The Assassin and the Sorceress Ch. 09

"She had turned to madness. Or maybe lost the will to live. She didn't do anything productive, didn't help me scrounge up the things we needed. Sometimes I barely saw her. I don't know where she went. When I did see her, she rarely spoke. I asked her a few times what she was and how she was able to do the things she could do. She never answered me, even got mad at me for asking.

"When winter finally hit us, that's when things got really bad. It was freezing, so we stayed in the castle where it could be reasonably warm. It was just the two of us, shut up in here, rarely ever going outside. I think that's when she really started losing it. I'd hear her muttering to herself sometimes, when she thought she was alone. One morning I found her sitting in the dining room fully naked. I asked her why she was naked, but she didn't answer me. She muttered something about somebody she thought was after her: somebody she seemed very, very afraid of. I didn't know who she could possibly be afraid of, not after laying waste to a small army by herself. I thought she had finally slipped the rest of the way into madness, that that was the day I'd lost her."

"I know who she was talking about. The one who gave her her powers."

"What? Who? Do you know how she is able to do those things?"

"The details aren't important. Just know that her powers came at a price. What happened in Ash was as much his doing as hers. He turned people against her, tried his best to turn her against them. At least that's what she told me, and I believe her."

"Who was he? Was it the devil?"

"I don't know. And it doesn't matter. He did the evil things he wanted to do, and left Morgana to suffer the consequences. I imagine he's moved onto other things a long time ago. I don't know much more than that." In truth, Adrielle knew a good deal more than that, but decided Susan didn't need to know.

"Then she wasn't crazy. Well, whoever may have been after her, she's still here six-hundred years later. Anyway, her madness seemed to get better eventually. She finally stopped moping around the castle. She built a few things to make life more bearable for us, she could stay focused on a whole conversation. But..."

"But what?"

"She became mean. She did things to me. Even though she seemed to have her mind back, she started wearing clothes less and less. Sometimes she'd make me take mine off, and she'd... do things to me."

"What kinds of things? Did she ever hurt you?"

"No, not exactly. Just stupid games, usually with her magic. She would trap me in odd positions, sometimes even change my body. Not turn me into a toad, or anything. Usually small changes, things to inconvenience me or punish me."

"That makes sense," Adrielle said, with a note of recognition. "She told me that sculpting flesh is one of the most difficult and complex things she's ever tried to do. She only tried it the first time because she was badly injured. Even then, she said it took some courage. So I think a frog is out of the question. Anyway, what kinds of things did she do to you?"

"She liked to magically stick my skin to things. It was really weird. I think it was revenge for some prank I pulled on her once."

"When you convinced her to lick a lamp post in the middle of winter?"

"Ah, yeah. That was it. She told you, didn't she? It wasn't a nice thing I did to her." Susan looked down at the ground, looking horribly guilty.

"It was a long time ago, and nothing you did makes you deserve being a captive for all these centuries. Apparently, that prank did some things to her mind, though you couldn't have foreseen that."

"Apparently. Because every time I said something she didn't like, she'd stick my tongue to the wall as punishment. Sometimes for hours. And anything could set her off. I had no way of knowing. Usually it was for me suggesting we should leave this accursed place and try to rejoin civilization. Other times, it was for talking to her at all when she wanted to be alone. Or sometimes I think she pretended to be mad, because she was just bored. I think she got off on doing those things to me. Like I said, it was really weird.

"And then..." Susan paused to stifle a laugh. "Oh, it all seems so funny now in comparison. One time I'd had enough, and I begged her not to stick my tongue to the wall again. I don't even remember what it was I had said that got her mad that time. Well, she gave me a choice. Either my tongue, or my bare nipples!"

"That's hardly any better," Adrielle said, sympathetically.

"Are you kidding? I threw my blouse open in a heartbeat!" Susan was actually laughing now. "It beat having my tongue forced out of my mouth for possibly hours and drooling all over myself. At least having my boobs stuck I could stand normally, and I could move my head around. Sure, maybe it was more humiliating, but the last of my pride was long gone by then, so whatever. Morgana can have her perverted fun if it pleases her. After that I chose boobs every time. Then she gave me a choice between boobs or my pussy to a bench, which meant I got to sit! It actually got kind of entertaining, seeing what my next punishment would be. I don't know how she came up with some of them!"

