Chapter Five
She blinked, and her mouth opened without anything coming out. After a moment, she managed to ask, “What happened to you, Krais? You’re so very . . . different . . . than you were before.”
The way she flopped her hands and shrugged made him realize that, in this moment at least, they were not doma and penitent, but just two people who lived and worked at the same Great Temple. So instead of acting penitent . . . and instead of acting like his old, arrogant, pride-filled self. . . . Krais shrugged. “I went up against the Gods. They showed me the errors of my path. Now I work to change my ways.”
That made her blink again, then frown . . . then raise a palm to her brow with a wince. “Dammit, I forgot to finish fully assessing you, too. This day just keeps getting longer and longer, doesn’t it?”
Somehow, Krais didn’t think her muttering was for him. Shrugging again, he shifted to kneel on the brick-red tiles of the kitchen floor. “Let’s get it over with, then.”
“Oh, please, not in here,” Pelai muttered. “Out there, where you can at least kneel on the matting and be comfortable.”
Brow quirked, he eyed her, then pushed back to his feet. “You’re being very kind to me. I thought you implied to my father that you would follow his wishes on punishing me harshly.”
That made her snort, as he had done earlier in her office. “Politics. I implied that to get him to stop pestering me. The older he gets, the longer he serves as an Elder Hierarch, the more Dagan’thio believes the laws do not have to apply to him—and I gave you an order, Penitent Krais.”
Her voice sharpened on that last statement. Stung a little by the unfriendly whip of it, Krais turned and strode back into the family room. The felt padding sat near the north corner, where the brick hearth awaited those rare nights when the weather turned actually cold, usually from the monsoons of winter. Unlike the felting of similar mats in the Elder Disciplinarian’s home, this one was still thick and spongy under his feet, which meant comfortable to his knees.
Settling into place, facing the unlit, empty hearth, Krais braced his palms on his kilt-covered thighs and waited. The last time he had felt the soul-deep searching of a Disciplinarian had been shortly before his final test as a neophyte applicant to the training. A test he had failed with the words This is not your Destiny whispered into his heart and his mind.
Her hands came down on his shoulders, once again half touching his deltoids, half touching his vest. For a brief moment, Krais wished he had been given a chance to change into fresh, clean garments. Even a pair of outlander pants would have been fine, so long as they were not age worn and in need of laundering with something better than a very mild cantrip. If such spells were applied strong enough to scrub out odors as well as stains, then they wore down the fibers twice as fast as soap and water.
Then she began, inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly . . . and seeping her energies through his personal shields. Shields which she now controlled, but had thankfully left in place, the kind meant to keep magical attacks from seriously damaging or stunning him. Those shields were instinct-deep magics, difficult to dismantle deliberately after years of training and reinforcement. Energy seeped down beneath the inks embedded in his skin, entwined in his powers. Down through muscles, into organs and bones . . . and then into his soul.
Unlike the warm sunshine of the Goddess, Pelai’s touch felt cool, almost chilly. Not in a bad way, though. To his inner senses, she felt like drinking down a spell-chilled glass of ice-mint on a hot summer’s day. The brew was a favorite across the whole of the Temple grounds, composed of a blend of tea leaves imported from the mountains of Aiar, far to the west, and locally grown Mendhite mint plants. With just a little bit of salt and sugar added to the mix, it became an instant thirst quencher—hardly anyone here on the Temple grounds could be found without mint on their breath on a hot summer’s day.
Krais had not drunk any in roughly nine months, but he remembered how refreshing ice-mint could taste. Feeling her energies mingling with his now made him shiver in unexpected pleasure. Never in a hundred years would he have guessed he’d enjoy having his soul weighed and measured by the power of the Goddess bound in Naranna Pelai’s wrists.
That energy seeped back out of him after a few more moments, retreating a little faster than it had spread, but not painfully so. The doma lifted her palms from his shoulders a moment after it vanished. Her words confused him.
“You are remarkably sin-free for your recent history. As if you had already been doing months of penance. You left nine months ago, faced the gods six months ago . . . and whispers of the Goddess tell me you are now free of sin,” she murmured, moving around to face him, a frown furrowing her lightly tattooed brow. “But when I look at you, I see the sigils of where to strike and with what implement marking your hide. Your existence versus my test is a contradiction.”
