The handmaiden with the towels laid them aside and spread the fur rug behind Meg on the stone floor. The woman with the jar set it down alongside, while the third draped the gown she carried over something in the shadows Meg couldn’t see. When all three converged upon her, Meg tried to rise, but they seized her and laid her back upon the thick, white fur.
“It is no use to struggle,” said the maid with the jar. She had taken it up again and was dipping her fingers in the pleasant-smelling oil inside. “You must be readied for the shamans. The experience can be as pleasant as you allow, but it must be done. You must be prepared.”
“Why? Who are you?” Meg cried, straining against the others’ grips on her arms. They were holding them over her head, and she was terrified.
“Does it really matter?” the handmaiden said, her oil-drenched fingers suspended over her. Several drops of the oil dripped on Megs breasts. It was cool, yet the flesh beneath grew hot as it touched her skin.
“It does,” Meg said. “Are you priestesses or whores? Why must you prepare me…for what?”
“I am called Zeona,” the maid said. “My sisters are Isobel and Mariet. Lie
still!
”
“Let me go!” Meg shrilled. “I beg you, turn me loose. I do not belong here. I’ve been brought against my will!”
The one called Mariet snorted. “You think any of us came here willingly?” she said.
“Then let me go! Why do to me what others have done to you?”
“There is no escape for the shamans’ whores,” the one called Isobel chimed in.
“You are no better than they to do this to me!” Meg sobbed, struggling. “Let…me…go…!”
“Would you rather the shamans do it, then?” Mariet said. “They will not be so kind. They will be angry, and you will suffer for it—we all will suffer for it. Lie still and submit. One way or another, you will be prepared. Better it should be at our hands than theirs.”
Meg sagged against the others’ grips. It was no use. They were possessed of uncanny strength. She could not stand against the three of them, and she shut her eyes and called up Simeon’s image.
Zeona had begun to massage the oil into Meg’s skin. She was a gifted masseuse, taking great pains to rub the ambery oil into Meg’s breasts. It smelled of hazelnuts, smoky and rich. It took her breath away. It was like a drug pulling her under, while heightening her senses at the same time. It was passing strange. Every pore came to life as Zeona rubbed and tweaked and circled her tall, erect buds, massaging the oil into them until they glowed. The heat it generated relieved her sore skin. If she only wasn’t so dizzy all of a sudden.
Zeona’s hands slid lower, following the contours of Meg’s torso, working the oil into her navel and along her thighs. Mariet’s hands worked her breasts now, and Isobel had parted her legs and spread them open for Zeona to knead the oil into Meg’s pubic curls. As dazed as a lord drunk on mulberry wine, Meg fought the waves of vertigo that starred her vision, but it was no use. The pungent scent of hazelnuts threading through her nostrils had rendered her helpless as Zeona spread her nether lips and opened her slit. One—two of the handmaiden’s fingers dripping the woodsy-scented oil slipped into her vagina, slathering the oil on her hardened bud, rubbing it deep inside her in circular revolutions that arched Meg’s back off the fur rug as if she’d been launched from a catapult. She groaned. Whatever was in the oil had awakened every nerve ending in her body until the tactile element of the massage became a painful experience—an excruciating ecstasy that cried for release. Meg’s whole body throbbed with it.
She was slipping further and further away. Subdued by the drug the handmaidens had rubbed into her skin, she’d become docile, almost semiconscious. “W-what are you doing to me?” she murmured thickly.
“Does it really matter?” one of them said. Meg couldn’t tell which one, though their voices were hardly similar. Now, under the influence of whatever they had administered through the oil, the laughter and chatter of all three sounded like it was coming from an echo chamber.
She scarcely felt them roll her over on her stomach. The coarse fur beneath her, rubbing against her engorged bud—grabbing her vulva as they moved her—caused shockwaves of riveting fire to course through her swollen sex. Her nether parts seemed gargantuan, as if the swelling had forced them to turn inside out.
The handmaidens had begun massaging the oil over her back, over the globes of her buttocks and the curve of her thighs. One of them spread her legs again. Another raised her hips, while the third massaged the oil into the tender skin between her sheath and her anus, penetrating it lightly to smear the thick, hazelnut-scented stuff inside the edge of the puckered rim.
Then she was on her back again. The handmaidens had removed their loin cloths. How odd: their pubic curls were shorn. Their nether lips and clitoris were visible, their pelvises as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Moving as if time had slowed to a snail’s pace, all three handmaidens descended on her, on her breasts, on her navel, on the throbbing, tormented flesh between her thighs, sucking, stroking, laving until she feared she would go mad, helpless to prevent what they were doing to her and to each other.
