: the tall riding boots, the mud-stained trousers, the spade and unruly hair. There was no sense in denying that she would fit her old haunt well.

"They are dangerous people, no doubt," her father added, nodding slowly. "But so is your infernal wife. And if this is what Ambros' life hangs on…"

Old habits guided the motions of the body, and Miria found her hand closed lazily on the pommel, hip bent slightly with a hint of the rake's swagger her friends had once tried to coach her in. Her father's unstated plan made sense; she could easily pass among lowlands men. The image of the two girls at the theater's balcony returned, their faces twisted into a cruel leer. They needed not to call for guards to convey to Miria what she already knew: no, she would never belong among their kind. Hers was the Three Crowns crowd, the harsh stench of booze and sweat, the life she was born to, not the one she tried to escape into.

"It's worth it, isn't it?"

"Yes, father," she admitted, bowing her head in deference. "It absolutely is."

Her father finished his mint, and rang for the servant again to clean the room for the night. It was the time for Miria to go.

"I used to think you would never grow up," Petrasz mused, walking her to the door, "but you keep showing me how wrong I was. I'm proud of you, Mirion."

She rushed downstairs, through the workshop, and into Karsz's unquiet night. The dark enveloped her with its usual kindness, paying no attention to her long stride, or the banging of her heavy boots on the rain-slick pavement.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Six: In Which Cards are Played, and Whiskey Imbibed

A flight of worn-down granite stairs took Miria below the street level and into the hazy embrace of the Three Crowns. The air inside was naught but tobacco smoke laced with the sharp stench of exhausted bodies and expensive liquor, all settling on Miria's tongue alongside the soot from long-burning wicks. She hesitated for a moment on the threshold, and then, with a hand roguishly resting on the hilt of her sword, dove in.

Tired eyes welcomed her, reflecting pin-prick embers of sputtering candles. A writhing mass of men-shapes, bristling with weapons and muscle, surrounded her; it made Miria think of the sculpted wall of flesh in the Lady Governor's shrine, and of the first wife's ministrations. She stumbled under the weight of that memory, and the masculine expectations it was failing.

But men around her did not notice; they only saw a boy's swagger turn to a misstep.

"Careful there, braveheart," a pair of canine eyes, straight from the Lupine Republics, cheered from one of the tables.

"Don't stab yourself with that needle," the wolf-man's companion added, entirely hidden from view, but speaking with the unmistakable drawl of an upland Leshite.

They both laughed, and Miria laughed with them, the well-worn chuckle of a boy letting himself be made the punchline of the joke. It worked; attention slid off her, turning into indifference. She became just one more shape awkwardly stumbling through the discordant quiet of a party stretched long past everyone's endurance. Empty bottles of akvavit lined the old chestnut tables; a gray-haired fiddler was catching a nap in the corner, his apprentice warily guarding a chest bursting with a long day's worth of spare silver. Somewhere deeper in, voices argued, laden with long exhaustion and far too much drink.

The men she was after did not make themselves hard to find; they were the axle the night turned around. Theirs was the table of honour, by the great fireplace; even now, a servant was throwing another fat chunk of beech into the flame, sending a shower of sparks up towards the ceiling. There were four of them gathered, all pictures of Leshite brawn, with their long sabers, hair kept long on one side of the head and shaved clean on the other, and gilded pistols tucked behind wide belts of brocaded silk. A woman in immodest dress tended to them, her skin sticky with sweat; they passed her from hand to hand over spent playing cards littering the floor at their feet, a deck for each game played. From a mantlepiece portrait, the late king stared them all down, burn-marks turning his stately face into a picture of pox. Whenever a new round arrived at the table, the men toasted him with crooked smiles and barked laughs.

"Vivat rex!"

The girl laughed with the men, their strained voices braiding together into a grinding, ugly sound, as familiar and as unwelcome to Miria as the weight of the sword on her belt. She dropped onto an empty seat, right outside the fireplace's ring of orange light, unsure on how to approach the late wife's bodyguards. If the men were not shouting, it was only because their throats had been shot already; their growling voices drilled into Mira a sharp yearning to be anywhere but here. Her body had stiffened at some point—perhaps the taste of air was familiar enough to remind it of its old fears of being seen through as a fraud. Anxiously, she stared at the girl in the men's large hands and briefly, in the flash of her ruby earrings, their eyes met—but hers did not linger on Miria, sliding off her as easily as they would off any other man. The same was true for the men, to whom she was only yet another boy-shaped shape in the haze; and yet, every time they moved their hard-featured heads in her direction, she tensed, expecting their eyes to fix on her, notice her fraud and punish her for it. This too was a familiar feeling. She swallowed, pushing down the choking mass of her fear, and tried to focus; tried to think about Ambros, and her purpose here, among men.

A card slammed on the table, breaking the languid quiet. The girl jumped from the lap she was in, climbing onto the shoulder of the victor, to kiss his hoary cheek. Across the table, his comrade swore viciously, tossing the losing deal to the floor.

"What's with this silence?" he roared, jagged voice jolting a dozen tired heads from their stupor. "Drink my ruin, you fucks! Akvavit, everyone!"

A rumbling cheer rose in the dark; encouraged by the clinking of gold, ruffled servants rushed with bottles and glasses.

"Bottoms up!"

Liquor burned its way down Miria's throat; when the Three Crowns broke into the obligatory song, she found her voice leading: a slight, tinny falsetto set against a choir of spent men.

"Louts!" the victor banged the table, throwing cards and glasses an inch up into the air. "Wasted louts, all of you! Sing, fuckers, sing!"

Instinct, beaten into Miria's flesh over the years of her father's tutelage, took wholly over. She downed the glass, and freshly flushed, broke into song again, cheerful cracks opening in her voice. For better or worse, it worked: she made herself heard, and the men at the table of honour staring straight at her, idle interest playing in their eyes.

"He gets it!"

Another man, small and mousy, with a face like a chipped knife, grinned at her, beckoning her closer.

"Sit with us, kid!" he called, grinning with a row of golden teeth.

Though she tried her best to appear at ease, she still stumbled as she stepped towards the table. The men did not mind. The biggest of the three held the girl on his lap close, freeing her seat for Miria; she sat down to the tune of her small, mocking protestations, feeling her shoulders brush against the arms of the last deal's loser. With an awkward smile twitching on her lips, she felt herself close down, suddenly dwarfed by those men—less so their physical size, though they felt larger than her, and more by the sheer intensity of their sweat-and-smoke cheer. A mound of imperial thalers piled up in the middle of their table, proudly displayed for all to see. Those men had not just just been paid off: they were also proud of it.

"So what's with the cunty voice?" the loser asked, giving her a sharp slap on the back.

He used to be handsome, once, before something burned a scowl permanently onto his face. A medal for battlefield courage glinted on his chest. Oak leaves: earned in one of the interminable wars waged by the republican wolves.

"Somebody snipped your balls? That's why you cross your legs?"

He made a scissoring gesture with his fingers. The table rumbled with idle laughter. Only Miria's stomach closed on itself, as if squeezed by an invisible hand. Cursing new habits, she forced her legs apart, earning another burst of laughter from the scarred man. Fresh shame reddened her cheeks. She sought the girl on the victor's lap, but again found no recognition nor comfort in her beautiful face.

"Or they haven't dropped yet!" the knife-face croaked, slamming a glass in front of Miria, and pouring her generously. "Look at how smooth his cheeks are!"

"Like goddamn buttermilk!" the loser's hand reached towards Miria's face, as if to touch. She froze so as not to recoil. "Hey kid, are you even old enough to remember that asshole?"

He toasted the portrait again; Miria followed on reflex, desperate to show some kind of camaraderie. Whatever they were drinking was no akvavit; it left a cool, harsh after-taste, like metal, like blood.

"Vivat rex!"

Iron barley whiskey, Miria remembered; a specialty from far in the West, to keep the fey at bay. No one ever drank it for taste. The hoary man spilled half of his round; the rest paid it no mind as if it was just vodka, not an imported delicacy. Even without thalers piling on the table, it was clear the men became recently rich, and had little desire to hold onto the wealth.

"Well, at least you drink like a man!" the knife-face laughed, and finally looked away from her, content..

"But still blush like a virgin," the loser added, continuing to watch her closely.

