“But not one of us! she shouted as he dropped to his knees, clutching his head between his hands. He is a mortal trespasser here in the world of Faery, and as such he has offended your Queen! Take him! Take him and stake him to my wheel, while I devise his torments!
Two of her handmaidens moved swiftly to Thomas’s side, and not ungently forced him to his feet. His vision still numb from the Queen’s blow, he followed their tuggings near blindly, obedient as they pressed his back against an upright four-spoked wheel and spread his arms and his legs, tying his limbs each one to a spoke with a rope stranded of springy vines. His head hung so that his chin brushed his chest. Yet, though he slouched, his shaft still stood firm, unabashed by his pain.
“Raise your head,” commanded the Queen’s voice. “Raise it, and look at me, mortal.” Her hands were on his shoulders, her fingernails knife-like against the flesh there.
He did as he was told, and saw the full, splendid, beautiful cruelty of her silvery face with its flaring pink eyes.
“I could do with you anything I wished, mortal,” she said, “and my courtiers here would call it fair justice for your intrusion into my realm. But tell me, first, what punishment is it that you think yourself you deserve?”
“I strayed,” he mumbled. “I was brought here. I stepped through a portal that I did not know was there. I have not despoiled your land with my presence by intention, your majesty, but only stumbled into it.”
“That does not lessen your crime,” said the Queen. To urge her point she traced her fingernails down over his chest and belly, stopping just short of his groin, drawing rivulets of bright blood from beneath the skin, the heel of one palm touching the plum-like end of his shaft. “There is no such thing as chance; all things have their causes; I permit no talk of accident in my court.”
Thomas thought quickly. “But I am a mere mortal,” he said, his voice feeling clumsy in his mouth now that his lip was beginning to swell. “How could I even aspire to have knowledge of the ways of your court, great Queen?”
She turned away with a flounce and a flow of her great iridescent wings and her cascade of hair.
“You two -” she designated a pair of her women with a beckon of her hand “- you two torment him as you will.”
Thomas steeled himself to bear savage, brutal pain, and sure enough the pain did come. The handmaids opened their mouths and smiled to show the predatory shine of their needle-sharp teeth, then moved around behind him, one to either side. At first all they did was stroke him, their small but long hands flitting down his back and buttocks. One inquisitive finger twitched briefly in through the ring of his anus; another tracked a line from there to the folds where the bag of his scrotum hung from the base of his branch. Blood dripped between his legs. If such a thing were possible his shaft grew even harder as he surrendered himself to the ecstasy of the pains they were inflicting on him.
And then, as the Queen and the rest of her court watched him unconcerned, one of the handmaids bit him in the side, just above the waist. The blissful agony rushed through him like the crescendo he had shared with the Gate only minutes ago, and he let out a shout that was in part protest, in part triumph.
Another bite, and another. His blood was flowing freely now. The handmaids raked their fingernails down his back and buttocks, carving out channels of erotic anguish, sending him into a frenzy that was distanced from the world by redly pulsing banks of fog. A hand snaked around him and clutched his maleness tightly, moving the skin back and forth over the wood within; yet he hardly noticed this, so sensitive had the rest of his body become to the delicious lances of pain that the paired courtiers were inflicting upon him. Already, though he had been drained by the Gate so lately, another flood was building up inside him…
“Halt!” cried the Queen.
The handmaids’ fingers and mouths froze in place.
“Let him alone.”
They stood aside from him, and walked demurely away from him to join the others by the Queen. There was blood staining their wings and mouths and bodies; his blood.
“Attend to me,” the Queen commanded Thomas, and all at once his vision was crystal clear, so that the colours and the lights in the clearing were brighter than they could possibly be, as if he were seeing them through a shattered prism.
“You are mine,” she said, “to do with as I will. Do you understand me?”
Although his blood was puddling at his feet, although his mind was still staggering from the pounding it had received, Thomas summoned up some last shred of resolution. “You may torture me until I am dead before you, but I will never be yours,” he said.
Her eyes flamed.
She said nothing, but gestured to two of her priapic courtiers. Without needing a word of instruction, they hurried forward until they were standing one to either side of Thomas, their mighty phalluses brushing his blood-slicked sides. Then, still without a word being spoken, they abruptly pushed against the wheel so that it fell backwards to lie flat with a crash against the ground, and Thomas spreadeagled on top of it. His wrists and ankles feeling torn, he stared at the sky through the lacing of the twigs and leaves.
The Queen came into view above him, her wings draped like glittering cobwebs around her, in one hand a bunch of stinging nettles. She stared down at him, her lips skewed into a grimace of scorn.
“The ladies of my court were too gentle with you, it seems,” she said, her voice now almost thoughtful.
The Queen knelt down beside him, as a lover might kneel, and the act tricked his mind into anticipating an exquisite kiss or a soft caress. Instead, she placed the stinging nettles to his chest and then slowly, deliberately guided the constellation of erupting agony down across the plain of his stomach to wrap the plants around his maleness.
His scream as countless points of sharp pain shot through his raw skin caused birds to flee jabbering in fear from the trees. And yet still more powerful than the anguish he felt was the delight, the sinister eroticism of the pricking plants. The Queen kneaded the nettles into and around the bulb of his penis, so that the sublime agony grew greater and ever greater; and yet his mind was not flinching and cringing away from the pain but was instead embracing it and dancing with it in a slow ballet of sensation.
Thought departed Thomas; sight departed him too, as did pride and selfhood, until all that was left of him were the splinters of pain he felt.
And then the Queen threw the nettles aside.
“Attend to me, Thomas!” she commanded once more, and his rationality and vision returned. She was leaning over him again, her face and her gaze no less merciless than before. “Are you mine yet?” she whispered.
“I am mine! he whispered in return.
The Queen gave a shout of fury. The small white clouds seemed to pause their scuttling across the blue, aghast. She spread her shimmering wings outspread until they seemed broader than the sky to him. From where he lay on the wheel he could see that, between her legs, in place of the adroitly pleated garland which had once dangled there, there was now a knotted fist of rose-thorns.
She lowered her face to smile at him a truly dreadful smile. He felt his shaft jerk amid its cloud of pain in anticipatory response. The Queen picked her way fastidiously over the rim of the wheel until she was standing astride his chest, then she cast her long, long hair forward and her wings back to create a cavern that contained only the two of them. Still looking upward, he could discern through the gloom the lips of her sex spying at him from among the thorns, with a nubbin like an infant’s thumb just above.
The Queen frowned down at him. “Must I torment you further?” she said.
“You have not yet tormented me at all,” Thomas replied. “You and your lackeys have not done anything to me that I have not welcomed, have not devoutly desired. I believed I had come to this place by mischance, but now I see that I brought myself here of my own yearning, that I guided my own destiny until my footsteps brought me to the portal that led me from the mortal world.”