It went on forever. Weak and wet from involuntary climax after climax and the strange effects of the hazelnut-scented oil, Meg lay helpless while they fondled, stroked and caressed her. Was this it, her preparation? Her heart was aching for Simeon’s embrace. Was this some sort of consolation? How could it be, when they knew nothing of her alignment with the Lord of the Deep?
Just when she feared she would die before she could bear more, they eased her into the steaming tub and formed a semicircular arc around her while they stroked and laved and palmed each other’s breasts, then bathed each others’ nether parts inside and out in the silkened water.
Had she died? And if so, was this heaven or hell? Still under the foggy haze of drug-induced euphoria, Meg breathed a ragged sigh. Her
preparation,
as the handmaidens had called it, was over at last. Preparation for what was still vague, for it was as if her mind had become unhinged—as if it had become separated from her body—and all that had happened since the eunuchs dragged her through the Mount gates had happened to someone else. At least that is what she thought until a cold draft snaked its way down the narrow stone staircase announcing the arrival of another. The heavy iron-hinged door slammed shut behind the tall, muscular man descending.
He was too attractive for a shaman, though that is what he was—a striking figure with chestnut hair and eyes so deeply sunken beneath the ledge of his brow Meg could not tell their color. He was wearing a long black
cote-hardie
, and he was naked underneath, his thick, bulbous erection exposed, protruding through the opening in front. He made no move to tuck it away, but flaunted it, instead, coming nearer. Nodding toward the cobalt-blue glass jar, he cast a slow blink toward Zeona, who scrabbled up out of the tub and dipped her fingers in the oil. Jutting his shaft, he stood arms akimbo while the handmaiden massaged it into his penis from its root along its long veined shaft to its burgeoning head.
After a moment, he groaned, and turned hard eyes upon the handmaiden. “Enough!” he bellowed, backing Zeona up apace. “Leave us, all of you!”
T
he three handmaidens fled, and the shaman strolled closer, stroking his penis absently. Meg barely stifled the gasp rising in her throat. His eyes were visible now. They were as black as sin, staring down dilated with desire.
Meg shrank back from the formidable image towering over her. Did her aunt know this was what would happen to her when she summoned the eunuchs? She must have. Would Uncle Olwyn have prevented her? He had been kinder, less rigid, in the short time she’d spent on the Isle. Perhaps that was why Aunt Adelia had given her up.
And good riddance!
Adelia’s parting words ghosted across her memory. And she had said she wanted to get shot of her before Olwyn returned. Could she have been jealous? It never crossed Meg’s mind until now, but it was a distinct possibility. It hurt her heart, but it didn’t matter anymore. Her fate was standing over her, reeking of stale sweat and strong drink. Instead of becoming a priestess of the Isle of Mists, she was about to become one of the shamans’ whores.
He laughed. “Come, come, do not shrink from me,” he said. “It is no use in any case. There is no escape. No one ever returns from Shamans’ Mount. I am sure now you see why. But that is of no consequence. It isn’t a bad life, servicing us. You shall want for nothing. You shall bathe in the most precious oils—wear the finest silks—eat the most delicious delicacies—live in the most sumptuous dwelling, all for the pleasure of lying beneath us in our turn.”
“Please, I beg you, let me go,” Meg pleaded. “I have been brought here against my will….”
“It is a privilege to lie beneath us,” he said. “It isn’t as though you are an innocent. Your virtue has already been taken, else-wise your fate would have been quite different. Now, you have two options. You become a temple whore or a blood sacrifice to the gods of Arcus. I presumed this would be your preference. Have I presumed wrong? Because if I have—”
“I belong to another,” Meg persisted. “I do not even know you!”
“That hardly signifies,” the shaman said through a wry chuckle. “You didn’t know him either, your lover, yet you spread your legs and gave him your virtue easily enough.”
“
Gave,
yes,” she sallied. “He did not force me.”
“I shan’t force you, either, little whore. Before I’m through, you will beg me to take you. And since it seems to be a point of contention with you that you must have the intimacy of a name to go with this face, I am called Seth, but you will not call me thus. You will address me as ‘my lord.’”
“You have plenty of whores,” Meg argued, scrambling out of the tub. “Willing ones. I will never give myself to you of my own free will, and if you force yourself on me, you will be shamed before the others.”
The bottle-green gauze kirtle the handmaidens had brought lay draped over a bench in the shadows. She reached it in three strides and wriggled into it. Looking down, her breath caught. She may as well have been naked for the coverage the flimsy thing gave her. It was slit in front to the navel in a wide V that barely covered her nipples. There was virtually no back to speak of in the garment at all. Despite the long flowing sleeves and voluminous skirt, her skin showed right through the gauze. It was sheerer than spider silk.
