Too Intelligent for a Slave Girl

Synopsis

Book 1: TOO INTELLIGENT FOR A SLAVE GIRL follows Valeria, a former financier who discovers that submission feels more authentic than any freedom she knew on Earth. Through her owner's tests and a love that demands total surrender, she must decide whether the woman she has become is who she was always meant to be. This first act is a fairly traditional BDSM Romance story. Later books branch out to more humorous and esoteric variations on the same theme. (Approx. 22,000 words)

Book 2 (to be published at a later date): NATURAL SLAVE: FIVE STARS, WOULD RECOMMEND shifts to Akina, a former physician whose clinical detachment and humor becomes her greatest asset and her worst blind spot.

Books 3 to 6 (Nysa; Book of Shadows; Cecilia; Arannis). Short story arcs. Each section is self-contained, but all derive some complexity if earlier parts are read first.

Chapter 1: Disposable

Everyone know how stories like this are supposed to begin, and how they invariably end.

A woman falls for a man and thinks she can change him. Instead, he enslaves her. The cruel man repents. The slave escapes but then remembers who she truly is; and they find each other again.

My story is simply a variation on this age-old tale.

Two years ago.

A city somewhere in the United States; the most powerful empire on the planet Ki.

Two years ago, and I was still a man.

On a morning like any other, I lay still for a moment in bed before I did anything else.

I had known Elaine for six weeks and that warranted a review.

Intelligence: mediocre. We had a shared passion for books, that had been the starting point. She thought that made her interesting, but it only exposed her feeble intellect.

Body: adequate, not exceptional. Nice tits and ass and a body which she maintained with care. I had no complaints about it.

Usefulness: Excellent as far as the acquisition of information about her company's pending merger.

Overall return on investment: positive, provided I closed the position soon.

The espresso machine started up in the kitchen. She hadn't been invited to stay the night. She certainly hadn't been invited to make coffee. I walked to the kitchen.

She was standing at the counter in yesterday's blouse. Her perfume had gotten into the air, mixing unpleasantly with the smell of the espresso. I watched her for a moment. I considered whether I should say something about a morning-after pill. I had no real information about how reliably she managed her own contraception; but it would have required a conversation, and possibly an argument. I let it go.

"I've been meaning to say something," I said. "This isn't going to work. For either of us. I should have brought it up sooner."

She turned around and leveled a withering look at me. She wasn't in shock; I could see that. There was a flicker of disdain in her expression. She certainly didn't cry. She simply walked past me, put on her coat, and let herself out.

Three sentences. That was all it had taken. Some men would have dragged it out over weeks when a single clear conversation would have finished it in thirty seconds.

I had erased her from my mind by the time I had finished my coffee.

I sat at the terminal in the second bedroom. The morning's positions were performing adequately. I sat back and regarded the framed print of Blake's Nebuchadnezzar above the set-up: the king on all fours, his eyes wild. Bought from Christie's about ten years back. I liked it well enough. I liked the return on it more.

By noon I was restless. I closed two positions I probably should have held and told myself it was profit-taking.

I showered and went down to pick up something for dinner at the small posh supermarket two blocks over. I bought a piece of salmon and some asparagus. On the walk back I took a side street I must have walked a dozen times before, and there, wedged between a shuttered tailor's and a nail salon was a shop I was certain hadn't been there before. It had a narrow frontage and a hand-lettered sign above it which read only ANTIQUES. No name, no hours. The window itself was crowded with objects that lacked any coherent theme: a yellowed map of a fantasy world; a weathered weiqi set made of timber with a nice grain; a Gladius and a Spatha of dubious authenticity; and bolts of silk and wool.

I went in, telling myself it would take five minutes.

The interior was dim, the shelves running floor to ceiling, packed with maps and a selection of leather-bound books. It seemed more antiquarian bookshop than anything dealing with antiques.

"Can I help you find something?"

The voice came from a shadowy figure behind a glass display case.

"Just looking," I said.

"Most people just look," the dealer said. "It's a shop that rewards patience more than intention."

I kept moving along the shelves for another few minutes until I saw it. It was flat, roughly the size of a thin hardback book, its surface some material I mistook for parchment at first. It was shelved facing outward and looked distinctly out of place amidst the detritus.

"What is it?" I said, picking it up and placing it on the closest glass counter.

"A book of fate. A book of fortune," the dealer said, head bowed. "Very old. Very particular about who it likes."

"It doesn't open."

"Not for everyone."

"What does it do, exactly?"

"It shows you things," the dealer said. "People find it very instructive."

I ran a thumb along the edge, looking for a seam, anything that indicated an opening mechanism. I should have put it down. I was not a man who bought things on impulse. The number the dealer gave me was perfectly fair, and I paid it without negotiating.

"Enjoy your fortune," the dealer said.

I carried it out under one arm, my groceries in the other hand.

That night, I examined it again.

I ran my thumb along all four edges again looking for the give of a hidden catch. There was nothing. The parchment-like front sheet had been persistently warm. It was warmer now.

My vision went white at the edges, and when it resolved, I was standing in my own kitchen, and I was Elaine. I was wearing a blouse that had been slept in, and I heard my own voice, from the doorway, delivering the three sentences I had been so proud of. I felt the exact moment she made the decision to leave. The cold hardness. Not fury but disdain.

Even inside her, I felt with even greater certainty that if I were a woman, I would want a man exactly like myself. Clear. Efficient. Not cruel, but honest. I thought that she should be grateful.

And then the white came in at the edges.

Chapter 2: The Obsequium

I woke up to the sensation of cold metal against my spine, and the taste of dirt and rust in my mouth.

My wrists were bound in front of me and my ankles were locked in metal cuffs fixed by a short chain to a ring bolted into the wall. Across my mouth, a strip of thick fabric had been pulled tight.

I opened my eyes.

I counted nineteen other men, arranged around the curved metal wall of the chamber, each bound and gagged. Only a few had their eyes open, darting from face to face, finding nothing. No shared history; strangers. No one spoke; no one could have spoken but even the eye contact stayed minimal, the way strangers avoid each other's gaze in an elevator. There was no comfort being offered or requested.

I registered that I was the smallest person in that hold by a significant margin. The others were big men and I could imagine, just looking at them, an entire roster of former lives: men who worked docks; construction workers; men paid to hit other men for a living; criminals, perhaps.

The vessel shuddered, and underneath that a sensation I associated distantly with elevators. We were falling, descending. It went on for what felt like minutes, long enough that I had time to feel the encroaching fear. Human traffickers I thought. A ransom would be demanded at some point.

When the hatch opened, the light that came through it was all wrong: too blue, too clean. And with the light came an unaccustomed weight; a gravity heavier than the one I had experienced for all of my thirty-four years. Figures moved in from either side of the ramp, dressed in leather armor. They didn't speak to us. They simply began working down the line, one man at a time, unlocking ankles from the wall ring and refastening them to a shorter chain. The courtyard beyond was paved in white stone and across it, rising in tiers of columns and shaded arcades, stood the building which would be our home for the next six months.

She was waiting for us when the attendants brought us in: as tall as most of the men in our line, and wearing a tie, a plain white shirt, and black tailored pants. The room itself was white, floor to ceiling, without a single feature to rest the eye on. She moved along the chain consulting a glass pad, matching faces to whatever record she held. She looked at us the way an inspector looks at a shipment: assessing condition and moving on. When she reached the head of the line and turned to address us, she spoke in English, which was only lightly accented.

"You have been selected," she said. "Because, An, this planet, your new home, has use for you. You will be administered a serum called Muliebris. The serum unlocks your latent female self which the selection device identified as dormant but constitutive."

Somewhere down the line, a sound came up through a gag: a protest, guttural and furious. I turned my head toward it as far as the chain allowed. A felon of some sort. His skull looked almost too small for the rest of him, shaved bare, and his arms above the wrist restraints were covered with tattoos.

The Mistress looked at him for a moment and made a short notation in her ledger.

Latent female self. Constitutive.

The word suggested something foundational. I did not know whether she meant that every man in this room carried something like this inside him, or only some of us.

They split us into groups of five, the attendants harvesting from the larger group based on the Mistress' instructions; and I found myself pulled loose from the larger line with four strangers, herded down a side corridor toward a cell.

It was large and clean for what was our prison, a toilet and shower alcove built into one corner with no door and no wall between it and the rest of the room.

Two attendants came in behind us carrying short, curved blades, and they went down our line cutting the clothes from our bodies; the fabric falling away in strips at our feet until each of us stood naked under the light.

I know now with the knowledge acquired during the six months we would spend together exactly who they had been before that room.

The one nearest me was Latino and built like a heavyweight fighter. He had made more money in the ring than most men make in a decade. Beside him stood a Japanese man, built like a seasoned swimmer. He had competed near the top of his sport for years before returning to a life as a physician. He was attractive and had enjoyed a short career as a modestly successful actor. The third man had been a soldier, some form of black ops though he was vague on the matter. Even now he seemed to be making threat assessments he had no power to act on. And then there was the fourth, a full head taller than the rest, pure mass and raw masculinity. He had been a police officer, African American, and a patrol veteran.

I didn't know it then, but these four men would become the closest thing to friends I had ever allowed myself to have.

What came next arrived within a quarter of an hour.

Five attendants filed into the cell carrying small devices roughly the size and shape of small pistols. They positioned themselves one to a man, standing close enough that I could smell them. The attendant in front of me lifted the device to the side of my neck. Someone said something and on the third word, five small stings landed at once. Then the attendants stepped back.

Nothing happened. We stood there bound and naked for what seemed like ten minutes, though at the time it felt considerably longer. I remember thinking that whatever this was, it clearly hadn't worked; that we had been threatened with something theatrical and were now standing here, unchanged.

Then all five of us dropped.

My knees buckled first, then the boxer's beside me, then the other three. It was at that exact moment that the attendants moved in and unfastened the gags, removed our restraints, and withdrew from the room.

I lay on my side on the cold tiles. My four cellmates were still upright on their knees; swaying but holding firm where I had landed flat on my side. I saw it in their faces when I glanced up: pity, contempt.

Then the heat arrived, and the pity in their faces was extinguished all at once.

It began in my chest, a warm pressure spreading outward down my neck into my chest and arms. I noticed the changes in my hands first, the fingers becoming slender, the flesh smoother and more succulent. I felt my bones shifting, altering the angle of my hips and the width of my shoulders. The mass of my body seemed to dissipate and redistribute, filling my hips and buttocks in ways that seemed strange and obscene. For a moment, as the heat peaked, I hallucinated and saw a room I did not recognize: a bed, a man's hand in my hair. Then it dissolved into the cell's white light.

Around me, the same thing was happening to the other four.

The enormous man who had been a police officer was shrinking; becoming something smaller, curved; his dark skin lightening, his cropped hair lengthening until what remained was a voluptuous woman with the appearance of a native of Northern Europe. The boxer was now a brown-skinned woman with a full figure and dark flowing hair. The soldier, who had been white to begin with, resolved into another blonde, her hair curled golden and lustrous as one of Slavic descent. And the swimmer became a small, delicately built Japanese woman.

Whoever ran this process cared nothing at all for where any of us had started. It didn't matter that an African American man had become a blonde white woman. It was simply business; a warehouse filling an order for certain body types. If a brothel had asked for five black women, we would have been transformed into the same without a second thought. Our prior lives and underlying ethnicities were simply irrelevant to them.

We were all paralyzed but still glancing furtively at each other; most distinctly, our receding male genitalia which contracted into something vestigial, forming perfect slightly protuberant slits. I stared at our formerly large friend, and he stared back, daring me to show even a flicker of amusement. He was the smallest of us now, his large member and scrotum now reduced to the most delightful cunt imaginable.

By the time my own transformation finished, I was curled on my side on the tile with my knees drawn up to my chest. My body was small with preternaturally flawless pale skin. Jet black hair spilled loose and heavy around my narrow shoulders, and my breasts and hips were full in a way the rest of my frame was not. For all intents and purposes, I looked almost like the Japanese girl's white sister.

