Judgment II: Mercy (15 page)

"He loved me, you know," Mahogany called out as she followed Mercy angrily. "I used to feel sorry for you. I would lie awake nights and pity you because I was everything to him and you were nothing but the burden he called 'wife'."

Mercy lay her hands flat against the wall and pressed her forehead to them, feeling the cold, jagged stones digging into her palms and the soft flesh of her forearms. She closed her eyes, wishing she could close her ears. Where were the guards? Or the other Lessers?

"He loved me best," Mahogany hissed in her ear. "And I called
you
mistress? You were so far beneath me, even then!

You should be down on your knees begging my forgiveness for the insult of having to bow to you!"

Mercy panted as though she had just run the length of the mountain and back at full speed. Oh, don't let Shipe come in now, she prayed. If he saw her and Mahogany like this, if he thought for a second that they were speaking freely one to the other ... She panicked. Every muscle in her body tightened as though she were again feeling the bit of the 134

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birch he'd used the first and last time he'd punished her for this offense.

She squeezed her eyes tightly closed and prayed for Mahogany to go away. Why wouldn't she just go away? She cried out as Mahogany grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked her backwards off the stool.

"Interloper?" the Elite hissed, and shook Mercy by her fistful of tresses. "I was the one he wanted! It was my body he took to appease his hungers! How dare you have thought yourself better than me!" She rammed her knee into Mercy's ribs, shoving her at the same time down on the floor, cracking her nose and forehead against the stones. "Beg my forgiveness! If not for you, I would have been mistress and maybe now I would still be free!"

The bell rang out the mid-morning break, startling both women badly. Mahogany let go of Mercy, stumbling back two steps as she stared warily at the door. She drew two shuddering breaths, then straightened her shoulders. The perfect Judgment Elite, she turned her back on the Drone and walked back to the sofas by the fire. She was just sitting down when the door opened to a wave of laughing, giggling Lessers.

Mercy picked herself shakily up off the floor. Both her forehead and nose were bleeding, but she didn't even notice until she felt warm liquid running down between her breasts.

She looked down and a steady stream of crimson splashed from her chin onto her unsteady hands and her chest. With nothing but her fingers to stop the flow, she crawled back onto her stool and faced the wall as she was supposed to.

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She closed her eyes, cupping her nose and trying to be invisible until the Lessers all went away.

A hand touched her shoulder and Guard Acola tipped back her head. "What happened?" he asked, moving her hands to press a white handkerchief to her nose to stop the bleeding.

Pain exploded behind her eyes when he pinched the bridge of her nose, and without thinking, Mercy said, "I fell."

The lie satisfied the guard and, once out, Mercy could think of no way for it to be painlessly taken back.

Acola slipped a hand under her arm to help her down off the stool. When he turned her towards the door, Mercy saw Mahogany watching them go, her face coldly void of expression.

* * * *

Sitting naked on the edge of his examining table, she sure felt it now, though. Her whole head was throbbing. Her broken nose had blackened both her eyes, and she had to breathe through her mouth because the swelling had closed her nasal passages.

Twenty minutes after a guard was dispatched to hunt down Shipe, the scowling master limped through the physician's office on two legs just as Moulton was handing her tunic back to her.

"I don't think anything's broken," Moulton said. "But she's certainly bruised her ribs."

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"What the hell happened to you?" Shipe snapped at her, his dark eyes raking her from head to toe.

"I fell," Mercy said softly. Guard Acola had already given that excuse to Master Doctor Moulton, who had put the lie down in his report to Tane. She was well and truly ensconced in it.

"Fell," Shipe echoed, and raked her with another assessing look.

Unable to meet his eyes, she studied her hands in her lap instead.

Stalking up to the edge of the exam table, Master Shipe took hold of her chin and tilted her face up into the light.

"Fell, huh? Do you want to tell me how?"

"I was clumsy," she stammered as, despite his angry tone, gentle fingers examined her cut and bruised face. She swallowed hard before digging herself into an even deeper hole. "I fell off my stool."

"You scratch yourself on the way down?" he asked, and his eyes bored into hers. "Those are pretty deep fingernail marks on your neck."

A chill of panic swept through her stomach. "I-I guess I must have."

He looked anything but convinced.

"I wondered about those," Master Doctor Moulton said as he came back to the table. He handed Shipe her corset. "No tight bonds for a while, and you'll want to take care when tying her down or taking her over your knee. At least for a week and possibly two."

Mercy fidgeted with her fingers.

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"I don't need to take her over my lap to blister her ass,"

Shipe said, glaring hard into her eyes. He took hold of the lobe of her ear and pulled her down off the table. Then he led her right out the door.

Did he know? How could he know? Mercy hurried after him on the verge of tears.

"Are you lying to me?" he snapped, as he marched her down the hall.

She began to cry. "No, sir," she lied again.

He took her back to the common library and her stool behind her desk. "This the stool you fell from?"

There was blood all over the floor, and she couldn't help but nod. "Yes."

Still holding her by the lobe of the ear, he marched her over to the fireplace, where the books she'd dropped still lay scattered across the floor. One had skidded into the fireplace and it lay with its leather cover slowly burning, the blackened pages curling back at the corners. She wanted to reach for it, but his hold on her ear didn't allow it.

"What happened over here?" he demanded.

"I—the bell rang," she sobbed. "The Lessers were coming.

I—my stool—"

Abruptly releasing her lobe, Shipe turned her around. "I'm going to ask you again," he growled with another hard look.

"Last time. Are you lying to me?"

Mercy shook her head, but she was so ashamed of herself that she couldn't meet his knowing eyes. She buried her face in her hands and just cried.

