The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jess

“I had thought better of you,” he said to me. I tucked those words away, a love note tenderly folded and slipped into a breast pocket. As I was leaving the treatment room, young Rella asked me if she should shave his head now. It is the custom to shave a new slave; in fact, there is a fine for not doing it.

“Would you like me to shave him now, or wait until tomorrow?” she asked earnestly.

“No,” I said.

Over the next few weeks, I took him down, woke him up, and took him down again many times a day, planting the anchor phrases deeper in his mind, and teaching him to sink deeper into the spell. He never complained of his pain, but every time I saw his body stiffen or the muscles around his eyes clench suddenly, I put him back to sleep and cast spells to soothe that particular pain, so that when he thought of entrancement, he would think of relief. I did use his trances for the difficult parts of healing him: he never knew that leeches had saved the sight of his right eye and prevented his ear from looking like a tumor for the rest of his life. When adhesions formed in the bad knee and I had to break them, he lay there on his stomach and never even twitched as I levered his heel back sharply against his buttock and everyone in the room could hear the scar tissue tearing loose. I took a kind of artistic satisfaction in all these victories, which his entrancement made possible, or at least made much easier. Still, watching the baby-like relaxation of his features, the feeling of having his wellbeing and comfort in my hands, sent a different kind of satisfaction—or something seeking satisfaction—tingling through me. I knew, though, that as Lara said, I had not won him yet. More and more, I wondered how that could happen. More and more, I thought of enchanting him to make it happen.

Lara had warned me against trying to create passion, but she had said that “obstacles” could be removed by my spells. What about the obstacle of his anger? I might have the power to obliterate it through enchantment, but doing so seemed far beyond the line that Lara had drawn. Besides, I was afraid that such an enchantment would so overwhelm his own soul, his self, that the man I now thought I knew would no longer exist. I needed to confine myself to gentler means, and for those to work, I needed to understand his hatred, know all its parts, and dismantle them a little at a time. I needed to know something else, as well. She had told me that I must not create a passion that wasn’t there. Losing his hatred for me was not the same thing as loving me. I didn’t know how to make that happen. Leila had taught me that what we call “love spells” merely wake up lust and dress it in the garments of love. I felt sure that I could not create actual love out of nothing. Under the hatred, what did he feel about me? Anything? I wanted to know; I told myself that I had to know in order to proceed properly, or to admit that I could not.

One evening, a few days after he had begun his physical rehabilitation, I arranged to meet him coming out of the bathhouse. I had a large towel folded under my arm. He came out with a linen robe loosely belted around him. He was flushed, still sweating from the hot soak.

“A word with you, Sergeant,” I said briskly, approaching him. He eyed me warily, suspicious at my use of his old army title.

“What do you want, Owner Jessica?” he said, blank-faced, with pointed propriety in my title and even more pointed avoidance of the formula, How may I serve you, Mistress.

I spread the towel on a bed of moss, under a big oak.

“Sit down here. I want to talk with you.”

He stared at me, waiting incuriously.

“I want to know if you are taking good care with your healing,” I said. “Sit down here,” I commanded, my open hand extended toward the towel as if offering it.

“Can’t your trainers tell you that?” he asked. He used a tone that I was coming to recognize, delicately balanced on the edge of insolence.

“I’m asking you,” I said. “Sit.” Finally, he did.

Then I was embarrassed. After an awkward pause I went on: “Are you eating well? Are you stretching after you strengthen?”

“Owner Jessica, you have watched me yourself every day. You know the answer to these questions. . . All right, yes.”

“Are you getting good rest at night?”

“Good enough.”

“Is it? You look tired. In fact, if you had to stay awake right now, I don’t think that you could, if you heard my voice saying, SLEEP, MY FRIEND JAK”

His eyes fluttered shut, his neck wobbled, and he fell backward. I was ready; I caught him under the neck and upper back, laid him down, feeling the weight of those broad back muscles, until he lay sprawled on the towel, boneless in relaxation. I sat next to his head.

“That’s good, Jak, very good, I’m so proud of you that you can still relax for me like this, let yourself sink deeper now, deeper into sleep but hearing every word I say, deeper yet, and you find you can answer my questions quite easily, quite naturally and truthfully, while remaining in this deep, comfortable, safe place I’ve made for us. A special place, this trance is a safe place where only truth is spoken between us, but that truth causes you no pain, because you can speak that truth while staying deeply, blissfully asleep. I know you want to tell the truth, don’t you, Jak?

“Yes,” he said.

“Now Jak I want you to imagine that someone else is asking you about your feelings. Perhaps it’s your friend, a friend to whom you would never lie, asking you about your feelings for the woman you fought with in the circle. You’d tell him the truth, wouldn’t you, Jak?

“Yes.”

“So he asks you, about the woman you fought in the circle, ‘Do you hate her?’ And you think carefully, determined to tell the exact truth.”

I swallowed and then took the plunge.

“And how do you answer this question?”

He lay silent for a long time; it seemed longer than our duel. And he said, “No.”

