The Emperor's New Pony (10 page)

But the sight of Master Morqan spanking Kari had made her suddenly want to beg Lord Ranin to spank her, and Edera had not been able to decide why. Now, looking into his stern face—the same expression he had worn when he told her that she must not go to the parley with Emperor Comnar—and watching him spread his legs in the leather breeches and pat his left thigh, over which Edera knew she must now go for her spanking, she suddenly understood, and it made her start to cry.

Lord Ranin, understandably mistaking the reason for her tears, said, “Come now, filly Edera, it is not so bad as that. Take your punishment like a good girl and learn your lesson.”

His voice sounded firm, but also somehow very sad. Edera knew that he did not want to spank her. Part of her grew angry, thinking that as his princess, and as the girl he must take care of, he
should
want to spank her. Another part, though, found in his reluctance that same old nobility that her father had once told her about.

“Ranin,” her father had said, when he left Amidia to go to the sea, to embark upon the voyage from which he would never return, “is the most honorable, noble man in Amidia—and to me that means that he is the most honorable man in the world. Daughter, when I am gone, you are to heed him in all things.”

At that thought, her weeping grew more violent. If she had heeded her father, and heeded Lord Ranin, she would not now be standing before him naked, an imperial filly, about to go over his knee for a spanking.

“Filly Edera,” he said, and she could tell that he meant ‘Princess Edera,’ and that he wanted to say ‘Princess Edera,’ and she loved him for it. “Get over my knee now, or I shall have to put you there. You are going to learn a lesson, and I am going to teach it to you.”

Tearfully, at last Edera obeyed, moving to stand between Lord Ranin’s legs and letting him topple her over his thigh until her hands and her head hung down to the floor, her toes just touched the straw on the other side, and her bottom, with its shameful tail, was raised up to confront Lord Ranin’s gaze as the most prominent part of her—the part in which, currently, he had the most interest. She still wept, but her sobs came quietly now. Lord Ranin gently gathered her hair—which the boys took very good care of, brushing it daily—and twisted it to hang over her right shoulder, so that when she turned her face to the left they could look one another in the eyes.

Gently, he began to pull her tail out. “We must get your bottom ready, sweetheart,” he said softly. “Push for me, now.” All the stable men called the fillies ‘sweetheart,’ but when Lord Ranin said it to Edera, she always felt—though perhaps it was her imagination—that he meant it in a way that almost made her blush. How could he not, she asked herself, seeing as he had known her all her life? But whenever she heard him call her ‘sweetheart,’ her tummy seemed to flip-flop a little.

She pushed for him, with a little sobbing grunt, and then the terrible, shameful sound came loud in the night air of the stable, where the fresh breezes blew through the windows to carry away the odors of the less savory things the fillies must do there, and bring the lovely scent of the flowering trees of the emperor’s pleasure garden. Edera felt herself blush crimson at the thought that every filly within five stalls must have heard her expelling her tail. It was much easier when there were other girls around who had to do the same thing at the same time. That seemed indeed to be an essential fact of stable life—all the awful things the stable men made you do got easier when you went through them with the other fillies.

Even the mounting seemed that way, really; so much so that part of Edera longed to feel the power of a man covering her the way she saw the knights who came to visit their fillies covering them. There were the informal mountings in the stalls, when a knight simply opened the door of his filly’s stall and stepped inside, and then all the other fillies heard the sounds of a stallion mastering his mare. Sometimes through the stall windows, Edera caught glimpses of that, and it always made her heart beat very fast: the man, usually having merely raised his robe, pounding his hips into the girl’s bottom while she cried out. Once Edera had heard a knight say, “Oh, so tight,” and it had made her wonder, as the wetness came to her loins yet again, whether the man who mounted her for the first time would say that about her own little cleft.