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"Pick up this mess," Shipe told her. "And from now on, no more stools. You sit on the floor in the corner on your breaks, and if you need something off the top shelves, you ask a guard to get it for you."

He didn't wait for her to answer, but turned on his heel and stalked angrily back out the door.

* * * *

The blond she knew as Stoner. The other, an older man with salt and pepper hair and crinkles around his eyes, she hadn't met before. Both had their switches out, and neither was smiling.

"Come on," the older man said with a wave of his switch to beckon her to him. They didn't spank her, though, but took her from the library and led her up and out of the bowels of the mountain. To Tane's room at the top, she realized with a start. Or to the fortress entrance. That fear made her stumble and she almost dropped to her knees twice. Accustomed to female reluctance, the guards each slipped a hand beneath her elbows to help her along.

But it was neither the entrance nor the Mountain Lord's quarters that they took her to, although Tane was there, along with Masters Deaton, Doctor Moulton, and Shipe. None of them looked very happy with her.

They stood gathered in front of an observation desk, the wall before them covered with security monitors and recording machines. Judgment, she realized with a start, was 139

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crowded with hidden cameras. Some of the monitors showed stationary vantages overlooking a single place, these being mostly the skill rooms and dining hall. Others flashed from camera to camera, room to room.

The monitor the masters and Mountain Lord were gathered before was the stationary camera that recorded the activities within the common library. There were jagged horizontal static lines across the screen, and from the stillness of the picture, she knew they had to be watching a tape. From the doorway she could make out two images: Mahogany and herself.

Mercy felt her whole body run cold.

Shipe snapped to a spot on the floor and she crept to stand before him. "Tell me again what happened?"

Her breath caught in her chest. She stared at the monitor, unable to breathe.

"You see, we have two very different problems here," Tane began when she remained quiet. He tapped the monitor. "This being the first."

He reached over and hit the play button, and Mercy watched the image of herself whirl around to face the obviously conversing Mahogany. There was no sound, but from the angle of the camera and the light of the fire splashing back upon the Elite's face, it wasn't difficult to see her moving lips.

"I didn't talk to her," Mercy blurted, shaking her head wildly. "I swear I didn't talk to her! I thought I missed the bell!"

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The Drone in the monitor dropped her books across the floor and ran for the bottom of the screen with the angry Elite following at a stiff-legged stalk. Mercy could just make out the outline of her desk, but the stool in the corner was well out of the camera's sight.

Mercy spun around to face Shipe, her eyes pleading as she sobbed, "I didn't talk to her! I swear I didn't! I swear!"

"She talked to you," Tane pointed out. "That much is obvious from the tape. What was she saying?"

"I-I-I don't know..." Mercy threw up her hands in a helpless, frantic shrug, her eyes searching the floor as though the answer lay at her feet, trying to remember exactly what was said. "That Richard loved her best—that I was below her—I d-don't know! I just wanted her to go away!"

"So the bell rang," Deaton surmised to Shipe. "She panicked, wasn't paying attention and fell off her stool."

"And scratched herself on the way down?" Shipe asked. He flipped her hair back off her neck to reveal three long, furrowed scratches on the side of her throat. "I don't see how falling off a stool did that." He then raised her tunic up above her hip to show the massive, round bruise spreading out over her ribs. "Or that."

"Unless Mahogany helped her to fall off," Master Doctor Moulton suggested, folding his arms across his chest as Tane moved closer to examine the injury.

"It's possible that she knocked the stool over," Deaton said. "She could have hit it on the way down."

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"Uh..." The master doctor made a slight face. "Unlikely, but I suppose it's possible. Looks almost like a kick or a punch to me."

Tane looked into her eyes. "Did Mahogany strike you?"

In the monitor, Mahogany stalked back to the sofa by the fire. Mercy watched the Elite seat herself upon the cushions, then lowered her eyes to the floor and miserably nodded.

"Our dealings, it seems, should be with Mahogany," Tane said. He studied her a moment with his dark, unwavering eyes. "If left up to me, I would sentence our deceitful Drone to a Demerit for lying. But considering her current condition, should the opinions of her barrack's master differ, I might be willing to bow to his authority." He arched an inquiring brow at Master Shipe.

Shipe took hold of her arm. "I'll deal with it."

The promise in his voice made her shiver, but she followed him without complaint back to his quarters. She expected to be tied over the bed, to be ordered from her tunic as though her shame denied her the privilege of wearing it, and to be punished. But he didn't. Instead, he brewed a cup of tea and held her on his lap while she drank it, her hands clasped tightly upon her knees because he insisted on holding the cup.

"It'll help with the pain," was all he said, before laying her down in his bed to rest. His gentleness made her feel even worse inside. She rolled onto her side and hid her face in her arms when he crawled into bed behind her. He pulled her back into the cradle of his arms and held her.

"Thanks for the pad," he finally said gruffly.

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Mercy turned her head, not quite looking back at him. She sniffed. "Does it help?"

"Still pinches, but at least the damn thing's endurable." He was quiet a moment, then sighed. "Do you do it deliberately?"

Slowly, she rolled onto her back. She shifted away from him, but his arm twined around her waist and promptly pulled her back to him. She fidgeted with her fingers. "I didn't mean to lie."

"I'm not talking about that. Actually, I can see how that happened. I'm still going to birch the hell out of you, but I meant the other things."

"What things?"

His dark eyes glittered. "You're hurt; I'll humor you. I'm talking about all the damn Demerits."

Mercy looked away first, then tried to roll back onto her side. His hand clamped over her breast, pushing her back onto her back. He moved over her, straddling her hips, bracing his weight off her with his thick hands planted in the pillows at either side of her head.

"We can play twenty questions face-to-face, or with you facing the floor," he growled.