Miria tried to match his stare, and found herself glancing away, anyway. She felt odd under the weight of his curiosity. For the first time tonight, she could not shake the feeling that she had been noticed somehow—and that notice pierced right through her, spearing her to the chair. Alcohol spread across her body, in a wave of warmth far less reassuring than she would have wanted it to be.

"Holy," the knife-face shook his head. "He really does!"

"Lay off, Koshei," the hoary victor shrugged, the girl in his arms holding on tightly so as not to slip off. "You're all scaring the kid. He hasn't even said a word yet!"

That much was true, though 'fear' was perhaps not the best word to describe the paralyzing pressure that made Miria freeze, as if the entire coffee-house was closing on her with a crushing force. Again, she tried to catch her bearing, and remember why she was here in the first place: to ask those looming masses of muscle, violence, and hunger about why they sold the life of the one they were sworn to protect.

Suddenly, her visit here no longer felt like a good idea at all.

"What's wrong with asking?" the one who lost the game and was called Koshei said, with mock indignation in his voice. "Do you know how many neutered boys I've had, back south? Wolfmen love them some…"

Again, he made the same scissoring gesture, and when the croaked laughs stopped, Miria finally recognized what it was that she felt brush over her skin as he looked at her: lust. The man ate her up as she would at those demon women on a theater's balcony, at Luna, at Asha. Or maybe not quite, she realized moments later; this was a different kind of hunger, altogether more possessive and nowhere near as careful. For a split-second, she glanced back at him, and saw the kind of want that would not hold back—nor would it be careful. Carefully, she exhaled, and fixed a smile on her face. Koshei was already pouring her another round. She thanked him by leaning into his shoulder, just shy of conspicuously. If the gesture was awkward, all the better. He seemed to fancy that. Others noticed.

"Don't let me ruin your fun," the knife-face said.

They drank; they played cards. Their leader—the hoary one, whom they called Bej—kept his hands wandering over and under the fine blue chiffon dress of the girl on his lap. She returned the advances with empty giggles and sloppy kisses, only sometimes stealing a glance towards the pile of gold, as if to make sure it was still there. She did not talk much, and neither did Miria. At some point—it was increasingly difficult to tell in the half-drunken stupor—Koshei yanked her from her seat and squeezed right next to himself, an arm possessively wrapped around her neck, so that she barely could turn her head. From up close, she could smell the spiciness of his sweat, and the earthen musk of his favoured tobacco.

When they next dealt cards, Miria did not receive a hand. Instead, she watched Koshei play his, and then cheered as he won and squeezed her in a tight, greedy hug in celebration. Only then did the girl in Bej's hand finally look at her, and smile, however briefly, in recognition of something she and Miria were sharing.

"Great call, Sirgij," Koshei smiled at the knife-face; his fingers brushing through Miria's hair, ready to pull at a moment's notice. "Wouldn't have noticed the sweetheart myself!"

Slowly, but inexorably, something changed in the way those men towered over the boy-toy wife. It was no longer that old, familiar fear of being near what she could never fully become; when they looked at her, she no longer felt like they were seeing their failure. No, there was no more open aggression or challenge directed at her, no need to prove to others that they were better than her; in Koshei's grasp, she was not a peer to them, but a prize. With dawning horror that not even the liquor could dull, Miria realized that if she tried to leave now, it would not go well for her. The fear was strangely sweet to sample, and not too dissimilar from arousal. She did not struggle against the hand, not even as it rested inches under the small mounds of her budding breasts. Worse yet, if she tried to ask about Visza, they would not hear her; she no longer had a voice.

Around, the coffee-house gradually emptied; not even the magnetic pull of the great wealth on the table could hold the party going on forever. Tired men sneaked out into the night, candles at the tables going out one by one. But not the fireplace. Bej would not allow the fire to draw low there, demanding that the servants stoke it, and paying with gold for each log thrown in. Koshei balked at that, and briefly turning away from holding onto Miria turned to face his comrade and accuse him of wastefulness, of pissing away the money now that they were out of work. With her head propped against his shoulder, Miria looked away, and listened keenly on, the words more real than whatever it was that was happening to her body.

In a deep bellow of a man too drunk to lie, Bej said he did not care for the money, for it was splattered with blood, and that was not how it was meant to be, and that even if they could care for it, it would bring them no good to hoard, for Karsz was soon to go up in flames, and that they were the ones that made it so. With a shout, he interrupted Koshei's protestation, demanding more iron-barley whiskey.

"This is the prize for my stupidity," he snarled, grabbing a handful of coins and tossing it around, towards the empty seats, "and I decide how to spend it!"

Then, he grabbed a servant and demanded that he find him a fiddler, and put some merriment back in the air, before the infernal troops burn the city to foundations. Three thalers were enough to convince the man to go out into the night and search. There were so many questions Miria wanted to ask, all of them silenced by the push of an arm squeezing her ever tighter; she could tell each time a twitch of worry went through Koshei, winding him up even more taut. Only Sirgij felt at ease, promising them that come morning, they would board a coach that would take them west, far west, beyond the lowlands, and maybe to the island courts of the fey, or to the Lupine Republics that were gearing up for war again, and would always need more soldiers.

"Oh, not me," Koshei barked in response. "Never trust those dogs, I tell you. Never."

From above his glass, Bej pointed at the medal on Koshei's chest, and the man spat out a jagged laugh, his fingers digging into Miria's shirt and flesh. He told a story, next, in sparse, unpleasant words, about catching the attention of a lupine general during the peninsular campaigns.

"Oh, he loved me alright," he crooned, "but you know how the dogs love. He wanted to make his bitch," he spat the word with boundless contempt, shaking Miria like a puppet as he did. He needed them to see that he was the one taking hold. "I am a fucking Leshite, and he wanted me to be his fucking dog bitch!"

He then told them, his speech growing faster and more frantic, about how he shot the general dead, and put the entire camp on fire before fleeing, pointing at his scarred face as evidence of the deed. Each exclamation point in the story, he punctuated by banging the table and squishing Miria in his hold.

"I am no one's bitch!" he exclaimed at the end, the noise far too loud for how late the night was.

Miria wondered if his comrades could see his vulnerability, the fear and hurt underpinning this bravado. She was, like the medal on his chest, a proof of something to him, and every time he looked at her, she saw how much it meant to him to keep her in his hands. There was no escaping him, nor was there any denying him—and yet, she understood that she too had power over him, not so different from the spell Luna had put her under, back in the shrine to Want. Holding onto what was loveliest about his touch—on the way it made her feel bound, and appreciated, and needed—she leaned over into his ear, and whispered, not hiding the boyish twang of her voice:

"Can I?"

There was a hook in those words, in their awkward, stumbling eagerness. It slid oh-so-very-easily into the cracks of the shell of him, pulling his attention as surely as if she had him secured on a leash. But there was no force necessary; she only needed him to hear what he wanted to hear, and knew what that was because in the disfigured mess of his sadness she saw, with cold and sad certainty, a life she could have led, had she not chosen to become a wife instead.

"Can I be your bitch instead?"

It was as if he was waiting for her to ask that all night long. Ignoring Sirgij's chuckles and Bej's demands he stay and play with them, he seized Miria by the wrist and pulled her up, and through the haze, towards the quiet, dark booths in the back of the Three Crowns, that were as famous as impolite to ever mention. She struggled to keep up, not even able to grab her sword before Koshei was all over her, hands, mouth, skin. With the calls of his comrades still echoing in the dark, he pushed her against a wall, fingers slipping under the shirt and finding Miria's breasts. Her breath caught.

"I knew it," he whispered a damp swoon into her ear, "I knew you were a toy."

She tried to imagine herself as leashing him, as being the one in control; but with his hand now shooting into her trousers, and closing around her crotch, she was not. He probably expected her to moan, so she moaned slightly as he squeezed and pulled at her nethers, and truth be told, it was not altogether unpleasant, merely distant. It was also, she realized, infidelity. She tensed in the man's grasp, and with needy kisses on her neck, he understood it to be arousal.

"Why didn't you tell me," he asked, stupidly.

The question, too, was an opening. Miria stifled a moan as he squeezed her breast far too tightly for any pleasure, pinching and twisting as if juicing a lemon—but this was only her body. Her thoughts were elsewhere now, circling around how she should explain it to the Lady Governor, and remembering, obsessively over and over again, what she came into this place for. The lie came easily to her, mostly because it was not a lie.