She seemed to be awaiting an answer. So he asked cautiously, “Do the words of the Goddess, the ones to absolve me of physical penance, outweigh the runes on my skin?”
“Normally . . . ? Yes, they would,” Pelai admitted bluntly. “When the Goddess chooses to punish a penitent personally, and when She chooses to remove the ink stains of your sins, mere mortal Disciplinarians know better than to get in Her way, or they risk being scraped off the pages of our own palimpsests. However, your father . . .”
Krais didn’t even have to wait for her to trail off pointedly. He realized immediately what she meant, and bowed his head at the irony. After six months of constantly haranguing his sons, Dagan’thio would never give up on the idea of punishing them for failing him. “My father will insist upon seeing whip marks and rope lines on my body. Burns and bruises. He was not suitably satisfied with your comments about inflicting me with mental and emotional punishments.”
“No, he was not,” she agreed gently. Crouching and resting her elbows on her knees, hands lightly clasped, Pelai studied him. “He needs to think you’re being thoroughly punished. And to be fair, my assessment did indicate that counting back more than six months ago, you had plenty of sins racked up in neeed of expiating. Arrogance, pride, rudeness, violence, greed, bigotry against other nations . . .”
Krais quirked his brows at her. “Part of me wonders if you were ever fully loyal to Mendhi.”
She frowned at him. “I would hardly be picked to be the next Guardian if I were not.”
“I meant, putting Mendhi first before all other nations,” he explained, accepting her chastising tone.
“That’s because you and your father have conflated true loyalty to Mendhi with being determined to see it first among all nations,” Pelai stated. “They are not the same thing.”
That confused him. Seeing it on his face, she shrugged and straightened, flicking her hands and her gaze briefly upward as if to ask the Goddess for patience. The doma moved over to the padded couch that faced the window-strewn wall overlooking the night-shrouded lake and lowered herself onto its cushions. Krais turned on his knees to face her, and saw her unlacing her boots by hand, not by magic. The simple act suggested they were going to stay here tonight.
“True loyalty to Mendhi is not dependent upon it being first among nations,” she told him as she worked. “I will be loyal to Mendhi even if we are proven to be last among nations . . . and now that we have the Convocation active again, there will be comparisons being made once more, as there were in centuries past. With hundreds of kingdoms around the world, the odds are low that we would be the first and foremost among them.”
“But . . . if you’re loyal to your nation, shouldn’t you want to see it be the best and most important?” Krais asked.
“Yes, but the needs of the kingdom must come first—the actual needs,” she clarified. “Do you remember at about this time last year, when the Elder Commander got into that big verbal fight with the Elder Agriculturalist on whether to spend discretionary funds on improvements to the Mendhi fleet, or spend it on the flooded villages in the Ungoro Valley?”
Krais gave a little nod . . . then paused, actually thought about it, and nodded slowly. “ . . . I think I see what you mean. The fleet could have made us more powerful in coastal defenses, but we already have reasonably good defenses. By contrast the villagers needed help getting their homes rebuilt, and the fields that had been washed out or buried in too much mud needed to be reseeded for more and better crops. Improving the fleet would make us seem to be number one in the eyes of our neighbors, but investing instead in the farmers ensured the survival of our citizens, the most vital part of the nation.”
“Exactly. Which is why the Elder Exchequer chose to side with the villagers, pointing out rightfully that without the farmers living in rebuilt homes and thus able to work in their fields, we would have less money gathered in taxes to pay for our armies and fleets. When we get Hierarch Elders who forget to take into account what actually is best for the nation . . . then no matter what our leaders might claim, we stop being the best of nations, and start sliding down toward the bottom of the heap.” Her hand made a downward swooping gesture, before she switched to untying the lacings on the other boot.
Since she didn’t seem interested in punishing him harshly, Krais found himself gesturing toward her loosened footwear. “Would you like me to pull that off?”
Her eyebrow arched up, wrinkling the pale blue inks of her translation tattoo. “Would you have made that offer, or even thought of making that offer, before meeting the Gods?”
