This is another story set in the same world as The Punishment Day Festival. Again in the large city of DunnisUrom. At least one of the characters in the previous story is referenced--but you don't have to read that to read this.
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FELLIS
Maci heard the bells tolling FELLIS as she made her way through the shadowed streets of DunnisUorm. It was before dawn and the city was in its dark, slumbering state between between its excited clandestine night-life and its more upright and respectable day time activities. A hunting cat eyed her from one of the gutters, big and striped. Its green eyes fixed balefully on her. She picked up her pace.
The cobblestone streets of the merchant quarter led to an arch that was surrounded by planters filled with pastel colored flowers and twin pillories, one on either side. They were vacant this morning but she had seen them full often enough. Beyond this arch was the Mother's and Matriarch's Hall--and they adorned their gateway with boys consigned to their care by the courts.
Those unlucky enough to be chosen to be sent suffered extravagantly. The Mother's Council was diligent in ensuring that those in its care remembered the lessons they intended to teach. And now, by the tolling of EAIX, one quick hour hence, she was going to be subjected to their mercies! Oh! She despised this!! Oh!!! It just wasn't fair!
Her face burned as she stepped over a puddle of something foul and crossed the street, moving through the archway into the flower-scented courtyards.The "Mother's Quarter" wasn't really a district like most of the others. It was surrounded by walls that linked to the city walls so it was considered its own domain--but it was comparatively small and had few permanent residents. It flourished because guilds and merchant houses were always happy to give gifts to the group that worked to arrange marriages, secure birthing permits, and, especially, policed young women. They didn't have official authority in many things--but their reach and power was undeniable.
She was furious at herself for having misstepped so badly and even more so at her own mother who was, she reasoned, at the root of this whole, awful ordeal.
Maci was the daughter of Eliais Throwhorn--he was prosperous as he had parlayed his experiences as a caravan guard and guide to the Kanari desert nations into contacts that he now used to import spices, rugs, and even more exotic things. He was not a member of the guilds, however, having grown up being unwilling to submit to their authority (and practice of humbling the initiates) and so when he had built his business, he had done it without them.
DunnisUorm was filled with plots and subplots and machinations and conspiracies--but Eliais had managed to grow powerful without either submission to one of the guildhalls nor overly angering them. In fact, he had thrown extravagant parties to which they were invited--he had given gifts--and he had facilitated their businesses--and even befriended, or at least impressed, the elder guild masters so that when she was born, he was already well liked and well secured.
That hadn't meant, however, her mother was unable to use the guild's resources to find her a suitable husband. She had grown up feeling superior to the other girls she was friends with: they were all having their futures and their unions arranged--and while they found it exciting and usually benevolent, there were cases where a union was arranged because the feeling of the girl's parents (particularly her mother) was that she was too taken with herself--and the union was meant to anchor and ground her.
Some of the young men of worth made their value known by evidencing a predilection for dominance and skill with domestic discipline. Maci had witnessed some of her peers being measured by their families for such a union.
"He's rich--and handsome!" Shala had said of their friend Oassis's possible future husband. Oasis' mother had been making inquiries and arranging shared activities for her (disobedient) daughter and the boy in question.
"He whips the housemaids!" Oasis had complained, "As a hobby!" She described him, having tracked and tallied any household mistakes for a week, he would summon the three girls each Theris-day, strip them naked and have them take a variety of exposing positions in the family's inner courtyard as he delivered lashes of a whip made to soak in some mixture that made its stripes blaze with pain and finally deliver a maddening itch--even beyond the normal--as they healed.
Maci's friends had seemed thrilled by this, much to Oassis's displeasure. "He also takes them for punishment--after." she growled, blushing.
"Good!" Maci's friends had judged this revelation. "If his spend is in the poor things' bottom, it'll make him more docile after!" Maci, a year behind Oassis, had found the mental image of her friend bent forward over a bed, her husband's cock in her anus, and her buttocks crossed with lash-marks hot! All the girls clashed with their mothers and Maci thought a strict marriage with lots of discipline would be good for her friend. Now, aged seventeen, Oassis was married last year (she had presented in a beautiful dress with a punishment corset on under it, her husband ensuring that all her family and friends could see her submission to him and only guess at what punishments the outfit entailed). Maci, having carefully followed her friend's courtship, suspected that when the corset came off that night, its miseries would have made Oassis very ready for the marriage bed and very, very eager to please her new husband!
She, however, had avoided coming under the thumb of the various boys she liked--and her mother had not had an easy method to shop her about. Her father, who had made his own way without being forced to humble himself before the merchant masters gave her some leeway in this (it was well known that a boy apprentice might be taken like a girl for punishment by a master or simply done often to affirm the master-apprentice relationship--but she couldn't imagine her father in the throes of such an event!). Mother, however, was having none of it. With a sound upbringing and an excellent education, the true gilding on her mother's cap would be a fine marriage for a daughter she found a bit too willful and often too clever for her own good.
So she had appealed the Mother's Council to help her find an appropriate boy for her girl. Although they must have gotten many, many such requests, by whatever stroke of bad luck they had chosen her mother's to act on, and, since she was, as yet, unmarried and living at the family home, when they had sent her a summons she had been obligated to come for an evaluation of her suitability for marriage material.
The row with her mother had been epic--she had unleashed her full batteries of ire and storehouse of resentments and even she had to admit she crossed the line by a wide mark. Her mother had declared herself "too furious" to spank her--which had confused Maci a bit but--her mother had sent her to her father's office for discipline... which she found to be incredibly worse.
Her mother could be quite adept and inventive at punishments--but her father... the idea of facing his disappointment in her behavior cut with a different kind of blade. She had immediately changed tact and begged her mother not do that (although later she had decided her father must have heard almost everything from his office) and her mother, sensing advantage had ordered her to the Mother's Council.
She'd seethed but she'd gone before them for the invasive and humiliating "interview." The older women--including some outright judgmental crones--had put her through several domestic trials--as though being the daughter of a wealthy merchant would find her doing maid's work! It was when she'd been asked after wifely duties that she'd had trouble.
To be certain, they didn't expect an unmarried girl--even at seventeen--to be experienced. They did expect her to be eager to please not just a master--but mistresses as well--and she had to be prepared to take a cock in her anus and mouth without much complaint!
She had stumbled on a question about using a seated toilet--something people of her class could well afford. Apparently the correct answer was to have a peasant style squat toilet installed to save the throne sit toilet for her husband and use the peasant style toilet herself.
She'd bristled at this intimate indignity she was expected to swallow and the Mother's Council had sensed this clearly--and bided their time--and pounced! In retrospect she saw how they had noted her resistance to the kind of humiliating submission this implied. They had then tweaked her and played her like an instrument for the remainder of the interview. She hadn't seen it then but they had needled her and pricked at her pride so that when asked about removing her sexual hair when her husband was displeased with her, made her roll her eyes.
She'd been warned, explicitly, by her mother and by one of the assistant ladies that showing disrespect by verbally scoffing or--worse--by rolling her eyes at the matriarchs was subject to serious punishment. At the time, she'd seen no reason she should not be able to breeze through this five hour long interview her mother had demanded and yet, when she'd done it, she saw the smirking triumph of the women over the young applicant.
