He finished the meat and vegetables to the last, also finishing two other dishes, one a roast fowl garnished with nuts, the second a grain pudding of some sort. My fingers were sticky and my arm ached from constantly being raised, and my insides were beginning to rumble with emptiness. I’d been given nothing beyond the two melon wedges, and I didn’t have to ask why. My portion of the meal lay on the carpeting where I’d thrown it, handily available if I got hungry enough. I grew ill at the thought of his insisting that I eat it, knowing I would throw it up again if I had to stuff it down, but he spared me that. He poured himself a goblet of wine, the tangy smell of it making me faintly dizzy, then relaxed back among the cushions with a sigh of contentment.
Without having any more bowls to handle, there was nothing for me to do but kneel where I was, listening and thinking and feeling. My knees and bottom hurt, my insides throbbed and burned, I felt sticky and naked and so badly used that I couldn’t stop the tears welling in my covered eyes. It didn’t matter whether I deserved the punishments I’d been given or not; I felt so miserable from them that I didn’t know what to do. He had blindfolded me, and punished me twice, and made me want him so badly I could have died. Now he had left me entirely alone in the darkness he had forced on me, alone and empty and unwanted. That was what I felt the most, unwanted. Nobody wanted me except to use me, and I still couldn’t believe he was any different. He may have had Len, but Len wasn’t a Prime.
“Wenda, why have you begun weeping again?” he asked, touching my face so suddenly that I jumped and lost control due to the startlement. A large, ugly corner of the misery and desolation I was feeling flared out at him, causing him to cringe inside and grunt aloud from the impact before I had it under control again. His hands fumbled clumsily at my arms, as though he were fighting to keep from shuddering or trembling, and then he had gathered me to him, holding me tight against his chest. I lay unmoving in his arms while he fought his twisting emotions, doing nothing to help him regain the calm he struggled for. It was a hard struggle, but his will was too strong for his own emotions to deny him for long. He gained control, and then he gained calm, and then his hand came to stroke my hair.
“Ah, wenda, what am I to do with you?” he sighed, holding me tight with one arm while he stroked my hair with the other. “It is my duty to teach you obedience and proper behavior, yet when I do so you become like a small child, bewildered and desolated by a punishment you have no understanding of. When I recall this and withhold punishment from you, you view the lenience as an attempt to coax the use of your powers from you, and grow bolder in your defiance. How am I to deal with you?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about and I didn’t want to know; I just kept trying to ignore how his holding me made me feel. I could have been so happy belonging to him, so happy just being held in his arms. Instead I had to be a political pawn, traded and fought for and bought and sold and used! The sobs joined the tears then, shaking me deeply, and his upset came so close to breaking out of his control that he nearly crushed me. He didn’t have to guess at what I was feeling, he knew, beyond doubt and beyond argument, and he was having trouble coping with it. I snapped my shield closed and buried my face in his chest, retreating deep inside until I could cope with it myself. He held me for quite some time, his stiffness and uneven breathing telling me almost as clearly as reading that he was making no progress in controlling himself, and he finally had to admit it. His hands went to the blindfold and pulled it off me, his lips came to my hair very briefly, then he was up on his feet and striding away, to the doorway and through it. I blinked back the glare of bright sunlight as I watched the door close, then slowly lowered my cheek to the carpeting. I didn’t know where he was going, and I didn’t have enough strength left to care.
It has never failed to amaze me how someone else’s energy expenditures can drain your energy if you watch them when you’re tired. It could not have been more than two minutes after Tammad left that the door opened again, admitting Len and Garth. The determination in their expressions fairly screamed of battle to come, an involvement I wasn’t anywhere near up to. I pulled a few cushions closer to me to do what I could about my nakedness, then resolutely turned my face away from their advance.
“Don’t turn away like that, Terry,” Len growled, rapidly closing the gap between us. “It won’t do you any good! I want to know what you did to Tammad!”
What I did to Tammad. I seriously considered raising my head to look at Len as if he were crazy, but it wasn’t worth the effort. My looking at him would not have turned him sane. So far Garth hadn’t said anything, but his churning confusion told me he was more than ready to add his oar. Garth R’Hem Solohr was an Alderanean, tall and broad-shouldered and dark-haired, a Kabran Colonel and a member of one of the oldest families on Alderan. Being a Kabran he was also a military man, as well versed in the art military as are all Kabrans, who make up more than sixty percent of the Alderan population. Tammad had brought him to Rimilia with a specific purpose in mind, but I hadn’t yet found out what that purpose was. Unless it was to join Len in bothering the life out of me, an achievement they weren’t far from accomplishing. Len stopped a foot away from me on my right, but Garth the military tactician moved around to my left, accomplishing encirclement with very little effort. I sighed to myself and considered putting the blindfold back on, but wasn’t given the chance to do so even if I had decided on it.
“You heard me, Terry,” Len snapped, looming over me. “What did you do to Tammad?”
“I beat him unmercifully,” I mumbled into the carpeting, closing my eyes. “He begged and pleaded, but it did him absolutely no good. He earned a beating and he got it.”
“Well, somebody got it,” Garth put in, and a minute later I jumped at the touch of his hand on my bottom. He was crouched down next to me, inspecting the results of what Tammad had done, feeling absolutely no compassion at the sight.
“Maybe Terry would like a few more stripes to join those,” Len suggested as he also crouched down, adding his own light touch to Garth’s. “We’ll both be glad to arrange it, Terry. All you have to do is continue being stubborn.”
“Len, Garth, you’re hurting me!” I gasped, finding it impossible to crawl away from them without dislodging the cushions I’d arranged so quickly. “Please stop touching me!”
“We’ll stop as soon as you tell us what we want to know,” Len answered ruthlessly, aware of the full agreement visible in Garth’s mind. “Tell us what you did to Tammad.”
“I didn’t do anything to him!” I answered in desperation, taking care not to squirm. “He did to me, just as he always does! Please let go!”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Len pursued, neither of them moving an inch. “Tammad’s emotions were totally out of control, so far out that I nearly didn’t recognize him. He told us to take care of you, then just about ran out of the apartment. What could have caused that?”
“I don’t know!” I insisted, then yelped as Garth leaned harder. My tone had annoyed him, and he was just short of replacing the touch with a smack.
“I think you’d better tell us everything that happened,” Len decided, shifting from his crouch to a sitting position next to me. “Go through all of it, and don’t leave anything out.”
Len had taken his hand back, but Garth still had full possession of my embarrassment, which left me very little choice. I told them everything that had happened, getting swatted only once, very early on, when I tried to close my mind to Len’s probing. If my narrative hadn’t been open to immediate verification I would have glossed over certain parts, but my tormentors refused to allow that. They had grown impossible to deal with, and at the end of it I lay belly down between them, Garth’s hand on my thigh, Len’s hand toying with a lock of my hair, both of them ignoring the mist of tears in my eyes as they discussed the mystery.