Chapter 28: The Taste of Grain
The scent of him was alien. Musk and bitter herbs, a perfume of dry lands that held no reverence for the Nile’s fertility. It filled my nostrils, dense and overpowering. My vision narrowed to the dark, thick weight of him, close enough now that the heat radiating from his skin was a separate entity.
My mind was a shattered mosaic. One piece held the image of the grain barge, ropes being untied. Another held Marisa’s stifled gasp from across the room. A third was simply the cold, smooth stone beneath my knees.
This body is a tool. This mouth is a seal.
I bent further. My lips touched not him, but the tight, wrinkled skin beneath. A sac of softness against the hard line of his thigh. I heard his low, surprised intake of breath. It was not the move he’d expected. A ruler’s pride, even in submission, finds its own paths. I closed my eyes and let my tongue trace the heavy curve, a slow, deliberate circumnavigation. The salt-tang of sweat was immediate, the texture a strange landscape. I worshipped the source, not the symbol. Let him parse the difference.
The first crack of wood on flesh was a sound out of time.
It wasn’t the pain first. It was the shock of the vibration, traveling up through my pelvis and spine, a brutal echo in my teeth. A sharp, hot sting flowered across my left buttock, blooming under the thin linen of my skirt.
“Ouch!”
The sound was out before I could strangle it—a short, bitten-off exhalation of pure, undignified surprise.
Behind me, Neferti’s voice was cool honey poured over iron. “Does the touch of discipline surprise the Daughter of the Sun? We were told your kind were forged in desert fire.”
I forced my mouth back to its task, my tongue moving again on skin that now felt impossibly sensitive. I spoke against him, the words vibrating. “I was caught off guard. Nothing more.” The defiance was ash in my throat, but I shaped it anyway.
“Then we shall ensure you are… braced,” she said.
The second blow came as my mouth finally opened, as I took the blunt, broad head of him past my lips. The two sensations merged: the overwhelming, flesh-and-salt intrusion in my mouth and the simultaneous, searing line of fire laid across the other cheek. This time I winced, a full-body flinch I could not control. My jaw tightened involuntarily around him, and King Jabari grunted, a hand coming down to roughly grasp the back of my head.
The pain was bright, clarifying. It burned away the last vestiges of numbing shock. This was the reality. Each strike would be a calculated escalation. Neferti would not tire. The spanking was not just punishment; it was a rhythm, a metronome keeping time for my degradation. This would be hot. It would be relentless. It would be the most challenging fight of my life, fought on my knees with a mouth full of enemy.
I focused on the mechanics. Breathing through my nose. The coppery taste of my own fear at the back of my throat, mingling with his essence. The feel of his hand, calloused and demanding, tangled in my red hair, now a leash. I let my eyes open, seeking a fixed point.
I found Benedetta. She was crying silently, one fist pressed to her mouth, her shoulders trembling. But her eyes, those warm, gentle pools, were fixed on mine. They held no judgment. Only a shared, drowning pain. It was an anchor.
To her left, Marisa stood rigid, her sharp face a mask of pale fury. Her gaze was locked on Neferti, memorizing the angle of her arm, the set of her shoulders, with a lethal intensity. She was not witnessing; she was studying. A part of me, a cold, surviving part, noted this. Stored it.
King Jabari began to move, a shallow thrust against the constraint of my lips. The wood whispered through the air again.
Crack.
This one landed on the first stripe, intensifying the burn into a deep, throbbing ache. A small sound, half-gag, half-moan, escaped me. He moved again. The room shrank to the cycle of it: the rough push into my mouth, the searing impact from behind, the stretch of my jaw, the grate of his skin against my teeth, the next sharp report of wood on flesh.
The obsidian mirrors along the walls did their duty. In fleeting, fractured glances, I saw the tableau: the mighty Empress, her proud head held forward by a man’s grip, her body jerking with each measured blow from a queen who watched with dispassionate eyes. I saw the furious red marks rising through the linen. I saw myself.
And in that reflection, I saw something else die. Not my will. That hardened, becoming a cold, black gem in my chest. But the last illusion of inviolability. They were breaking the symbol, yes. But they were forging a new one in its place, hammered out on the anvil of my own flesh.
The spanking continued. The pace did not quicken. Neferti was a master of her craft. Each stroke found a new, tender place, or layered precisely over an old one, building the fire from a sting to a deep, resonant burn that seemed to pulse with the beat of my heart.
I concentrated on the anchor of Benedetta’s tears and the weapon of Marisa’s stare. I concentrated on the taste, the smell, the sound of my own ragged breath through my nose.
I paid the tax. Stroke by stroke. Thrust by thrust. The grain would flow. The people would live another moon.
And the cold, black gem of my will recorded every detail, every humiliation, every spark of pain. It had no room for shame. It had only room for a single, future command.
Remember this.