Betrayed (Hidden Worlds Book 1) Read online

  "You'll stop this now, you small snake," the soldier snapped, and I could hear confusion in his voice, as well as irritation. I understood his puzzlement all too well. From his perspective, for no reason whatsoever, Christy had run mad and attacked me in a heartbeat.

  But Christy ignored him, and continued to scream and writhe, looking directly at me from time to time and howling, "Get us out of here."

  Finally, when a particularly sharp kick from her foot caught the soldier just above the knee he grunted and his face started showing true anger. Deftly, he dragged her up and flipped her around into the position we were now becoming all too familiar with, under his arm, with her head back and bottom forward. "Are you wanting a good skelping, then you bad wee wench? Settle down now, or it'll be happening."

  She ignored him; truly, I realized she was probably beyond hearing him. She continued to struggle and shriek, trying to throw her body out from under his arm. He grunted with the effort of holding her.

  Suddenly, his face changed, screwed up into a grimace of pain, and he jerked. "Bite me, will you, wee bitchy," he hissed out, and striding heavily over to a chair, he sat on it, and flipped her down so she was lying across his knees. "I may not be a married man, but I've reddened my sisters' bottoms a'plenty. And for biting me, lass, it's red you'll be." As he spoke, he flipped up the back of Christy's tunic, and jerked open the back of her trousers.

  Suddenly, I could feel the soldier holding me stiffen, and I glanced up at his face. He was looking at Christy's bottom, fully bared by the opening in her trousers. "I wasn't believing it. She isn't having the marks," he muttered.

  I found my voice and began struggling as I realized what they were truly going to do to her. "Please, please you don't understand. Leave her alone. Please…" The grip of the soldier holding me, which had been light against my upper arms, tightened immediately. "Watch yourself, lass," he snapped, "or you'll be getting the same as your friend."

  The same as my friend was dreadful. The opening in her trousers was wide, and, just like we'd seen in the classroom, her naked buttocks were offered to him, high and round. With no more warning, he brought his broad palm down against her pale cheeks, again and again, hard and fast. Almost immediately, her skin began showing pink, and Christy's cries went from furious hysteria to true pain. I could barely swallow over the thick lump I felt in my throat. To see this happen to two anonymous strangers was one thing; to see it happen to someone I knew, who was the only link to everything I knew, was terrible.

  The soldier spanked hard, his brawny arm dropping from above his shoulder with full arm swings, his wide palm impacting Christy's small bottom over and over. And because Christy was so tiny, she seemed dwarfed over the man's wide thighs, almost like a child. Her feet did not touch the floor, but flailed everywhere, kicking scissoring, spreading. She tried to bring a hand back, but the soldier merely caught it, gripped it in his huge fist, and pinned it at her side while he continued to strike. Her skin was becoming a brilliant red, his finger marks showing first white, then a darker red against the overall glow. Frantically, she began flipping her head from side to side and trying to rock her bottom away from his cruelly-punishing hand.

  They can see this, I realized suddenly. Because I can see it, they can see it, and as soon as I had the thought, as soon as I pictured Hal Turner and the others in the Drakkon above us, their faces intent, I closed my eyes, tight. I would not give them the… Could "pleasure" be the right word? I would not, I thought desperately, and I squeezed my eyes more tightly, wishing I could close my ears as well.

  "What in bloody hell is going on here?"

  I snapped my eyes open and took a deep, shuddering breath. Rohan stood in the doorway, the Head Matron's face, framed black with her head-covering, visible behind him. They both gazed into the room with astonishment on their faces.

  The soldier thrust Christy off his lap and rose quickly. Christy, obviously frantic with the pain, reached under the back flap of her tunic, and put her hands to her bottom, while she stamped her feet quickly. She was still crying, her face red and streaked with tears, her mouth a wide "O".

