Royal Treatment Read online

  Royal Treatment

  by Cecilia Tan

  Royal Treatment

  Copyright © 2012 by Circlet Press, Inc.

  Cover Art Copyright © 2012 by tentan.

  Published by Circlet Press, Inc.

  39 Hurlbut Street

  Cambridge, MA 02138

  This electronic version was produced in-house at Circlet Press.

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  Part One

  I wasn't supposed to see what I did. I was supposed to be elsewhere, occupied, doing what doesn't matter now.

  I wasn't supposed to see my father rocked back on his heels by the power of a slap so hard that it sounded like a gunshot in the spare, hard room he used as his audience chamber. The orbital station he called home was never luxurious; softness did not suit him. I was too late to hear what he had said, or see what he had done, to deserve such a blow. I ducked to the side of the doorway.

  "Give me your hand," I heard a female voice say. The woman in the room with him, by the glimpse I had caught of her, was someone important. I dared a peek around the edge of the open hatch. She was in bright scarlet, the royal house's color, carried a rod of office, and had a long, red cloth woven through the mound of hair on her head.

  My father opened his hand, palm up, and extended it toward her. She placed something in it, and I saw his fist clench instantly, the cords of his muscles and veins standing out as he squeezed whatever it was as hard as he could. It was hurting him, as if she had dropped a hot coal into his palm, yet the pain never registered on his face.

  She smiled. "You always were a stoic one."

  He nodded.

  "You've been hiding him long enough," she then said, and I suddenly knew why I had been sent off on an errand just before. Any thought I had of sneaking back to my duties disappeared. This visit from an important personage was about me.

  "I haven't been hiding him," he said, his broad shoulders tensing visibly. "His mother's people…"

  "Come now, come now." she said, her voice sinuous and light. "We know about the school on Phynia, about the girls whose parents called them suddenly home. He's one of us, Audan. You of all people must recognize that."

  "I will train him, as I have done before. When he is ready."

  "He is ready. He is more than ready. It is you who are not ready to face that he is not a boy anymore. He is twenty-three, Audan."

  "I know how old my own son is."

  The bantering tone she had been using evaporated. "Trella will not be denied in this. You will send him to Baelia where he will meet the others. Tomorrow. Be thankful I am not taking him with me now."

  And then I saw something else I had never seen. Which was my father, slave trader, slave trainer, and former high priest of the Empire, dropping to his knees. The woman parted her scarlet robes and he placed a cursory kiss upon her mound. Before he could rise, though, she had the rod on his shoulder. She lifted one elegant leg in scarlet tightskin over his other shoulder, and then I could no longer see his face because her robes were in the way. By the sound of it, though, he was licking her, and she was enjoying it.

  I turned away in shock. Yes, of course it was within her rights as a noble superior to demand such favors, but as far as I knew it was rarely done other than as a part of a public abasement. And I had never seen my father abased before anyone before. I knew, of course, that he had been through the full training, had years as an acolyte to the priesthood as well as years at court, so surely in his lifetime he must have spent as many hours on his knees as any man of his position. But I had never seen it. I had never met a Kylaran who outranked him. And certainly never one who demanded her full right.

  I also suspected, as it was certainly rumored, that my father had not touched a woman sexually since my mother's death. Men yes, both slaves and peers, but women, no.

  If the long disassociation with the female genitalia had affected him, I could not tell. It seemed mere moments before she began to cry out, and I heard the sound of the rod falling to the floor, then something heavier. I peeked again and saw she had collapsed, and he now had his arms locked around her thighs as his tongue continued to work, as her cries rose and fell and rose again. Now she was trying to push him away, but weakly, her hands barely responding as her body arched with pleasure and sensation and she writhed.

  When he pulled away, he remained on his knees, eyes up, hands open on thighs, perfect posture. Hers was somewhat less than perfect as she stood, still slightly a-shudder. He sat placidly, the only evidence of his exertions was the sweat making a fringe of the gray hairs behind his ears. She opened her mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it, and instead left through the opposite hatch, the one toward the airlock.

  I waited until he had regained his feet to come into his presence, and I did not kneel when I approached him. Between us, we only used the protocols when I was actively training. But there were advantages to not looking one's superior in the eye.

  "You need to learn to hide your emotions better," was the first thing he said. I suppose it was obvious from the expression on my face that I had just seen everything. He looked at me as I stood there, trying to think of what to say, what to ask him. "Everything changes now," he added. His eyes swept the room. The space was curved, all white and gray, as antiseptic as the medical center and as empty as a tomb, save two chairs on a raised platform at one end.

  I found my tongue. "When she said 'Trella'…"

  "She meant Princess Trella. You're to join a group of others in forming a circle for her." He used the old word for "circle," torun. The word had echoes in it of our words for collar, and for embrace, and for strangle. He went to sit in the left hand chair, then sat staring at the palm of his hand.