"Did she do anything else? Did she ever force herself on you?"

"Only the first time, before... before all the killing."

"At the bridge? She told me that part. She said she regretted touching you how she did."

"Yeah, that time. After that she did actually keep her hands to herself. Her punishments were more annoying than anything else. No, her weird games weren't what made life with her so bad. It was just how she treated me in general. How she talked to me. She bossed me around, wanted to be in control of every little thing, refused to tolerate 'insolence...' She just treated me with contempt all the time. I think she blames me for what happened. I testified against her at the trial. I told them about what she did to me at the bridge, and that was all they needed to sentence her."

"You were just doing what you thought was right. It's not your fault."

"I know. But thanks. Well, we lived like that, just the two of us for several months. In the late spring, some soldiers from the Empire showed up. I don't know exactly what they were doing there, but looking for a witch that killed a whole town would have made sense. I saw them first. I was such a fool! I told Morgana of them approaching. I should have run to them when I had a chance. As soon as she saw them, too, she grabbed me and said we had to leave right then. She ran, and dragged me along with her. We ran far away from Ash. Then, we just wandered the wilderness together.

"I had no idea where she was taking us. She acted like she knew where she was going, but I think she was trying to get away from everything. 'We'll camp here for the night,' was what she said every night. Then she'd conjure us a tent and some food and firewood, whatever else we might need. In time, maybe after a month or two of wandering, we found a nice spot next to a mountainside lake. She declared we shall live here, and spent several hours conjuring us an entire house.

"I was so disappointed. The whole time I thought she had been taking us to a city, someplace with people. I told her so, and she threatened to 'punish' me again. We stayed there a couple of years, then moved on to another place. Then onto another. Sometimes we wandered, sometimes we settled. I never saw another soul. I wanted to leave, to try to go back to something resembling the life I knew, but of course I couldn't run away. I had no idea where we were, or where the next city was, and I had no idea how to survive in the woods by myself. I would have starved for sure.

"It was here that she decided to do away with her clothes for good. She'd go for days without putting anything on, and why not? Who else was going to see? One day she just left her clothes behind and never put them on again. She asked me why I even bothered wearing mine, when her magic can keep us warm. Well, of all the things she provided for us, new clothes for me wasn't one of them. Eventually mine were so worn out I finally decided why bother? And after that, we were both naked as animals.

"There was very little to do, even with all her magic. We actually became lovers... of a sort, as if I had somehow forgotten that she was the one that had taken everything of my former life I had known and loved from me. She still seemed to resent me, yet she refused to let me go. It never made sense to me."

"Wait, you were lovers?" Adrielle asked, curious to hear more details. "How did that start?"

"Well, it started when she... oh what the hell, there's no embarrassment left. It started when she caught me playing with myself one night. Hey, we all have needs, right? And it's not like there was much else for me to do. I figured she was going to use that as another excuse to 'punish' me. No, she said it had been taking me far too long, and thought I might need some help with it. Maybe she'd been watching me through her magical sight."

"What kind of 'help' was she talking about?"

"That's what I asked her. She said she'd offer me her tongue, or she could conjure me a 'phallus' to use, which might feel better than my fingers. I said no that time. But like I said, we all have needs, and not just for physical pleasure. I think I eventually said yes because I needed to feel someone's touch. A hug, even a shoulder rub would have been nice. I'm not going to say our relationship was a healthy one, but being intimate with her was about the only positive attention I ever got from her or from anyone."

"How was your relationship with her? How did she treat you?"

"She still treated me harshly somewhat often, but it was a little better. And at least while we were pleasuring each other, she seemed to actually like me. She even called me beautiful a time or two, which was nice. Usually, we'd finger each other, or take turns sucking each other off. She loved my breasts. She would play with them for hours when I'd let her. I was mostly putting up with that part, but it didn't bother me too much, and I knew she wouldn't be mean to me so long as she was doing it."

