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.
