The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jess:

I could already hear the hoofbeats coming up the slope, as Jak sighed and his head sagged, chin against his chest.

“Thank you, my love, my dear love, for trusting me,” I said to him. I woke him up then, with instructions to follow my lead in anything I said to the search party. Then I turned to Mira and her sister. “You swore to be my friend for life, when we became women” I reminded Mira. “I know you’ll be true to that promise, Mira. Whatever I tell the Council about . . . what has happened, I need you to back me up. And bind your little sister, too, by your family vow.”

They would be through the tree line in minutes. “Jak,” I said clearly. “Kneel down beside my litter. Bow your head over my feet and cry. Your heart is broken, Jak. You are devastated that I, your mistress, was hurt in an accident that was partly your fault. –Not because you cut me; you never cut me. My sword came out of its scabbard by accident, when . . . when I was climbing the cliff. It was your fault because you ran away, and broke the bond of the duel. Your grief and shame are too hard to bear. You must cry, or you will break apart.”

It was a cruel necessity to use this suggestion, because it exploited guilt that I knew he really felt, made that guilt stronger, agonizing. The tears broke out of him jaggedly, at first, as they do in a man who is not accustomed to them, a series of harsh, coughing sobs. By the time the riders reached us, he was wailing like a child whose mother has died. My own eyes filled and I swore silently that I would undo these suggestions as soon as I could. The Captain of the Bodyguard arrived first, having the best horse and having ridden him the hardest. She looked down impassively at Jak as he wept all over my feet. I thought I read her disapproval. She would have been perfectly willing to kill him, but to see a warrior reduced to this blubbering despondency angered and shamed her.

“Bring the shackles,” she said to her sergeant. “Tie him onto a horse.”

Then Leila drew up on her horse, whose price could have bought a fine house.

“We should make the slave walk back,” said one of the newer recruits, watching Leila, as if she expected these words to please her.

“Brilliant,” said Mira tartly. “Let’s allow our champion to bleed out so that we can make a statement about a slave. For everything holy, bring the wagon up and get her back to a surgeon. A vessel in her leg is cut. We can’t keep the tourniquet on much longer, and who knows if his stitches will hold.”

“His stitches?” said Leila, dismounting and holding out a hand wordlessly for her healer’s bag. “He sewed her up to stop the bleeding?

Mira hesitated only a little, stealing a glance at me.

“Yes, Mother,” she said.

“And who gave her this wound?” Leila demanded, removing the bandage carefully. This time Mira paused a long time. The one who broke the silence was not Mira.

“It was my fault!” Jak cried out. “It was all my fault. I broke the bond of the duel. I ran, and she got hurt following me! I deserve to die!

“By whose hand was she hurt?” Leila pressed, her tone pointedly empty of an emotion.

“My own,” I said. “We had him hemmed in, with a sheer cliff in front of him. He panicked and started to climb it to get away. I climbed after him, with my sword still buckled on. I slipped off a narrow ledge, the sword must have snagged on the rock and come out of the scabbard as I fell. I guess it fell point-down and stuck into my leg. I don’t remember anything between my foothold giving way and waking up on the ground, bleeding.”

“Exceptionally bad luck,” Lara said, with a telling silence before and after. “You, slave,” she said, breaking eye contact with me and taking on an authoritative tone that seemed more political, more aimed at other senior members or the party, than to Jak. “When she fell, why didn’t you just keep going?”

He stopped crying and raised his face to hers, and I had the queer sensation of hearing two Jaks speaking in unison: the entranced slave, and the free fugitive. “I did. But then I couldn’t let her die, so I came back.” he said.

“Couldn’t let her die?” said Leila. “How did you know she would die, if you were up the cliff and she had an “accident” way down below you?”

After a silence just long enough to be agonizing, I said, “I screamed. He looked down at me; he must have seen the blood.”

Leila just looked at me, while the other officers looked away, as if embarrassed.

Mira broke the silence and proved that she was my friend. “With submission, Mother,” she said, “I fear for our Champion Jess if we delay getting her to a healer.”

Lara nodded. “Put the Champion in the wagon, bind the slave on a horse, and ride for the Healing Temple,” she ordered. “The slave’s case will be considered when his owner is well enough to attend the hearing.”

Leila spoke up, obviously wanting her remarks to be heard by more of the party than just Lara.

“The slave should be kept in detention until we are satisfied that he is under control. His owner is in no condition to make that determination now.”

Lara paused, then nodded. “Agreed. Take the slave to the Keep. Maintain close guard all the way. We don’t know for certain what he is now, but we know for certain that he was a very dangerous man.”

It took a week for my leg to heal enough so that I was ready for the hearing, and another week of bureaucratic dawdling before it was scheduled. Throughout that time, I was not allowed to talk with Jak, only to see him, when I insisted that I must know if my property’s value was being eroded by neglect at the Keep.

Jak:

Their prison was not particularly brutal, on the face of it. I had seen worse. In fact, during training for Resisting Capture I had lived under much worse conditions. For a couple of days they paid no particular attention to me. I got the same prison slops that everyone else got, my cell was solitary but had a cot with a blanket, a skin bag of clean water with a wooden dipper in it, and a clay pot for waste. While conditions are good, take advantage of them to build your physical and emotional strength. Don’t think of them as normal; they are luxury.