Since the answer to that was a flat-out no, Krais flushed and frowned at her. “We are stuck together for two months. You have to spend a minimum of six hours a day tending to my Disciplining in some way, as my legal sin was failing the Hierarchy’s demand. Since you will soon have many other duties as the next Elder Mage to occupy the average working hours of your day, that means I will be stuck in close proximity to you during the other hours, just so you can have time to assign my penances.
“I was thinking we could try to get along, rather than be constantly at odds with each other. For once. Now that I’m somewhat reformed,” he added under his breath.
That made Pelai sit forward, brows raised. “So, you acknowledge you were a massive inksplat to me in the past?”
He started to protest that she wasn’t exactly smear-free herself in her actions and words, but caught himself. Breathing deep, Krais struggled to let it go. She watched him through two, three breaths, her expression far more thoughtful than the accusatory one he had feared. Contemplative, not condemning.
When he felt he could speak calmly, he simply said, “Yes.”
Brows rising again, if briefly, she murmured, “Well, I definitely cannot top that, whatever I might try to do to you.”
“Oh, haha, very funny, good pun,” Krais quipped sardonically. He’d learned more than enough about being a Disciplinarian just by growing up around his father—never mind his quickly aborted attempt at undergoing the training to be one—to know that top was the nickname for the person who did something to another; bottom was the person who received whatever was being done. They were not interchangeable with dominant, the person in control of a situation, or submissive, the person conceding control of that situation.
She flashed him a brief grin. “I’m glad you found it so amusing. Now, take off my boots and move back. You don’t want to be close for the next few moments.”
“After wearing boots instead of sandals all day? I’d think not,” Krais muttered. Taking a deep breath, he carefully worked her unlaced boots off her feet, then moved back quickly, setting the boots aside to air out. Sandals were more comfortable but Disciplinarians were expected to be able to fight the rogue mages they were sent down to hunt, and toe-to-knee boots covered in defensive runes among the pei-slii sigils gave their shins better protection in a fight.
But she didn’t try to stick her feet in his face, or demand that he remove her socks. Instead, she peeled off the short stockings that kept her feet from being blistered by the leather, pursed her lips, made odd kissy-noises, and called out, “Purrsus, it’s stinky feet time! Here, kitty kitty! Stinky feet!”
More air-smooching noises followed. Krais felt his jaw drop a little. Of all the possible things he could have imagined the Second Disciplinarian to have said and done, that was certainly not among them. Certainly not in such a cheerful, amused tone. Her efforts did get results, however,
Thump-thump-thumping paws echoed over to them. Her cat scampered out of the kitchen, bounded across the rough-glazed tiles, and skittered to a stop. The feline sniffed her toes, immediately headbutted her soles, and purred madly, rubbing his fluffy muzzle and cheeks all over her bared feet. Bemused, Krais looked up at the owner of those feet.
Pelai smiled and shrugged. “He has a smelly-foot fetish. Either I sit down for a few minutes at the end of my day and let him indulge . . . or he claws at my feet until I stop moving so he can flop and rub all over them. Since I don’t want to be clawed, we just have this little ritual at the end of every day.”
“Ah . . . so that’s why you never pick up any submissives for a week. Your cat does all the worshipping for them.”
Snorting, she flipped a hand and scoffed. “Oh, please, I am not Doma Calippa, who cannot walk five lengths without a bevy of submissives swirling around her, backs perpetually bowed in obeisance. I don’t want any submissive servants in my life.”
Krais frowned in confusion. All his life, he had seen his father picking up submissives from the courtyard and putting them to work in and around the house, whether it had been their family home in the city before his elevation or at the manor here on the Temple grounds. It was seen as a badge of honor to be picked for service by the Elder Disciplinarian, and his mother, Karei, flat-out delighted in ordering them all about. Despite being a mid-ranked librarian, she had learned many Disciplinarian tricks, and handed out praises to the worthy and punishments to the needy with a deft, experienced hand.
It was in that vein of confusion that he asked, “But . . . isn’t that why you became a Disciplinarian? To have control over others?”