"Well, I certainly won't judge you for that. So, what happened next? The two of you stopped living in the wilderness by yourselves eventually."

"From time to time, I'd work up the courage to ask her if she was ready to find other people to go live with. Her answers varied from 'But my magic can yield everything we could ever need,' to 'We can never return to society after what happened.' I think she was afraid they'd try to kill her again."

"Or maybe," Adrielle mused, "she was afraid of having to kill again. Maybe both."

"Possibly. She ended up being more correct about that than I would have thought at the time. I have no idea how long we wandered the wilderness together. I stopped counting after three years. I was afraid of how high I might eventually count, and decided I would rather stay ignorant. And it was easy to lose count. Each year was the same as the next. There wasn't much to tell them apart. But it had to have been ten years, maybe far more. We had aged a little. She finally realized how badly I needed to return to society after..."

"After what?"

"After I tried to kill myself."

"Oh my God! I'm so sorry!"

"Well, maybe you guessed it didn't work. Morgana wouldn't permit me die, and I'm actually thankful for that. Less so for driving me to do it in the first place, but at least I finally got through to her. That was also the time she started using her invulnerability spell on us at all times, probably not coincidentally.

"We traveled far. She took us over the sea, even. She said she wanted to put as much distance between us and Ash as she could in case anybody suspected who she might be. Well, it worked, and it didn't.

"When we got close to human population, she made new clothes for us so we could walk among society again. She made us young again, maybe to disguise who we were. We even took on fake names, though it might have been unnecessary. Most people hadn't even heard of Ash, or the events that happened there. I believe the city was called Rotomagnus, or something like that. I know it began with an R. It was nothing like Ash. It was so much bigger, and there were so many more people! Morgana and I had never seen anything like it! And it took some time for us to catch up with the language, the dialect was so different.

"One thing we were never able to do was make a place for ourselves in society. The city may have been bigger than Ash, but the population was bigger still. In Ash, land was everywhere. Even the poor families like Morgana's could have their own house. Here, half the populace lived in tenements built up against the city's walls. It was squalid. People were practically living shoulder to shoulder. Also, in a small farming town, there's always work someone can do to make a living. Not there. Two young women wandering in with no wealth and no skills, there was only one profession either of us was qualified for, and we weren't having it. I asked why she didn't just conjure as much gold as we needed with her magic, but she wouldn't. She said she was done with her magic while we were among other people.

"Well, the situation said otherwise. There was so much poverty in the city, so eventually hunger drove her to use her magic to feed us. She conjured what food we needed and a few basic necessities. But it wasn't easy making food for ourselves in secret while we watched our new friends put their children to bed hungry. There were so many hungry people, Adrielle! She wanted to help them! So, she made more food. She was very careful. She usually created it inside of the bag she used to deliver it, so nobody could see it forming. She made a lot! I helped her to distribute it. It was a lot of work!

"Well, remember how I said our disguises worked, and they didn't? I tried giving some of it to the church so they could help us distribute it, but that was a mistake. Two pauper girls coming up with enough food to feed several families probably seemed suspicious.

"As it turned out, the authorities had already noticed the city's poor had been less starved than before. And not just more food, but much of it more exquisite than the lower class could normally hope to afford. They must have figured somebody had been stealing it, and suddenly, here was Morgana and me delivering a surplus of food to a church, with no way to explain where we had gotten it.

"They took both of us in for questioning. Like I said, Morgana was very good at keeping her magic secret, but they somehow figured out, or maybe correctly guessed, that Morgana had been producing the food magically. Maybe it was because none of the merchants claimed to be missing the stolen goods. Well, whatever their reasons, Morgana found herself being accused of witchcraft all over again, me along with her this time."

"Wait, hold on! This was a Christian church?"

"Yes."

"Didn't Jesus himself make food from nothing? How could any good Christian not look at that and think it was a miracle?"

"Most Christians aren't as good as you think. By my guess, they were afraid of losing power if someone not under control of the church started performing miracles for the poor. Besides, when has the Christian god ever been a woman? That's a pagan concept. So, witchcraft it was. Well, we escaped. This time she even managed not to kill everyone.