"I was afraid," she cried. "They killed one of us. The lady's wife…"

For a moment, only his hands spoke. He did not know when to stop, or perhaps had just been too hungry for too long, and could not stop marveling at how the pliant flesh did not meld away back into a dream, at how someone wanted to be his. Each squeeze, each pinch, was a joyous confirmation of something he had long since given up on.

"Shh," he murmured, "don't worry about it. It's not because he was a toy…"

He. It stung; even through the veil of separation Miria mantled herself in, it stung. He wanted her, she finally realized—but he did not want her. The hands were asking for her body, and nothing else.

"...his wife, she set him up. She paid, so that he would die."

It was a good thing that the dark shielded them, and that her body was frozen in Koshei's hold, too still to be moved even by the shock of those words.

"That was the Lady Governor's money?" she managed.

His hands finally slid from under her clothes; his arms bumped into her back as he struggled with the belt on his pants, drunk enough that even the simple knot holding together slipped in his fingers.

"It came from the palace, so who else?"

She could name at least a few names. Unfortunately, most of them were the Lady Governor's wives. Miria's throat clenched, heart refusing to steady. Koshei could hear her ragged breath, and clearly liked the sound of it.

"It was not about being a toy," he repeated. "His wife just needed an excuse…"

A few wet, squishing noises reached her ear; Koshei's arm moved a few times, as if working something up and down, followed by a frustrated sigh. He reached around her waist, fingers closing around the buckle of her belt, fumbling to undo it.

"Come on…" he murmured.

"Excuse?" she asked.

"To put the Episcopacy down, are you thick? Just help me here!"

Anger built up in his voice and touch, and Miria had to reach down and, braiding her fingers with his, tweak at the belt, until it finally gave up, and allowed her trousers to drop. Something damp and soft wormed its way between her thighs.

"Fuck," Koshei huffed, his fist smashing the wall right next to her head, hard enough to split skin. There was a split-second when Miria could not tell if the blow had not been meant for her. "Fuck!"

A false, ugly note reverberated in his voice, turning what just moments ago was joy sour and violent. The sound of it alone was enough to make Miria's own thoughts stop, waiting for what he would do next. He tried to work his dick with his hand, to fit it between her legs; it only left a slick stain on her skin, too soft for anything more.

"Fuck!" he cried, stepping back. "Wait here. I'll get something, I'll get it working… Bej had some fly, I think."

She nodded, even if he couldn't quite see the gesture in the dark. But once his shuffling steps vanished behind her, into the grinding noise of the hurdy-gurdy playing in the main room, she did not wait. Her body moved like a puppet, but at least it was her will that pulled at the strings; she made her hands pull the trousers back up, made them buckle the belt again, and then made her legs move into the haze of the coffee-house and out towards the stairwell up. She stepped lightly, and the ragged, drunken music muffled the sound of her escape. She had what she came for, and hadn't even needed to commit infidelity for it. For all the sickness churning in her stomach, this was a success.

Koshei's touch lingered on her skin long after she emerged into the cold streets above. It was hard to shake, for it did not burn with shame and disgust only, but also something more. There were moments back below, in that thick air, when his hands felt almost good, like something she wanted. No, worse: it was something she wanted. She wanted to be held like that, with her face pressed into a brick wall, she wanted to be made a possession of; she did not want the fist right next to her head, and the cold knowledge that to those hands, she was meat, and nothing else. But still, want she did.

In some ways, thinking about how close she came to adultery seemed easier than considering the other side of the night, that is the fact of the gold on the table, infernal thalers piled high as a price for the second wife's life. If Koshei did not lie—and why would one lie to a boy-toy like Miria—then whoever planned Visza's death could be found at the palace. And the notion that it could have been the Lady Governor herself, however impossible, lodged itself thorn-like between Miria's thoughts. Could she really be so callous as to sacrifice her beloved wife, just to wage war on an already conquered land? It seemed so cruel, so pointless, so vicious—but was she not an heir to Azya the Dire Hand, whom they also called the Red River? As much as she did not want to, Miria could not help but to remember the old lessons the episcopal pamphlets held about demons: that they kill as men spit, and mourn only the loss of power.

By the time she reached the mansion hill, and climbed up the secret path, she was no longer sure, and the image of the Lady Governor counting coins that would name Visza's death played out every time she closed her eyes. So instead, she kept them open, and thanked the good fortune that the night did not put any more demands on her. She found her dress hidden as she had left it, and crossed no guards' nor servant's path as she worked her way back into the palace, and then through its cozily warm corridors, towards her room, and bed, which for a few—too few—hours would offer her a reprieve from the mess she insisted on getting herself into.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Seven: In Which a Warning is Issued

"What is this stench, young lady?"

Headache smashed on the inside of Miria's skull, coming in waves set to the rhythm of pulsating nausea. She curled under the covers, straining to keep her eyes shut, even as the cold voice thundered above her.

"Whiskey?"

She mumbled something incoherent. The voice drilling into her ears was the Hofmeisterin, and there was no avoiding facing her, not when her words trembled with disappointment. In a futile gesture, she pushed her head deeper into the warm pillow. She did not feel awake, anyway, but more as if the short sleep had vomited her out.

"You reek like a distillery!"

Someone abruptly pulled the sheets from above Miria. Cool air smashed into her, jolting her back into a semblance of lucidity, right into gloved hands grabbing her by her shoulders and forcing her into an upright position. She heaved, buffeted by another crash of nausea, the taste of bile and rust filling her mouth. Another pair of hands fixed a pillow behind her to help her sit. Tentatively, she managed a lousy kind of steadiness.

"Look at me."

Reluctantly, she obeyed. The room was mercifully dark, the dull morning outside gingerly filtering through half-covered windows. In the dim light, the Hofmeisterin loomed positively spectral: a gaunt figure in funeral white, flanked by a pair of lesser, subservient wraiths. But she did not come to claim Miria's soul; rather, she took one look in the boy-toy wife's face and sighed like a hissing serpent.

"Mariś," she commanded, "find Doctor Iżek and ask him to fix up a dose of the morning cure."

She did not turn as she spoke, continuing to scourge Miria with her eyes the entire time. The maid hurried out of the room, each click of her polished shoes like a hammer banging right next to the boy-toy wife's ear. She winced, and tried to rub the headache away. It did not help. What had even happened to her? She tried to count the drinks she'd had last night, but her memory only served her choppy impressions of hands digging into her skin, and of a dangerously sweet sense of shame.

"I should have a word with the cellar master. He should know better than that."

Miria rubbed her eyes, trying to get the hazy images out. What was the Hofmeisterin even talking about? Her face pursed into a deep frown in an effort to recall the last time she had crossed her paths with the bony, liver-spotted gnome of a man who served as the Lady Governor's wine keeper, but nothing came up. Only more headache.

"Do not even think of giving me that look! Did you think your little escapade would go unnoticed?"

Fear lanced through the hangover haze. Miria bolted upright, the Hofmeisterin's disapproving glare filling her vision, tiny tendrils of panic creeping at the edges. She had been seen. She had been seen. Her stomach knotted on itself, squeezing out a fresh serving of bile right into her mouth.

"Shit," she mouthed.

"Language!"

The slap that followed barely even stung, nor was it supposed to. Even the Hofmeisterin was not allowed to dispense that kind of discipline to one of the Lady Governor's wives, sixth or not. The hand on Miria's cheek was merely meant to get her attention for the inevitable tirade. She looked away, bracing for the worst.

"You disappoint me, young lady. You stink and speak like a dockworker. Do you not know that nights are for sleep, not for rambling about the palace, looking for a bottle? Like a lout!"

The head servant punctuated the last point with a finger jab right at the middle of Miria's chest. But when the boy-toy wife reeled, it was not from the blow, but rather sheer relief. Her muscles went slack, tension releasing at once: they had no idea she had sneaked out. She slumped back onto the bed, only now feeling the cold sweat gluing her nightgown to her skin.

"And whiskey?" the Hofmeisterin continued. "It is a men's drink! Can you imagine the Lady Governor asking for her wife, and having her," she delivered that word with enough stress to crack stone, "stinking like some common thug? How many times do I have to say it? You are no longer a boy, and you will stop behaving like one!"