  "Are you hurt?"

  "No. Siksie's little agony bomb left no marks." He held up the hand to prove it. "She's a vicious one," he told me then. "And I will apologize to you now in advance for the suffering she is going to inflict on you to get back at me."

  "For taking control from her," I stated.

  "Exactly," he said, his approval radiating from his eyes as he almost smiled before he became serious again. "But don't think she is so easily beaten. I took my one opportunity and made it count."

  "I know how the game is played..."

  "It's not a game." It was not like him to interrupt me. "I won't be able to protect you down there."

  I opened my mouth to say I could take care of myself, but this time he stopped me before the words came out.

  "No, you don't understand. In the palace they are not just about who is sleeping with whom and who is dominant to whom. I could really lose you."

  "You mean she might make me her slave consort forever," I answered. "I know that. Anyone in the circle could…"

  "Could end up dead," he finished, finally shutting me up. It was a signal that I should listen. I spread my feet slightly and settled my weight on my legs. If he started to lecture I might be standing there for a long time. "What the other sons and daughters of our noble peers and superiors might do for power, what rules they wi
ll follow and which they will break, I don't know. You will have no allies but your own wits."

  He rubbed his knuckle hard against his chin. "I always knew you would someday have to take a place in our society," he said. "Even when I didn't want to admit it to myself. But I didn't think it would be quite like this. Right into the palace!"

  "Surely one of the others will be eager for the position and the rest of us are just there for show," I said.

  He huffed. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if the choosing were rigged. But things are rarely so simple. Those who bear a grudge against me would think nothing of taking you apart just to see me suffer."

  He proceeded to give me a crash course in palace politics as they had been when he was my age and what he knew now. I had been on and off Kylar many times in my life. I wasn't a complete stranger to the protocols, the hierarchies, and the rules, even if Audan had, for his own reasons, raised me outside of them for the most part. I was also confident in my abilities to withstand pain and pleasure, and to deal out both. But we didn't know anything about Trella, who had been raised mostly in seclusion, and what we knew about the Emperor himself, well, let's just say there was a reason my father lived on an orbital platform and not on the surface of the planet. I still didn't know exactly what had caused the falling out between the two of them years ago. Once upon a time they had been so close that my father named his first born son, me, after the man. Certainly many Kylaran nobles did the same, it was a common enough custom, but not the sort of thing Audan would have done without a reason.

  He also would not have kept me standing there through the whole conversation without a reason. But maybe he had said it himself. Everything changes now.

  "Obviously, I have to go," I said when he wound down. "But is there something you want me to do?"

  He made a noise, half-grunt, half-gurgle. "Your mother wanted you to be your own man. In her eyes, that meant not being… dependent on the Kylaran way." He suddenly glanced up, as if realizing I was still standing, and indicated the chair next to him with a flick of his eyes.

  I sat. "What do you mean?"

  "She felt a person had to be a person first and a master or a slave second. I promised her I would give you the chance to discover who you were outside of dominance and submission." His eyes lingered on the chair as if he had never seen it before. "Outside… protocol." He seemed almost chagrined at how easily the two of us had slipped into a formal mode. "That's why you spent most of your life away from here."

  "But you knew this might happen." I thought about the two times he had sent me to foster on the homeworld, once when I was seven, and once when I was fourteen.

  "I had to respect her dying wish, but also prepare you for a life here, if you wanted it."

  "You never told me it was because of her."

  He didn't answer that, merely let the statement hang there as truth. Then he said, "I don't believe you can be anything other than what you are," and I realized we agreed. Perhaps my mother was able to make a separation where the Kylaran way stopped and the Kylaran personality started, but Audan didn't and neither did I. "And I am sure the Emperor thinks that, as well."

  "It sounds like someone has been watching me." My sudden recall from Phynia was making more sense to me now, too. I had been engaging in, shall we say, a healthy sexual life while there and had created a circle of willing slaves of my own there. Phynian girls are very particular but very specific about their virginity, and that had made it a particularly interesting challenge for me. And even the woman who had just been here, what had she said? He is one of us?

  "Trella wants you for some reason, Arshan." My father stepped down off the dais and we faced each other eye to eye. "I don't know if it is revenge for something I did, or if it is part of some other scheme we have yet to uncover, or if maybe she just likes what she sees. All I know is, if she bonds you for life as her slave. . . " He grimaced at the thought.

  "How do you know I wouldn't be happy as her slave?" I asked him, smirking at my own thought. "Maybe she's what I've been waiting for."

  He gripped me by the shoulders. "Don't joke about it!" His eyes searched mine.

  "Didn't you teach me yourself that even the most dominant of souls must serve sometimes?"

  "I know you, Arshan. You were not made to be bonded as a slave. Your soul would die."