I hadn't had time to register anything more than that before the door opened again, and an enormous man came in carrying a sturdy steel rack with attached harnesses under one arm.

He looked over the five of us and told us where each of us would be marked: the two who had become blondes on the left hip in the fashion of the Northern barbarians; the brown-skinned girl and the Japanese one on the buttocks, he would decide which cheek in a few moments; and myself, he said, looking directly at me, on the left pelvis.

"I am Master Tyenn," he said in accented English. "You will call me Master."

He took the former police officer first. All the mass that had made her so imposing was now extinct. When he lifted her from the floor and secured her to the rack, she made a high pitched sound, almost a whimper. The fight had gone out of her, completely. It seemed almost too easy.

"You are Caia," he told her, buckling the last strap over her hips. "Say it."

"Caia."

Her voice broke even as she spoke, and then the iron came down on her hip and she screamed.

I watched the entire process, still curled on the tiles, and felt pure animal dread, watching what was coming for me. Caia's beautiful face was wracked with agony, and tears streamed down without let. She sobbed loudly and miserably even as our Master applied salve to her wound. She had been a large, formidable man mere minutes ago. Surely that part of her ego was still intact. I couldn't understand why she had broken so quickly and utterly.

The Japanese swimmer was next, renamed Akina as the iron touched her. She screamed furiously, her whole small body arching against the restraints before going slack.

Then it was my turn.

He lifted me onto the rack, his hands closing around my new, unfamiliar torso with a vigor that told me exactly how little my resistance would matter. He strapped a wide band across my pelvis, cinched tight enough that I couldn't have shifted an inch if my life had depended on it.

He looked down at me and said, "You are Skye. Say it."

"Skye," I said, and the voice that came out was a stranger's.

The iron touched my pelvis and I screamed. I knew in that instance why Caia had broken. The shock, the pain, the humiliation-those were simply the things at the surface. Deep down, the "constitutive" part of my soul had been laid bare and was now free to envelop me.

My Master had branded me and claimed me. I was his. I would let my emotions flow to assuage his anger. If I made myself small. If I made him know I was simply a weak female…he would have mercy.

Each of our markings were different. Mine was a single, highly detailed, elongated phoenix feather curving along the iliac crest. The central shaft of the feather followed the bone, while the barbs swept backward in graceful, sweeping arcs. It was a striking, asymmetrical piece.

A cool salve was pressed against the mark almost immediately, the pain receding into something manageable, aching rather than burning. All five of us were weeping openly. But it was not the pain alone which made us cry; something in the marking had reached down into whatever the serum had rearranged and touched something none of us had access to before.

"Master," I whimpered. "Master." Somehow the words made me feel better.

He ran his large hand through my hair. "Good," he said.

Our Master chained us next, wrists locked above our heads to an overhead bar, our bodies left to dangle and find their own footing; and we were told we would each receive ten lashes and would count them aloud. The first landed on my back before I managed to brace for it; and I counted.

Caia was last, and by the seventh lash I heard her voice break entirely, and she said, through tears, "Mercy, Master. Please, mercy." Her voice, even through the cracks, was honeyed femininity itself. She wasn't only begging out of pure misery; she seemed to be begging him to use her in other ways. I looked away half disgusted and half wondering why I hadn't done the same myself. He gave her an eighth lash anyway, then set his whip down.

"Because you have begged so well," he said. "I will show you mercy." Then he turned to address the rest of us where we still hung. "Watch and learn from Caia."

After that came the piercings.

A slave girl was brought in to do the work; two studs in each ear, a nose ring, and a note that some of us, in time, might receive rings through our labia as well. And then the collars, each of us made to say our new names aloud as the collars closed around our throats. Mine was inscribed with the numbers 7347-4. Akina's, beside me, read 7347-5.

They looked pretty. I wished I did too.

Mistress Kore ran the facility though she wasn't the one who provided instruction most days.

That work belonged to Master Tyenn. He ran us through morning inspection and position training until they became automatisms: kneeling, presenting; all of it became no more effortful than standing.

Then language lessons in the common tongue of An, Talosian, were conducted by a smiling slave girl of uncertain age called, Yuki. Purely conversational for the first two months. My natural facility for languages served me well here, and I found it simple to memorize the elementary cue cards she presented to us at the start of our second month, practicing my writing on scraps of paper I begged from her.

We groomed ourselves and each other in the evenings, learned to remove hair from legs and arms and elsewhere. In the days that followed, I would slowly learn to become expert at the various looks required of a slave girl; the cosmetics were cheap but effective. Then there was the smoothing, trimming, and filing of my sisters' feet and toenails. I noticed, somewhere around the sixth week, that these rituals had become something I looked forward to rather than endured.

The five of us were meant to function as a unit, and we did. For the most part. If one of us failed an inspection, all five of us paid for it, and that alone should have bound us together. Instead, a rivalry crept in almost immediately, all of us reaching for the same smattering of approval, the way I imagined a company of dancers would compete for a single principal role.

Caia and Akina pulled ahead early, earning consistent praise from Master Tyenn. And that praise produced a burning feeling in my chest that had nothing noble in it at all; because I wanted what they had.

It was in the first week, that Master Tyenn came for me in the early evening and took what none of us had been permitted to keep; on the understanding, spoken plainly, that girls bound for a tavern floor had no use for virginity and every use for the training that removed it.

He laid me back and positioned himself over me, his weight settling down along the length of my new body. There was no foreplay. Masters had no duty to stimulate their livestock. In truth, there simply was no need. The mere sight of him, his overwhelming maleness, made my nipples and clitoris painfully hard. I juiced within seconds and was ready and hungry for him.

He entered me slowly, his face close enough to mine that I couldn't look anywhere else, his eyes holding mine the entire time with an attention that felt like my entire world. The stretch burned and that thin tissue separating maiden from whore broke. When I gasped, more in pleasure than in pain, he paused, nodded his approval at my response, then took me to the hilt. There was nothing in my previous life which compared with that small indication of approval. The filling of me, the fullness I felt, my flesh enveloping him was the reason why my new status seemed so right. I felt something in me give way, some last resistance dissolving, and by the time my body found its release, shuddering under him, I heard myself say without prompting:

"I am your slave, Master. I am your slave girl."

Those were the first words of Talosian that the Master had taught us: what we were, how to describe ourselves to all who asked.

"I am a slave girl."

I would always be a slave girl.

I said it again once the shaking had settled, and again after that; and each time I said it, the words seemed more and more like the plainest, truest sentence I had ever spoken.

After that first week, all five of us treated Master Tyenn with something closer to reverence than we ever had before, doubling our efforts in the training yard the way a congregation redoubles its devotion after a particularly moving service. I understood, without being able to fully explain it even to myself, that whatever the serum had rearranged in my body was continuing its work quietly beneath the surface, uncovering responses to touch and to approval.

The Mistress appeared only occasionally; and when she did, her corrections came in the same level voice regardless of what she was correcting.

"Skye, that position is incorrect," she told me once, without the slighted impatience. "Adjust. You will find the correct position easier to hold than the incorrect one."

She was right, every time.

At thirty days, and every two weeks after that, they brought us before a panel of three assessors to demonstrate what Master Tyenn called our receptivity. To our Masters it was no more than a scheduled review of metrics rather than five naked women performing increasingly intimate acts.

We trained on male slaves first, learning what pleased them and how men differed in their needs and wants. We learned how to use our tongues; how to take their balls into our mouths; how to take the length of a man into our throats while keeping our gag reflexes quiet; how to swallow what he gave without hesitation or the flicker of distaste. We practiced positions meant for our own pleasure and positions meant entirely for someone else's, learning to hold and release the muscles inside us with the same precise control a singer learns over breath.

Caia was the standout from the first week and only pulled further ahead as the weeks went on, lascivious in a way none of the rest of us could quite match. She was made first girl of our group before the first month was out, and she wore the distinction the way I imagined she must have once worn a promotion on the force.

One evening, the five of us lay together in the dark of our cell, and Caia talked about who she had been before. She said she had been competitive as a man, ambitious; and that none of that competitiveness had left her when the body changed. If anything, she said, it had sharpened; found a new all consuming arena to operate in. She said she genuinely could not picture being a man again. That was a story that had happened to someone else, a stranger she wanted to forget. She didn't want it, had no use for it.

I understood her, because the same thing was happening in me. What I wanted, lying in the dark listening to her, was not what Master Tyenn wanted from me, not exactly. What I wanted was to be better at giving it to him than Akina was; Akina who had become, against every instinct I had once brought to relationships, something like a friend, and whom I now watched across every evaluation with unadulterated envy.

Both Caia and Akina could outperform me on raw sexual technique. On some weeks at least. But I could best them in calculation and in precision; the small margin of control that made the panel's eyes settle on me. And there was walking, grooming, serving, cooking, conversation, and dancing. I could hold my own on all of those.

The arousal that followed wasn't rooted in anything that had been done to my body, it rose out of the praise itself; out of Master Tyenn's voice saying my name in front of the others with the warmth he reserved for genuine achievement. I would grow wet from nothing but the sound of it, standing there naked under the light with the rest of the panel's eyes moving over me; noting, with approving nods, the visible engorgement of my labia and the moisture already pooling and sliding from my cunt down the inside of one thigh.

All the girls congratulated me the day I finally bested Caia and Akina in sexual service with a male slave. I thanked them humbly with a deep bow before we each retired to our separate corners of the cell. Nysa and Arannis were always together, as were Akina and I. Caia flitted between the two groups. She was still first on the chain, and we all honored her.

"You were a total whore today," Akina said, fingering my clitoris. "Were you thinking of Master's cock?"

"I was. I am," I said. "I want to suck his cock and swallow his cum."

Akina giggled, pinching my nipple. "So do I."

The rewards that followed were not sentimental, but they didn't need to be. I needed only the marks of progress: a silver ring added to my collar for the first evaluation I led outright; an embroidered ribbon to be worked into my hair; permission to wear a trace of perfume; and an anklet strung with small bells that announced every step I took through the corridors. Whatever else had been taken from me in that transformation, the part of me that needed to be recognized as the best in the room had survived completely intact.

Near the end of that stretch of training, in one of the last private sessions before we were due to leave for the tavern that had acquired us, I found myself on my knees in front of Master Tyenn.

"I am not pretending, Master," I said. "I really do want you to fuck me."

He looked down at me for a moment, his expression quite unsurprised. "I know, Skye," he said. "I know."

Chapter 3: An Education

The tavern was called, Lustrum, and consisted of two dozen tables scattered across two levels. The bar itself ran the length of one wall, and behind it a corridor opened toward what were the private rooms.

Master Drest stood in the middle of the room when we were brought in; and all five of us went to our knees in unison. He looked down at us, consulting a delivery sheet.

"Brand," he said.

We showed him. I lifted the hem of my slave rag and exposed my bare cunt and brand to him without hesitation; making sure not to seem too eager or prideful. Every slave girl is proud of her brand, and I was no different. He glanced, made a mark in the ledger, moved down the line.

"Akina. Bar."

Akina bowed and crossed toward the stone counter where a boy was already stacking clean glasses.

Drest read from the sheet again, tilting it toward the lamp. "Caia. Room eight. The client has bought two hours." Caia bowed and left, hips swaying as she had been taught.

"Nysa. Arannis. Kitchen." Neither of them let anything show on their faces, but I caught the half-second of swallowed disappointment I would have felt in their place. Trained for six months in the arts that mattered and sent instead to peel vegetables and potatoes. I understood all too well. I watched them bow and go, already reassuring themselves that it was temporary. Girls this well-made didn't stay in kitchens long.

Then Drest looked at me.

"Skye," he said, as if testing the name against my face. "You don't look like a Skye to me." He gave it two seconds of thought. "Valeria."

"I am Valeria, Master," I said, head bowed.

"Go with Pell," he said, gesturing towards a girl who carried herself like someone first on the chain.

Pell was tall, and her arms carried a light, visible muscling. She glared at me for what seemed like five seconds, and I shrank slightly.

"Follow me," she said.