“I’m glad you’re coming to your senses,” Seth said, strolling closer, as if he hadn’t heard a word. “That gown is much more provocative than naked skin. Wise decision.”
“They have taken the kirtle I arrived in,” Meg defended. “I have no other.”
“Ah, but you will, Megaleen, the moment you accept this,” he said, exhibiting his penis. He’d been pumping it since their conversation began—slow, lingering strokes through the ring he’d made of his thumb and middle finger. The engorged shaft was blue with distended veins, the head a threatening shade of purple. It trembled in readiness, wet in anticipation.
Meg backed away. “I told you, I belong to another,” she snapped at him. Maybe that would shrivel the menacing penis, reduce it to a flaccid state. But no, it only seemed to grow thicker—longer. She took another step back from him.
The shaman continued to stroke his sex. “The Lord of the Deep?” he scoffed. “The selkie lecher of Arcus…Have you any idea how many maidenheads he’s taken? And you accuse
me
a whoremaster!” He threw his head back and convulsed in riotous laughter. “You think he will be faithful to you—a
selkie
be faithful to a mortal? Never—not unless she possesses his sealskin, and you do not. Already he strays.”
“I am not his whore!” Meg insisted. “And even if I were, he is not a priest of the temple! You are a sacrilege to the Arcan gods you serve.”
Again, the shaman flaunted his penis. “You waste our precious time together,” he said. “Do you see what I do? My cock is ready. If it comes in my hand and not in you, you will be the worse for it.”
Still skirting his advance, Meg ignored him. “How do you know these things,” she said. “How could you know so much about me…so much that no other knows? How do you know he strays?”
The shaman hesitated. “Tiresome little bitch!” he seethed, seizing her arm. “That’s got your attention, has it? You want to see how? Will that persuade you that you are better off right here with me? So be it!”
Hauling her up the narrow staircase, the shaman dragged her out the same way she had entered with the eunuchs, only this time, he took her behind the folly, where an ancient copse fringed the rear approach to the temple complex. How strange, Meg thought, that trees grow here and not on the Isle of Mists proper. But then, a peculiar, mystical atmosphere prevailed about the archipelago. Mainland folk had long since spoken about it in hushed whispers, about the water world beneath the waves that served as the deep lord’s subterranean island, and the dark lord’s isle, lonely and barren, that none dared trespass; about the enchanted forest isle, home of the Lord of the Wood and the forbidden fire lord’s volcanic domain; and in their midst, about the mysterious Isle of Mists, where, like an arm flung into the bay, stood Shamans’ Mount, the seat of Arcan clerical power, cloaked by the fogs unless the shamans chose to expose it to mortals, view. Not once since she’d come to the Isle of Mists had she seen the Mount until now…when it was too late to be forewarned of the true danger, of the shaman’s dark secret that none who ever ventured to the Mount returned to tell.
They started down a narrow footpath through the trees that soon opened to a little clearing, where a rock pool stood. It was small and deep, judging by the color of the water, but that, Meg surmised, could well be from the canopy of pine boughs that let precious few shafts of light through to reach the ground. Instead, an eerie green darkness clung about the place. It was well into the afternoon, and one fractured sunbeam sliced through the haze, illuminating the pool of dark water enclosed in a rock formation that was part of the granite wall at the opposite end of the peninsula. Meg could see it in brief glimpses beyond the thinning trees.
The shaman hauled her along toward what looked like a little raised well at the edge of the pool. A strange green mist rose from it, taking color from the atmosphere in the wooded glade. Fisting his hand in the back of Meg’s hair, the shaman propelled her closer.
The scrying pool.
Meg’s heart leapt. It was! She had always presumed it to be hidden somewhere on the Isle of Mists proper. Giving her hair a jerk, he shoved her closer, and she braced her hands on the cool, smooth stones that edged the pool and peered over the rim. The strange green mist drifted up her nostrils. It was warm, and smelled sweet with the heady, woodsy scents of spring approaching summer. It did frightening things to her equilibrium.
“What would you see first, eh?” the shaman asked. “The past, present, or future?”
“Please…just let me go,” she pleaded.
“You wanted to know, did you not? Well now you shall…”
The shaman swept his hand over the scrying pool, and the mist dissipated, revealing her image and Simeon’s during their last embrace in the little cove, where in just hours, she was to meet him again. She gasped and reached toward the water.
The shaman seized her wrist. “No!” he said. “Do not touch!”
Before her eyes, she watched Simeon embrace her—watched him build a little pillow of sand beneath her hips and drink her juices—watched his life live inside her deep, pistoning thrusts that had brought her to ecstasy like no other.
“No more!” she sobbed, trying to turn away, but the shaman held her fast.
“Now the present,” he said, passing his hand before the water in the scrying pool again. “You wished to know how I knew your precious Lord of the Deep would stray…Even as we speak, he lies in the arms of another, little whore—
look!