“Ugh.” She lifted her foot and pushed it at his face. Krais swayed back before he could touch him. A good thing, too; her silver-and-black cat mrraurred and reared up, hooking his paws around her ankle to drag her toes back into comfortable sniffing range. Obliging, Pelai lowered her foot, letting her cat continue to rub and purr, and explained her disdain. “You have learned some very bad perceptions from your father of who and what a Disciplinarian is. He likes the power games. So does your mother, and definitely your youngest brother. I’m not sure about Foren.”
“He follows in their footsteps,” Krais said, shrugging. “They both . . . all three of us . . . sought to please Father by echoing his words and mirroring his moves. Gayn looks the most like him, stout-bodied, medium brown eyes, wavy hair that’s dark brown instead of black, and he certainly acts the most like him. Foren looks the most like our mother, lean body with a very round face, straight black hair, so he was favored by her, though our father rules the household. I fall somewhere between the two in looks . . . but I tried to please my parents for far too long.”
“Hmm. And now?” Pelai asked, her cat still rubbing his face against her toes, still purring, acting like a subservient happy to please and honor his doma.
“I finally see what I have been doing wrong. What . . . Father . . . has been doing wrong.” He started to say something more, then closed his mouth.
“ . . . What?” Pelai asked.
Krais shook his head.
Sitting forward, she scooped up her cat and cuddled him on her lap, giving his chin the scritchies he could no longer get from her toenails. “Whatever you tell me will be held secret, under the sacred bounds of the confession. I am a Disciplinarian, even as I become the next Guardian.”
Still, he hesitated. She didn’t press him, just gave him time, and gave her pet loving attention. Finally, Krais spoke. “I feel . . . betrayed. By my father.”
“How so?” Pelai asked softly, stroking Purrsus. The cat blinked sleepily, studying him more directly than his mistress, who studied her cat. That indirectness gave him the room to speak.
“He’s led me—my brothers and me—down a path that . . . included accepting a contract to kill someone. We didn’t . . . by the grace of the gods . . . and . . .”
“And . . . ?” Pelai prompted after a few moments of silence.
“She spoke to me.” When Pelai glanced at him, seeking clarification on who and about what, Krais cleared his throat. “We were . . . contacted by an official of the Katani government who wanted the incipient Queen of Nightfall killed. Offers of immense wealth, entire trading ships filled with exotic goods . . . Gayn said yes right away, and I agreed right on his heels. Foren was the only one who hesitated, but only for a moment—what kind of a father teaches his sons it’s okay to barely even hesitate about committing a murder?”
Pelai didn’t speak, but she did make a soft, sympathetic sound as the words tumbled out of him. A confession of hard thoughts he hadn’t been able to voice around his brothers, who were still too enamored of trying to win their father’s pride and love by obeying without much thought.
“Yes, she was our enemy, she had the Living Host in her care, she was going to reopen the Convocation of Gods and Man, and make her tiny little island kingdom first among all nations . . . but these things would not have harmed Mendhi. We would be no worse off even if we were no better off.” Krais sighed and rubbed at his eyes, tired down to his soul. “Your mother and father need to teach you that lying and cheating and stealing and harming others just for personal gain are wrong . . . but he didn’t teach us that, and Mother didn’t stop him from teaching the wrong lessons, either. She’s reveled too much in her power over the subservients he brings home.”
That narrowed her eyes. “Has your mother been abusing them?”
Krais shook his head quickly. “No. Everything they do at home is within the letter of the law.”
“But not the spirit?” Pelai asked perceptively.
Her question made him hesitate, and review his memories. “ . . . Nothing that could be acted upon. My parents have always been good at treading on that line.”
“Treading, but not crossing it.”
Krais cleared his throat. “I didn’t say that . . . but I’m not going to bother refuting it, either.”
Brows quirking, Pelai studied him. “ . . . You really have changed, Krais. Nine months ago, when you left, you’d never have said any of this to anyone. Let alone to me.”
“We didn’t exactly like each other, so no,” he admitted candidly. “But . . . I think much of my disdain for you was merely a reflection of my father’s disdain for you. Which is an odd thing when I think about it.”
“How so?” Pelai asked.
Krais gestured at her. “He disdains your plebian parentage, daughter of a baker and a stasis mage, yet admires your skills as a high-ranked Disciplinarian . . . and has always ranted at his sons for not being better than you.”
