The Traitor’s Mercy by Iris Foxglove

Chapter 9

Sabre was starting to wonder if he shouldn’t just greet all his clients naked.

Devon Chastain, whose brother Sabre did punch in the nose before their fathers arranged for them to forgive each other and become “fast friends,” barely even permitted Sabre to greet him before he had him laid out on the floor of the common room with blood in his mouth and a jagged tear over his right sleeve. Gwydion and Percival were hosting together that night, and Percival made it two steps across the room before Sabre tightly shook his head.

“Can’t imagine what a traitor like you thinks you’re doing, wearing fine clothes like you’re a person,” Devon said, and ripped open the rest of Sabre’s shirt, scattering buttons.

It was the fourth time someone had chosen to ruin his clothes, and the gut-wrenching humiliation of it was starting to give way to the very real dread of having to sew it all back together in the morning. Sabre forced himself to look at Devon instead, and something in that must have infuriated him even more, because Devon growled and kicked Sabre across the carpet. Sabre gasped softly, and winced as Devon spat on his back.

“Get up, cur,” Devon said. Sabre got to his knees, and Devon kicked him again. “Don’t walk. I almost don’t want to lower myself to fuck you.”

Some didn’t. After Sabre’s First Night, Sabre was booked through year’s end with requests, but several of them didn’t have more than a passing interest. Those would just ask him questions, maybe slap him once or twice, flog him if he was lucky, and never call on him again. The rest were like Devon, venting out years of frustration, or nobles who wanted to brag to their peers about how they beat Sabre until he was sobbing and fucked him until he was begging for more.

Devon, Sabre thought, would probably come back.

Sabre had his own room, now, prepared by the other courtesans while he slept through the last of his First Night, but he discreetly returned half the furniture after he spent an entire evening frantically trying to clean up the mess before a new client came to wreck it again. Now, Devon looked at Sabre’s simple bed, the chair next to a desk he only used to be fucked over, and the worrying hooks on the walls and floor, and snorted.

“Far cry from your usual palace,” he said. As a second son, all Sabre knew Devon could hope for was the name Chastain and a pittance from his father, or a life spent in the military. “Fetch a chain, and shackles. You have those, don’t you?”

“Yes, my lord,” Sabre said.

“Bet it galls you, having to call me a lord. I know what you think of me. You and the prince were so close, looking down on the rest of us while you, what? Tried to fuck your way to the throne? I bet that’s what your mother wanted. You were too busy sucking Adrien’s cock to care.”

Sabre brought the chain, attached to heavy, impractical cuffs that would have been hard to lift if Sabre hadn’t spent most of his afternoons training with Isiodore, and grunted as Devon dragged him to the wall.

Devon caned him until his skin split and he started to shake with the effort of staying upright, then put clamps on his tongue and made him kneel in the middle of the room, desperately apologizing while Devon prowled around him like a furious hunting cat, stopping only to flog his shoulders in sharp bursts that did no more than leave Sabre wanting, his cock hard between his bare legs.

“You’re sick,” Devon said, not even stroking himself while Sabre rutted against his boot, eyes closed, face burning with mortification. “I don’t think I can bring myself to fuck you. Maybe next time, when you’ve earned it. Apologize for ruining my night, cur.”

“Ahh,” Sabre was down to one clamp, but it blocked his tongue, making his words slurred and incomprehensible. Devon took it off and tossed it in the corner with a snarl of frustration. It was strange, Sabre thought, as Devon stared at him with overbright eyes, that Devon hadn’t used the natural dominance in his voice even once. Perhaps he didn’t have enough to notice.

“Stop looking at me,” Devon said, tightly. “Stop looking at me like you’re sorry for me.”

When Devon slammed the door after him, Sabre lay in the middle of the floor, naked, his clothes shredded, his cock still hard.