Her tone dropped into a cadence that was well familiar to Miria: the impatiently slow delivery of a frustrated teacher, one demanding attention, but no longer expecting results. But unlike before, the words found a fresh sort of purchase in Miria; she listened on, her thoughts wandering back to memories of the night prior that were finally starting to coalesce into something solid. She had not been a boy last night, or at least not the kind that the Hofmeisterin was trying to breed out of her. Agnes the beautician, hunched to the head servant's side, offered her a sympathetic smile; but really, there was no need.

The reprimand continued in its usual pace until interrupted by the creaking of the door, and an overpowering, earthen smell. Mariś returned, cradling in her hands a steaming, clay mug. When its contents rolled down Miria's throat, she almost choked on their rotten sickness. For a moment the world went dark, but the maid was ready: she caught her before slid off the bed, and helped her wash the medicine down with half a jug of water. Within a few pained breaths, something unknotted inside Miria; colour returned to the world, seeping into the empty space where the ache resided. She inhaled, no longer sick—merely tired.

"Now," the Hofmeisterin declared after Miria pulled herself back up, "it is only natural to mourn, and I cannot fault you for that. However, a lady would not become drunk with grief…"

With lucidity returning, so came the rest of the last night: blood money among spent playing cards, and the smug streak in Koshei's voice, accusing the Lady Governor of selling her own wife. Soon after the desperate hope for this to be a lie exploded back, followed by doubt, crawling like an insect up her skin.

"...and furthermore, a boy-toy especially must not allow herself to be incapacitated…"

But what if? The thought, unbidden, unwanted, nonetheless refused to leave, clamping down on Miria's mind like a pair of steel tongs. What if? What if the Lady Governor, the beautiful demonic woman she wanted nothing more but to be with—whom she wanted to belong to, heart, body, and soul—could throw her beloved to Veznian brutes just to excuse a bloody purge? She tried not to consider it, but all her thoughts spiraled irresistibly towards that one question, and the horrifying absence of an answer behind it. What if Ambros was marked to die, just so that countless other Leshite men could be made to hang, in the name of the demonic law? What—

The slap—again gentle, again only a reminder—came as a reprieve. Miria blinked to see the Hofmeisterin leaning over her, preparing for yet another tirade.

"I asked you a question," she stated coldly.

"I am sorry," she lied back on reflex. "I am still a bit sick."

The head servant seized her with suspicion in her eye, and with a pained sigh, decided to accept the excuse.

"I want you," she repeated, uttering each word very carefully, as if talking to a slow child or a cow, "to tell me why a boy-toy such as you must never allow herself to be indisposed without her lady wife's explicit permission?"

Such questions usually had the same answer, so Miria bent herself in contrition and tried it out.

"Because it is unladylike?"

The Hofmeisterin sighed again, and something in her gave up.

"That as well," she explained, stepping back. "But also because your role is to be always available for the Lady Governor's service. What if she called for you this morning, while you were stewing in the stench of booze, and barely able to walk? You must remember what you are here for!"

Miria nodded, brushing aside yet another pair of consoling glances from the maids. Truth be told, even now, even through her worry and exhaustion, the image that the Hofmeisterin painted spread a hungry kind of warmth inside her; the places where Koshei's hands had grabbed her burned with want for different fingers on them, brick-red, black-tipped. And this desire meant something else, something as absolute as the fact that she could not allow Ambros to die: she needed to know if Visza's blood stained the touch she so longed for. She needed to know, and fast. But how? How was she to ask, to find out?

The idea that came to her peeled off the ornate cover of a book left by her bed, red and orange with painted infernal flames. A Complete Catechism of Want for Human Wives, the title read. For a split-second, she hesitated; but she had already defied the Lady Governor's express orders. In no world could what she was about to suggest be more damning. In fact, it could even pass as pious. If only it did not also expose her to the risk of refusal.

"I hope you will remember it this time," the Hofmeisterin said. "Are you ready for your toilettes?"

"Yes," Miria nodded again, eyes still on the Catechism. She swallowed, and tried to speak, stumbling over the first word—but after that cleared from her mouth, the rest fell out like a bursting dam. "Please—please relay to my lady wife that I wish for nothing more but to show her my devotion tonight, by helping her mourn as the Want demands!"

The grey line of the Hofmeisterin's eyebrow rose a full inch, quickly followed by a suspicious frown. Miria's heart sank instantly, the boy-toy wife utterly terrified of the thing she had just proposed. She watched the old servant's frown deepen, flanked by expressions of shock on Mariś and Agnes' faces.

"Lady Governor has requested the Third Wife's presence in her bedchamber tonight, and it is unlikely they will want a spare…"

Miria followed after her heart, sagging instantly. Of course, another wife had the bed. Of course, another had the ear. Of course…

"...however…"

She looked up, the word the first time something said by the Hofmeisterin had given her a genuine shot of hope.

"...this is the time to be wanton. I will bring this plea to the Lady Governor's ear shortly. And on the off-chance there is a need, Agnes, please make the young lady presentable."

What washed over Miria as the beautician ferried her off to the washroom was not exactly happiness—but it was a kind of a hope, underpinned with an eerie sense that the boy-toy wife could not exactly name, but which felt like it mattered. And sure enough, it did not last: as on every morning, it did not survive the sight of her naked reflection in the bathroom's mirror, dissolving instead into the sticky, familiar vulnerability. Dark thoughts followed, only sometimes interrupted by the physical unpleasantries of Agnes and Mariś' hands trying to make something out of her body. It helped that they handled her like a rag-doll, to be washed, wrung, and prepared for play; she could go limp and still be carried through to the end, when the beautician slid a size three plug up her back, and then moved to apply a delicate rouge to her cheeks, to hide the exhausted pallor.

At the end, she found herself back in her room, smelling lightly of soap and a drip of lilac perfume rubbed behind the ear. The maids left, with the unspoken, but clear expectation that Miria would not; that instead of heading for breakfast, she should sit in her modest, white dress, and wait for the Hofmeisterin to return with the Lady Governor's decision. This meant that she was, for the time being, alone with her thoughts: the bitter mixture of being certain that she was going to be refused and desperately hopeful that she was going to be wanted.

The gifted cameo waited on the night-stand, polished sardonyx gleaming even in the morning's dim light. It rested heavily in Miria's hands; she turned it around a few times, letting her fingers trace out the shape of the scene impressed on one side, and the word carved into the other. Mine. How much she wanted it to be true—unless, of course, this did not mean love. Not even the ratcheting tension of waiting could keep her mind from that notion for long. The second wife was also the Lady Governor's, dearly beloved—and fully possessed. Miria's mother had cried when the marriage contract was signed, cried over a son she thought she was losing—and Miria resented her for that. But what if she knew better than her what that ink on parchment really meant: a life given away whole, to be dispensed with as one wishes?

She put the jewel back, and instead reached for the Catechism, starting again to thumb through its pages. The book was beautiful, printed on silken paper, and with hand-painted illustrations to demonstrate each point of the infernal teachings. It was the First Wife's gift to the newly-weds, and one that Miria had always been grateful for. Its rich descriptions of the wifely hierarchies and their duties—the first, the priestess; the second, the consort; the third, the arms-bearer—brought a feeling of belonging and order. She could find herself inside, painted as this deliciously slender figure with her crotch enclosed in a gilded chastity cage, and read about the boy-toy, the amusement wife, the one taken for pleasure. She distinctly remembered how aroused it made her to take in the details of her role for the first time, how she lay in bed, stroking herself to those words and the fantasies they carried. The charm had barely worn off since, only the wife-medicine making such play markedly more difficult. Now, however, something changed; she flipped from page to page, wondering about where the need for this book came from. The title stressed that it was For Humans, not the old blood of Dis, but those coming under Her Infernal Majesty's scepter. Like the kingdom once known as Leshia, now the Lowlands Province. A wife, be her first, second, or fifth, the page she was on read, right next to an image of three women keenly before their devil wife, backs bent in full submission, owes her lady wife absolute respect, and absolute surrender.