She moved through the layout quickly. The kitchen, the linen cupboard in case I needed a tablecloth for a special client or even slave silks. The small shared room at the end of the back corridor where the five of us would sleep. Then she planted herself at the end of the bar and watched me work for a few minutes.

I carried, I poured, I set down, I collected, and I cleaned tables. I did it exactly the way six months of training had drilled into me; without spilling, without hesitation.

Pell exhaled through her nose: "The Obsequium didn't shortchange us this time. Thank Ea."

Then a man came through the door, greeting Pell by name, clapping her on the shoulder; and before I had fully registered what was happening he had taken her by the wrist and pulled her toward a table where his three friends already sat. He drew her shift off in one motion and bent her over the table's edge. He took her while his friends watched and offered commentary.

This was utterly provincial behavior, even more so for one of the finest taverns in Novus Augusta. Yet Pell was completely loose and cooperative. One of them stroked her face and fed her his food-stained fingers, which she sucked clean without any hesitation.

"Tell me how you feel, Pell," he said.

She answered him between grunts, describing exactly what was happening inside her: the pull of her clit against the table's edge, the perfect fullness in her vagina. And I moved between the tables refilling cups, watching surreptitiously. Not out of curiosity or disgust; I watched just in case they wanted to fuck me as well.

When the merchant finished inside her, Pell smoothed her hair and caught the coin he tossed her, tucking it into the small purse at her hip. She stroked his cheek fondly before she turned back toward the bar. She was still half naked as she strode between the tables towards me.

Her eyes went to my shift, to the damp shadow already spilling from my slit and spreading across the linen.

"Questions?" she asked.

A week in, and there were still no questions which my training at the Obsequium hadn't already answered.

I came out from under a table on a slow Thursday evening.

The cloth merchant above me pressed a coin into my palm before he had even finished tucking himself back into his trousers. The money wasn't mine; it would go into Master Drest's general accounts. A slave girl owned nothing at all except what her Master chose to give her; not the coin, not her time, certainly not herself. I had stopped finding that strange the morning after I had been fucked for the first time by Master Tyenn. I found it, if anything, calming.

Across the room, was a girl I hadn't yet spoken to: dark-eyed, her hair a deep, glossy brown pulled back. She wasn't unfriendly, exactly. She simply looked at me the way I imagined a merchant looks at a competitor's storefront.

I got my answer that night in the corridor, on my way back from the linen cupboard. She was leaning against the wall near the portal to the main hall.

"You're the one they call Valeria," she said.

I bowed deeply. "A new girl would appreciate your instruction in the things which please our Masters," I said, keeping my eyes down.

She looked me over once. "You're faster than the last one they sent," she said. "Prettier." And then she walked away.

I found Pell later and told her what had happened.

"Don't mind Fae," Pell said. "Natural born. Family debts. Enslaved for showing the wrong tendencies at the wrong time. Far too eager to kneel; and now she's miles from home with a brand on her butt. All the natural borns are jealous of us. You know that, right?"

"No," I said. "I don't know that."

She smiled at a glass she was polishing, holding it up to the light. "No woman is more feminine or more sexually ravenous than a candidate who's been through Muliebris. Nobody told you? Earth men make the best slave girls in the Empire. There really aren't that many of us with the requisite constitutive femaleness though. I mean the kind which can't help but submit." She set the glass down and poked me once, lightly, in the ribs, winking. "I'm from Earth too," she said, switching to English.

It was the first time in months that I had heard my own first language spoken back at me.

"Ever hear of a heavyweight fighter called Pelle?" she asked.

I frowned. There was an inkling of a memory: a man built like a Viking raider from the Dark Ages. He had taken two or three championship belts then simply vanished from the sport.

"They let me keep the name," Pell said. "Said it sounded enough like a girl's name already. It means…"

"Slut," I finished, "in the language of the Northern Barbarians."

She looked at me for a moment. "Fast," she said, echoing Fae's words. "Anyway. Fae smells competition. You reek of female heat."

It didn't embarrass me to hear it, because it was indisputably true. I hadn't been fucked in three days, not once; and my whole body had apparently decided to make that fact known to any slave girl standing close enough to notice.

The bolt went home with a heavy, final sound. The lamps were still burning low along the walls, and the last of the smoke from the kitchen drifted near the ceiling.

The arches of my feet ached and the inside of my right wrist was faintly sore.

Akina wasn't among us that night. Pell told me she had been loaned out while we banked the last of the lamps. Sent to a guild called Labyrinth; private city guards who kept the district quiet in exchange for coin and favors; a sweetener for services Master Drest wanted to keep flowing without interruption.

Nysa and Arannis wouldn't be joining us in the shared room either. They would be sharing Master Drest's bed that night. They had gone without a word of complaint. Kitchen duty had ended for them by the fourth day.

Caia came in last, well after the others, still carrying the smell of the three men she had spent the evening with. The men themselves were sleeping it off upstairs, dead to the world in a drunken stupor.

I breathed in the smell of men on her without meaning to, and felt the old, familiar burn. Three days without a hand on me, without a mouth on my breasts, or anyone's weight settling over mine; without being penetrated. And here was Caia radiating the whole evidence of exactly what I had gone without. I turned my face away before she could see whatever was showing on it; something ugly I was sure. Was I really that undesirable?

She didn't seem to notice or, at least, didn't hold it against me. She knew that us slave girl's had needs and were apt to be grumpy when they were denied. She rested a hand on my shoulder, squeezed me gently, and murmured something I didn't quite catch. She was asleep within a breath or two.

Is this mine, I thought, or is it the Muliebris?

I didn't have an answer. Yet.

Chapter 4: The Favorite

Five months as a tavern girl.

Or perhaps a little more than that. Almost one year as a woman.

I moved between the tables refilling cups.

I liked it. I liked being a woman. I liked being a slave girl. Despite all it had cost me, and I knew, even in this state of mind, the exact cost: the comforts and predictability of modern society; my personal freedom; my position in society; the constant taking without being asked. I knew that it was wrong. Consent was important, even here; but I still enjoyed it. Thoroughly.

But I knew that my old life had been slightly wrong as well. The wealth and power had covered innumerable cracks--the emptiness--quite effectively. And how I had treated the women of Earth (or Ki as the people of An call it); each and every one of them. Elaine: that was wrong. I had always known that if I was being honest. I would never treat any of my fellow slave girls in a similar fashion, even if I could. I enjoyed the domination of men and the submission, but that was my kink. The slaver's of An seemed to agree with me as well; they never took a man (or woman) who was not willing; and that was where the Book of Fate and Fortune had come in. There didn't seem to be that many of us transformed men; I understood that it had been outlawed but tolerated; an illegal traffic in forbidden goods which only Ki was made to supply.

Fae's hand landed flat against my backside waking me from my reverie, a proprietary little smack that she had taken to giving only me.

"Room three," she said, her fingertips still lingering on the bare flesh of my posterior. "Quick suck and fuck. He's already paid Master Drest, so don't dawdle." She leaned in and kissed my cheek, her breath smelling of the wine a customer had pressed to her mouth. "Have fun."

I went. The man in Room Three was neither cruel nor memorable, but he was, like most of my customers, a man of An. A real man and a real Master.

When I came back out into the main room, I returned to my service and to my thoughts. Nothing fundamental had changed in me. That was the conclusion I kept arriving at.

Caia was still Caia, soft but assertive; always watching before she spoke. Akina was skilful and gregarious; she had always been this way, even before the training. Nysa and Arannis were still inseparable. And I was still myself, still cataloguing and wanting to be the best in whatever room I occupied. The serum and the months of discipline had not replaced any of that. It had only filed the edges down, the inconsiderate and ethically deficient parts; and let me my true self emerge. What was left underneath the hood was quieter and better lubricated. All five of us submitted to the men who used us the way a person doesn't refuse good food set in front of them: not from weakness, but because refusing would have required inventing an objection that didn't exist inside us anymore.

Aging itself had been solved on An generations ago, and yet the men outside these walls still died constantly: in mercenary contracts and border skirmishes and the endless grinding disputes between the royal houses; as though the empire had found a way to abolish decay only to leave violence fully intact; as if brutality was the price it had agreed to pay to keep death interesting.

Meanwhile we, the slave girls, stayed unnaturally new. Muliebris did something to our bodies beyond the initial transformation, some slow maintenance running under the surface that Pell said kept a girl looking twenty for decades. Pell surmised that the injections we had been given included contraception and vaccinations from some unknown space faring source; just as Mistress Kore's clothes did not belong to An or this era.

As for the free women, the wives and daughters of that same endless violence, they still died the way women had died for centuries: in childbirth, through disease, in the sack of border towns, in the ordinary attrition of being unprotected in a world designed by men for men. The serum was forbidden them: because of unspecified side effects, because it had proven eminently useless if not harmful in most cases. And the mere chance of perpetual slavery and rape was more than enough to dissuade the majority of them from volunteering for it.

It was, I thought, an almost perfectly balanced cruelty. The empire had cured the disease of time and kept every other disease alive and well.

An hour later I found myself behind the bar, damp cloth in hand, sidling up behind Fae, and resting my chin on her shoulder the way I had taken to doing when I wanted her attention.

She didn't give it to me. Her eyes were fixed across the room on a table I had not marked yet, and when I followed her gaze I understood why.

A man sat alone in the corner; lean, composed, dignified, somewhere in his middle years, which would be about thirty on An. He was dressed passably but without ornament, his hair an untidy mess, a single cup of wine in front of him that he had not asked to have refilled. His hands lay still on the table, simply watching and waiting.

Over the course of that evening, I watched as girls drifted past his table and lingered. Nysa bent low to refill a cup, offering with her gestures far more than mere wine. He accepted the wine, and declined everything else that was offered. Fae hovered near him for the better part of an hour, her whole body angled toward his table like a plant toward a window.

Eventually I took Fae by the hand, and led her to him.

I knelt first, forehead nearly to the stone, and felt Fae kneel behind me.

"My slave sister, Fae, would be pleased if she could entertain you, Master," I said, and then, glancing at the small dark bloom already visible on the silk between her thighs, added, "Have pity on a wet slave."

Master Cassian did have pity on Fae.

And he came back several evenings later, carrying a weiqi board under one arm, and two cloth pouches that clacked softly with the stones inside it.

"Who here can play?" he asked the room at large.

The girls nearest him exchanged glances and said nothing. I was at the bar pressing and folding a stack of cloths.

"I can, Master," I said.

He was a rank beginner. The cheap trinket he called a board should have told me that from the beginning. Within the first ten moves I could see that he wasn't even pretending. I let him exist till move twenty the first two games, then got bored with his incompetence for the next two and crushed him. By the fifth game I had stopped playing to win and started playing to teach; walking him back through a sequence and showing him where his stones had lost their liberties three moves before he noticed.

"You are far too intelligent for a slave girl," he said, returning all his captured stones back to their pouch. I knelt before him in deference for beating him so soundly, and he mussed up my mane of hair while my head was bowed.

He began talking then, the way he often did after losing. Which was often; actually, always. He talked about the slow burning conflict between the royal houses, and how it fed a whole economy of mercenary contracts. It was dangerous work, the kind he had done once and would consider doing again if the coin justified the risk.

"You would go back to that, Master?" I said. "Being paid to be closer to death."

"Most men on An perish closer to that kind of death than they would like. Regardless of payment," he said. "I would simply be compensated for the proximity. And the men of An are built differently from the men of Ki."

I knew that of course.

I asked him about west facing territory of Thamud, Talos' chief thorn in its side; then the Witch Queen of Thamud, who had vanished from every account I had overheard. She had killed tens of thousand in her time, keeping the population of the continent acceptably low; or so the myths propagated.

"She was a pleasure slave," he said. "Before she was a queen. Some say she always was, underneath the crown."

"How does a slave girl become a queen and a monster," I said. "Did she even like submitting?"

"Who knows," he said. "It seems unlikely."

"I doubt if she was a natural slave," I said. People said she was once a man of Ki and I did not want to be associated with that legacy.

