The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jak:

As she fell backward, I snatched her sword out of its scabbard and bolted into the crowd. I had just enough presence of mind to slip the sword under my betrothal tunic and to stop running after I was deep enough into the crowd to be out of sight. Once I walked normally, people looked right past me toward the noise of disturbance I had left behind. It helped that I was wearing the white tunic of a betrothed man, not the unbleached wool of a slave. I changed direction several times. Focus on the mission, I could hear my instructors telling us as they threw one painful obstacle after another into our path. My mission was to get out of Mar territory as fast as I could. After that, I didn’t care. They would expect me to clear out by the shortest route possible, along the river, straight up the valley floor to the thinly grassed, hillside pastures that made up our border with them. With one bad knee, I didn’t think I could make good enough time to stay ahead of a determined pursuit. They might use dogs. As I got close to the back of the crowd, I saw a small tradesman moving from the front of his stall to the back. He dealt in leather and was wearing some of his gear. I looked around quickly, saw that the uproar behind me had everyone else’s attention; why not his? He was shrewd; he was taking his little stock of coins away from the place where he served his customers, not wanting to be robbed while no one was looking. I was his robber, as it turned out, but instead of his money, I took his clothes. I used my own tunic to wrap up the sword, a harmless-looking bundle. When I had cleared the market area, I thought of a better use for the tunic. I walked up behind a wagon that was leaving the area to go up the river road. The back of the wagon had a few feet of rope lying in it. To it I tied the white garment I had worn all day, paying out enough rope to let it drag in the dust. The dogs might pick up that scent and follow it a long way before their handlers saw the trick. In the tradesman’s sleeveless leather jerkin and pants, with a pair of his sandals on my feet, I branched off, away from the road to Ter, back toward the Mar coast, toward the sea caves. I knew the dogs would lose my scent there, if they had ever picked it up. The wind moves the sand around; the shorebreak washes the scent away. I knew how to live off mussels and crabs, to trap small fish in the tide pools. I could wait her out.

Jess:

The bodyguard group all thought he was attempting an assassination, perhaps of our negotiator, perhaps of his own as well. We were well aware of the popular resentment of our influence over their negotiators. After they got the negotiators into a fortified building for safety, tracking dogs were called for. The dogs followed his scent into the crowd but then lost it.

“He’s trying to get out,” Leila said to me. “His only decent chance is to get into their territory before we can catch up.”

“He knows we know that,” I said.

“You may be overthinking this,” she said to me. “He’s just a man. A Teran man at that. My experience is that they aren’t that devious.”

I picked up her cue. “Perhaps you’re right,” I said. “We’ll send two-thirds of the bodyguard up the River Road; maybe they can pick up his trail. I’ll just take Mira, her sister, and a dog.”

Leila shrugged, then gave me a strange look—eyes narrowed, but mouth curving in a close-lipped smile. Suddenly I began to doubt that she wanted him to be caught

It took me four days to find him. The larger group of the bodyguard I sent out sent back a courier excitedly to report that his scent had been picked up. They believed his deception and followed a false trail up the river.

I thought that he would be more likely to wait us out, but he would have to go where he would not be seen, and he would have to have water and food for that time. So he would either go to the forest or to the sea. We don’t have a great deal of forested land that is not supervised by gamekeepers and timber foresters; he would find it too easy to be hemmed in there. Our shoreline is long. If he could steal a boat, he would be gone. Even a rowboat would do, for someone with his strength. We could not dedicate enough ships to patrol the entire coast, day and night, so we had to identify the most likely stretches of shore and concentrate there. On the morning of the fourth day, one of the patrol boats reported seeing a light briefly on the cliffs near the Bayan Sea Caves. The caves were deep, and some had been dug by winter seas so heavy that no waves of any less violence could reach them. It sounded worth a visit. I took the one dog with me, along with Mira and her sister, whom I could trust. I didn’t know what I would do if I found him, but the mere fact that I didn’t know would have been considered treasonous by some.