“Oh. That,” she said dismissively.
“You sound like you know the reason why,” Krais murmured, eyeing her warily. “Did he tell you?
“No, but do you realize you just answered your own question?” Pelai asked him. At his puzzled look, she said, “He’s envious of me, and disappointed in you. Since he can only castigate his own sons so much, he has had to find ways to attack me, to lower my ranking and diminish my accomplishments in your eyes.”
“Ah. I hadn’t considered that,” Krais murmured. “I should have. I’ve been thinking for six months straight . . . “
“You’ve had a lot on your mind,” Pelai soothed.
Apparently annoyed by the absentminded attention given by his mistress, the cat on her lap squawked a little and ducked out from beneath her grip. Escaping with a lithe squirm that ended with a thump on the floor, Purrsus padded over to Krais and sniffed at his kilt-covered knee. Since he liked cats—Gayn preferred birds as pets, and Foren had no preference so long as it was friendly—Krais lifted his hand to pet the animal. He hesitated before actually touching her pet. The feline quickly sniffed at his fingertips, taking advantage of their stillness to investigate his scent.
“Go on,” Pelai told him, granting permission. “You may pet him. We may not have agreed in the past, but you’re not a bad man, Puhon Krais. I trust you with Purrsus.”
“Thank you.” Gently petting the cat, Krais enjoyed the soft, sleek feel of the feline’s fur. “I will not betray that trust.”
“Good. Because cleaning his sandbox will be your chore from now on—your father would expect me to punish you with menial tasks, but even you should know a spell or two for cleaning droppings out of sand.”
He slanted a look up at her, barefooted and relaxed on her couch, though she still wore her working leathers. “Considering I cannot access my magic right now . . . ?”
It was her turn to blink and feel abashed, given the way she blushed under her tattoos. “Oh. Right. Well, I do have an old hand-sieve for the lumps. I’ll just clean the rest of it with a spell—I hated doing it without the help of magic as a child, since my parents made my siblings and me scrub the sand with soap and water down by the river, but I don’t think you deserve that level of punishment.
“Unless your father asks . . .” She nibbled on her fingernail for a moment, thinking, then tapped her bottom lip. “Actually, that brings up a question. Would your father interrogate you via truthstone to see how you’re being punished?”
Krais blanched a little, remembering prior punishments. Clearing his throat, he admitted, “That is a distinct possibility. Mother, at the very least, would use a truthstone on us to see if we’d behaved whenever she thought we’d damaged something at home, or hadn’t been paying attention to our lessons.
“She hasn’t used it in a few years . . . but mostly because we’ve been gone nine months. That, and Gayn finally grew up enough that he stopped tripping over furniture and breaking things—all of us had clumsy stages,” he found himself adding honestly, gently scratching her cat under that black and silver chin. At her raised brows, he clarified, “I had an awkward burst of magic in my early teens that knocked over the spirit-tree stand, when we had a small house in the city, before Father’s elevation to the Hierarchy. Broke the pot the miniature tree was in.”
Pelai sat forward, forearm braced on her knees, and reached down to pet her cat. “How did your father punish you?”
“The same way as always, extra lessons in magic, removing all my free time for weeks or even months, and physical exercises, like running down to the arena, buying one of the sugar-wheels they sell, and running back before an hourglass ran out. And then he’d break up the sugar-wheel and give it to my brothers and I’d get none . . . or I’d be the one to get some and one of the others would be punished by having none.” He confessed it matter-of-factly. “That particular time with the spirit tree, it was Mother who punished me, as well as Father by setting me to run places and move stuff. She made me buy a new pot and tend the spirit-tree personally until it recovered. I nearly killed it before I figured out I needed to go find a gardener to ask for advice.”
“Stubborn and prideful?” she asked as her cat lost interest in both of them and wandered off.
“Stupid and prideful,” he corrected. “After that, I wised up enough to look for experts to advise me, but . . . I realize now that I never really thanked them for their expertise. I assumed my rising knowledge and skill was due to my own diligence, and not to their willingness to share and teach. Stupid and prideful, not stubborn.”