“Look sharp, kiddo,” said a voice through the wall, and Sabre jumped. Nanette laughed. “You’ve got Lord…oh, this is one of Simone’s. Lord Beaufort.”

“Was he the one who wanted the stocks?”

“Yeah, he’s, uh. Look, wear clothes you’re okay with laundering really well, okay?”

Sabre looked down at the scraps of his last outfit and sighed.

Later that night, when the last of Sabre’s clients were gone, Sabre limped naked into the communal baths, climbed down between an alarmed Percival and Simone, ducked his head underwater, and screamed.

“That’s comforting,” Simone said, as Sabre came up for air.

“The last one broke the mirror,” Sabre said. It had been enough to startle him out of the pleasant haze he tended to fall into at the end of the night, and Yves, watching through the alcove, had almost gotten up to fetch Laurent.

“They do pay for damages,” Percival said, which wasn’t the point, really. “Do you want to hear about the Dear Brothers Woman?”

“Oh, no, what’s she up to this time?” Nanette asked. She was still wearing a pair of cat ears as she slipped into the bath next to Simone, who gingerly unpinned them from her hair.

“Wants us to live with her in her country estate,” Percival said. “As friends.”

Nanette groaned.

“At least she isn’t writing us poetry!” Gwydion called, from the bath where he was letting Margritte do his hair.

“Or crying,” Margritte said. “I hate when they cry. I never know what to say.”

“You don’t say anything,” Charon said. “Unless it’s how pretty they are when they do it.”

“Crying isn’t pretty, it’s embarrassing.”

“I am very charming when I cry,” Yves said, sneaking a sidelong look at Charon.

“No, you aren’t.” Margritte’s voice was inflectionless, matter-of-fact. “You screw your face and hiccup.”

Yves gasped in horror.

Simone gestured to Sabre, who swam to her side. She liked to wash his hair—It was strange, as a man grown, to let people do those things for him, but he found it comforting after a night spent being hissed at and spat on.

“You seem to be holding up well enough,” she said, threading his hair through her fingers.

“It’s easier, some nights,” Sabre admitted. “Harder, when they mention my father, or cousin Adrien.”

“Really? But your father died so long ago. I listen to gossip, love,” she said, when Sabre turned to look at her.

“Old wounds, I guess,” Sabre said. The truth made it hurt less, when he could bring himself to look at it that way. People telling him that his mother was a traitor didn’t sting so much now that he wasn’t fumbling in the dark. But he still wept for them, at night, in dreams where his father rode a horse through a forest of gallows, his mother and sister dangling from the ropes, Sabre staggering after as his father’s saddle started to slip.

“Old wounds always ache,” Simone said, softly. “When the storms come. There. Yves and Percival are arguing again. You can sneak out without unnecessary questions.”

Sabre gave Simone a curious look, and she smiled.

He had half a mind to wrap himself up in a towel and head back to his room for once, just to show that he could, but as Sabre slipped out of the baths and into the main stairwell, his gaze automatically turned upward, to Laurent’s door.

He shouldn’t. He knew it wasn’t right, taking advantage of Laurent’s kindness, stretching out what welcome he had, but Sabre couldn’t stop himself from climbing the steps to Laurent’s room. It settled him, in a way he couldn’t place, to lie there while Laurent slept or to sit by the desk and watch him go through the night’s numbers, to work on his endless sewing while he told Laurent stories his father’s nursemaid used to tell, ones full of strange creatures living in the stars and women falling from the heavens to distribute things like math and philosophy.

Sometimes he would just sit there, watching Laurent sitting in the lamplight, until Laurent inevitably glanced his way again.

Laurent could, and did, settle him properly when he asked for it, but Sabre was starting to look forward to the quiet, too, when Laurent’s hard edges seemed to soften.

He knocked on the door and went to his knees on the soft rug, waiting patiently for Laurent to answer.

* * *

Laurent staredat the numbers he’d recorded, wondering why he didn’t feel happier about what he was seeing.

