Talla was looking forward to some point in her life when things would become normal. It couldn't be far away, could it? The pain in her chest had disappeared. Neither her oversized breasts nor the Strength upgrade from the previous night were causing her any discomfort. So she was healthy. That had to be a good chunk of normal, didn't it?
She probably wouldn't be doing any more Priming. Whatever Alli'anya might have said about her Mistresses considering her and Tina innocent of pilferage, she doubted she'd be back in that privileged position any time soon.
Add to that Shen's healing. She had damaged him and was pretty sure that what she had done to him was not something that any other girl could have done. That much she had to acknowledge, even if only to herself. Would they punish her, if she told them what she'd done? What would they think of her? She would have to tell them that she'd done something to his mind – overridden his will.
And they would ask her, then, what was it that you made him do?
What could she tell them?
"I was forcing him to punish me," she would say, "because I thought I deserved it."
Would they punish her more? And would being punished make it right?
Or was it sufficient that she would never, ever do anything like that to anyone again?
So maybe she could just try to be normal.
Yeah.
Normal.
She was just an Initiate with unusually large breasts. She was going to take care of children during the day. She was going to go out five nights a week, have sex with randomly chosen young men and in doing so bring the peace of the Goddess to those men, delivering social order and containment directly through her vagina.
Just like everybody else.
Who was she trying to fool?
She could tell herself that she was the same as the women she passed in the alleyways and courts of Gern, but deep down she knew she was lying.
There was still a hook, buried in her chest. It pulled at her; pulled her toward a farm not so far away. Out there, somewhere, a particular young man was labouring under the sun. He was sweating. He was tense and anxious for reasons she couldn't quite grasp. He was exhausted.
And in spite of everything she knew, in spite of every warning she'd been given concerning the hazards of monogamy, the unorthodoxy of the violation on which her heart was set, she knew that the moment they had a chance, they would run to each other.
There was nothing she could do about it, and no amount of fear or false desire for normalcy could overcome it.
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"This is what we've been doing?" Maksa asked blankly – she was still in shock.
Her new Mistress, the Sorceress of Pussy, nodded slowly.
"For over three centuries?" Maksa added.
It wasn't necessary to tell Maksa the entire truth, was it?
"Across every Temple," the Sorceress pointed out.
"Only those of Pussy are ever inducted in to this?"
"Sometimes it is necessary to tell those of Sweetness, Lips and, rarely, a few of Endowment," Pussy said. "They can be sworn to secrecy by the Goddess."
"But never Form."
"But never Form," the Sorceress confirmed. "They would never have it. We can't imagine the consequences. We only induct those whom we have already determined are likely to have a very strong belief in the wisdom of the project. No woman of Form would ever – well – the secret would be out in a day."
Maksa nodded.
Form was all about rules and justice. You couldn't have rules and justice without equality of opportunity. Even now, the idea of using the magic of Goddesses to breed some kind of super women made her heart want to rebel. If such women were being created, what chance did others have by comparison? What would happen if the women of the Temple thought, even for a moment, that they did not have an equal chance at promotion?
That was fundamental to their existence. It was one of the axioms they taught to children. It was supposed to be ability that mattered. Maksa had never understood why that lesson was jammed down their throats so violently. Now she knew the alternative. Now she knew what the Temple had been preaching against with that lesson. But here was Pussy, secretly ignoring it just a little bit.
Maksa understood the necessity. Her new Mistress had explained "The Difficulty" as she called it. Form wouldn't believe it. Not in nine centuries or nine millennia. Not until it was too late. Form would want a meritocracy and let the gods and the principle of fairness decide.
As it was, the women of Form wanted to end the use of parental identification to differentiate women of the same name. They had already successfully pushed to start using creche names. The next step was obvious: stop telling people who their parents were. It would be the grand goal of the ages, the end of nepotism. There could be no genealogical favouritism where parentage was anonymous. Only those of Pussy, with their charts, would know.
Form would have those charts destroyed. Ancient argument, that one. Pussy would toss up the rather frightening danger of inbreeding. But Form had an answer to that, too. If the rules of sexual interaction were followed, it was only necessary to keep pregnancies far enough apart, wasn't it?
One by one, the cloaks in which the conspirators of Pussy had wrapped themselves were being stripped away. Soon they would be entirely unclothed and they could either end their project and dress like everyone else or walk down the streets naked and let everyone see every inch of bare flesh.
Maksa shivered.
But until that day, there was work to be done. There were well born men to be matched with women of high rank. There was – greatest shock among all other surprises – the Goddess's pregnancy to be managed. There were children, progeny of this process, to be shuffled off to other cities -
Gods, Maksa thought. To think she'd been planning to travel to Beshenna. What a waste of time that would have been!
Zhina, she thought derisively and rolled her eyes.
Someday she might meet Zhina. But the actual daughter of Mih'lan would be a curiosity, and that was all, because there was no sense in which she was a sister – half or otherwise – of Talla.
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"That's the fastest I've seen anyone learn," Zhair'lo heard someone mutter.
It made him proud. A compliment accidentally overheard always seemed more meaningful.
As it was, he was proud of himself anyway. He was quite good on horseback by now. He had found, as Harzen called it, his "seat".
He even thought he could ride as well as any of the farm hands – not that he'd ever seen any of them ride. They would exercise the horses, letting them run on a track around the farm. Occasionally he would see, in the distance, an unidentifiable rider, but that was the exception.
"Alright, boy," Harzen exclaimed while watching him. "Lead them once around the track and back in to the stable. Keep it to a trot."
Harzen had been letting him lead the stable of horses around the track, making sure they stayed in shape, ever since he'd managed to bring Sunrise back in one piece from his first trip.
"Aye, Master Harzen," he replied crisply and turned the horse about.
He trotted the horse past his boss, who leaned back quite casually against a section of the corral's fence.
"The tits on him," Kurran said to Harzen after Zhair'lo had passed out of earshot. "Fit to be a messenger and not even two weeks."
"Yeah," Harzen answered softly. "That's all the time they gave me anyway."
"Really?"
Harzen frowned at the departing steeds as Kurran came to lean against the same section of fence, but from the outside.
"He's a Seal Breaker, you know," Harzen told Kurran.
"I figgered," Kurran replied, "what with him coming and going every other night."
Harzen wiped sweat off his brow and heaved a weary sigh. Kurran had known Harzen for years and had never once seen the man like this.
"They're sending us another one."
"Another Seal Breaker?"
Harzen nodded.