He looked at me, then reached down and slid a cushion beneath my knees where it had gone numb against the stone.

"Thank you, Master," I said.

A week later, after another round of teaching games, he pressed me to reveal my personal history; then looked exasperated when I finished recounting it. Which annoyed me no end, though I did not show it on my face. The slave training is forever.

"You speak as though you never had a choice, Valeria," he said. "I cannot accept that. If we possess reason, we possess freedom."

"Master. On Earth. On Ki," I said, "there were philosophers called Stoics. They believed a dog tied to a cart may run willingly or be dragged behind it. Either way, the cart reaches its destination."

"So you think you were dragged."

"I think I was the bitch who eventually discovered she had always been running in the same direction as the cart."

"You were once a wealthy man," he said. "Successful. Ambitious. Independent."

I laughed. "I believed I was."

He reached out and took my chin between two fingers, turning my face first one way and then the other.

"Let me see," he said. "No. I don't see it at all."

I laughed again and asked him to stop, and he did, releasing my chin but not his gaze.

"Every important decision I ever made revealed the same soul," I said. "I admired strength and despised weakness in other people because I was afraid of it in myself. I measured everyone by their usefulness; and I spent my whole life looking for something or someone worth obeying."

"No, that doesn't make sense at all," he said. "And that hardly proves destiny."

I lifted my chin so the silver ring on my collar, a mark of accomplishment, was visible to him. "The shop on Ki," I said, "the one that sold me a book before any of this happened. It didn't show me a stranger's life at random. It showed me the woman I had discarded that same morning and let me feel from inside her skin that I wanted a Master. The book only opens for the ones already written into it."

"And the priests of Ea?" he asked.

"They teach that every soul casts a shadow before it enters the world," I said. "We do not walk into our shadow. We spend our lives catching up to it."

"You seem to know quite a bit for someone recently arrived from Ki."

"I am a fast learner, Master," I said. "I have been well-trained, and I am always listening. Perhaps this world is not so strange to me as you assume."

He seemed to accept that. "You believe slavery was your shadow."

"I believe Valeria was."

"You are comparing employment to slavery," he said, frowning slightly.

"No," I said. "I am comparing self-deception to truth. I worked seventy hours a week and called it ambition. I knelt in front of numbers on a screen every day of my life. When Muliebris stripped away my excuses, I discovered that obedience brought me peace. Was that manufactured? Or had I spent decades pretending to be someone else?"

"You could simply be adapting," he said.

"Then why does every day as Valeria feel more authentic than every year I spent as him?"

He had no ready answer.

"Free will may exist, Master," I said. "Perhaps I freely chose every path. But every path led to the same door."

"And behind that door?"

I bowed slightly. "You, my Master."

He was pleased. I could feel it.

When he pulled me up and cradled me in his arms, I could see, across the room, Fae watching us both, her jaw so rigid that I could see the muscles working beneath her skin.

Another few days and we were together again.

"You are far too intelligent for a slave girl," Master Cassian said again, once the stones had been swept back into their pouches and the board folded away. "It troubles me."

I reached for the hem of his loincloth, my fingers finding him through the linen. "Will you allow me to untrouble you then, Master?"

He caught my wrist before I got any further. "No, slave. I'm afraid it is time I addled your mind."

He led me by that same wrist back through the corridor into one of the small private rooms at the end. When the door closed behind us, I reached for him again out of pure habit, my mouth already anticipating its work, and salivating. And again he stopped me.

"Not tonight," he said, and then his hands were on me.

His hands closed over my breasts with a tenderness that made my breath catch. He kneaded them slowly, thumbs finding my nipples, not pinching, just tracing with small circles until they went hard and sensitive; until I arched up into his palms. His mouth followed, and I felt his lips find one nipple while his fingers kept working the other. Something in my belly clenched hard enough that I grunted like an animal.

That was when I felt my first orgasm ripple through me.

He let me settle for a moment; then his fingers moved lower, tracing the crease of my thigh before finding the slick furrow of my labia, parting them with two fingers; exploring and pressing, as though my body were a text he intended to read in full.

He found my clitoris and circled it, so lightly at first I nearly wept from frustrationt, and when my hips finally tilted up toward his hand he increased the pressure by exactly the amount my body required. And I realized that he had been listening to me the entire time, for the small tells that told him what to do next.

That was when I orgasmed a second time.

I kissed him on his mouth, on his chest, anything to make him stop for a moment; to allow me a moment's respite.

When he felt my pulse settling, two fingers slid inside me, curling forward to find the place that made my whole body seize, and he worked that spot with the same maddening precision.

I knew what he was doing. I had been trained to respond to exactly this. My vagina clenched around his fingers and my clitoris was so swollen and sensitive that even the drag of his palm against it made me gasp. I had spent six months learning every possible way to make a man feel what I was feeling now, and it had never once occurred to me that someone might spend that same attention on me.

The third climax took me by surprise, a hard, sudden clench that left me shaking, and I thought that he would stop there, that this was the gift and it was finished. He didn't stop. My eyes were closed now and he was all over me: my face, my lips, my neck, my breasts, my thighs, and my belly. His fingers were gentle, stroking me, waiting for the aftershocks to pass. Then he began again, patient as before, and the next orgasm came faster than the last, my thighs closing hard around his hand, my fingers finding the rough linen and gripping it.

"I am your slave girl, Master," I whimpered. "I am your slave girl."

I thought this proclamation would settle and calm me, but it did nothing of the sort.

By the fifth, I had stopped being able to track anything except his hand; and the sound of my own voice was no longer contained, filling the small stone room in a way any normal person would have been embarrassed by. By now I was babbling in English.

"Oh God," I cried. "Oh God. Oh fuck, Oh fuck."

By the sixth, I was begging without words; my whole body strung tight and then breaking apart and then strung tight again before I had finished recovering.

By the seventh, I had reached my limit entirely.

"Please, Master," I said, my voice cracked open. "Please, no more. Have mercy, please. Please, take me. Finish inside me. Master, please."

He moved over me then and entered me slowly the way Master Tyenn once had, except this time my body was already wrecked and desperate for him.

"You will not come until I tell you to," he commanded.

And I obeyed. I had been trained to do this, I had a silver ring on my collar to prove it. He pummeled me for what seemed like an eternity, taking his pleasure from me while I held on to him, grunting, holding back as best I could. Then, as the tears began to flow down my face, he said: "Now."

And I came.

It was only a few moments before he found his own release deep inside me.

Afterward I lay still on the rough linen, my body quivering in small aftershocks I couldn't stop; no, I didn't really want to stop. My mind was quiet. I knew now that I had never truly submitted to a man before that night; not fully.

And now I had.

A week later Master Cassian came in without his board games and asked for a private room. I had arranged this with him after he had last taken me, and Master Drest brought two low stools to flank his chair.

Fae seemed puzzled when I stroked her back and took her by the hand. Tonight, we would serve him together. He began soon after he had made us drink slightly more than we were used to.

"Tell me," he said, "whether justice exists because the gods will it, or whether the gods will it because it is just."

Fae answered first; something about how justice was what a good heart recognized when it saw suffering. It was a sweet enough answer, and I watched Cassian's face stay pleasantly neutral while she gave it.

"I think," I said, "that if justice depended only on divine will, then whatever the gods commanded would be just by definition, even cruelty. Which means either justice exists independently of them, or the word means nothing at all."

He asked us three more questions that evening, about courage, about the value of an oath sworn under duress, about whether a slave who loved her master could be said to love freely; and each time Fae answered from feeling and I answered from argument; and each time I watched his attention settle on me a half-second longer than it settled on her.

Fae's spine became increasingly rigid with every question; and I stroked her back to settle her. She did not push me away; she had been trained too well. By the fourth question, she was reaching for a precision alien to her and simply stuttered into silence halfway through.

Master Cassian was careful not to notice her embarrassment.

"Make love to each other," he said. "I would like to watch."

We moved to the thick rug at the center of the room, and I reached for Fae. She let me kiss her once, twice, and I thought for a moment that the evening might pass unblemished.

Then her hand closed in my hair, a full fist of it, and she wrenched my head back hard enough that my scalp screamed and my vision blurred at the edges. She forced me down against the rough throw and held me there. But even pinned like that, even with my scalp burning and her grip trembling in my hair, I could feel that this wasn't cruelty, not really.

"Please, sister," I said. "It doesn't have to be this way."

She seemed to lose control just for a moment, her face quivering and turning from anger to sadness, resisting the tears that were threatening.

"I love you, Fae," I whispered. "You will always be my friend. That will never change."

Her grip loosened, but she held me there a moment longer. Across the room, Master Cassian watched us both, making no move to intervene.

Then her free hand found its way between my thighs, and her fingers found my clitoris, stroking me tenderly. Then she released my hair and brought that hand down to my right breast, kneading it hard enough to ache. I gasped, and I felt my body answer, climbing despite everything, the pain and the pleasure tangling together.

"I'm sorry," she said, touching me more gently.

I came against her hand with my scalp still throbbing where she had pulled it, my small cry filling the room, except this time it carried an edge of grief.

When I opened my eyes, Fae was looking down at me with tears flowing down her cheeks, her mouth trembling. I reached up and found her hand where it still rested against my breast and held it; the way I might have held Elaine's hand once, in another body, in another life, if I had ever once thought to.

She didn't pull away. She didn't say anything for a long while.

And then she kissed me.

Chapter 5: Liberation

[Trigger warning: Contains depiction of attempted suicide.]

Lustrum in the early morning belonged to no one; not the customers who wouldn't stir until the sun was well up, not even entirely to us girls, busying ourselves with the "housework."

I heard the door and recognized the tread long before I turned.

"Master Cassian," I said. "The tavern doesn't open its better offerings until midday. You'll find nothing here but girls in aprons."

"I've found worse company at worse hours," he said, and set a leather satchel on the counter.

He drew out a stool and told me to sit. Then he opened the flap and produced a folded document, its edge sealed with a disc of dark red wax. He held it out to me, and I took it with both hands. I noted the quality of the vellum before I had even broken the seal.

They were my ownership papers. My current name, Valeria, near the top and beneath it in smaller script my permanent collar number, 7347-4. I had been transferred from Master Drest to Master Cassian.

I kept my eyes down on the page, because that was the correct thing to do. I knew that a slave girl's face did not get to run ahead of her Master's intentions. My posture didn't change. My hands didn't shake. I was, in that first half-second, purely and completely happy: he wanted me. He had bought me, taken me off the tavern floor and into his life. In truth, I was already composing the version of myself I would become for him.

Then I looked up, and there was nothing in his face.

Not cruelty. Master Cassian had never once been cruel to me, not in the whole time I had known him. But there was no warmth in his expression either.

"You will be transported back to Ki," he said, "on a commercial vessel. Standard cargo passage, though I've paid for a private berth. The pod will restore your male form during transit, and you'll wake as you were. Your former apartment is intact. Your trading accounts, your assets, all of it. I confirmed this myself, through channels I trust. You will not be in want."

I understood that he had thought this through, that this was not whim or cruelty.

"Thank you, Master," I said.

The words came out small and hollow.

Fae reached me first, drifting over from the far tables with a cloth still in her hand, and Akina came a step behind her.

"You're going home," Fae said, touching my arm. "I'm so happy for you."

Fae was natural born, she could not possibly understand. But Akina did. They were both looking at my face by then, and I couldn't hide what I felt. I watched the gladness go out of both of them, Fae's first, then Akina's.

I turned away from them and busied my hands with the papers, squaring the corners against the counter's edge, smoothing a crease that didn't need smoothing.

Cassian said nothing further. He lifted the satchel, settled the strap over his shoulder, and left, and I listened to his footsteps cross the stone floor until the door closed behind him.

I felt Akina cradle me from behind. I did not look up, but I could hear her sobbing.

I woke flat on my back, arms at my sides, legs straight, as though someone had arranged me for a photograph or a funeral. I was dressed in a white Oxford shirt buttoned to the collar, a black tie, a pair of socks, and dark trousers.