Perhaps, Miria thought, she was too quick to ignore the warnings that the episcopacy issued regarding the nature of demons and their desires. She shut the book, no longer trying to shake the image of the Lady Governor arranging Visza's brutal death. It should terrify her, to the full extent that the word allowed: the idea that she could belong—that she could owe her all—to a monster like that. But if there was fear, it still was not enough to sever the bonds of wanting. She could let her mind linger on the notion that the human wives to the Lady Governor were nothing but tools to be used to the breaking point, if so needed—and still long for her hands, still long to be hers.

No, if there was a fear in her right now it was that the door to her room would stay closed, that no one would come to fetch her, that once again she would prove to be the less wanted one. And was it not a virtue? Had the same priests that preached against the temptations of the infernal Want not asserted, time after time, that love heedless of one's life is the font of overwhelming grace? Maybe she learned from them better than either of them had ever suspected. With a smile at the edge of defeat, she pinned the cameo to her dress' high collar.

She only needed to make sure that Ambros was going to make it out safely.

In a small blessing, the agonizing uncertainty of her wait did not last much longer. A few short knocks on the door announced the news, and before she could even open, a servant that Miria did not recognize entered, head politely bowed. The sixth wife's body tensed, already bracing itself for the refusal.

"The Lady Governor," the servant announced, her sulfuric yellow eyes hinting at more than just a drop of infernal blood, "conveys her gratitude for your eagerness, and requests that you join her in her study…"

Miria slackened, the tension in her releasing to a sense of stunned, but joyous disbelief. She looked at the servant as if she could kiss her right there, and found her smiling impishly back.

"…as soon as you are properly fitted."

The tugging in Miria's groin, and the pink flushing her cheeks, were anything but innocent. She had only been taken to the fitting room once before, for her wedding night. Excitement, only barely tinged with anxiety, filled her as she followed the half-demon servant through the white-draped corridors. For a few sweet moments, the thought of the murder, and her brother's peril was purged from her mind, replaced by the memories that smelled of leather and caoutchouc, and emerged from black cupboards ornamented with scenes of infernal revelry.

The room waited for her right opposite to the Lady Governor's study, the door concealed flush in the hardwood boiseries. It was an ingenious little trick, really, one more of the costly wonders that the last king of Leshia had so favoured. The servant pushed at a carved peacock's tail and gave it a quarter-turn; in response, the entire panel folded inwards, opening a narrow passage into a hellfire-lit room, and closing quietly behind them.

The first thing Miria saw when stepping inside was the colourful fresco decorating the vaulted ceiling: satyrs lurched in a chase after a throng of nymphs, a reminder from the time the room served to conceal the old king's trysts from the queen consort's prying eyes. The second was the familiar, broad back and chestnut curls of the fourth wife. The servant in front of Miria paused in apprehensive surprise; for her own, Czewa remained fully focused on a cabinet full of heirloom whips.

"Do not mind me," she waved them off.

Seated in a small chair in the center of the room, Miria nonetheless could not help herself but to keep trying to steal a peek at whatever it was that the fourth wife was up to. She rocked to the sides, trying to get a better angle to see whatever Czewa was trying to find among the Lady Governor's collection. One of those glances had to finally catch her attention; she looked briefly over her shoulders, her eyes settling on the small pile of gear being readied next to Miria, and then on the blush still lingering on the boy-toy wife's cheeks.

"Oh, it's you," she said cooly, and shut the cabinet. "I'll take it from here, Noa. You can leave."

The servant hesitated; Czewa made a shooing gesture.

"I will get her fitted," she declared, glancing at the pile. "Don't worry, I know what she likes."

Noa bowed, and withdrew with only a quiet acknowledgment on her way out. For a moment, the fitting room remained silent but for the wet crackle of the hellfire lamp. Miria shifted nervously, suddenly uncomfortable under the tall woman's heavy gaze. Of all the wives, she knew her the least, and understood even less. But then, Czewa smiled, and some of that distance closed.

"So," she asked, "how was your night out in the city?"

Of course Stava told her. They were close, after all. Miria sighed slightly, lips pursed, trying to to think up an answer without getting too worried—or revealing too much.

"Oh, don't fret," the fourth wife shrugged, "I'm not telling anyone. Just curious. I actually do admire the chutzpah, sneaking out like that. Wouldn't have expected it out of you."

If this was a compliment, it sure did not feel as one. There was something unpleasant in Czewa's voice, a barb that Miria could not fully locate, only get caught on. Still, she remembered the promise she had traded to the fifth wife. She swallowed, and tried for a measure of honesty.

"I wanted to see my family," she said meekly, in the same tone that had worked such wonders with the groundskeeper Mihasz. "I'm worried about them."

"Really?" Czewa's eyebrow arched, giving her face an even sharper, angular look.

She gave doubt time to drill into the boy-toy wife, instead turning to the gear Noa prepared before leaving, and starting to slowly flip through its unfamiliar, enticing leather shapes. However sour the sudden nervousness was, Miria could not shake the deeper arousal still waiting under its surface, and the sweet expectation that she would be seeing the Lady Governor soon. Probably—unless it turned out that Czewa had some other ideas. But she would not deign to defy her lady wife, would she?

"You know, I would have never guessed you care so much about them," the fourth wife finally broke the uncomfortable silence. She let her voice go completely here, down to an utterly unfeminine rumble. "You never talk about them."

"I don't talk much in general."

Czewa laughed, the sound strangely warm for all of her cool.

"True, true," she lifted her hands palms out in an universal gesture of yielding the point. "But didn't your dad sell you here for, what was it, trade concessions?"

The question fell from her mouth with false lightness, and at first it almost slipped past Miria's defenses. She sagged briefly, a bitter taste in her mouth—but one that quickly gave way to a mounting frustration. Everybody, it seemed, kept assuming she went into the infernal embrace out of coercion and violence; so much so that some nights, she could not help but start doubting her own desire. And yet, right now, all she wanted was to be free from this conversation, and in the Lady Governor's embrace. Her face hardened.

"I wanted to be here," she said, quietly, but as firmly as she could manage.

Czewa's other eyebrow joined the arch, a look of bemused incredulity plain in her harsh features.

"Is that so? Let's get you ready for your wish, then."

Neither of them said anything for a while. The fourth wife picked through the readied gear, and knelt in front of Miria. She hiked her skirt above the knee, and carefully began to attach soft, leather pads to her shins, strapping them tightly on the inside of the boy-toy's legs. She had cold fingers, though far from clammy; still, they were enough to make Miria shiver. The sensation was not entirely unpleasant, however, and after the initial shudder, she found herself breathing deeply at each buckled strap, the pressure and softness at her flesh reassuring in ways she did not need to fully understand. She closed her eyes, and imagined herself on her knees; the woman towering above her had features that were at once the Lady Governor's, Luna's, and Czewa's.

She did not see, then, but rather felt when the fourth wife finished with the pads, and next grabbed her by the wrist. Sternly, but not painfully, she made her close her hand into a fist, and then started to wrap it up with long strips of fabric, until instead of fingers, Miria had a balled-up stump, ready to be encased in a tight, leather mitt. The shape of what was to be expected of her started to solidify, and she yielded to the sweetness of the idea, smiling; she offered her other hand to Czewa, eager to have it bound too.

Finally, the fourth wife reached for her foot, bending it straight, as to climb on the tip of her toe. Miria held it that way, letting Czewa work a tall boot up her leg; it was less high-heeled as much as heel-only, and when it was laced up, it left her foot locked extended into a knife-point, leaving the boy-toy to doubt whether she could stand on it, let alone walk. She lifted her other leg, exhaling a wistful breath every time Czewa tightened the laces up.

"You're leaning into it," she heard the fourth wife speak, ice melting from her voice.

Miria opened her eyes, to admire her now-stubby arms and useless legs. In a way, it was powerlessness; in another, she saw the edge taken off Czewa's face, replaced by unexpected softness. For a fleeting second, she could almost imagine herself as beautiful. Buoyed by the pleasure of the moment, she broke out of her own thoughts, and realized what the fourth wife was attempting to do. She let her explain, however, instead fixing her eyes on Czewa's large hands. She had been powerful, once, and the strength continued even through the changes wrought by the wife-medicine.

"I thought you were simply pliant," she continued, in the same thawing puzzlement. "But you're offering yourself up. How your body yields under touch… And your smile!"

She stood up, and retreated to one of the cabinets, only to return with a polished, silver collar in her hand, a small brass ring in front catching all the orange and old reflections of the soaring hellfire.