“You really have given your life some thought, haven’t you?” Pelai murmured, bracing both elbows on her knees.
“Six months at sea, sailing from port to port, walking the decks for eight hours at a stretch, using magic to keep the wind in the sails and the rigging sound and true. It’s boring work most of the time,” he confessed, and rubbed at his eyes. “Sorry, I didn’t sleep well. It’s been a long day.”
“Same,” Pelai murmured. “Don’t yawn, or I’ll have to flog you. I still have to figure out . . . wait, you blushed.”
Krais felt his cheeks heat further. This conversation had suddenly turned in a direction he did not want to go. So he lied. “I did not. I flinched.”
“No, no, you blushed. . . . Flogging. No, not just flogging alone . . . something about me flogging you is what upsets you,” she clarified, and peered closely at him. “Why does the thought of being flogged by me upset you?”
“Because it’s flogging?” he retorted defensively. “It’ll hurt?”
“You’re not afraid of pain, Krais. I’ve seen you taking a worse beating while practicing your fighting, and do it without flinching,” Pelai pointed out.
Rolling his eyes, Krais tried to throw her off track by changing the subject slightly. “Are you planning on flogging me to throw my father off the scent? Or are we going to pretend, since you say I don’t really need to be flogged? And if so, how does that work?”
“I said you’ve done penance by other means over the last six months,” Doma Pelai chided him, sitting up again. “I did not say you’ve expiated all your sins.”
Krais opened his mouth to say he didn’t deserve any punishment . . . but while he’d skirted the edges of that by the letter of the law, Menda had been explicit in warning him not to protest his punishments. Demonic invasion. Right. Dammit.
Biting back the urge to protest, he breathed deep and merely said, “ . . . I will not protest bearing bruises and welts or whatever where my father will see them and feel satisfied. But I request that you beat me in private. Not in front of my father. Or anyone else.”
“Why not?” Pelai challenged him.
Jaw tightening, Krais didn’t answer. While they had achieved a sort of accord of understanding between the two of them, he couldn’t bring himself to admit anything quite that personal to her.
“What is it about me beating you in public that you want to avoid?” Pelai asked, sitting forward and peering intently at his face. “Is it the humiliation? The submissiveness of it? . . . No? Do not make me get out a truthstone, Penitent. You know you are to answer my questions fully and honestly. Tell me in full detail why you don’t want me to beat you in front of your father . . . or it will happen.”
Face hot, Krais glared at her. When she merely raised an eyebrow, arching it in silent challenge, he gritted his teeth, breathed deep, and forced himself to explain. “We took some bottles of concentrated lust philtre with us to use on the Living Host, to make her compliant and cooperative with one of us taking control of her Fountain through lovemaking.”
“—Oh that deserves a beating right there,” Pelai snapped, her eyes widening in outrage. “Because that is not lovemaking!”
“It was supposed to be a last resort! And she didn’t get any used on her,” Krais snapped. Feeling discomfort in his legs, he shifted from kneeling to sitting with his calves crossed.
Her stare hard and stern, her voice chilly with lurking threat, Pelai ordered, “What does that mean, Penitent? That she didn’t have any used on her. Did someone use it on you? Without your permission?”
Krais couldn’t blame her for catching on. He’d put the emphasis into his words himself, and she wasn’t oblivious by nature. Clearing his throat, he confessed gruffly, “ . . . During one of the storms we sailed through, the, uh, carrying case got knocked loose . . . and one of the bottles inside broke. I didn’t notice it because a sailor found and put the box back, and when I went to check inventory a little while later, I . . . tucked my hand inside one of the padded slots to pull the bottle out for inspection, cut myself on the glass . . . and got pure lust potion soaked into my blood. Concentrated lust that lasted for over a week.”
She blinked at him, this time frowning in confusion. “ . . . So?”
He rolled his eyes at the ceiling of her family room, silently begging all the Gods for strength and patience. “I had to work it off? To the point my skin turned raw and blistered. That was when I tried flogging myself to try to bury the lust under pain, but . . .”
“ . . . But?” Doma Pelai prodded when he trailed off. “Put it into words, Penitent.”