I caught my reflection in the wardrobe mirror across the room. It was the old face. I ran one hand along my jaw, then down my throat, my sternum, the flatness of my chest. My hand stopped at my left pelvis. My fingers spread against smooth skin, waiting for a texture that wasn't there: a raised mark, a roughness I had always taken for granted. There was nothing. Smooth skin, unblemished by the branding iron.

I moved through the apartment slowly, touching things. Everything was exactly where I had left it, exactly as it should be. I stood at the kitchen counter for a while with my hand flat against the cool stone, looking at the framed print through the open door of the second bedroom: the king on all fours, his eyes wild. I should call someone I thought. A doctor, perhaps. Or simply go back to bed and see whether the wrongness would go away.

I did not call anyone.

I made coffee instead and drank it standing at the counter; and the whole time my free hand kept drifting back down and finding nothing there each time.

The days followed the shape of my old life.

I ran along the river in the mornings. I dressed fully even on days I had nowhere in particular to be. A cashmere overcoat, a bespoke charcoal suit, a silk tie, the shoes polished to a shine. I looked like a man other men deferred to.

One morning before I left for work, I stood at the window watching the street below. A man was crossing the road two blocks down; handsome, moving with a certainty that made the other pedestrians part around him. I watched him the whole length of the block: his bearing, his confidence; the way another version of myself might have registered a woman's figure.

At the office, nothing had changed. Servers ticking away behind glass, forty keyboards going at once. Colleagues nodded at me in the hallway the way they always had. Someone mentioned, in passing, that the quarter's bonuses were tracking well above target. I sat down and pulled up the overnight positions and found that I could still read them.

I didn't pursue women.

This, more than anything else, should have alarmed me. A woman at a client dinner leaned in close enough that I could smell her perfume, and I registered the whole transaction the old way-intelligence, body, usefulness-and found the entire calculation simply banal. Deficient.

What I needed instead arrived without warning. I was sitting in a meeting half-listening to a managing director outline exposure on a position I had already flagged as a problem, and felt, beneath the boredom, an actual physical ache to kneel; right there, on the carpet. I didn't do it. I sat through the meeting like a rational adult, took notes, offered two sentences of correction to the managing director's numbers. It should have satisfied something in me. It used to.

Two weeks into it, a woman from compliance stopped by my desk and called me by a name that wasn't mine.

"It's Billy," I said

She looked at me with mild confusion. "Sorry," she said. "Of course."

I told myself it was nothing. People misspoke names constantly.

I went to the men's room soon after, to splash water on my face, and it was there that I noticed the mirror wasn't keeping time with me. I lifted a hand to my chin and the reflection lifted its hand a half second later. The lag was so small I might have imagined it, except I tested it three more times. I stood there gripping the edge of the sink until the nausea receded.

Two days later, passing a colleague's desk, I caught two men mid-conversation speaking Common Talosian. They looked up for a moment at me, then went on talking. I stood there a moment longer, then kept walking.

That evening I called Elaine. I don't know why.

"Hello?" she answered.

"Elaine. It's Billy."

"I'm sorry. Billy who? Have we met?"

"This past winter. You stayed over. We were…"

"I really don't think so," she said. "I would remember that. I think you might have the wrong Elaine."

"There's only one Elaine," I said. "In your…"

"I'm sorry," she said again. "I hope you find who you're looking for."

She hung up before I could say anything else.

I knew this was how it started for some people. Not a single dramatic break but an accumulation of small defects. I did not call a doctor. It was pointless. The psychosis would have to run its course.

The roof gravel shifted under my shoes.

I had been up there twenty minutes by the time I thought to check, the wind coming hard off the lake and cutting straight through the cashmere. My fingers tightened on the cold stone of the parapet.

Whoever had woken in my bed three weeks ago, correct in every detail, was a reconstruction. A costume. I knew this now, more than ever. The real self was somewhere else. Gone. What remained was a shell devoid of substance.

I leaned over the parapet and considered the smattering of foot traffic traversing the cold, gray pavement below.

If I ended this, the last true thing about me ended with it.

And I couldn't let her end; wouldn't let Valeria end. I would find my way back to An, or I would become the woman I had already discovered myself to be here on Ki. But I would not let this friendless imitation of a man be the final entry in the ledger.

I stepped back.

Then the gravel went soft beneath me like pieces of foam, the wind stopped mid-gust, and the coat and the roof and the parapet and the whole city dissolved together into white.

I opened my eyes inside a pod.

There were restraints on my wrists, and above me ran a strip of faint blue light. Dark hair pooled against the padding beneath my head, and for one disorienting moment I didn't know which self I was currently inhabiting, until the weight of my own breasts told me plainly enough.

Through the pod's small window I could see two overseers standing at a console just outside, one of them consulting a readout, the other leaning in to read over her shoulder. Their voices carried through the thin wall.

"She doesn't pass," the first one said, tapping the monitor. "Look at the divergence curve here. It should have stabilized by day nine at the latest."

"They rarely stabilize past day nine," the second said, largely unbothered. "Recommend resale?"

"Recommend resale," the first confirmed.

"Money saved again," the second said with a smirk. "Whew."

"It's hardly our fault if the screening process never fails."

The hatch released with a small mechanical click, the restraints falling open at my wrists, and I sat up slowly, my head swimming for a moment.

My hand went to my left pelvis and I felt it beneath my palm before I saw it: the raised, familiar shape of the brand, the phoenix feather Master Tyenn had burned into me on the first day, still there, exactly where it had always been.

I looked down at it anyway, needing to see it as much as feel it. The tears came before I could stop them. I didn't try to stop them.

Chapter 6: First Girl

It was a rather poorly adorned facility on the periphery of Novus Augustus, far from the eyes of customs and excise.

Six of us stood in a loose line in a small pen with an open toilet and running water in a corner. Each of us marked on the left breast with a lot number in grease crayon. I was Lot 14-4. I did not know the names of the other five, and by then I had stopped expecting to learn them before they were gone from my life entirely.

The buyer came in, a Northerner in a coat trimmed with coarse fur. The auctioneer trailed a half-step behind him with a ledger tucked under one arm. It was clearly not his first inspection of the day.

He started at the far end of the line. He kneaded the first girl's breasts with both hands, testing their give and for imperfections; then ran his fingers roughly through her hair, checking for lice with a comb and brittleness at the roots. He pressed a thumb to her jaw until her mouth opened and peered inside. He surveyed the rest of her skin and body quickly and thoroughly, then his hand went between her thighs, two fingers pushing in without preamble, testing tightness. She flinched hard enough that the auctioneer made a small mark in his ledger that I knew was not in her favor.

He moved down the line the same way: all were clearly war booty and scared witless. One was rigid and blank, staring at the far wall. All of them wept, the more intelligent ones silently.

When he reached me, I went to my knees: spine straight, thighs spread to the correct angle, my hands resting palm-up on my thighs. The buyer motioned for me to stand and he conducted the same examination. My nipples firmed to his touch, and my body was relaxed and completely yielding.

"Brand," he said.

I tilted my hip, and presented the mark on my groin elegantly. He ran a thumb across the raised lines of the feather, tracing the shaft where it followed my hipbone, the barbs sweeping back in their careful arcs.

"She's been trained," he said, mostly to the auctioneer, though his eyes stayed on the mark. "The brand is from the Obsequium." Then more quietly, to himself: "Now why did they leave that out of the manifest?"

The auctioneer said something about an oversight, but the buyer didn't appear to be listening. His two fingers pressed inside me then, and I was already wet. I had been wet since he first put his hands on my breasts, my body responding to the inspection with the same shameless ease it had learned to produce for a panel of assessors in a white room. He noted it with a small grunt of approval, withdrew his fingers, and looked down at me.

"Play with yourself," he said.

I did, my fingers finding my clitoris and circling it, my hips tilting into my own hand, my breath catching at the right intervals, for the benefit of the men watching.

"Come now," he said.

And I did, my body answering the command the way it had been trained to, a shudder running up through my thighs and belly, my stifled cry filling the low-ceilinged hall.

The buyer straightened and turned to the auctioneer without carrying on down the line.

"The price remains the same," he said.

The auctioneer hesitated. "There must have been a mistake in the allotment. I'll have to check if 14-4 was inserted by mistake. The price is…"

"The price remains the same."

The auctioneer sighed and nodded.

My Master took the whole lot there and then. I heard him tell the auctioneer that a pale, Ki-born Muliebris-ian (a neologism?) with jet black hair would add something exotic to his current brood back North. He was clearly rubbing it in and the auctioneer could only nod in the affirmative, deeply unhappy that a prize mare had been sold at a steep discount.

Coin changed hands and a boy came down the line with a small metal punch and updated the tag on each of our collars in turn.

I turned to the other girls in the lot for the first time since my Master's inspection. They were staring at me wide-eyed, mouths agape; one in barely concealed disgust. They would all have to learn, somehow.

Master Amund called me Tove before we had even crossed the threshold, and I answered to it the way I had answered to every name given to me by men.

The word Sköka was carved into piece of hard wood above the door to his establishment. I presumed it was more descriptive than an actual name, though I never bothered to ask. There were twenty-five women in that house, though ten mostly did the cooking and cleaning. I was the only one among them who had arrived by Muliebris rather than by conquest. The rest were taken from towns and holdings on the losing side of assorted indistinguishable border disputes.

I understood, within the first week, that I was built differently from all of them. I had been trained in one of the best houses of course, but it was more than that. Simply put, I was a natural slave and they were not. The Book always chooses well or so I've been told. It would have been pointless, not to mention expensive, to inject my sisters with Muelibris. There was nothing in them to unmask.

That first week I served whoever the house gave me. By the second I was serving the better clients. At the start of the third, Master Amund had begun addressing me in front of the others in the tone of a man discussing his best asset.

As first girl, I spent most of my free time training the other women, even the kitchen attendants who stood a chance of being picked on busy nights. There were ten who needed the most work, five of them from my own sale lot; all raw and jittery. I did the best I could under the circumstances, joining them for their first few assignations, taking the heat of the men's more lurid demands.

The sleeping quarters at night was its own country, twenty-five bodies arranged close together on straw pallets. Some nights the room dissolved into laughter, someone recounting a client's peculiar request or the eccentricities of Master Amund; and the laughter would move down the row of pallets like a contagion. Early on, the younger girls would cry silently, trying to keep it from the others out of some instinct toward dignity that hadn't yet been trained out of them. I would take each one in my arms, stroked their hair without comment until their breathing evened out, because there was nothing really useful to say, and I had learned that touch mattered more than words. It was clear that I enjoyed the work in a way none of the other twenty-four did; and this fact, which should by rights have made me strange to them, instead made me steady in their eyes, a fixed point they could orient toward.

Four months passed that way, season folding into season, until the morning Amund came into the sleeping quarters, a length of cord hanging loose from one hand.

"Tove," he said. "Present your wrists."

I rose, walked briskly to him and knelt, holding my wrists out, one over the other.

"You've fetched me a handsome profit," he said. "You should be proud."

"Thank you, Master," I said.

The others wept, and Master Amund was kind enough to let my sisters say their goodbyes. I gave whatever advice I could in those last few moments: reminders to the absentminded, gentle ribbing to ease the sadness and fear. They didn't really need me, I told myself; and, Janna, my second girl was more than capable.

Janna bowed deeply to me then hugged me tightly. They all did, the five new girls from my sale lot crying the loudest possibly because I had spent the most time with them. All of them were now slightly stronger, pressing their hands over their mouths to keep the sobs in. Master Amund looked on with bemusement. I did not turn to look at any of them as I left. I had learned that looking back only made the leaving harder for everyone.

But I carried their faces with me anyway.

My new Master was called Sicarius.

He was lean, his muscle built by actual use rather than for display. Warrior tattoos ran the length of both forearms and climbed his neck in dark, angular bands, and when he turned to look at me for the first time I saw a face weathered into its thirties by more than years.

The lodging smelled of weapon oil and was a mercenary's borrowed quarters, spare with a single narrow bed and a rack for blades.

"What have they called you," he said.

"Skye, Master. Then Valeria. Then Tove."