"You want it," she stated, as if amazed she had not noticed it sooner.

"I do," Miria hushed, short on breath. "Her, too."

Something dark flashed through the fourth wife's face, but she said nothing. The collar cinched around Miria's neck, Czewa tightening the nut fastening it until it sat flush against the skin, its presence deliciously unyielding every time she breathed or swallowed. The fourth wife's hand lingered for a moment longer, brushing alongside the surface of the cameo, now sitting right in the middle of the collar's ring.

"That's a very pretty stone," she muttered, grabbing a short leash. "Let's get you to her."

She helped Mira stand up, her arm wrapped around the sixth wife's arms so that she could balance on the knife-points of her boots and carefully, step by precarious step, make her way out of the fitting room and into the empty corridor in front of the Lady Governor's study. Even then, by the time she made it there, her feet were already aching and legs beginning to shake; but as Czewa guided her slowly down to the floor, and onto her padded knees, she noted with elation how this was not going to be a problem. She was not meant to walk. She lifted her bound hands up, imagining them to be some animal's paws; Czewa shook her head.

"Incredible," she whistled, finally clipping the leash to the collar—and then, bringing its handle to Miria's mouth.

The boy-toy wife realized instantly what she was expected to do, grabbing the lead between her teeth. The taste of leather filled her mouth, and the world shrunk to the sheer, focused pull of desire.

"She'll love it," Czewa whispered into her ear. "But, Miria?"

She turned her head away from the door, leash firmly in mouth; in the moment, she could not care less about how silly this had to look.

"Be careful. You would not be the first wife to suffer for wanting from demons what they never give to men."

Before Miria could ask, or even consider what those words meant, Czewa opened the door for her, and then it was too late to think.

 

[Gargulec]

Chapter Eight: In Which a Use is Found for the Toy

Crawling, Miria discovered, was hard. Her bound hands slipped on the polished floor, bandaged fingers unable to provide any kind of grip. Instead, she had to laboriously work her legs to push herself over the threshold and across the study. The weight of the collar forced her neck down, and a thin trail drool drooped around the leash in her mouth. All of it was nothing short of intoxicating. Her cheeks burned, the heat spilling down her chest, dissolving all the little aches of a contorted body into exultant expectation.

Voices—familiar, multiple—floated above her. There was no need to strain herself looking up to know that it was not just the Lady Governor's eyes that welcomed her entrance. Shame attended the weight of those looks, but with all its sharp edges sanded down to a strangely serene core. She glanced up with bashfulness that did not have to be exaggerated, and basked in the moment.

"Adorable!" Luna clapped her hands, leaning back in her chair.

In the brightening light of the high noon, she cast a radiant figure. Sunlight fell through the tall windows and cascaded down the first wife's bare arms in a stream shimmering with gold dust, sprinkled as it was across her lilac skin. For the sake of mourning's indulgence, she'd made herself a jewel to be admired. Chains of precious metal spider-webbed from a filigree choker, holding up a silk dress no thicker than a morning mist. It could not hope to conceal that some of the links connected not to fabric, but to flesh.

"And how respectful," she added, her finger guiding Miria's eyes down to the golden rings peeking through the cloth, exclamation points for the dark areola beneath.

"Please, First," Mażin murmured, barely looking up from the documents piled on the Lady Governor's desk. "We have work to do."

Unlike Luna, she made no attempt to draw attention to herself. She wore her white modestly, hair veiled under a knitted scarf in accordance with the lowlands custom. It aged her; with the deep frown bringing out the wrinkles on her face, and shadows so clearly visible under her eyes, she held an air of years to her.

"Of course you wouldn't appreciate a boy-toy on its fours." The first wife shook her head. "Was it your idea, Asha?"

"Yes."

The Lady Governor's voice was a low rumble, drawn from the depths of the earth. Still wearing her uniform, she was a splash of fresh blood when set against the white-draped portraits behind her. She hunched slightly behind the desk, as a panther might shortly before pouncing, and if the way her fingers coiled greedily on the gilt hilt of her saber was indication, it was more than a passing impression. Two nights had done nothing to dim her fire—if anything, they'd only kindled it, and now there was raw fury simmering in her, too intense to be contained in the flesh. It spilled out, hanging around her as a mounting tension, a gale building up.

"Come, Miria," she beckoned.

Sheer want wiped the taste of calamity from the sixth wife's lips. She worked her way eagerly across the room, hands skidding in excitement.

"Look at it go!" Luna cheered.

"Her," Mażin scoffed.

"Not when it's on the floor, it isn't."

The words went to Miria's head like fine akvavit, only strengthened by the sharp sting of the first wife's tail she felt on her ass as she passed by. She yelped at the slap, drawing a trilling laugh from Luna, another frustrated sigh from Mażin, and nothing from the Lady Governor. The silence made her pause; she looked up to her lady wife, plaintive, and realized that she was focused on something more important. Still, there was a reward waiting at the end of her crawl.

"Up to your knees," the Lady Governor ordered, a smile briefly softening her face.

Miria smiled back and lifted herself up, back ruler-straight, but head low. She reached a little above the sitting demon woman's waist and her shadow and her presence enveloped her in a warm embrace. A black-clawed hand brushed through Miria's hair, scratching her tenderly behind the ear. When she purred in response, the hand took the leash from her mouth, wiped the spit from it, and wrapped it around the sword-bearing wrist. For the first time in days, or weeks, the boy-toy wife did not feel out of place.

The privilege of the touch did not last long. Soon, the Lady Governor's hand returned from Miria's head to flipping through the papers scattered all over the desk. Most were letters in the sharp lines of the native script of Dis that demons kept to themselves. Here and there, however, there was also the dense Leshite calligraphy that Miria would have to squint to read. Thin sheets of today's issue of Karsz Mercurious peeked from between the papers, the word "ULTIMATUM!" screaming from the headline.

"Moving on," Mażin coughed, passing another letter towards the Lady Governor, knotted signatures blotting the bottom of the page. "I would not read too much into this. The Chamber of Commerce does major business with the temples, so they had to make some kind of a gesture. But I doubt they will—"

Miria listened only distantly, words flowing around her head at a leisurely pace. Most of her attention was taken by the Lady Governor, who, however busy, would sometimes let her hand down to enjoy the kneeling wife's presence, or play idly with the leash while the others spoke. And each time she opened her mouth to address Mażin and Luna, Miria bit down on a faint hope that the voice would come for her, and tasted the small, shameful pleasure of being ignored.

Even so, the boy-toy wife still caught a shred of meaning, a few loose sentences slipping by and digging their way into her attention. They coalesced into an impression of a conversation that turned around a single, burning question: of loyalty. With the Overwhelming Grace to be stormed, and its sanctuary violated, who among the many people of Karsz could be trusted? There could be no illusion. If the assault was to go through, there would be backlash—but how severe? So many factors compounded when it came to trying to predict whether it would end with a single night of riots, or would spread into the entire city rising in rebellion. Would burghers stay passive in their homes, afraid to bite the hand that lifted them out of submission? Would Karsz's aldermen send the city guard against the rioters, and would those men fight in defense of sacrilege? And what about palaces on the hills, and the old Leshite nobility still living in the memory of their lost kingdom—would they not see an opportunity to seize?

Names were first to yank Miria's attention out from the blissful haze. Mażin, who helped to oversee the palace's finances, had a keen sense for burgher politics, and kept mentioning people that the boy-toy wife recalled from her time apprenticing at her father's side. Hearing which of them were most likely to break trust with the Lady Governor made soaking in her warm presence difficult. Against her will, Miria found herself listening on, and soon came to share the same desperate worry that returned in Mażin's repeated plea.

"The city will not accept it. This will be a disaster. Please, there must be another way."

Her lady wife's answer was always the same.

"I have made my choice. Now they make theirs."

Somewhere between all those words of protest and concern, the Lady Governor's hand stopped reaching down to caress Miria. She let the leash dangle loosely from her wrist, and when the boy-toy wife let her posture slacken and back hunch, she offered no chastisement. She did not even seem to notice.