On the third day, someone had apparently made up her mind. They started in on me, but it still wasn’t really bad. A team of two or three would drag me out of the cell at unpredictable times, taking me to a cold, dark room for long interrogations, the questions punctuated with slaps in the face or over the ears, meant more to humiliate than to hurt, I suspected, then sleep deprivation, the cold keeping me shivering but not severe enough to send me into the sleep that precedes freezing to death. They gave me just enough water to keep me alive, but never enough to quench my thirst, which became much more of a torment than the beatings, even more than the denial of sleep. Sometime during the fourth day, I think, they brought me to a different room. The warmth in the dim light seemed incredibly luxurious, and I had to fight not to relax into it. I was losing that fight. I complained of the heat and they brought me a full water skin; it must have held a quart. It wasn’t great water—a little salty and a little bitter. They had kept me this thirsty with a purpose beyond tormenting me; they wanted me to gulp down that water despite the telltale bitterness. Some time later they told me I had a visitor, but by then I was feeling too woozy to be curious. I had expected either Jess or her mentor, the white-haired one, but it was their head negotiator, dressed as if she were going to one of their extravagant parties; her hair was done up to bare her white throat, and around it was the collar of a full-length coat of silk-seal, the style designed to make a man think about the softness of its touch on that flawless skin. She might have been thirty, or forty; in any case, those enormous blue eyes and fine bones could keep her beauty formidable for another ten years. She looked at me, gave me a sad smile.

“I’m Mistress Leila. You look exhausted, Sergeant,” she said. She said ‘sergeant,’ not ‘slave.’ That was nice, I thought. As soon as she mentioned my being tired, I realized that I was. I yawned.

“I won’t keep you long,” she promised in a slightly breathy, melodious voice, low in pitch for a woman; “Your owner wants you home tomorrow, and you’ll need a good night’s sleep. I hope they haven’t hurt you here; I gave orders forbidding it.” She sounded really concerned; as her fingertips reached out to probe my scalp as if searching for signs of a beating, the fur of the sleeve glided softly over my ears. It felt nice. I was feeling nice, too. In fact, about half my mind seemed to be sitting off to the side, like a spectator, waiting to see what the other half was going to say to Mistress Leila. She had very pretty eyes.

“Don’t worry, Jak, I can see how sleepy you are. That’s why I had them bring in this comfortable chair, so that you can relax. So relaxed now. It’s nice and warm here, and you can relax further into that warmth, relax deeper and deeper. You’re in in a safe, soft place where we can relax and tell the truth,” she crooned. “And you’re so sleepy that it’s too difficult, too tiring, to say anything but the truth. The truth is easy. The truth is just what happened, and how you feel about it. The truth about Jessica, for instance. You know you can trust me; I’m Jessica’s friend. In fact, I’m the one who taught her how to make you feel so good. So aroused, and then so relaxed. You can tell me.”

She was stroking the sides of my face with those sleeves rhythmically, and her, low, silky voice had the same rhythm.

“Why didn’t you continue your escape, Jak?”

“I thought she would die,” I said, or somebody did.

“Why would you care? You struck her in public and stole her sword, didn’t you? That sounds like an angry act. Or were you not angry?” she asked. “What do you feel about your owner?” she pressed me.

“I love her.”

“You say you love her, but you punched her in the face and later you nearly cut her leg off?” Mistress Leila’s voice was not so smooth now, or rather, it was smooth as a polished blacksnake whip is smooth before it whistles through the air and strikes flesh.

“I am devastated that my owner was hurt in an accident that was partly my fault. I ran away and broke the bond of the duel. My grief and shame are too much to bear,” someone said with my mouth. There was a silence. Then she said, “Remember that you can only tell the truth here,” again with an edge behind the smooth tone. “What is the truth?”

“I love her.”

“So Jessica was hurt by accident?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you say that your grief and shame are too much to bear?”

“Yes,” I said. “Too much to bear.” And I started to cry again.

“Do you want to prove to Jessica how bad you feel, how sorry you are?”

“Yes!” I sobbed.

In a voice that sounded like that of a different person, she said to the jailer, “Release the straps.”

“My lady—“

“Do it.”

She addressed me again.

“Jak, I’m going to give you a knife. That shows that I trust you to do the right thing. If you are sorry for injuring your Owner, cut off the top of your right ear.”

From somewhere, a small dagger appeared in my hand.

“I told you that you would be safe here, Jak,” she said, reverting to that soothing, kindly tone. “And you will be. Giving up a piece of your ear is a small thing, but you know it’s the right thing to do, don’t you? Cutting off a piece of the ear is what we used to do to slaves who did bad things. You know you did a bad thing, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I mumbled.

“Yes. Because you hurt your Owner, whom you claim to love. So the pain of this gesture will be a small price to pay, to show her how sorry you are. Are you truly sorry, slave?

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!”

“She can’t hear you, slave. She can’t be here because she has not yet recovered from the hurts you caused. You can’t tell her how sorry you are. But you can show her. I will let you keep the piece of the ear you cut off, so that you can show it to her when you return to your duties.”

“Thank you!” I cried. I didn’t stop crying until I began to cut. During the cutting, I never made a sound.