  I shrugged off his intensity, though not his grip. "It's not as if I haven't served before. Remember when you sent me to Mirell's house?" Mirell had been cruel and sweet to me, exacting and never skimpy with either punishment or reward. I remembered her fondly.

  "No. This wouldn't be like training. This would be forever, a pact drawn in blood in front of the gods."

  "I thought you didn't believe in the gods anymore."

  He stared at me. "The gods are real, Arshan," he said softly. "I just no longer follow them."

  Part Two

  I landed on the surface of the planet the next day, escorted by a scarlet-robed acolyte who was silent for the entire trip. She left me in a sleep chamber in the Sunset Palace, the "vacation" palace, if you will, where the princess was gathering all her potential suitors.

  Suitors was not the right word, but partners wasn't right either. Candidates, perhaps? Out of the circle, she would draw not only her slave consort, but possibly other important figures in her court. That such a group had not been convened for Trella before now was curious, as some young royalty in our history gathered their peers when they were barely teenagers or younger. Some of the groups had been known to bond strongly and stick together through difficult times. But it was as Audan had said. Many of the old rules and the old ways were being forced to change, even as those ruling kept the ones they liked.

  The chamber was sparsely furnished, a strange mix of ancient and new. The bed was a thoroughly recent construction, with ties and attachment points cleverly hidden around an indestructible frame, but the bookshelf was old, real wood, and the books looked even older. I was afraid to touch them. It was clear no one lived in this room; it was for visitors.

  I met my fellows that night when we convened in a high-ceilinged hall for dinner. A circle is supposed to be eight, a sacred number, which if Trella were included in that number would make seven of the rest of us. Five women and one man besides me made up our group of candidates, which seemed skewed toward the female side. The other six mostly seemed younger than me, though not by much. Trella was not at the table, though. Instead, we were hosted by Siksie—the woman who had delivered the ultimatum to my father—and a bevy of house slaves who were silent around us, barely noticed as they whisked delicacies in and out.

  Siksie sat at the head of the banquet table, resplendent in the tightskin suit over which her robes flowed so smoothly. I was seated at her right, where I had plenty of opportunity to see her rod of office, which lay inert on the table between us. The handle was thick, carved or formed out of some substance that might have been wood or bone; the body tapered to an angular hook like a bird's beak. She was a gracious hostess, encouraging us to eat and drink, telling us stories about the history of the castle, which had been built in the days before space flight. The flagstones under our feet were cut and laid two thousand years ago, the tapestries woven six centuries back. But when the house slaves had cleared the dishes and we had each savored a chilled glass of a strong cordial I had never had before, she rose, raised her rod of office, and the face of the friendly hostess fell away like a mask.

  "There are no ranks here," she said. Then she smiled as if she had made a clever joke. "That is, among you seven, there are no ranks. Your birth order, social station, none of that matters now that you are within these walls." She chuckled. "Trella and I, of course, do have rank. As do the other members of the household, the officers, staff, and trainers. Of course, we are the same as always. Even the house slaves."

  She examined the crook at the end of her rod, as if something interesting were written there. "You are lower than the house slaves, of course."

  A gasp escap
ed from one of the women toward the end of the table.

  "You all begin at the bottom. Are you familiar with the tale of Zal's Ladder? As of this moment you are not even on the bottom rung, yet. How you perform during your tenure will determine the hierarchy within your little group and whether you rise in station above others outside of your group, as well." Her eyes flicked to me. "Trella will be training you herself some of the time, and one of you will bond to her, caishen to caitan." She used the formal words for master and slave, words which implied the bond in their very meaning.

  I could sense the glances going from one to the other among them, though I could not look away from Siksie, whose gaze stayed on me. "I know. You've all been raised to be masterful and dominant, your whole privileged, noble lives. You barely remember what it was like to be subservient to someone other than your sires."

  The rod came down on the table with a startling crack. "Well, you'll remember soon enough."

  With that, she stood and strode out of the room, leaving us there talking amongst ourselves. Or, I should say, the others talked amongst themselves while I sat and listened. Some of them had known each other from society, others had just met tonight. Already I could feel the shifting, though. Would friendships survive the climbing of the ladder? And why did I get the feeling that the odds were stacked against me?

  "What does it mean that we're lower than the house slaves?" the red-haired woman on my right turned to me to say. Her name was Miera and she was the daughter of a high-ranking official. She was also the one person there I thought might be my age or older, and I liked her voice and her smile. "They don't really expect us to grant them favors, do they?"

  "Yes, we do." A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who had been stoking the fire spoke. She put aside the tool with which she had been poking at the coals and came to stand in front of us. Her voice quavered a tiny bit as she said "Her ex-excellence, the Princess T-Trella expects the members of her house, slaves and all, to abide by these rules."