Sabre had been an enormous asset to the House. He was always booked, and while most of his clients visited once or maybe twice, there were already a few who were going to be regulars. One of them was Lord Chastain’s son, Devon, who’d marched out of the house when his time was up like a man going to war against a hated enemy, trembling with rage and a wild, dangerously unstable look about him.

There were others eager to see the former noble of House Valois, and Laurent knew that when the shine was off the coin—a crude but apt phrase—it would ease up, for Sabre. He knew what the nobles did to him, the kicking, the tearing of clothes, the stocks. Two had choked him with a rope and been angry when they’d come too fast from Sabre’s terror. Yves, who’d been assigned to watch that night through the wall, had fled and begged Charon to take his place.

It was Nanette, Charon and Simone, mostly, now. Laurent would not allow himself to do it, because the second he saw someone put a rope around Sabre’s neck and get so aroused they came in their pants...well. He would not be responsible for what happened, except he would be, and then the whole house would suffer for someone doing exactly what Laurent had known they would do.

Finally he’d gone to Charon for tea that morning, sick with himself for how Sabre looked when he came to him at dawn after a night full of clients; not shaking and wreathed in horrific bruises, trembling and sobbing from fear...but quiet and calm, eyes red but clear, as if the gauntlet of humiliation and pain had done more for him than any quiet touch ever could.

“It is not one or the other,” Charon had explained, pouring him the strong Arkoudai tea. “Sabre is a masochist. It is as natural an urge as submission, and our..urges...are stronger, when we are under stress. When we are kept from having what we need. In Arktos, I met a man, like your Sabre. He was brought to me to break. But I was not a man who broke others for pleasure. Which you have learned, I think, by now.”

Laurent just nodded. “Your secrets are your own, Charon. You needn’t tell me about them, if you don’t want to.”

“That I am a sadist is no secret, my lord. That Sabre craves darker things is why he’s here, yes? He is getting what he needs, and you should be glad of it. I think they would do these things to him even if he were not inclined to like them, and that would be worse.” Charon’s dark eyes were steady, even. “Most of the men I broke, they did not like it. The nobles here, they are too...like, what do you call them, the birds, with the feathers? They have them, in the royal menagerie. They show them off, the feathers, and scream for a mate.”

“Peacocks,” Laurent said, trying not to choke on his tea. “Those are peacocks.”

“And that is what they are, these nobles. They do not know the difference or care. And just as there are only a few true masochists like Sabre, there are not many who know how to handle him. As he settles, he will see the ones who are true and the ones who posture.”

“The peacocks,” Laurent had said, lifting his teacup.

“Yes,” Charon’d responded, lifting his. “The peacocks.”

“I would never think someone would like it, the things they do to him,” Nanette said, when she made her report. If she was bothered by what she’d seen, it didn’t show. “But I know someone getting hot and bothered when I see it. The only time he looks legitimately uncomfortable—without liking it—is when they tear his clothes.”

“He hates the mending,” Laurent had said, then thanked Nanette and went back to chastising himself over being too involved when he knew he shouldn’t.

And it was lucrative, both for the House and for Sabre himself. His debt was impressive, but he wasn’t adding hardly anything to it as the others did—his room remained simple and unadorned, and maybe he thought he couldn’t do anything but mend his clothes, or maybe he simply didn’t see the point of adding to his debt by ordering new ones. It wasn’t nearly out of the realm of possibility he would earn it out, if he stayed as frugal as he was and put everything toward it.

And I’ll get rich while he suffers, Laurent thought, then reminded himself he’d saved Sabre from a life of toil and hardship in the quarries, and also, Sabre liked what was done to him well enough, on some biological level that made little sense to anyone.

And then, he inevitably flashed back to Sabre’s First Night, and how he’d stripped in the carriage, climbed on Laurent’s lap. They wouldn’t have cared about the truth.