When the first wife spoke, she shared few of Mażin's worries. Confidently, she argued that the aristocracy would ultimately side with power over religion, and that without its support any disorder would be short-lived. She had good reasons to believe that, too. Before hearing her today, Miria had not even realized just how well connected Luna was. The priestess of Want casually mentioned dining with the Razvids, being friends with the Kaszabi heir, and getting personal invitations to the hunting lodge of the erstwhile hetman Hrywan Spaszni himself. In years at the Lady Governor's side, the first wife had woven for herself a network of personal alliances, favours and debts of gratitude, all waiting to be called.

"I can't help it," she laughed brilliantly. "Men are made to eat from our hands."

In turn, Mażin's face hardened. With quiet exasperation, she listed names of old Leshite blood, of families that remembered the kingdom from before it had rotted from the inside out, and that had accepted infernal rule only reluctantly. Miria dropped lower still, until her head rested on the Lady Governor's lap. From this close, she smelled of dry heat and summer wind. She was so wonderfully warm, and her attention was entirely elsewhere.

"Do you really think," with a heavy sigh, Mażin finished, "that the Borejs will side with us against the episcopacy? Let alone Mierzwas?"

"They will fall in line," Luna replied, as if it was nothing. "Or finally give us a cause to break them."

The argument turned ugly, and mostly circular. The first wife accused the third of blithe defeatism, the third, in her slow and determined way, kept charging her back with failing to understand Karsz, and the lowlands spirit in general. The Lady Governor did not break it up, keeping to her stormy silence. Yet, Miria, with her ear to her lady wife's body, could feel the rush of tension whenever Luna mentioned violence and bloody retribution; she could see the way her lady wife's fingers curled around the saber's hilt, knuckles pale pink. Was it grief, turning her towards rage? Or having put her wife to death, was she simply growing impatient, having already waited too long to resolve, once and for all, the problem of her subjects' disloyalty?

It was not a question Miria wanted to hold in her mind, but neither was it one she could shake off. The effervescent elation that had kept her buoyed above such dark thoughts had receded, leaving behind submission's detritus. Her bound fingers were growing stiff and soaked in sweat; small pinpricks of coming pain reminded her of the unnatural position her feet were stretched into. But that could all be so easily ignored, and she was ready to ignore it again. What gnawed at her the most was a different kind of discomfort, not at all physical, and yet sharper for it.

The Lady Governor flipped through the papers on her desk. Her wives argued, one with vicious lightness, the other at the verge of tears. And Miria knelt, unnoticed and unnecessary.

Why had she even been brought here? Luna and Mażin came to deliver counsel, which, as the catechism taught, was a wifely duty. But Miria had nothing to add; she was, at best, spare. The notion, just as that of the Lady Governor's possible complicity, was profoundly unwelcome. Together, they nourished a budding, bitter resentment. The boy-toy wife longed for those hands to return to her. She wanted to be held, commanded, used, abused even—but not ignored. Not forgotten. Mira wanted more. Even though scarcely two days had passed since Visza's murder, she was already thinking of her needs. To realize that was a shame stripped of all its sweetness, one which could not even dull the aching sense of lack.

A sharp knock on the door cut into the conversation, momentarily jolting Miria out of her slide into the darker parts of her self.

"I apologize for interrupting," a voice belonging to the Lady Governor's secretary announced, "but His Serenity Bużan has just arrived to see you."

Miria swallowed hard. Of course her lady wife would want to have a word with that old episcopal priest, the very same who also happened to hold the prelacy and stewardship of the Overwhelming Grace. Even if he also had to have been present there during the attack on Visza. Perhaps precisely because of that reason. Anxiously, the boy-toy wife eyed the saber propped by the desk, and the hand closed around it.

"Already?" the Lady Governor exhaled in barely restrained frustration. "Make him wait."

She stood up. Miria's head slid off her lap, before being abruptly pulled on the taut leash wrapped around the demonic woman's wrist.

"We'll finish this later," her lady wife said. "You can go now."

Miria opened her mouth to ask, then hesitated. Peeking above the table, she watched the other wives turn to leave, Mażin lifting herself heavily from her chair and Luna leaning over to give the Lady Governor a quick kiss on the cheek. Was she supposed to go with them? No command had been issued, but neither did her lady even look at her. She only seemed to remember Miria when, making a big step into the now-empty study, she almost ended up dragging her wife behind her, the boy-toy barely catching her balance with hands firmly planted on the floor.

"Sorry," the Lady Governor muttered, and tossed the leash loose back onto her chair.

She spent the next few moments pacing the room rapidly, her hooves banging out a frantic rhythm on the hard oak below, punctuated by repeated pauses whenever she reached the white-covered gallery on one side, or the bookshelves on the other. The study seemed so small compared to her, unfit for her infernal proportions, or the magnitude of her anger. There was a dryness in Miria's mouth, one she could not tell if it hailed from her own nervousness, or her lady wife's fury spilling out.

"Let him in!" the Lady Governor called suddenly, halting her rounds.

If the wait bothered prelate Bużan, he did not let it show. Although advanced in years, he kept well; unlike so many other episcopals of his rank, he took less after the obscene affluence of cardinal-princes of the old kingdom, and more after the wasteland ascetics that had first spread faith in the Holy all those ages ago. Like them, he was a tall, thin man that even in the rich blues and golds of his robe of office could not help but to look slightly withered. Though Miria had no doubts that his smile was forced, he wore it confidently.

"Lady Governor," he said, meeting her in the middle of the study, and offering a respectful bow.

"Your Serenity," she acknowledged, more than a bit terse.

They sat down in silence, the leash once again wound around the demonic woman's wrist. Bużan noticed, of course—it would be hard to miss the boy-toy wife kneeling awkwardly, half-hidden behind the desk—and greeted the sight with a brief frown. Miria wondered if he recognized her, but his eyes moved quickly on, more interested in the saber rather than the Lady Governor's plaything.

A servant—the same half-infernal girl that had been meant to fit Miria earlier—carried in a plate of refreshments. Small cakes and cups of steaming, fragrant coffee were placed on the top of the desk, and a small water bowl at its feet. The blush returned to Miria's cheeks; she had not been entirely forgotten.

"Am I interrupting something?" the priest asked, watching the maid lean back up from above the boy-toy wife.

"No," the Lady Governor replied, ostentatiously placing her hand across Miria's head.

There was little tenderness in this touch, and much tension. Black claws dug into the skin, not yet cutting it, but not far from it, either. The boy-toy wife froze, deathly still.

"Very well," he nodded, looking away with another of his small frowns. "Before we begin, allow me to once again extend my sincerest condolences for the tragedy that befell your fa—"

"Enough."

The demonic woman's hand opened abruptly, letting go of the head; her other bit into the side of the desk, beech cracking under pressure. Against herself, Miria hunched, as if someone had just taken a swing at her. Bużan only sighed.

"Very well," he repeated, his tone unchanged. "I have conveyed your message to the men taking sanctuary in the Overwhelming Grace, and I have their response."

"Will they surrender?"

"These men are ready to atone," Bużan shook his head. "Once they leave the temple, they will put on sack-cloth, and enter the strictest cloister at Mount Insza."

"The only place they'll be going is the gallows. Or the gibbet."

"Once there," the priest did not allow himself to be distracted, "their life will be prayer and contrition, and only in death will their penance end."

It was, in many ways, true. The monks of Mount Insza swore vows of silence and poverty. They wore white and worked with their feet bare, for they were considered dead to the world, and alive only to the Holy. But the monastery was no dungeon,—rather, it was a fortress, and many a Leshite noble had used it as shelter during the long wars that defined most of the old kingdom's history.

"So they will not."

"To take sanctuary is to give up on the temporal."

The heat was no illusion; it was on Miria's lips now, salt and smoke together. The Lady Governor's eyes burned, and the fire overflowed, rushing out into the study. The priest had to feel it, too; there was sweat on his wrinkled brow. Yet, he kept his calm, speaking in a measured, careful cadence.

"It would be an unspeakable affront to the Holy for those men to hand themselves in to worldly justice now. Or be brought to it. It's an article of our faith."

"And my wife's blood, spilled over your altar slabs?"

She kicked back, almost breaking the chair, and leaned over her desk, her entire height and the weight of her presence towering over the prelate. With the collar cinched tight around her neck, Miria struggled to draw in breath through the air so hot and heavy.

"That does not offend your religion?" she pressed on, claws shredding the papers below her. "That is no affront at all?"