”
The water rippled, then cleared, and Meg stared at Simeon in the arms of his favorite consort, Alexia, their naked bodies entwined. She had hold of his penis and was twisting it erect. They were underwater, beneath some sort of mesh canopy, but the setting was unfamiliar to her. Other consorts were grouped around them. For a moment, they appeared to be spectators, but then they, too, swam beneath the canopy to participate in the coupling.
Tears welled in Meg’s eyes. She couldn’t bear to look, and yet she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Was this something in the selkie nature that couldn’t be broken, a drive that not even love could curtail? There was no mistaking what she was seeing. The selkie females were all over him, like a living, breathing quilt of naked bodies. Her heart was breaking.
“No more!” she sobbed, struggling against the shaman’s grip. He had hold of her still, but he also had hold of his penis again. He had brought it to life with quick, deft strokes until it had grown longer and harder than before. Evidently the scene in the scrying pool had aroused him. Spinning her around, he leaned her back against the stone rim of the pool and forced his hot hard shaft against the cushion of her pubic curls through the thin gauze kirtle.
“I will wait no longer,” he panted. “This is as good a place as any for our first coupling.” He began hoisting the skirt of her gown up with his free hand while tethering her with the other. “Do not struggle,” he warned. “Struggling only stimulates me.” Spreading the
cote-hardie
open wide, he exposed his hard muscled body to her gaze and forced her hand against his engorged penis. “That’s right, hold it…stroke it…put it in you,” he charged. “Take me the way you took him….”
Her hand jammed against his shaft grazed his testicles. They were swollen and hard, and Meg shifted position. He was on the verge of climax, and she gave his sex a vicious tug, brought her knee up and delivered a blow to his groin with all her strength.
Shrieking, the shaman let her go and doubled over just long enough for her to shove him away and dart off into the forest.
“Run!” he thundered. “You cannot escape me, little whore. You would have to sprout wings to escape the Mount. I will have you, and when I do, you will rue the day you raised your hand against me!”
As the sun approached the zenith, Simeon reached the Pavilion astride a penitent waterhorse. Much of the distance had been traveled beneath the waves since it was daylight and the course took him dangerously close to the mainland, something selkies rarely risked except at night. Only for brief intervals did he allow Elicorn to surface and ride the white-capped waves as the animal so loved to do, and those occasions were well offshore, out of sight of prying eyes. Now, they had reached the place where bay and sea met in a howling vortex seamed together by seven currents that whipped the seas to a briny froth and lured more than one ship to a watery grave, fair weather and foul. Here deadly waterspouts hammered vessels and their crews into swirling eddies to vanish without a trace, and the sirens’ wails from the rockbound shoreline of the mainland alone proclaimed their eulogies.
The undertow was strong and dangerous—too dangerous for the selkie cows to navigate, he was hoping. In their seal incarnations, the females could not stay under water more than an hour or two without discomfort and finally being driven above the waves. Neither could the males, except for himself. The Lord of the Deep could exist in any underwater condition. It remained only to determine if Meg could exist there with him.
The water here was many fathoms deep, with great rocky shelves and underwater caves, many with air pockets. Simeon left Elicorn in one of these to graze and swam below, passing shipwreck after shipwreck all the way to the bottom. Vega was right. Meg would never make it to the surface if her breathing failed. He would have to visit the Waterwitch for a potion or a spell, but that would have to wait. He was nearing the bottom, and the Pavilion, which had once been grand in its day, loomed before him from its subterranean air pocket, draped in sea moss and overgrown with aquatic vegetation. The sea creatures welcomed him, flocking to him in droves. He had not come this way since he was a child, and it warmed his heart that his legend had lived even here, at the edge of the Arcan wilderness.
Sirens and sprites, nymphs and naiads flocked to him there to pay homage to the Lord of the Deep. There was no question that he and Meg would be welcome, and all factions, ecstatic at the prospect of having their prince so close at hand, pledged to restore the Pavilion as best they could—to sweep the ocean residence clean of the death and decay that occupied it now and make it fit for their selkie lord and his bride.
At last there was a ray of hope, and he bade them farewell and started back to the cave where he’d left Elicorn. Time was short. If he was to reach the palace in time to slip into his selkie skin and meet Meg at the cove on the Isle of Mists, he couldn’t waste a minute.
Warmed by the music the sirens made proclaiming the news from their rocks along the shoals, Simeon surged through the water passageways that threaded through the maze of underwater caverns, caves, and sunken ships clinging to their ledges toward the surface. Muriel, their leader, was marshalling the legions, and the water rang with their sweet music, calling sea creatures near and far to lend a hand in the restoration.