"Unfortunately, there weren't miles and miles of woods for us to get lost in like the last time. So, we had to hide, and as we were lay in hiding, we came across a few others fleeing the persecution of the church just like us. This was Lucilla, Michael, and Julia. They were pagan worshippers who didn't want to give up their love for the old gods. Lucilla had even been a priestess at the local temple of Venus. Until that temple was torn down by the Church, and many of its former members arrested. They wanted to arrest her, too."

"Wait, Lucilla was a priestess of Venus?" That was interesting. Adrielle had spoken to Lucilla a few times before. She didn't know her as well as some of the others, but that was something she had never mentioned about her past. But that wasn't so important right now.

"She was, though she gave that up eventually, though maybe because Morgana offered her something better, rather than at sword-point. As it turned out, maybe sometime around when Morgana and I were wandering the wilderness, the empire outlawed all other faiths than Christianity. All the old gods, gone. Temples were smashed, priests and haruspices were executed. It was terrible! So, if you're wondering why I hate Christianity so much, that might have something to do with it.

"But Morgana offered to protect them, and we took them in. Then we went back into isolation. So much for hoping for a normal life."

"Was it better for you now that there were more people?"

"Not so much. They looked up to her as their savior, and I suppose that makes sense. She even had to tell them several times not to worship her as a goddess. They still followed her every example, and that included her contempt for me. I don't know if she even did it on purpose, but she turned them against me. They laughed when Morgana punished me. I was still one of them, just the least of them.

"I'm afraid the story gets rather repetitive after that. She collected more followers over the ages. Sometimes we wandered the wilderness and subsisted on our own, sometimes for a year, sometimes for a century. Sometimes we tried to take part in civilization. Rotomagnus wasn't the last time Morgana tried to do humanitarian work, though there weren't too many more attempts. Eventually, I think Morgana gave up on humanity entirely. That's when she brought her followers back here to the ruins of Ash, and here we've been ever since."

Susan exhaled deeply, then leaned over and rested her forehead in her hands.

"Thank you for telling me all that. I'm so sorry to hear you've been treated like that, and for so long. But it's almost over. I promise, I'll get you out of here. One way or another, I'll make it happen. And I have a feeling it will be soon."

"Thank you," Susan answered, quietly but sincerely. Adrielle put her arm around Susan's shoulders and hugged her from the side. Initially, Susan cringed away from Adrielle's bare skin touching her own, but then seemed to realize this was different than how she may have been touched before. Susan turned and hugged Adrielle firmly, burring her face in her chest. Susan held her tightly for a full minute before she let go.

"I think supper should be ready soon," Adrielle said, looking at the light coming from the window. "I'm starving! Will you sit with me?"

"Okay. If you want."

***

Supper that night had a very different atmosphere than usual. There was very little noise or merrymaking. Everyone was solemn. All of Morgana's court was present except for three. Guarin and Cateline's absence was no surprise. Gwendolyn's vacant seat, while also not a surprise, was more troubling to her.

Adrielle sat in her usual place not far from Morgana's end of the table. This time, Susan, who normally sat as far away as possible, was right next to Adrielle. Susan seemed nervous, but she had her new friend next to her to give her courage.

When Morgana finally entered the banquet hall, what conversation there was died in a second. Morgana wore nothing. She hadn't bothered to wear the cloak and boots she normally wore to meals and other gatherings to distinguished her from everyone else. Everyone watched her, wondering what she would say.

"I'd like to start off by apologizing," she began, breaking the silence, and the relief felt by each listener was palpable. "What I did to Guarin and Cateline was inexcusable. And in betraying them, I betrayed all of you. I let Gwendolyn manipulate me, but I have no intention of placing my own blame on her. I let myself be seduced by a deceiver who told me lies I wanted to hear. I wish I could say that was the first time I was fooled by such vain lies. I realize now what Gwendolyn has done to me, and I give you my promise that it is done. Here and now, I wash my hands of her tainted influence, and devote myself to all of you, who have been here for me all along!"