Had he? Or had he used Sabre’s desire to know to his advantage? Did it matter, anymore? He’d gotten off to the memory of Sabre on his lap more than he wanted to admit, stroking himself in the bath and gasping out his pleasure as he remembered how Sabre felt around him, staring at him, saying I want to be good for you while he bounced so eagerly on Laurent’s cock.

When the knock came as he knew it would, Laurent threw down the quill and nearly knocked over the ink pot, standing up and taking a slow, deep breath even though it wouldn’t matter. The second he saw Sabre, under and lovely, the raging want would come back. Laurent wasn’t a sadist like the men who wanted to see Sabre humiliated. He liked watching an eager masochist writhe under the lash as much as the next dominant with similar urges, but it was putting them under, settling them, that he craved.

Laurent ran his fingers through his hair. He could ignore the knock, and Sabre would kneel there, pretty and quiet like a gift by his door. “Come in.”

Sabre entered, on his feet, and he was naked and freshly bathed. “My lord. If you’re busy.”

He said that, every time. Laurent shook his head. “I was finishing up. Come in. How was this evening?” Of course he knew, already. And Sabre knew that he knew.

“They’re very into breaking things,” Sabre said, padding over, sinking to his knees next to Laurent. “My things. I’ll need another mirror. Nanette offered one, but it would be on her debt, wouldn’t it, if the next one broke it?”

“We’ll get you a mirror. Basic furniture isn’t your responsibility to replace.” It was in the House of Gold, but this was not the House of Gold. Laurent could afford to replace a few broken things. “Devon Chastain wasn’t too awful, was he? He will request you again. He had that look about him.”

“Yes. He didn’t quite get to fuck me. Said he couldn’t make himself. I think he doesn’t like sadism as much as he thinks he does, or he came too fast, and didn’t want me to know.”

“They do that,” Laurent said, amused. “I had a client, once. Marlow, his name was. Apprenticed in an accounting house, could hardly carry on a conversation, and was...unfortunately put together, let’s say.”

“Ah,” Sabre said, smiling a bit, twisting his damp, red-gold hair into a sloppy braid.

“Come here and let me do that,” Laurent said, rolling his eyes as he sat on the edge of his bed and motioned to Sabre. “Anyway, this poor man must have spent his entire savings on a night with me, because he came the second I took my robe off. Then he taught me how to balance a ledger book.”

“You’re making that up,” Sabre said. “I’ve learned nothing useful but the various ways to kick a man and that I have, I think, a bit of a fondness for a certain type of leather boot.”

Laurent laughed. “You’re a delight when you’re under, you know that?” He set about braiding Sabre’s hair. “It’s remarkable how different you are, when you’re...ah. Not.”

“They kept that way, I think. My mother, at least. So I wouldn’t notice things. I don’t know. It seems like she would have preferred I didn’t...or wasn’t...fully myself. But please, my lord. Tell me more of your accounting lessons.”

Laurent tugged his hair. “Brat. Well, he taught me and he was…an entirely different person. He spoke so confidently, that his, let’s say, unfortunate arrangement of physical characteristics—”

“Just call him ugly, my lord,” Sabre said, and laughed.

It was, Laurent thought, the first time he’d ever heard Sabre laugh. A real laugh, deep-chested and lovely. “All right, he was ugly, but when he spoke about numbers and ledgers, he had this...power, about him. Dominant, certainly, but not even that. Confidence. Anyway, I asked him some questions about how to cheat at cards, too, and he also knew that. I was so turned on by how smart he was, I offered to suck him off even though his time was up.”

“Did that go better, then?”

“For me or for him?”

Sabre smiled. “Both, I suppose.”

“He came when I breathed on his cock, but I suppose it was easy enough work for me.” Laurent finished with his braid, pulling just a bit too tight to hear Sabre gasp.

“Did he come back ‘round, afterwards, to try it again, then?”