  The soldier looked nervous. "I'm sorry, Lord. The wee wench just went crazy, she did. They were talking, quiet-like, not a peck o' trouble out o' them, and all of the sudden, this one's attacking the other one, screaming foul, foul things, using barracks' language. Then I snatched her up, but she wouldn't stop struggling. I threatened her with a spanking, but she still didn't stop. Then I put her under my arm, and she bit my back. I'm sorry, Lord, I know it wasn't decent, seeing that she's not o' me or mine, but I didn't think…"

  The soldier was very discomfited and I knew immediately, from his words as well as comments that had been made earlier, that apparently who could punish a woman was limited by certain social factors. Rohan gazed at him, the look cool. "Ye're not to be striking a lass in anger, Trevor. Ye're almost ready to pick your own bride. I'd have thought ye'd be knowing this by now. Maybe ye need to have another year of growing behind ye, before ye get a girl of your own."

  Trevor went pale. "Lord, please…" I noticed that while he was talking he was rubbing his palm, the one he hit Christy with, against the rough fabric of his trousers absently.

  Rohan dismissed him with a nod of his head. "We'll be talking on it, Trevor. Ye can go now."

  Trevor inclined his head stiffly. I could see his jaw clenching under his skin. "Yes, Lord." Silently he left the room.

  Rohan looked back at Christy, his expression completely unmoved by the fact that she was still crying and desperately trying to rub the pain away from her bottom. "If ye bit him, girl, ye got nothing but what ye deserve." He looked at me, his blue eyes brilliant against his tanned face. "What about ye, lass? Planning on biting anyone?"

  I looked back at him, meeting his stare with a frank one of my own. Everything was happening so fast, and I desperately needed to reassess. But something became crystal clear in a heartbeat. I owed the fiends who'd abandoned me here nothing. Absolutely nothing. Why shouldn't I spill my guts to this man? I could tell him everything… who we were, why we'd come, everything. At the very least, all the information we could give them, ideas for modernization, would surely count for something. We should be able to negotiate some sort of better position or advantage for ourselves with that.

  "I'll not bite anyone…" I swallowed with the effort of bringing out the respectful sobriquet, "…Lord. But I will tell you who we are… and where we've come from."

  Christy looked at me, her hands still at her bottom, and squawked out what had to be a combination of a cry of outrage and a frantic question. But I ignored her, as did Rohan, his face immediately going still and calm. "Will ye now? And where might that be?"

  I stiffened my shoulders. "We're from Earth. We were left here, this morning, apparently to spy on you. We're not sure, but we both think that we've been implanted with…"

  Out of nowhere, Rohan exploded, his body diving for me frantically. Standing still, he was overwhelming enough. Lunging for me, every muscle in his shoulders cording visibly, he was terrifying. Unable to help myself, I cowered away, my body slamming into the soldier behind me, my arms draping over my head. Rohan grabbed me, turned me so my back was to his hip, and locked his arm around me, pressing his huge hand over my mouth. I was aware of the overwhelming size of him, the hardness of his muscles, the slight odor of horse and male sweat. "Tell another lie like that, lass, and what your friend got will look like a mamma's tender kiss." It seemed to me that he was breathing heavily, and in spite of my fear, I felt surprise at the amount of emotion he was evincing.

  Had he never heard of Earth? It seemed impossible. The entire history of this colony could be spanned by the lifetimes of three or four people… and these colonists had been literate, well-educated. It was impossible that they had not retained a fairly accurate cultural history of their arrival. And his very reaction proved he did know of Earth. If he'd never heard of it, why would he be any more upset than if I'd said we came from Shangri-L
a? Slowly he dropped his hand. "Are ye going to be stopping this now?"

  I turned to face him, trying to be courageous, a hard thing to do when I had to crane my neck all the way back to see his face. He was horribly intimidating up close. "Why should I stop it? It's true. Don't you know where you came from? How your ancestors got here?"

  Rohan looked at me straight on. "We were dropped from the wombs of great mother sky-birds."

  My mouth dropped open slackly. "Great mother sky-birds?" I was so astonished by what he was saying that I forgot to be afraid. "What a bunch of fucking idiots you are. Sky-birds! Jesus Christ!"