The dog was indifferent as we walked the beach; it could not pick up his scent—another factor that made this a likely place. The soldiers of his unit were known brigands, trained to evade capture in all sorts of environments, to live off the land, whether inhabited or not, and to kill to avoid detection. We began to lead the dog into the mouth of one cave after another, and on the third one, the dog wagged the whole rear half of its body and barked. Jak had evaded us for most of the day, but he could not shake the dog off his trail, and finally we had cornered him; this cave had no back door.

He looked haggard and weary, but not beaten; he still had my sword. I had borrowed a replacement, and Mira had her own. Her sister was still serving her apprenticeship, carrying the knapsack. For arms she had only a dagger, but it was balanced for throwing, and she had already put in the requisite million throws to make throwing it a reasonable tactic instead of self-disarmament.

“What would you have done if you had gotten away?” I asked him.

“From what we hear, your welcome in Ter would not be a warm one,” Mira said.

“Shut up, Mira,” I told her. I saw the surprise in her face. Well, she could take it any way she chose. So could he. “I can’t let you go, Jak” I said.

“You’ll have to kill me to stop me,” he answered, “and I’ll kill as many of you as I have to, to get away.”

“You’d betray your oath?” I asked. “When you accepted the duel, you swore to accept the consequences of losing.”

“You’re really going to lecture me about betrayal?”

“Betrayal? You were in pain. I tried to take away the cause of it in your memory. I was healing you. That was my ‘betrayal’.”

“Yes! If it was pain, it was my pain, and it was real. Pain is the great schoolmaster; I’ve known that all my life. I lost the duel; I had nothing left but to learn—from that pain. . . You had no right—”

“—I’ll offer you another duel, Jak,” I broke in.

“If it looks too good to be true, it is,” he grinned sourly. “You have me outnumbered three to one. Why should I believe you’d throw that advantage away?”

“You said you’d kill to get away. I know how well you fight empty-handed, and I imagine you’re at least that good with the sword. You’ll probably kill one of us. I don’t want that to be one of my friends. So. A fair fight, just the two of us. What do you say?”

“Yes, all I have to do is find a way to break your magic, and it’s a fair fight,” he said dryly.

“No magic, and no interference by either of them,” I said.

One corner of his mouth pulled up to show his disbelief. “If I were going to enchant you, Jak, I could have done it the moment you were within hearing.”

That was not entirely true, since Jak’s burning humiliation and his anger at me would have blocked the spell until I could talk him down to a certain level of calmness, but he didn’t need to know that.

“No magic, I swear it,” I said, and then I said to the sisters, “You are bound by my oath. If he gets by me, even if he leaves me dead, you will not pursue him. You will not tell anyone else where we found him. You will seek no vengeance against him, either then or later. Swear it!”

They did.

“That would sound good, except now I know that you can read me. That’s how you won the first time. That’s your advantage.”

“Yes, and you’re stronger than I am, just as quick, and you have a a longer reach. That’s three advantages for you. And a fourth: now you know I can read you. Aren’t those odds good enough? Here.” I took off my helmet, breastplate, and greaves, throwing each piece at his feet, one token of challenge after another.

He stared at me, not saying anything, but he flushed with anger at the suggestion of cowardice. He knew I had goaded him with it deliberately, but he hung onto his caution. It seemed too obvious that he had no better choice than what I was offering, so he was examining the too-obvious for hidden assumptions.

“And you hate me,” I reminded him—not that it was necessary. “You feel humiliated, and you think l betrayed you. You feel . . . soiled by me. You want to get away and you want revenge. Isn’t that a good enough motive? All that hatred. It could be an advantage.”

“Or a weakness,” he said.

“Whichever it is, your vengeance ends with me,” I said. “You won’t harm either of them, unless they attack you. And they won’t.”

“Why should I believe in anything that comes out of your mouth? When have you done anything other than manipulate and lie to me?”

“When I said I would trust you with my life,” I said. “Now I’m trusting you with the lives of my friends.”

He kept his face still, but I could see the struggle that those words set up in his mind.

“I will kill you all before I’ll let you take me back,” he said. “Trust that.” When I said nothing in reply, all he said was, “I accept your terms.”