Shutting his eyes, Krais gritted his geeth and answered. Punishments were always worse when a penitent refused to answer a Disciplinarian. “It . . . it only turned me on more. So don’t flog me in front of my father. He’ll think I’m a submissive—and I am not submissive, even if I am submitting to this stupid, Goddess-insisted punishment!”
Rather than prod at him further on his point about the Goddess insisting on his punishments, Pelai blinked, sat back, and held up her hand in a calming gesture. She questioned him on the other matter, the embarrassing one. “So . . . you’re saying you have discovered you are aroused by pain?”
“Yes! But only because my mind has been messed up by the lust philtre,” he asserted. He needed her to see him as normal. Strong. Dominant. Not submissive and subservient—he would bow to his Goddess, but to no other! “It warped my brain into thinking pain equals pleasure!”
“Krais . . . it doesn’t work that way,” she told him, relaxing and speaking bluntly. At his frown of confusion, Pelai explained. “Such things either develop from constant exposure over years, the kind of long-term exposure where increasing amounts of pleasure are openly associated with increasing amounts of pain . . . or it’s simply the way you are born to feel.
“Unless it’s a spell controlling you at that exact moment—which requires constant vigilance on the part of the mage applying it—or a potion you constantly take, you’re not going to find being flogged all that arousing if you don’t already find it arousing by your nature. And the only way that nurturing it would work is if you were constantly exposed to it physically and mentally . . . and even then, you still have to think that it might be appealing, to have the thoughts in your own head acting as the seed from which it all grows. Otherwise, it’s just repulsive,” she finished. “Not everyone finds such things attractive, and not everyone ever will.”
“Well, it didn’t happen before our trip to Nightfall Island!” he shot back. “I was normal before that point.”
“Were you ever actually punished with a mix of pain and pleasure? I don’t mean the times when being disciplined by a family member, which most find inherently unsexy,” Pelai added dryly.
That checked him. Krais blinked, casting his mind back through his younger years. Finally, he had to shake his head. “Not . . . mixed with pleasure, no. Father and Mother did punish us, but . . . not sexually in any way. But ever since the broken bottle,” he muttered, blushing and not meeting her gaze, “any little bit of pain I experience . . .”
“Then you cannot blame him, just as you should not blame yourself,” she murmured. “Dagan’thio has done many things that skirt the line of acceptable behavior, but he hasn’t crossed it. Krais . . . you failed the very first submission test. I was there, I saw it happen.”
“Yes, but . . .” he admitted, trailing off at the memory of that day over a decade ago.
“But, nothing. That simply means you never got far enough into your Disciplinarian training to experiment with those sorts of games. Without personally having been through that mix of pleasure and pain, how could you have known you liked such things?” Pelai challenged him. “Part of it could have been nurtured into the back of your mind from the excitement associated with watching your parents dominate their subservient staff, yes. But I suspect you’ve simply had an undiscovered inclination all along. The lust potion problem awakened your awareness of it, and the mix of pleasure and pain over the week that you spent working the stuff out of your blood firmly mixed the two sensations in your brain. You felt pain during forced pleasure, so now you feel pleasure when you’re forced to endure pain.”
“So it is to blame,” Krais asserted, seizing on that point. Something had to make sense in all of this!
Rolling her eyes, she flipped a hand ceilingward. “Only as much as the sky is to blame for being blue. Nurture or nature, it doesn’t matter. You have this inclination; it has been tested and embedded deep in your responses. There is no shame in accepting and admitting it.”
“But I am not a submissive!” he asserted, slapping a hand on his kilt-covered thigh. “The only reason why I’m submitting at all is because Menda told me to!”
Her brows rose at that for a moment, but once again Pelai chose to pursue the other topic, not the Goddess-wrought one. Rolling her eyes, sighing in exasperation, she dragged in a breath and demanded, “Setting that aside for now . . . Krais, for a man raised in a Disciplinarian’s household, you have seriously gotten your axis points confused. What is the difference between a top and a bottom?”
Struggling to keep his frustration in check, Krais recited the words he had learned as a child simply from being around his father and mother and their servants. “ . . . A top is the person who does something to someone, and the bottom is the one receiving what is being done to them.”
“And what is a dominant versus a submissive?” she prodded.