Laurent almost messed up tying the end of the braid, he was so unaccustomed to Sabre sounding like a young noble, which he did in that moment more than he ever had, before. “No, my prices were suitably unaffordable for the laymen. But I hired him to look over my investments, and once a month he comes too fast for Yves and then teaches everyone else how to manage their own money, when they’re done.”

“You’ve the soul of an economic revolutionary,” Sabre said, smiling a bit.

“Hardly. I’m a whore who became a lord, unless that’s the sort of revolutionary you mean, and Sabre, perhaps that’s a poor choice of conversation for us to have.”

Sabre’s smile faded, but he nodded. “Perhaps so. Would you like me to go back to my room? I am sure the glass is swept up.”

“No,” Laurent said, because he didn’t want him to be anywhere but right here. “It’s all right. Your company is hardly a bother, you realize.”

“I ask for much of your time,” Sabre said, and it was clear he was starting to slip, maybe, come up a bit from the place where a night of humiliating degradation had sent him.

“You do, and if I minded, I would tell you. Remember who’s the whore and who’s the lord, here, Sabre.” He tugged on the braid. “Is there something you need, specifically?”

“I...it always feels better, when I come back up, and you’re here.”

Something sweet and hot kicked around his chest at that. “Then stay here. Would you like more stories about my time as a whore, then? I had a client who could only get off to the sound of sneezing, that was quite memorable. I had to inhale a variety of things to make myself able to sneeze long enough for him to find his pleasure—regrettably, he did not come as quickly as the accountant—and to this day, I cannot stand the scent of black pepper or ginger in excess.”

Sabre’s mouth quirked. “Is that story true.”

“As I live and breathe,” Laurent said, stretching. “You may attend me, if you like.”

Sabre had a healthy dose of service submission along with his fondness for pain and humiliation, and he rose easily to his feet and began to attend to Laurent’s clothing, which were simple enough as he’d changed after the first of the evening’s rush. “May I ask you a question, my lord?”

“You may.” Curious, Laurent tilted his head, watched Sabre’s long, elegant fingers as they undid the buttons on his shirt.

“How did you come to be in Staria?”

“Well, I would imagine my mother lay with my father and—what?” He laughed. “How does anyone come to be anywhere?”

“But you aren’t...my lord, you aren’t Starian, are you?” Sabre blinked up at him. “You’re taller than most, which I suppose isn’t all that rare but...your coloring isn’t found here, and sometimes you speak with an accent.”

An accent? That was new, no one had mentioned that since his early days in the House of Gold. “Oh. Well, yes, originally, I suppose I wasn’t. But I’ve been here as long as I remember, though I suppose it’s possible...you mean to say, the others haven’t told you? My harridan of a sister?”

“Told me...what, my lord?”

Yves could pull off coy, Sabre could not. Laurent sighed and let Sabre help him undress, then slipped into a robe and tied back his hair as he went to a small liquor cabinet near the desk. “I don’t have any memory of my life before I was at the House of Gold.”

“Oh. You were brought there young, then?”

“No, that’s the thing. Kneel for me, pet, by the bed, there. Good.” He took up a bottle and waved it at Sabre. “This is athenero. It’s liquor made from desert wildflowers, they grow only in Arktos and it’s impossible to get some. I gave a bottle to Charon after his First Night, and he wept. Actual tears. I think he would give up all his maps, his books and his tea to keep it hidden.”

“It’s that good?” Sabre asked.

Laurent poured some in a glass, two swallows-full. “Gods, no, pet. It’s awful. It tastes like—what?”

“You said that once, before.” Sabre’s eyes went downcast. “Gods. Just, um. Just once, when I was in your bed.”

Gods, how I want to fuck you.

“Is it that strange?” Laurent asked, walking over, holding the glass out. “Go on, try it. It will help you sleep, if nothing else. It’s bitter, which Charon says is because the Arktos are contrary about everything, even flowers and things that should taste good.”