  He clapped his hand right back over my mouth, and his face went to anger instantly. "Ye will shut your foul mouth, and ye will shut it now. I am so angry with ye, I canna bring myself to question ye further, for I'm fearing I may do ye harm. When we speak again, lass, we will do so with a leather in my hand. I'd be remembering that if I were you." He looked up at the soldier who had held me while Christy was being punished. "Take them to my mother's suite and lock them in. Now." And Rohan, the Head Matron in his wake, turned on his booted heel and left.

  The soldier grasped our arms and hustled us down a corridor, then up a flight of ornate steps. What now? I wondered incredulously. We'd been threatened with corporal punishment when we refused to tell them where we'd come from, "whose" we were, and now, when we tried to tell them the truth, we were threatened with the same.

  What was I going to do if he made good on his threat? I obviously had no ability to make up any sort of plausible lie: we'd already tried that and failed. But what if he did start beating me with the same leather strap I'd seen used on the girls at the school? As much as I hated to admit it, it looked much more painful even than what had happened to Christy. And what would I say? If I kept trying to tell him the truth, would he just keep whipping me?

  We rounded a corner and the soldier opened a wide, carved wooden door, and pushed us through to a beautifully ornate room. "This was the Lord's mother's." He fixed us with a steely glare. "I'd not be breaking anything, if I were ye." And with that he left, locking the door behind him.

  Quickly, I rushed over to the wide window, and threw it open. There was a balcony, and as I stepped out onto it, I knew that that route of escape was hopeless. We'd come up one flight of stairs as we'd entered the castle, and now another. We were on the third floor, and the stone-cobbled court below was busy with people. Wearily, I slipped back inside, and saw Christy, holding her tunic back up and her trousers apart, standing facing away from a wide mirror, looking over her shoulder at her bare red bottom. Hastily, embarrassed, she jerked her tunic down. "Don't bother." I looked at her with exhaustion. "I've already seen it, Chris."

  She sniffed pathetically, and dragged her hand across her nose. "Jen, it hurts so much. You have no idea… God it was so horrible…" Her voice was weak and weepy.

  It was true that I had no idea, but I made some sympathetic noise anyway. I was suddenly aware of another bodily need, made worse, I suspected by the examination I'd had and the oil that had been injected into my bottom. Desperately, I wondered what sort of sanitary facilities they had here…

  What if I needed to go outside to some sort of primitive… thing?… but a quick peek behind several of the doors in the suite revealed not only a luxurious bedroom but a chamber of just the sort I was looking for. It was different from what we had on Earth, but it was very functional and self-explanatory, and in an adjoining room, I saw a tub that was huge, far beyond merely functional.

  I used the facility first, then Christy followed, taking a very long time. I was sure she was inspecting her punished bottom in that mirror, but when she finally emerged, I was too polite to comment on it.

  We walked back into the suite's sitting chamber. I sunk down on a cushioned bench, and Christy, after one look at it, kneeled down with a wince on the floor next to me. I assumed she was trying to keep pressure off of her bottom. Limply, she put her head on my knee. "What's going to happen to us?" I felt almost guilty about asking her the pathetic question, she looked so wretched, but she was Unit, after all, and supposedly somewhat more prepared than I was.

  "I don't know," Christy muttered wearily. "He sure didn't want to hear anything about Earth."

  "Can you believe what he said? The womb of the great sky-bird? Unbelievable."

  "Yeah." Christy's voice was thoughtful. "It is. Almost too unbelievable, if you know what I mean."

  I didn't, really, but felt I couldn't take time to consider what she meant. Useless superstitions were of no interest to me. "So what are we going to do? We can't escape… Did you go out onto the balcony while I was in the lav?" She nodded slowly. "It's a three story drop." I snorted, then felt myself growing chillingly somber as another thought intruded. "Maybe we should just… jump."

  Christy raised wide horrified eyes to mine. "Jen, you can't mean that!"

  "Oh, no? Why not? What future do we have? Some barbarian who thinks his ancestors got dropped here by a goddamn sky-bird is coming to this room some time very soon, and has every intention of beating me until I tell him where I come from. But my one previous attempt to tell him the truth made him so angry so fast he almost killed me. And our attempt to lie was so unconvincing, it was pointless. At least if we're dead, the prick bastards who left us here won't have the satisfaction of using us," I felt myself becoming furious. "You hear that, you prick bastards? And if we jump, at least our pain will be over in a millisecond. Better than being beaten to death," I finished fatalistically.