There were the mountings in the yard, too, which were more formal. They took place during morning and evening exercises in the hidden palace yard behind the imperial residence. While the rest of the fillies trotted around the rings on the longe lines held by their trainers—Lord Ranin, always, for Edera, but Master Morqan or one of the twenty stable boys for the others—the girls whose mounting day it was went one at a time over the device fixed in the center of the yard, called the mounting saddle. Edera could not look at the mounting saddle, a sort of curve-topped leather-covered bench to which girls were strapped down by the stable boys, without blushing crimson, but she also envied the girls who rode it and were ridden there by the lords, while other men watched and jested, and the maids from the palace knelt in front of them and took their manhoods into their mouths.

And, she knew, there was the arena, where Edera thought mounting must make part of the mysterious displays. One evening a week—fifth day, which in Maq marked the end of each week—a few of the fillies were led away by the trainers to the arena, but none of the Amidians had ever dared to ask them where it was, or what happened there, nor did those girls ever volunteer the information during morning break. They usually had lash marks on their rumps when they returned, but that of course represented nothing unusual, really. Sometimes Edera thought that the girls who had been to the arena looked distracted the next day, as if trying to emerge from a vivid dream, but perhaps that simply came from being kept awake late into the night; the fillies never got back to the stable until everyone else had already fallen asleep.

“Filly Edera,” Lord Ranin said quietly, stroking her back gently at the same time and calling her away thus from her little reverie. “I cannot let you think that this strange life the emperor has thrust upon us is something to take lightly, and you have been dreadful on the longe line for the past three days. I must teach you that as your trainer I will not tolerate you giving less than your best.”

Oh, but if only he knew why, Edera thought. If only he knew that the reason she couldn’t keep her gait properly was that the more Lord Ranin trained her patiently—the more forbearance he showed in not touching her up with the quirt he wore at his waist like all the stable men—the less she could concentrate on pleasing him. She felt overwhelmed with guilt every time he put her into harness and led her out to the ring. When the training began and he took her from walk to trot, which should have been the easiest thing in the world, the past two sessions she had gone to canter instead, but Lord Ranin had not touched her with the quirt. Indeed, Lord Ranin had
never
touched her with the quirt.

Chapter Eleven

“Edera,” Ranin said, looking down at her lovely round bottom, free of the tail and so beautiful that he wondered yet again, as he had been wondering all night, whether he could actually do the terrible thing he had decided he must do, after that afternoon’s disaster in the ring. A few moments before, he had said that he thought he should have given her a spanking a long time ago, and he had meant it—even if the words had welled up inside him, unpremeditated. Perhaps if Auner had told him to take Princess Edera over his knee when she threatened to do something foolish, everything might have turned out different.

But actually to do it now, although he knew he had to, seemed impossible, just as it had seemed impossible to ‘soothe’ her three months before at the emperor’s command, and touch her between her legs upon her sweet little cunt. He had no choice: he must remember that he had no choice. Master Morqan had said in the morning, quietly, in Ranin’s ear, that the emperor, watching from his balcony the previous afternoon, had noticed that Edera’s training was not coming along. That the emperor enjoyed the little torture he had bestowed on them by making Ranin train Edera, but that Comnar had plans for Edera—plans to make a special show of her, in the arena, soon—and if Ranin could not train her, Edera would be taken away from him and he would be sent into slavery like all the knights of the honor guard except for Lennar, who waited in the dungeon for a show that Ranin had heard the emperor was planning, though no one to whom he talked could tell him what that show might be, or whether it were the same show the emperor planned for Edera.

That would be disastrous, and not merely because Ranin would go into slavery, for if he did, the plans Morqan had begun to hint about would never come to fruition for Ranin and Edera. Only Ranin could make the desperate attempt he now made daily, in hints and nods and words under his breath to the stable master, to be part of something that would change his country’s, and his princess’, fortunes.

“Yes, goodman?” Edera said through her quiet tears.

“I want you to understand that after I punish you, you will have paid the penalty for going to the parley with the emperor.”

“What?”

Ranin heard surprise in her voice, but also a kind of bewildered happiness.