He considered this for a moment. "Valeria," he said. "For the time being."

He was unlike the Northerners in another way as well: he bathed almost daily; and my first duty in his household was to attend to him in a small stone chamber where steam rose off a copper tub. I worked the soap across his shoulders and down his back, and it was there, tracing the muscle along his spine, that my fingers found it: a gash long healed but wide enough to tell me it had taken months to close, running from his left shoulder blade down toward the base of his spine in a ragged line.

He felt me pause.

"A coward's work," he said, without turning. "Struck from behind. He didn't live long enough to explain why."

"I hope you are not a coward, Valeria," he added.

"All slave girls are cowards, Master," I said, keeping my eyes on his back and the work.

He made a low sound which I took for affirmation.

When he was scrubbed clean, I worked a soft cloth over his arms and chest, rinsing with water warm. When the water had cooled past comfort, he rose, and I knelt.

I took him into my mouth slowly, letting my tongue trace the ridge just beneath the head before I settled into a rhythm, my hand working the base in time with my mouth. I read his breathing: the small catch when my tongue found the underside, the longer exhale when I took him deeper; until I felt the tension in his thighs telling me to ease back before he was ready to finish. I worked him that way for a long while, pacing myself, taking him deep enough to feel the head press against the back of my throat, then withdrawing to circle the tip with my tongue; kissing and inhaling for effect and out of desire; drawing his balls into my mouth; until he shifted, wanting more, and only then giving it to him.

Somewhere in the middle of it, he murmured something to himself rather than to me.

"I have waited years for this."

It was an odd thing to say to a slave girl he had owned for less than a day. I set it aside and gave my full attention back to the only task in front of me; until his hand came to rest in my hair and his breath went ragged, and I took what he gave without hesitation, swallowing it down the way every good slave girl should.

It was a simple life.

Cooking, cleaning, bathing, and sex. I would mend his clothes while he was out, then kneel at his feet when he returned. He was largely illiterate as far as Talosian was concerned and allowed me to read to him from the gazettes and books he had seized from his raids. It was on just such an unremarkable night, two weeks into my new position, that we finally had an honest conversation.

The fire had burned down to a steady orange by the time my Master reached for another piece of lamb, tearing it from the bone with his fingers. He held it out, and I raised my head and took it from his fingers with my lips. I chewed, swallowed.

"Thank you, Master," I said, lying back down at his feet.

Our night's reading was lying upright against the leg of his chair, and he let his bare foot trail up along the back of my calf.

"We'll return to Holmberg soon enough," he said, this time feeding me from his palm. "My home city. South West of here." His foot moved higher, tracing the inside of my knee and then my soft thighs. "I don't mind telling you that I have been searching for you for quite some time."

I did not raise my head or reply.

Then he switched languages, and his next words came out in perfect American-accented English.

"I came to An the way you did," he said. "Through a Book of Fortune. A Book of Fate found among a dead friend's effects." He reached for another piece of lamb. "The male crossing is rarer, but it happens. An needs warriors the way it needs slave girls, and one man from Ki is worth fifty from An if he is chosen well. I think you've seen some of that during your time at Amund's little establishment-the other girls were as nothing compared to you."

"I was inducted into a mercenary guild within three months of landing," he continued. He spoke of killing next. "I've found that bloodletting and death doesn't move me in the least. It's the art of it that excites me. The rest is only a byproduct of this obsession."

I shivered, and he felt it against his foot.

"A slave girl's response," he said.

"Yes, Master," I said, and smiled. "I still don't recognize you, Master. Forgive me."

"I am much changed," he agreed. "As you are." He shifted, drawing me up on to his lap with one hand so that my head lay against his chest. "While I trained in the arts of killing, I had free access to Kore's stable of trainees. It's possible that we knew each other, in a manner of speaking. Though I couldn't say for certain. I was hooded most of those sessions. I wouldn't have recognized you in any case."

"They did not want us to be swayed by a man's appearance, Master."

"Logical." His hand found my breast. "Kore and I are friends, of a kind. Once I had standing in the guild, she opened her records to me. It still took months, even with guild credentials, to trace one girl through that much paperwork. And illegalities, I should add."

"Thank you, Master," I said.

"The pleasure is all mine, Valeria."

He fed me another piece of lamb, and I chewed slowly while my mind began assembling the pieces he had laid out: the Book, an absent friend, the crossing, the months of searching, the particular attention he had paid to a slave girl he had never formally met. There was only one possible conclusion.

"Perhaps," I said.

"You've finally thought it through," he said.

I spoke next in Talosian, because he seemed to need it that way.

"Are you perhaps related to Mistress Elaine, of Ki?"

He pinched my nipple, gentle and approving, the way Master Tyenn once had over far smaller accomplishments. "I thought it would have been obvious sooner," he said.

"Please forgive a poor slave girl, Master," I said, lowering my eyes. "But I see nothing of the former person in you."

"Virilis," he said. "The counterpart to what was done to you. Latent maleness, dormant but constitutive, same as yours was female. Just as you were always a slave girl, a natural slave underneath everything; I was always a warrior."

He looked at me, waiting.

"Yes, Master," I said. "I was a slave girl. I am a slave girl."

"No fear then?" he said. "Of what I might do to you, for how Billy treated Elaine?"

I lowered my head. "My previous despicable behavior had nothing to do with my contradictory but constitutive gender, Master," I said. "It was simply who I was. A bad person. As a worthless slave girl, I no longer have access to those actions."

"Amund's reports say otherwise," he said. "Nothing but helpful. Almost sisterly to every girl under that roof."

"Thank you, Master."

"I was angry, at first," he said. "Before I understood the Book's logic; before I saw Kore's records. After that, I could not help myself. I simply had to see what you had become." He paused. "I'll keep you a while yet. Sell you when I tire of you, when the time is right."

I went to my knees at once, legs spread wide, and bowed till my forehead touched the stone; and from that low angle I could already see that he was hard and erect.

"It's true then. There Is there nothing male left in you?" I did not know if he was genuinely astonished at my change or simply trying to humiliate me.

"Nothing, Master, nothing at all" I answered. "A slave girl is what I was and always meant to be."

I rose and straddled him where he sat, and he took my hips in both hands and guided me down. He filled me slowly, and I rode him, my hands braced against his chest.

"This is better," he said, as I moved over him, "than anything I remember from before. You can't imagine it, Valeria. What it feels like to be a man of An. A real man."

His hips rose, and he thrust into me with renewed vigor.

I didn't disagree with him. I only moved faster, matching his thrusts. But somewhere beneath, I held the quiet certainty that whatever he was feeling, however true, I still had the better part of it: the part that simply arrived, wave after wave, without a single word required to justify it.

A few weeks passed in that borrowed lodging, and I grew almost used to the rhythm of my Master's life. Then Master Sicarius told me, one evening, that he was leaving.

"Another campaign," he said, buckling a strap across his chest. "North. A man's work." He stroked my hair, smiling. "You wouldn't understand. Holmberg will have to wait a while longer."

He was right. A slave girl couldn't possibly understand what it meant to be a man of An.

"I'm loaning you back to Amund," he said, checking the blade of his sword. "You'll work Sköka again while I'm gone. It adds to both our coffers. There's no sense letting an asset sit idle in an empty house."

I was being passed between men the way I once passed a folder across a desk to a junior analyst. There was no malice in it. He was simply allocating me with the same logic I had once used on the women of Ki; and it was strangely intoxicating to the natural slave deep within.

"Yes, Master," I said.

He finished with the strap and crossed the room to where I knelt and rested one hand briefly on the crown of my head.

"You've done well," he said. "Both here and at Sköka before. Amund speaks of you the way I imagine he speaks of very little else." He let the hand stay a moment longer than the sentence required. "Wait for me."

"I will wait, Master," I said. "A slave girl has no choice."

"Amund expects you by the mid-afternoon shift. You can sleep until then."

He turned, gathered the rest of his gear, and walked out without looking back.

I stayed on my knees a moment longer than necessary, listening to the last of his footsteps fade.

Chapter 7: The Return

[Trigger Warning: This chapter contains a depiction of rape.]

Some months later…

I set two wooden bowls at the table, straightened the single spoon beside the knife, and crossed to the chair where my Master's cloak had slid half onto the floor. I smoothed it back over the chair's back.

Tonight, he had told me, I would be his Ki-Earth wife. No kneeling. No Master. Just the two of us, the way it might have been if the Book of Fortunes had never fully opened for either of us; and if we had met and married on Ki.

I did not know why he wanted this. It was not a slave girl's place to ask, but it all seemed perfectly ridiculous just the same.

The beef I had found at the market that morning, two loin slices about three thumb widths. I had seared them quickly in the fat left over from the morning's bacon, timing them to land medium rare. I set those on a separate plate beside the soup. He was still at the weapons rack when I finished, running an oiled cloth down the length of a blade he had already cleaned once that week. I sat at the table and waited, because the alternative was to kneel near the door, and that was not permitted tonight.

"Come on, dinner," I called to him. "The food is getting cold."

He didn't look up. I took a taste of the soup, found it good, tapped my bare foot against the stone floor, and smiled at him.

It was the hardest work I had done in months. Not the cooking. The sitting upright at a table across from my Master, without lowering my eyes, without spreading my knees to indicate that I was receptive to him. Every time I opened my mouth I felt the word Master rising from my throat, and every time I had to catch it and put something else in its place. Honey. Sweetheart. Those words were acceptable for the moment.

He came to the table eventually. He looked at the two slices of beef, then at me, and a smile crept into his face.

He didn't touch the soup; he simply reached for the steak with his fingers.

"Use the knife, M-Sicarius," I said, slapping his hand.

He reached for the spoon instead and began sipping from the bowl daintily.

"You've become quite good at this," he said, nodding at the table, at all of it. "I remember you telling me that you had never learned to cook a thing in your old life. Paid other people to feed you."

"Thank you, honey," I said. "Actually, I used to cook all the time. Wasn't bad at it too. How was work today?"

We ate. He talked: about the campaign he had just come from, the shifting loyalties among the Northern holds, how the southern houses kept buying mercenary contracts they intended to renegotiate the moment the fighting stopped going their way. He drew invisible borders on the tabletop with one finger, showing me where Thamud pressed against Talos's western flank, where the mountain passes made an army's supply line its greatest weakness.

Then he asked me what I was reading.

"First Year at Mary and Magnus' Tower by Elsa Holmberg."

"Holmberg? As in our City of Holmberg?"

"She was one of the last in her line before Holmberg was sacked by you know who."

"Sounds boring," he said, popping the last piece of steak in his mouth with his fingers.

"It's about a school for rich princesses. Think Town and Country mixed with bitchy Enid Blyton episodes."

"A bit more interesting? Maybe?"

"There's a whole chapter on Zeinab of Thamud, and her mother, Zhou Yu."

"You mean, The Witch Queen."

"The Witch Queen," I confirmed. "I wish I could meet her. She speaks English, apparently."

"And Mandarin, apparently."

"Duh. She literally is Chinese. What else would she speak?"

"I don't know," he said, theatrically stroking his chin. "Teochew, Hainanese, Cantonese… Just because people think she might have been transported from China…"

"Okay, smart ass. I'm the one who speaks Mandarin here, not you."

"Just saying," he said, tilting his head from side to side.

It was, in its way, a perfectly natural conversation between two people who cared for each other. Except that no part of it was natural. Every question I asked, every attentive nod of my head, cost me the same effort it might have cost me once to hold a plank position. I could do it of course. I had been trained to do far harder things than sit at a table with my Master and call him honey and a smart ass.

I cleared the bowls when we had finished, stacking them by the basin, and it was there I thought of the night that had taught me, more thoroughly than any lesson at the Obsequium, exactly what a true man of An was capable of, and exactly what I had become in the months since.

It had happened on the road between Holmberg and Novus Augusta, in the long stretch of forest where the mercenary roads thinned to game trails.

We had made camp in a clearing off the main track, the air cold enough to numb my fingers if I kept them out of my sleeves too long. Sicarius had gone off before dusk to check a snare line, telling me to keep the fire fed.