  "But I don't want to die, Jen. My mother will miss me, and…" her voice grew thick with sadness, "I have a sister I'm close to. I'll never see them again."

  I rested a hand on her shoulder, trying to be politic. I was not close to my family, so it was harder to relate, but I had plenty of friends and a little dog that I loved. "Christy, whether we kill ourselves or not, neither one of us will ever see anyone on Earth again." I remembered her comment to me, when I hadn't realized about the implants and parroted her words. "Don't you get it? No matter what they intend to do with us, no matter how much data they do or don't get, they can never take us back. We're here… forever… until we die. And all I'm saying is that maybe that should be sooner instead of later."

  Christy shook her head jerkily. "No, no, I'm sorry, Jen. I don't want to die. Somehow, if we both tell him exactly the same thing, we'll have to make him believe about Earth. Somehow."

  I sighed doubtfully, wondering how we were going to convince a man who believed in mother sky-birds about the reality of super-light space travel and nuclear fusion, but it was our only hope.

  Then the door opened, and everything we'd planned fell apart it one brief minute. It was Rohan, standing with an older woman at his side. She carried a tray with a pot and two cups, and was clothed like the Matrons at the school, all in black. I knew a moment of brief, buoyant relief as I saw he did not have a leather discipline device in his hand, and then I got a look at his face. It was incredibly somber, etched in stark brutal planes. His voice was grim and hoarse as he spoke.

  "The only conclusion that I can come to is that the two o' ye are Muradi spies. Ye'll be executed as soon as we can ready the device. Matron Suse will wait with ye. She's lost her hearing, so it'll be pointless fer ye to be talking to her, but she'll be sitting with ye to prevent ye from harming yerselves or trying to escape." He swallowed hard. "She's prepared a beverage for ye…to relax ye and make it easier when the time comes. I recommend ye drink it." And with that, without any look behind him, he turned and shut the door.

  "Executed." For a moment, I couldn't think of what the word meant. It was an archaic word and like many old words, I sometimes had to grope, just briefly, to make the connection. And then, as Christy began whimpering in short little gasping sobs next to me, the reality became all too clear.

  But Rohan was already gone. Even if we could have thought of something to say, there was no one to protest to. We were left with a deaf woman, who, after bringing us the warm be
verage, went to stand before the balcony door and regarded us implacably.

  Time dragged. We sat in shocked silence at first, quivering with our arms around another. All my glib comments about suicide, made only minutes earlier, came back on me, and I was reminded of the old saying that warned one to "Beware of what you wish for." I didn't want to die. How could I ever have even thought it? Not knowing what else to do, I sipped the drink, my hand shaking, and found it sweet and hot, like good tea. Christy numbly followed my lead.

  Then Christy began muttering, "He's got to listen. He's just got to listen," while I entertained fantasies that our comrades above, who were no doubt watching all of this, would redeem themselves in the end and come to our rescue, weapons blazing, like something out of the 2-D films from the twentieth that I'd seen clips of in museums.

  But it was not to be. And as the minutes dragged out, our fates became ever more firmly sealed. Whatever was in the tea worked. I relaxed and found myself curiously resigned, growing just more and more numb. The entire day, from the moment we'd first walked back into the glade to find the ship gone until now, seemed like nothing more than a nightmare.

  The door opened, and Rohan walked in, accompanied by two soldiers, older men. One was Jancy and the other I did not know. The drug had worked so well that for a second I couldn't remember why they looked so grim. Then I remembered and found I didn't care. It was all part of the dream anyway.

  "Best carry them." Rohan muttered. "Looks like the tea worked. Good." Jancy picked me up, and the other soldier took Christy. We walked along several long corridors and down flights of stairs, and I lay against Jancy's chest in a daze. Finally, we reached a door. Rohan opened it with a large key, and we all entered.