“We don’t believe in gods, here,” Sabre said, and took the glass. He sipped it, and then coughed immediately. “This is foul. Why would anyone, ever drink this.”

“Take another sip, wait about two minutes, you’ll see. It sends you under without the pain, that might be why.”

“What’s the fun of that,” Sabre coughed, but he took another sip and immediately pulled a face.

“Charon said if you ever go to Arktos and add honey to your tea or your athenero, they’ll lose all respect for you. Considering I’ve lost respect for their palate and think their taste buds must be permanently damaged by all the bitter tea…” he knocked back the rest of the drink, shuddered, and then put the glass on his bedside table. “I came late to the House of Gold, actually. I was—well, I was told somewhere between ten and thirteen, no one was sure, not really. I woke up in a bed, and it was sunny, and I could hear the last lingering bits of a lullaby, just the...edges of one, like someone sang it while I was asleep.” He whistled it, just a bit.

Sabre’s eyes went vacant. “That’s familiar, I…I swear I’ve heard it before.”

Laurent shrugged. “Then you’re one up on me, I have no idea what it was. The proprietor said I’d been brought here by a woman who said she’d found me in an alley, wracked by a fever and muttering in a strange language. But I woke up and called myself Laurent, spoke the common tongue with a slight accent that I assumed was just a mark of the lower city, and never remembered how I’d ended up there, or where I was before.”

“Did you try and find her, the woman who brought you?”

“There was no reason, really. It was said she covered her face, refused to sign her name and was adamant about taking no coin for giving me over, which I assume was because she knew it would go toward my debt if she didn’t take it for herself, but...well, it’s hard to believe a stranger would be that caring about someone they found feverish in an alley. I assumed it was my mother’s way of making sure I didn’t know who she was, and the least I could do was honor that wish and not find her.”

Laurent climbed into bed, and said, “Go ahead and bring the water carafe, if you want to clear the taste from your mouth.”

“I could do that another way, my lord.”

The warm, strong liquor made the protests that Laurent already wouldn’t have wanted to listen to weak and unsubstantial. He reclined in the sheets of his bed, and said, “All right, then, show me how a good whore pleases his lord.”

Sabre was eager, and warm, his hair soft against Laurent’s thighs when he took Laurent into his mouth. And maybe it was the alcohol softening the edges of his dominance and Sabre being a little under along with it, but it was...easier, between them, than it had been before. Laurent let Sabre pleasure him and didn’t try to grab or choke, just kept a firm hand in his Sabre’s hair and sometimes held him for a second or two, just to feel Sabre’s throat flutter around his cock. And he came in Sabre’s mouth without bothering to pull out and finish on him, as dominants were wont to do with their clients.

Sabre did not, in that moment, feel like a client. Laurent drew him up when he was finished, kissed him and murmured, “Taste better, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Sabre said, and kissed him back.

“Do you want to come, tonight, or would you like to lie there and ache for me?” He smiled when Sabre squirmed, clearly aroused by the thought of it, being denied. “My little masochist, I’ve never met anyone who likes being hurt like you do. Go ahead, curl up there at the bottom of the bed and I’ll see to you in the morning, if you’re good. I might let you hump my boot, mine are far better leather than Devon Chastain’s.”

“Yes, my lord,” Sabre murmured, and moved to lie contentedly at Laurent’s feet.

Laurent was nearly asleep when he heard Sabre say, quietly, “My lord, I remember when I heard that song. Before. The one you were humming.”

“Oh?” Laurent shifted on the silk, yawned. “When was that?”

“She used to sing it,” Sabre answered.

“Who? Your mother?”

“No,” Sabre said, surprising him. “Not my mother. Adrien’s. The queen.” He hummed it, again, and it went on and on, and somehow, without knowing exactly why or how, Laurent realized he was humming, too, fingers tapping out a forgotten rhythm on the silk of his pillowcase, over and over, in the dark.