I heard them before I saw them. Ten of them came into the firelight together, rough men in mismatched leather. I did not run. I did not reach for the small knife I used for kindling. I was a slave girl, and they were men.

"My Master is not a man to be trifled with, sirs," I said.

The one nearest me, missing most of his left ear, grinned. "We plan to kill your Master, whore," he said, and the others laughed.

My head had been bowed, my tone had been deferential, but that had made them angrier at me somehow; as though my warning had been an insult rather than a courtesy. The nearest one took a fistful of my hair and forced my head back until I was looking up at the dark sky.

And then they raped me. Slave rape-I had been trained for that as well.

My body performed what my body had been trained to perform while some quieter part of me watched from a slight distance, waiting. Hands moved over me; someone's palm closing rough over my breast, someone's fingers parting me without preamble the way the buyer at auction once had. I was wet and ready. The first person who found this called me a slut. Another slapped my face and said I was a natural slave.

They took turns. I made the sounds my training had built into me.

Sicarius came back into the clearing while the fourth man had his hands on me. I don't know how much of it he saw before he acted. He simply moved, and men began to die.

It was the economy of it that stayed with me longest, more than the blood, more than the sounds the men made. He never raised his voice. He never seemed, even once, to hurry. A blade opened one man's throat before the man beside him had turned fully around. Another went down with a thrust so precise and quick that I did not understand how he had died. He moved through them the way a man moves through a wheat field with a scythe. He later told me that he didn't disembowel anyone because that would have caused a stink almost immediately. And we still hadn't had our breakfast.

Ten bodies in the dirt, and my Master standing among them breathing no harder than he had before he started, wiping his blade clean on a dead man's coat. He grumbled under his breath that he had just oiled his blade and would have to do it again that night.

He didn't comfort me or ask me if was "alright." I surmised that he had seen far too many women raped in his short career as a roving mercenary. Possibly raped a few himself. And I was a natural slave. I had been "trained" for this.

I stayed on my knees where I had been left and felt a relief so sharp my hands shook; and underneath that relief, mortifyingly, a flush of pure want that had everything to do with what I had just watched him do.

"Master, I'm sorry," I said, when he came to me, checking my body the way he might have checked his horse for injury. "I'm sorry for not being…" I stopped, ashamed of the shape the sentence wanted to take.

"Not being more of a man? Were you going to say that?"

"No, Master," I said sullenly. "I'm not an idiot."

He laughed.

"You wouldn't have these thoughts if you belonged to any other Master," he said, drawing me up by my arms. "No man of An expects a slave girl to defend herself. In any fashion. We both know your natural instincts are to submit. Don't be ashamed of yourself." He said the last while holding my chin gently, then withdrew as if he had made a mistake. "I've been too gentle with you. That's the reason for this. And you are far too intelligent for a slave girl."

"I did enjoy watching you kill them though," I said.

I set the last bowl in the rack to dry and looked over at him where he sat again by the weapons rack, running that same oiled cloth over a blade that didn't need it.

He had found the shape he was always meant to wear. So had I.

The common room of Fatum Ama ran loud most nights.

It was Holmberg's finest whore house which really wasn't saying much. Master Sicarius always made an effort to loan me out to the most established brothels of the cities we visited, if only to spare me the long hours of training new arrivals-which was inevitable at businesses with lesser resources. To be honest, I didn't really mind. Being a trainer made me feel useful at least.

It was perhaps a year into my time with Master Sicarius, before the campaigns took him away from me more and more often, that a free woman walked in on a merchant's arm.

It was Fae.

She wore good wool the color of an autumn field and a silver brooch pinned at one shoulder. I froze for perhaps a quarter second and then crossed to serve them. Her eyes found mine and I watched recognition move through them, which quickly cooled to the scorn a free woman gives a mere slave girl.

It was well done. I was proud of her.

"This one," her companion said to her. He nodded at me. "An effeminate Ki male injected with Muliebris. Rare stock these days, and almost always natural slaves. Consider her yours for the evening, my dear. My treat."

Mistress Fae laughed. It came out of her before she could catch it. For that one unguarded second she was simply Fae again, the girl who used to smack my backside on her way past the bar.

"How generous, my dear," she said, once she had gathered herself, and the clipped tone came back. "Thank you. I accept."

I knelt.

The private room they gave us was small, and Mistress Fae settled onto the edge of the pallet while her companion sat in a chair, wine cup in hand.

"Begin at my feet," the Mistress said. I sensed the hesitation and a modicum of civility. She was not as practiced at giving orders as she was at receiving them. Not yet.

I lifted her foot into my lap and drew my tongue slowly along the arch of it, then took each toe in turn into my mouth, working them with the same care I would give a man's cock. She made a small sound and her toes curled against my tongue.

I worked upward from there: the inside of her ankle, the soft skin behind her knee, her inner thighs, then the crease where her thigh met her hip; pausing at each threshold long enough to feel her breath change before I moved further; inhaling the musk emanating from her pussy as I drew near her small bush of pubic hair. Her companion's cup had stopped moving toward his mouth. I could feel his attention on us both, and I let myself perform for it a little, arching my back, sighing against her skin; because a slave girl who is only good at the mechanics and not the theater of pleasure has understood only half her training.

When I finally settled my mouth over her, she was already slick. I took my time there too, circling her clitoris with the flat of my tongue because I knew she preferred that to my fingers. Her hand found the back of my head, and I heard her breath go ragged. I did not stop until she had finished twice, her thighs closing hard around my ears the second time, a broken sound coming out of her that her companion clearly enjoyed a great deal.

Afterward, once he had stepped out to settle accounts with the house, Mistress Fae let me kneel at her feet.

"The girls at the tavern think you're dead," she said. "Killed on the crossing back to Ki. That's the story we were given. I am… glad to see that you are alive."

I bowed my head so she wouldn't see whatever was written across my face.

"You will always be my friend, Mistress," I said. "That will never change."

She didn't correct me for the presumption. She sat still for a moment, then rose, smoothed her skirt, and crossed the room to rejoin her companion without once looking back at me.

I traveled frequently with my Master; mostly to the North but also to Albion and Thamud. It was the Master who arranged the loan in Novus Augusta that put me back on Lustrum's floor. I had never thought to ask him myself, which seemed foolish or selfish in retrospect.

I came through the same door, and the warm lamp light and the smell of roasting meat hadn't changed at all. Master Drest looked at me and frowned.

"I remember," he said, shutting his eyes momentarily. "Skye. A Ki girl. Stable mates with Caia and Akina." He paused. "If I had known how scarce your kind would get, I wouldn't have staked the other four in a dice game the way I did. That was poor judgment on my part."

I bowed. What more was there to say; maybe this was the reason why I never asked permission to return.

Pell was the only face left from the original chain. When she turned and saw me she blurted out: "I thought you were dead."

"I was," I said. "This is my second life."

Two weeks into my return, I was working a table of Qin merchants, their robes cut in the expensive silks that the Talosians could only dream of.

They were well into their cups when the least inebriated of them, a merchant called Zheng, reached down into his bag and withdrew a supple piece of leather rolled tightly into a thin tube. He unrolled it with a flourish, and when I saw the 19×19 grid, a smile came to my face.

"Have you heard of the state of Qin, little girl?" Master Zheng asked, grinning at his companions.

"Pell said she plays weiqi, you idiot," another said, cuffing him lightly. "Of course she knows where Qin is."

I played three games. I was rusty in the first and lost it cleanly. I lost the second more narrowly, my memories of classic fuseki coming into sharper focus. By the third, whatever had been dormant in me woke fully. I tried an early 3-3 invasion and won without difficulty.

Master Zheng sat back, frustrated but genuinely impressed.

"No one plays like that in the manuals I've read," he grumbled.

"She's from Ki, you dumb egg," one of his more drunken companions shouted. "They have 'Electric' Brains there."

"If I had the means," Master Zheng said, "I would buy you and bring you home. Way out west. A girl who plays like that is wasted pouring wine."

"Thank you, Master," I said. "Would that be where the Witch Queen once served Queen Pingyang as a slave attendant, Master?"

The table erupted.

"We don't call her a witch where we come from," one of them said, half-offended on her behalf.

"Even if she was mildly witch-like," Master Zheng said.

"Stop!" The offended one said again.

"Isn't she dead?" another asked, genuinely uncertain.

"Returned from the dead, rather," the first said, waving his cup. "Haven't you heard?"

It was only then that I noticed that another patron had been taking quick glances at our final game position. I knelt, bowed, and excused myself, citing my duties elsewhere in the room. Master Zheng reached out and caught me by the forearm as I rose.

"A rematch," he said. "Before the night is out."

I told him I would find him, but I was already moving toward the far corner of the room; because the man was sitting alone with a cup; his hair still untidy and his tunic still disheveled; talking with someone at the neighboring table.

Master Cassian.

I made my way across the floor with a fresh jug. I filled his cup to the measure he always preferred, and he raised it toward me in thanks, his attention still fixed on whatever his neighbor was saying about grain prices along the eastern road.

Nothing in his face had changed. No pause, no curiosity about a slave girl he had just seen playing weiqi; none of the things I had spent that walk across the room bracing myself against and hoping for. I stayed near his table longer than required, refilling cups that were still nearly full, straightening a stack of coins someone had left slightly askew, giving him every reasonable chance to look up and find something in my face worth pausing over.

He didn't. His conversation moved on to the price of iron and local sources for the wood of Kaya trees; then to a wedding between the royal houses of Thamud and Talos. His eyes passed over me twice more in the ordinary course of gesturing for the jug without acknowledgement.

I had carried the memory of that night in the private room for almost a year; how he had mastered me; how I had submitted utterly and completely to him. And he had looked straight through me three times in ten minutes without a flicker of recognition.

It appeared that I was truly dead.

Three weeks later, at the close of a slow shift, Master Drest told me to assume binding position. I knelt, bowed my head, and crossed my wrists without asking why.

"You've been sold, Valeria," he said, looping the cord and drawing it snug. "Sicarius arranged it by correspondence. He's in Thamud, gathering with the others. There's talk of a real war coming, not just another border squabble. He doesn't have the time to settle this in person, but he asked me to tell you that he'll find you when he returns."

I thought I heard Master Drest mutter, "If he returns," under his breath. He paused for a moment, pulling lightly on the leading end of the rope. "I wonder if he has gambling debts." I knew that Master Sicarius had as much interest in gambling as being knifed in the back.

"The buyer's an old friend of his," Master Drest continued. "Good house. You'll be treated well enough. I wouldn't let you be sold to some vagrant, not that a vagrant would be able to afford you of course." He chuckled to himself. "You're welcome to return if your new Master permits."

I said nothing, and he led me out through Lustrum's door into the lamp lit streets of Novus Augusta.

The house he brought me to stood apart from its neighbors, three storeys tall and deathly dark and quiet. When the front door opened I smelled the dust and mustiness which gathers from paper and parchment. It was clearly the domicile of some scholar with rooms built around reading rather than commerce.

The single woman of the household, a wide-eyed slave who struck me as war booty, led me to a room on the second floor. I understood, looking at it, that whoever kept this house did not think of a slave's quarters the way most Masters did.

It was a bedroom in every practical sense, a real bed with real linens, a chest for clothes. The only mark of what I actually was sat bolted into the wall beside the bed: a heavy iron ring. It was the kind of thing used to chain disobedient but desirable slaves. I had role-played that once or twice during my training; being kicked off the bed by a disgruntled Master.

A note lay folded on the coverlet. The hand was unfamiliar, but the instruction was simple enough: prepare a meal for three; your Master will return two hours after dusk.

I found the kitchen without needing to be shown and worked with whatever I could find in the larder. It would have to be something simple, I didn't have much time. I decided quickly after a fast survey: Cream of Leek and Barley Pottage, and Roast Salt Pork with Apple-Herb Sauce.

Ms. War Booty (her name was Daphne I soon discovered) stood at the kitchen door still wide-eyed and with a look of consternation on her face.