Morqan, in confirming what Ranin thought he already knew, had got it right. “You need to spank her,” the stable master had said. “It happens with a few of the fillies—usually the ones who have been royalty or high nobility. Their guilt is just so great that I need to release it for them. I take them over my knee and I give them what they need, the way a loving papa does.”

The man truly had depths that Ranin only began to sense: Master Morqan trained the imperial fillies to the high standard he did only by knowing what lay in their hearts better than the girls knew it themselves.

He kept stroking her back, fighting against the terrible temptation to stroke the shapely ovals of her bottom, and just barely winning the battle. Sooner or later they would have to face the reality of the situation, and he would have to begin to train Edera’s mouth and her cunt for whatever the emperor had planned, for that made an essential part of filly training in the imperial stables. Comnar had exempted Edera, but nothing in the emperor’s conduct made Ranin think that that exemption would last, or that when the emperor decided Edera would be deflowered, it would be less than a terrible ordeal for both him and his princess. He knew he needed to ready her: his gravest doubt was whether he could keep from deflowering her himself, so desperately did his body yearn for hers.

Ranin closed his knees to imprison Edera’s legs between his own, and pressed his left hand down upon her back to steady her. She gave a little startled cry. That cry turned into a gasp of pain as he lifted his right hand and brought it down hard on the very center of her little bottom, in answer to her “What?” twelve times, very quickly.

“Oh… oh… lord… ah! I mean…” Her yelps built into a wail, and then he stopped after the twelfth spank, and put his hand on her bottom, right where he had spanked her. She sobbed as if her heart would break, like a little girl who had lost her favorite pet. Her bottom felt warm under his palm, and it quivered with her crying.

“I am punishing you for your foolishness. The foolishness that led to me, at the head of an imperial legion, entering our city, and giving the keys of your palace to the emperor. The foolishness that has made your people imperial subjects—and I call them that in order that I not have to call them slaves.” He could hear the terrible sadness in his own voice, and he fought tears and won the victory, because Edera would need his strength more than anything else. And she sobbed now even more violently than she had when he was spanking her.

“After I have done it, we will not speak of that foolishness again. You will be an obedient filly, and we will please the emperor until he lets us go free, as he must someday, to return to our home and lay our lives at the feet of our people, and try to make amends.” He wished he could tell her about the plans of which he had begun to learn, but far too much danger lay along that course. Edera must think that their hope waited far in the future, when she reached thirty and could go into service in a different part of the empire.

Edera did not respond except by her tears and her wracking sobs. More and more certain that spanking her was the correct thing to do, Ranin began again, alternating now between her right and left bottom cheeks, and making her squeal in pain, giving twelve more that way, and then returning to the center of her backside for a further twelve.

At the end of it, the little bit of struggle she had put up at the beginning had gone, and she lay limp over his leg, her shoulders heaving. Ranin sighed deeply. He had done what he must. He hoped it would help. Without even thinking about it, really, he put his hand on her warm, red bottom and rubbed, hoping to comfort her a little.

Edera’s response took him by surprise. “Ranin,” she whispered, from where her head hung down. She turned her face so that he could see her eyes, puffy with weeping but shining with the tears. “Soothe me? Please? I’ve… I’ve missed it so.”

Edera uttered the words pleadingly, but Ranin heard them as a command, or something in him said that he could at least use that as an excuse: his princess had told him to touch her between her legs and comfort her there. All the other trainers, he had quickly realized in the days he had spent in the stable, living in the apartments above with Morqan and his lads, soothed the fillies very frequently—rarely to the point of climax, but always until the filly was gasping and moaning with pleasure. Now, in that moment, having taken the dreadful liberty of chastising Princess Edera, Ranin had a single desire: to give her pleasure so exquisite she would lose her guilt and shame into that feeling.

As gently as he could, he began to run his fingertips over the place where her thighs came together with her bottom cheeks. Edera whimpered and groaned, and tried to open her legs, though Ranin still held them imprisoned between his own powerful thighs, covered by his leather breeches.