“Even though she hurt you, had to hurt you, and did?” My voice felt raw in my throat, and my tongue seemed possessed by this hypothetical friend, dragging out an answer that I feared to hear. “Even then?” There was another long silence; then he sighed out a breath, reluctant, weary of the topic, and said,

“Duty.”

He had acknowledged that by hurting him so badly, I was only doing my duty. Understanding. Even some respect? So did that mean that he had forgiven me?

Jak

The days since my treatment moved into physical training were confusing to think about. For one thing, I kept finding gaps in the day. I could remember strange conversations with Jess, her asking me about my diet, the intensity of my training—even down to details like whether I was stretching enough at the end of the workout. But I couldn’t remember the ends of these conversations, or how we parted company. I remembered waking up on my cot, hours later. One day, I woke up with an erection.—Not exactly the first time that ever happened, but this time it bothered me for some reason. I felt . . . on guard.

Jess:

Two months later, his body was healing fast. Some discoloration lingered around his eyes, but barely any swelling. His arm and leg had improved enough so that I assigned a small team of athletes to run him through exercises designed to speed the last phase of it, rebuilding his strength and flexibility. After one of them, a male, asked why his head wasn’t shaved, I told him rather coldly not to bring the subject up again. In his mind I read confusion with an edge of resentment.

As I introduced Jak to his trainers, I reminded him that rebuilding his body was part of his duty, a notion that he accepted readily; in fact, I saw that he took a grim relish in pushing the exercises to the limit of his strength and endurance, to the point where his muscles and joints screamed their protest at him. And then, as he pushed his body further, he began to add in his own exercises, clearly based on combat moves. At this distance, he was like a magnificent statue that moved, slowly, with perfect control, through the formal exercises from that oddly beautiful fighting art they practice in Ter. I especially loved the moment of imagined contact when he went through the routine at full speed, his fist blurring like an arrow passing by and the muscles under his arm locked for an eyeblink, sharply sculpting cords of strength from the upper back through the shoulder, down the back of the upper arm, even into the forearm. On rare glimpses of his face I could see the same expression—eyes narrowed, nostrils flared, his mouth a sneer of dark joy—that it had had worn when he pulled himself to his feet and threw his last, hobbling charge at me during the duel. Was it a sneer at me, or at the fear of death? Now, as he went through the series of movements again and again, faster each time, the sweat leapt out of him and rolled down those muscles that stood out more sharply as his demands upon them mounted. Watching him, I couldn’t tell if he was trying to heal his body or break it to pieces while dreaming of breaking me to pieces.

That sight, however, gave me insight; I understood the possibility Lara had raised was true, and more: although he denied it even under a spell, hatred of me might be growing out of his anger, his shame, his hatred of himself for failing. I had made him fail. Perhaps, then, the obstacle was his having failed. What if, in his mind, his failure had never happened? However, the removal of the obstacle was not enough, in itself. I needed to know if there was any passion—or the seed of it; I told myself that would be enough, for now. I had learned from Leila and others that passion nearly always comes before love, in men. Love may or may not follow, but it hardly ever leads. I needed to test him for passion. And, of course, I wanted the test to turn out a certain way. Leila was a polymage, not just the most knowledgeable herbalist among us, not just a master at healing by the art of laying on hands; not just a sensitive almost as good at reading emotions as I was, I who lacked all her other gifts. She was one of our most powerful negotiators, still a ravishing beauty nearing the end of her thirties, and known for her ability, through a series of subtle gestures, facial expressions, and seemingly innocuous language, to so arouse and distract a man that he could be led to agree to almost anything, to believe almost anything, without a suspicion of what was happening to him. By all those and other means, she was both a mighty healer and a mighty enchantress.

I went to her villa, one of the most luxurious in the town, since she received a commission for every profitable bargain that she struck on behalf of the Marian merchant nobility. For years now, she had been such a merchant queen herself, putting her profits into ventures to make more profits. As a former student of hers, I would have been allowed the run of the grounds while I waited her leisure to see me. As the champion of this war, I was now famous enough so that she would see me without an appointment or intermediary.

The room in which she received me was palatial, the floor lined with the fine marble from the southern islands, covered here and there, and especially in front of the fireplace, with the pelts of silk seals, the softest fur in the world, and the most expensive. She could afford to use them as rugs, the biggest of them perfectly placed in the comfort zone before the fire. I thought about what had probably taken place on that rug; Leila’s appetites were almost as well-rumored as her abilities.

As I was announced, she rose with the grace of a dancer and a smile of welcome that could have made me fall in love with her.

“Champion Jessica,” she murmured, in a low-pitched voice that stroked the ear like the touch of her priceless rugs, “You have made me proud to have instructed you. We are all in your debt.”

“Lady, you are too gracious. What you taught me of herbs and potions becomes more precious with every year that I live. And I came here to place myself further in your debt, if you can give me a little time.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That would be a privilege for me, not to mention . . . a pleasure. Do me the grace of asking for something,” she said, and her slim, lovely right hand floated over her heart and happened to ripple its long fingers over her left breast. I felt a slight moistening between my thighs—and I am not much attracted to women. Lady Leila has had such effects on many women and even more men. There could be no doubt that I had come to the right source.

“I want to . . . influence a man,” I said.

She smiled.