Finally, Bużan inched back, the pressure too much for even him to bear. And yet, his voice did not waver; how could it? He was, after all, a man of the Holy, and the Lady Governor stood for a nation of everything the episcopacy preached against.

"To take sanctuary is to admit guilt. And no matter how great the crime, we must always allow for atonement."

"So they get to live. And my Visza gets to rot."

"I understand that this is not the way things are done in cruel Dis. But we beg you to respect our ways, too."

"Oh."

When the Lady Governor started to move, there was a flicker of a moment when Miria's heart stopped; she was sure that her lady wife was about to draw the saber and quench her rage in the priest's blood. Then, her leash yanked her up, and a clawed hand closed around her head like a vice.

"There is something your ilk does not understand," the demonic woman snarled.

As if handling a rag doll, she turned Miria around, and pressed her face into her stomach. The red of the uniform and the scorching heat of her body filled Miria's world. She gasped for breath, golden buttons digging into the skin of her cheek. But she was not hurt, and when the hand forced her down, so now she was pushing into the leather trousers and feeling the budding stiffness behind, she realized what use she was about to provide.

"You have no idea what I would be like," the Lady Governor's voice rang in Miria's head, terrifying, but once again sharply enticing in ways she could not even begin to name, "if I were not respecting your ways."

She did not loosen her belt, but snapped it off, her claws rending leather like paper. For a split second, she pulled Miria's head back, and the boy-toy saw of dark red skin, of wiry black hair, and the tip of her lady wife's cock. The last thing she heard between opening her mouth, and the Lady Governor driving herself into her, was Bużan cursing.

"See how we grieve in cruel Dis."

She filled Miria to the throat and held her there, her hand not letting the boy-toy withdraw an inch. Instead, the boy-toy went slack in the grip, letting her bound arms hang loose by her sides, frantically trying to catch some air through the heat, and the numbing taste of salt, flesh, and arousal.

"We are born to Want!"

Moments before Miria's eyes bulged, the Lady Governor forced her slightly out—enough for drool to spill, enough for a single hurried breath. The reprieve did not last. She pushed in again, the sixth wife's entire body twitching in response.

"To wonder and wild desire!"

A haze came down upon Miria's senses. Only taste and touch remained undulled; the rest of her turned numb. She was nothing human now, just a puppet for someone else's need. An open mouth that could only try to serve its purpose and not gag. The voices were coming from so far away.

"To love and—"

A single gasp interrupted her snarl; Miria could taste it spill into her.

"—and slaughter."

The next thrust withdrew farther; enough to show the world the single strand of white connecting her lips to her lady wife's tip. But the Lady Governor was far from finished, and the display only for a moment.

"I will go now," the prelate said, his words barely making it into Miria's ears.

"No," the Lady Governor growled, and her claws parted Miria's skin. "You will stay, and see!"

She was getting closer, now, driving into Miria's mouth with desperate, ferocious need, quivering to an accelerating rhythm. Forced to her groin, the boy-toy wife served, tears welling in her eyes, body drenched in sweat, lungs begging for air.

"I really don't need to—"

The peak approached suddenly, but the Lady Governor did not give it to Miria. She pulled the boy-toy back one last time, hoisting her up and onto the desk, the toss scattering books and papers. The painted ceiling flashed above her, before her head lolled loosely back to allow her to see Bużan's face, painted into a mask of shock and disgust. Then, her lady wife came, all over her splayed body.

"This," she said a moment later, wiping her hands with the hem of Miria's dress, "is what you see when I do not respect your ways."

Heaving for breath, splattered with hot filth, and feeling the morning nausea returned, the boy-toy wife was a dirty rag. She did not want to move, nor was she certain that she could; and so, instead, she watched an esteemed priest of the religion she was born and raised in stare at her as if a devil herself, his previously unbroken calm entirely shattered.

"Tell those murderers," the Lady Governor added, sitting back down, "that they have eight more days to reconsider. And afterwards, I will do as Want commands."

Bużan did not answer. His mouth moved, searching for something to say. Nothing came out.

"You can go now."

The old priest hesitated. Miria felt his stare sweep across the milky splatters trailing down her face, straining to look away. She was not sure if what she glimpsed in him was revulsion, or pity. Perhaps it was both.

"Message received," he finally exhaled, with only the smallest shudder. "The Holy keep you, Lady Governor."

He stumbled as he left, tripping over one last worried glance thrown in the boy-toy's direction.

For a time, there was silence. With titanic effort, Miria steadied her breath, and turned her head, to look instead at the plate with untouched refreshments she luckily had not landed on. She could hear her lady wife panting too, her whistling inhales and exhales. The heat receded, lingering in the sticky layered sweat clinging to skin, and the suggestion of violence that hovered in the air like a perfume. Some time later, the boy-toy wife opened her mouth, and licked her lips. They were so very dry. She thought of the water-bowl, but she was still on the desk, and too used up to reach down. No other thoughts made their way through the droning buzz in her head.

The Lady Governor's hand, the same that had guided Miria's head moments ago, reached for the cool coffee. The boy-toy wife tried to follow the cup's arc, but her neck struggled to turn.

"I would have killed him, if not for you."

The words came out slowly, in a cracked tone Miria had never heard from her mouth before. She blinked, their meaning confusing. All she'd done was be used. She curled, on the desktop, her stomach trying to force some of that morning medicine back through her strained throat.

"I would have ripped him apart," she continued, "and we would have the war now, not in a week. But you were here instead."

Understanding arrived sluggishly, drawn between pained breaths, but arrive it did. The study cooled; the Lady Governor's simmering rage was dying down, expended without slaughter. Once again, Miria thought back to the sermons she had spent her youth listening to, of priests warning their congregation that the rulers of Dis could not tell between love and murder. But if that was true, if it was the same lust and the same drive, it did not have to be slaked in blood. Not when there was also flesh. Was this how the boy-toy wives came to be? To soak up murderous rage, without question or complaint?

She finally managed to look up, and once more, her eyes caught on the Lady Governor's clawed fingers, and those tiny specks of red that edged them. The wounds they left were not deep—scratches, really, and Miria could not deny how a part of her was proud of those small cuts now ringing her temples. And yet, she wanted more than the hard grip; she wanted to feel again the same warm touch that had been given to her on the wedding night. She wanted to be tucked into this warm body and held against it, tight, secure, and loving.

There was joy in being used, but she wanted to be loved.

The Lady Governor pulled herself up and started to pace the room again, though slowly this time, without agitation. When she spoke, her voice drifted, and Miria knew she was no longer on her mind.

"These fuckers…"

The way she said it—a curse loosely thrown, oozing with frustration and contempt—was not meant for anyone's ears. It grated to hear her like that.

"They are forcing my hand, and don't even give a shit about pretending. They want the monster they warned their brats against. Bastards."

She paused mid-step, hands folded. Idly, Miria noticed how she was using her tail to keep her trousers up. That, at least, made her smile.

"And it's working," she muttered, sagging. "Such a simple fucking plan. I'd applaud it, if it had not cost my Visza her life."

With her anger spent and slowly drying off all over Miria, little remained to hold her grief back. She cracked over the name, speaking it with the small chuckle men sometimes give, when they want to hold back tears. The boy-toy wife also stifled a sob, though one rising from a far less noble place, for in that name there was contained the enormity of the desperate need that she did not get to feel on her skin. Terrible, burning jealousy seized her, and in the moment, Mira could only resent Visza for having everything she would never get. Guilt followed immediately after, and the worst kind of shame; she could not bear to look at her grieving wife, and so finally pushed herself off the table, the pads of her shins softening the awkward fall. The water-bowl waited, and she was very thirsty.

"Oh, right," the Lady Governor muttered, noticing her wife lapping at the bowl. "Let's get you cleaned up."

Servants came soon after, to free Miria and help her out of the study, to wash her and finally let her rest. As she was leaving, her lady wife collapsed back into her chair, and said, before yielding to a brooding kind of shame:

"You did well."

Miria smiled faintly back. What lurked underneath her heart was not unhappiness, though it stung of disappointment. Ferried out of the room, and struggling to stand on her strained feet, she wanted nothing but a long kiss goodnight, though she knew she was not the wife to receive it. At least there was no more doubt. To the Lady Governor, Miria might ever only be the boy-toy. It was Visza who was the beloved she would burn the world to avenge, but could never sacrifice.