"Well," I turned around to look at her. "Are you going to help?"

She shook her head almost immediately.

I timed each element of the meal backward from the failing light, so that everything would land on the table hot at the exact moment dusk gave way to full dark.

When it was done, Daphne was still at the doorway looking at me.

"The Master asked for a meal for three," I said. "Are you the third person or should I expect a Mistress and her child?"

Nothing.

I sighed and went to the front entrance and stood waiting.

I went to my knees the moment I heard his boots on the threshold. Spine straight, knees apart, palms up, and head bowed.

I could smell him before the door had fully opened. It reached me the way a familiar piece of music reaches you before you've placed a name to it.

"Welcome home, Master," I said, without lifting my eyes.

He came through the doorway and set down a leather bag from which a new yellow-hued weiqi board peeped out; then bent and worked his boots off before entering in the fashion of the Qin. He stood in front of me then, and for a long moment he didn't speak at all.

His hand came into my hair.

He didn't grip it, didn't pull or test or claim. He simply let his fingers settle against my scalp, mussing up my thick mane, and began to make small circles with the same patient attention he had once given me in a small stone room at Lustrum a lifetime ago.

His fingers found the tension at my upper spine and worked it loose, then moved lower, along the back of my neck, into the muscle that months of service had made slightly tight. I made a sound low in my throat, and felt my shoulders drop as I pushed into his touch. He kept at it until I was shuddering lightly, my whole spine gone soft, the training forgotten, the careful posture I had held dissolving. This would have cost me the silver ring on my collar, I thought to myself.

Then his hands reached under my arms, and he lifted me the way he might have lifted a pet rabbit, which I supposed, by An's measure, I was; and set me on the tips of my toes so that our faces were nearly level.

He kissed me.

I returned it without a half-second's hesitation, the way I had wanted to for months on end. My hands came up to find the front of his shirt pulling him closer and my tongue found his.

Whatever price had changed hands to bring me here, I had just been recognized, finally, by the one man on two worlds whose recognition I had never stopped wanting.

Chapter 8: Master

I woke in a real bed decked out in real linen, and, for a moment, felt the urge to kneel and wait for someone to tell me what to do.

No one did.

There would be no morning inspection here, no voice telling me that my knees were not parted wide enough. It was a novelty of sorts and not entirely welcome. I sat up slowly, drew the blanket around my shoulders-because I was cold and because that was what a "lady of the house" would do; and went looking for my Master.

I found him in the kitchen, already dressed, slicing bread. He looked up when I came in and didn't seem at all surprised that I wasn't naked. Which concerned me.

"There's cheese in the cold box," he said, "and eggs if you want them. Or… Daphne can prepare your breakfast."

That was the whole of it. He showed me through the house himself rather than delegating it to Ms. War Booty. He opened doors as we passed them: the linen room; a small chamber for bathing with a copper tub; a room given over entirely to maps pinned along one wall; a few small reading rooms; and then the second floor library.

It was the largest room in the house. Shelves ran floor to ceiling and across two levels; each crowded with volumes bound in leather, bound scrolls in the manner of the Qin, and large codices. A writing table sat beneath a drawn window, and on it, lay a stack of paper, a bottle of ink, two quills, and three leather-bound ledgers.

"You'll want somewhere to keep your thoughts," Master Cassian said. Then he left me to my own devices.

I crossed to the shelves and let my fingers trail along the spines, feeling for the raised ridges of old binding, and opened at random. After an hour or so, I picked up one of the quills and turned it in my hand, testing its balance, then set it down again.

I cooked our second supper together just as I did the first, though Daphne helped this time round. Partway through the meal he set down his cup and asked what I made of a line he had been turning over that afternoon; something from a Talosian philosopher about whether a well-made cage could be called a kindness if the bird inside it had never known the sky.

"I would want to know if the bird chose the cage, Master," I said.

"And if it didn't choose it, but has come to realize it prefers it?"

"Then, Master, I would say that your metaphors have become a bit too obvious and considerably less instructive since we last had a similar discussion."

I wanted to be disciplined, but he only laughed.

The second day, the trouble moved to my body instead of my mind.

I caught myself watching his hands at the table, the way he broke bread, and then, before I could stop myself, my eyes had dropped lower where his leather breeches outlined something I wanted.

I busied myself with rearranging the serving dishes twice before dinner; moving a bowl three inches to the left and the knives more correctly in alignment with the forks. When I looked up, I saw Daphne with the mushroom and onion tarts on a tray, and a look of amusement on her face. I scowled at her.

That night, alone in the real bed with its real linens, I let my hand drift down over my own breast, my thumb finding the nipple and rolling it until it stood hard. I was three strokes from finishing what I had started when I stopped myself, drew my hand back, and lay still; telling myself that whatever release I found here by my own hand would only be a smaller, meaner thing than what was owed me.

By the third evening, I had managed to calm myself in the full knowledge that my Master was only testing me; and that my happiness would be achieved by harnessing the patience I had been trained to.

Daphne set down the first dish of smoked trout chowder and withdrew to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on the venison stew I had prepared earlier in the day.

The conversation came easily, the same back-and-forth I remembered from a dozen games of weiqi at Lustrum. For a while I let myself revel in it, the plain pleasure of my Master enjoying all of my person. At an appropriate juncture, he set his cup down, and reached into his coat, and laid a folded document on the table between us.

I was an expensive piece of vellum with a familiar disc of red wax closing it.

"Your papers," he said. "Updated. A passage is booked for you to Earth, on a private berth. No reintegration protocol this time; I have made absolutely sure of this. You will be happy to know that those responsible for your previous experience have been dealt with in the appropriate fashion." He took a sip from his glass of wine. "Billy's assets, his properties, all of it remains exactly as you left it. Yes, even after all this time. You'll want for nothing back home." He paused and looked up at the ceiling lamp as though considering whether anything else needed saying, then returned to my face. "You can leave in the morning."

I felt the heat come up my throat first, then into my face and my ears; a flush I couldn't have hidden if I had wanted to; my pale skin betraying every degree of it. My hands, resting on the table curled slowly into fists, the knuckles whitening.

I did not look at the papers. I would not give them an ounce of my attention; would not so much as glance at the seal that had once made me so happy and which now made me want to put my fist through a wall.

I looked at him instead.

I didn't care to govern whatever was on my face; couldn't have if my life depended on it; and for once in all my months of service and training I didn't fucking care.

The silence went on until, finally, I said: "No, Master. I will not go. I would rather die."

My tone was pure unadulterated rage, it was all I could do to prevent myself from screaming at him. My whole body was shaking with the effort of keeping it a sentence at all.

Cassian sat back in his chair and looked at me the way he might look at a mildly interesting problem in a book of mathematics, his eyes holding mine without any of the softening I wanted from him.

I lifted my chin defiantly, waiting for the flat of his hand, for some correction, because I had just refused a direct order from him.

As expected, he rose, picked up my papers, made to open the seal, and with a small flourish, a little flick of the wrist, tossed it into the fire.

Then he laughed.

It came out of him whole and unguarded, filling the room; and I stood there with my face still burning, watching the papers curl and blacken and go to ash. And I felt fury and confusion cross my face all at once in a single expression that must have been half murderous and half delighted.

"You… asshole," I finished in English, because I didn't want him to understand everything that I felt at that moment.

He kept laughing, looking at my flushed, furious face with an undisguised pleasure that made it so much worse,

"You should look at yourself now, Valeria," he said, barely catching his breath. "Really. The anger looks good on you. I don't think you've had such a good purgative in all your time as a slave girl."

I crossed the room and began hitting him, small girlish blows against his chest and his abdomen-I couldn't really reach his face-that landed with all the force of a sparrow against a stone wall; and that did nothing at all except make my fists ache.

He let me. He didn't raise a hand to stop me, didn't so much as step back, just stood there absorbing it, laughing still; and somewhere behind me I heard Daphne make a small strangled sound and clap both hands over her eyes, before her footsteps hurried out and the door slammed shut behind her.

Then his hands closed around my wrists, and he drew me down with him onto the rug in front of the hearth. I fought him, I went with him, I turned my face away from him. But he put a finger to my chin and turned me back towards him, saying: "Obey."

And I did.

Near dawn, Master Cassian slept with one arm around me, his breathing slow, a small smile on his face.

I eased out from beneath him, carefully; the way I had been taught; and found my way back to the library.

I still didn't know whether what I had said across that table to my Master had come from some true, unmanufactured part of me or from the Muliebris. Perhaps, the question itself was the answer; that I was probably as free as anyone ever gets to be, on Ki or on An, man or woman, slave or otherwise.

I dipped the quill because I finally had something to write:

Everyone know how stories like this are supposed to begin, and how they invariably end.

A woman falls for a man and thinks she can change him. Instead, he enslaves her. The cruel man repents. The slave escapes, but then remembers who she truly is, and they find each other again.

My story is simply a variation on this age-old tale.

Epilogue: The Only Life That Is True

And we lived happily ever after. Perhaps that was true.

I sat back and looked at the sentence for a while. It read like something a very good slave girl would write.

But there is another ending I remember. That he never came and no one remembered me. Perhaps that was true as well. But that did not mean I was unhappy. Because I was still a woman and a slave girl.

I pressed my fingers against the page. I wanted to feel the grain of the vellum under my skin.

Every choice across two years…was any of it mine? Or was it the Muliebris completing a shape it had already decided on the day the Book opened for me? Perhaps freedom is a word I use out of habit and nothing more.

The lamp flickered, and when I looked down at the last line I had written, the ink was blurring at the edges. I reached to steady the lamp and found that my hand was indistinct, the whole limb rendering itself in fewer and fewer details the longer I looked. The smell went next. Paper and old leather, gone. My hands were still pressed flat, palms down, fingers spread, except there was no vellum beneath them anymore, only a short length of cord drawn snug around both wrists. The wood of the writing table had become something harder and colder under my knees.

Everything else went out like a tide pulling back from a shore.

I was kneeling, wrists bound.

The stone beneath me was cool and familiar; as was the gravity that pressed my knees into the stone with a fraction more insistence than on Earth. Beside me knelt four other women, my four sisters. I knew each of them by the shape of their shoulders. Akina, on my left, Caia beyond her. Nysa and Arannis at the end of the row. In my belly, I felt a low, steady warmth: the Muliebris, finishing its work, closing whatever doors it had opened.

My eyes found the single high window set into the far wall, where the shimmering light of An's morning was already climbing through a sky I would come to see as mundane. My body was new. My mind entirely my own. But I could not tell whether what I had just experienced was memory, prophecy, or a life well lived.

A woman entered the cell carrying a flat glowing pad. She moved down the row, pausing before each of my friends in turn. She reached me last; studied my face for longer than she had studied any of the others. There was nothing on it worth hiding: no panic, certainly not grief; perhaps happiness that nothing had been imagined, that I was truly a slave girl on An.

"Batch 7347-4," she said, into the pad, "pre-conditioned acceptance. Full integration anticipated."

Then, breaking whatever pattern she had been keeping with the others, she cupped my cheek and said:

"Everything will be as you dreamed it would be, my beautiful lucky girl. Have faith at least in that."

I smiled and nodded.

Then, releasing my cheek, she straightened and addressed all five of us at once.

"Slave girls," she said. "Are you ready to serve."

"Yes, Mistress," we said together, without a moment's hesitation; mine included, mine perhaps loudest of all.

I was eager. Genuinely eager. The way I imagined a person is eager on the morning of the thing they have wanted for longer than they can remember. And I wanted, more than anything in either life, to live all of it again-more deeply this time, missing nothing, neglecting nothing.

A hand settled on my shoulder from behind, warm on my naked flesh. It moved upward into my thick dark mane, mussing it with fingers that lingered at my scalp.

None of the other girls turned to see who it was. Akina, beside me, kept her eyes looking straight ahead with the rest of us; but I caught, at the very edge of my vision, the small smile that crossed her face, a smile visible only to me.

And when he spoke, the voice was familiar and welcome: "You are far too intelligent for a slave girl, my love."