“A dominant is the person in charge and the submissive is the one letting them be in charge.”
“Setting aside the fact that most subservients actually have quite a lot of power in the dynamic, because they can always tell the dominant or the Disciplinarian no . . . when they’re not a penitent,” Pelai allowed. “Krais, a top is not the same thing as a dominant. A dominant can order a submissive to do something to the dominant . . . and that makes the submissive the top, the person doing something to the dominant, who in that moment is the bottom, the person receiving whatever action or service is being performed.”
Krais frowned. “I never saw that at home.”
“That’s because your father’s a dominant top. Think of it as a grid,” she told him, using a touch of magic to sketch a blue-glowing box in the air, and dividing it into four sections with two crossing lines. “Being a top is at the top, and being a bottom is at the bottom—obviously—but dominant is not on the top. Dominant is on the left, and submissive is on the right. So when you open up the spectrum of actions and assertions, you have these four corners where people can be a dominant top, a dominant bottom, a submissive bottom, and a submissive top. Or there could be partial variations, like a fairly balanced person who likes being both top and bottom—doing and receiving—while at the same time they’re fairly submissive. They love doing things to other people, and love having things done to them. A submissive top is someone who wants to be told to do something to others.”
“I . . . I suppose that’s possible,” Krais admitted, still a bit dubious.
“You’ve only ever seen your family’s dominants acting in the upper left corner of this grid, topping the household subservients, who as a result of that stance are forced to exist down in the bottom right corner of that grid,” she pointed out. “Dagan’thio is good at what he does, but because he disdains the center of the grid, he isn’t a well-balanced example of a Disciplinarian.”
“Are you well-balanced?” Krais asked dryly. At her chiding look, he felt compelled to defend his father. “You’re making judgments about my father. Are you well-balanced, when you say he is not?”
The Second Disciplinarian gave his question a few moments of thought. To his surprise, she actually shook her head. “ . . . No. I am not perfectly balanced. I can be submissive if necessary . . . and I don’t need the command of our Goddess to do so, unlike you,” Pelai pointed out dryly, teasing him. “But I do prefer to be the dominant far more often than the submissive. As for top versus bottom . . . I enjoy having things done to me, but I get a bit more enjoyment from doing things to other people.”
“So you do want a submissive to play with, just like Father and Mother,” Krais muttered, looking away in disappointment.
“Absolutely not!”
He snapped his gaze back to her face, and frowned in confusion. “You . . . don’t?”
“Nope,” she confirmed promptly, elbows braced on her knees, fingers lightly laced in front of her. “Managing a subservient—and of course a penitent—is work, Krais. If it weren’t for the fact I know your father would be tempted into meddling, which would lead to him breaking the law, I wouldn’t even have you here this late at night. You’d have time off, and so would I. The last thing I want in my life is a dependent to have to take care of. I want an independent soul in my home and my life. That’s why I picked a cat for a pet, and not a dog or a monkey or whatever.”
Eyeing her, Krais found himself asking, “Then what do you want in your life?”
“Someone I can do things to as a top, things of both pleasure and pain, which makes them happy to receive as a bottom. The rest of the time, I want them independent and capable of managing for themselves. I don’t want to be responsible for their life. I want someone who can work independently, exist independently. It’s good to be able to come together to offer sympathy and support, and healthy, but I don’t want to have to be in charge of the other person, and I don’t want them to think they should have to be in charge of me.”
This was the most personal conversation they had ever had, and yet something within Krais made him push it even farther. “You say person. Do you want a male in your life? A female? Someone else?”
“The gender doesn’t matter to me,” Pelai told him. “Only their personality, and hobbies and interests, personal preferences.”
“Then you’ll not have to worry about me, I guess,” Krais murmured. At her bemused look, he added, “Because you don’t like me.”
“I didn’t like your old self, not so much, no,” she allowed. “But this new Puhon Krais, the man who thinks for himself instead of playing parrot with his father’s words . . . if I am completely honest with both of us, I find myself intrigued by this new side of you.”
Krais blinked at that. He was not certain exactly how they had gotten onto this topic, though he knew he was at least partially to blame. Clearing his throat, he pointed out, “As your assigned penitent, I know we shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing.”