Mirelle lies in her bedroll, staring at the ceiling. She’s supposed to be sleeping. They’re deep in the earth-swallowed City of Twelve Bells, and her pick-locks and trap-hooks are one of the bulwarks of their success. If she doesn’t stay sharp, who knows what might befall them the morrow?
Worse than befell them today.
Mirelle’s still not certain of everything that happened in the ancient temple chamber, probably never will be, too swift and chaotic. The roof above rumbling, the floor beneath them cracking into chasms, and the angry ghosts of long-ago monks rushing to beat them back as intruders and despoilers. Separated from the sellsword Sarrha and her godless concubine, Mirelle and the wizard had huddled by an ancient plinth and its sliding puzzle-pieces, antique mystery-religion proof of induction, Mirelle doing her best to beat back their assailants so the wizard could break the problem across her intellect and bluff their way into claimed camaraderie with the unreasoning dead.
“Nearly! Nearly!” the wizard had chanted, beneath her breath, frantically shoving carved stones around in ageworn, dust-clogged channels, and then clutching spectral fists had snagged her clothes and the hair spilling from beneath her hat, and dragged her backward.
“Mirelle!” Oublietta had yowling, flailing. “Quick! Finish it!”
“I don’t know how!” Mirelle had yelled back shrilly, spinning about to stare in frantic blankness at it.
The wizard had said something starting Fuh— and puttering out in a noise very like someone being pummelled by angry ghost monks; and Mirelle still doesn’t know whether, perhaps, she was simply exclaiming Fuck! or, mayhap, Forgive me— or some other thing entire which has not come to Mirelle’s mind.
Mirelle saw her cast that spell before, once, back in the city. After some cups of a good plum wine, a flirtatious maiden had perched on Oublietta’s knee and giggled innuendos at her, asked for demonstration of her sorcerous might; and Oublietta had finally, with a flourish, set her on her feet, and very earnestly asked her permission for what she was about to do.
With the maiden’s assent, Oublietta had conjured puppet-strings, a double handful, of some softly shining silken kind; tied around each of her fingers, and trailing downward into dimness and insubstantiality. Simultaneously, around each of the maiden’s limbs and joints, dim and shining lines appeared, likewise trailing off into dreamness and air — but straight up toward the ceiling.
Eyes intent, corner of her mouth crooked, Oublietta had, with the delicate motions of her fingers, made the maiden touch her own nose, pirouette, walk up and down a little, curtsey; then, with a controlled sigh, released her, strings dissolving to nothing at all. And then Oublietta had curtsied in turn to the maiden, who’d looked at her with new fascination but also trepidation, cheeks a little blushed.
There was no time today to ask permission of Mirelle; only a dozen dozen silken snags, abruptly drawn tight around her. Not tight enough to hurt, but instantly and constantly unmistakable. And control of her body was not her own.
She closes her eyes to the sleepless sight of the ancient ceiling above her. Swallows.
She had not moved like herself. The wizard’s puppet-threads left her in full possession of feeling, the apprehension of touch; left untouched her motivation. But she could not, if she had wanted, have turned away from the ancient puzzle, not unless the wizard directed so the motion of her feet. Her hands were drawn into motion only by the strings’ tensions, their shift and play as the wizard, plucked at by ghosts, did her perceptible best not to jostle Mirelle. She moved like — well, a marionette, she supposes. A device. A thing. An instrument for the whim and delight of someone with the wit to put her on such strings.
Using her hands, deft and quick, Oublietta shoved around the last few stones of the configuration, and with a final angry shudder of old stone, the temple stilled. The monks faded to abeyance. The strings on Mirelle evaporated, returning her native motive will. The wizard bounded over to her, reached for her shoulder; froze at Mirelle’s flinch.
“I’ll see to Sarrha,” Oublietta had blurted, and backed hastily away.
In her bedroll, Mirelle does her best to inhale deeply without making a sound. She can’t stop thinking about her snared limbs, obeying none of her own impulses, only the wizard’s. Such an instant, total theft of her volition. The way the wizard had been so careful to ask the tavern maiden; the way she’d only seized Mirelle.
Contemplating her own helplessness within it makes Mirelle feel warm and somehow, inside her skin, faintly dirty. Small and a little sick in her stomach and squirming with — with feelings that make her clench her toes within her bedroll. She wants to whimper with an excess of feelings. She dares not.
Very carefully, she turns her head just enough to peep at the wizard’s own slumbers from the corner of her eye. So far as she can see, the wizard sleeps, outline gently rising and falling with her breath.
Digging her teeth into her lip, Mirelle slowly, silently, most of all furtively, worms her hand around inside her blanket, and down between her smallclothes and skin. The first brush of her fingers on herself sees her teeth dig in involuntarily, her breath catch. She freezes, not daring even to inhale or exhale until the lack of air forces her. What they’ll think of her, what the wizard will think of her, if — oh, she knows they won’t even know what she was thinking, if they did catch her, she knows that, with her right mind; but this feels a terrible, a sexually profane thing to be dripping about—
She just needs release. She’ll touch, and spend, and be purged of it. All warm and awful ideas put in her head gone, just as easily as some terrible little spell put them there. She looks again from the corner of her eye, paranoid about being caught—
The wizard’s eyes gleam right at her, in the dark.
“Mirelle,” Oublietta breathes, soft as mist, and Mirelle catches an anguished sob inside her throat. “No, sweet, don’t — I’m sorry to put that on you, today. Not without — well, you saw me do it, once. And I saw you, the way you looked, how it fascinated you.”
Mirelle tries shaking her head, the only part of her that doesn’t feel frozen under terrible judgement.
“Sweet,” Oublietta says, quiet and kind, and rolls out of her blanket; crawls over to Mirelle’s quaking side, “there’s nothing wrong with liking a thing,” and stops Mirelle’s voice by putting a soft-skinned shushing finger over her lips. “You can be a doll, a little, if you like.”
Mirelle looks up at her, knowing her own eyes have gone big at the sound of the word. Doll, it repeats itself in the confines of her mind: Doll.
Oublietta smiles down, neatly folds back Mirelle’s blanket, runs careful fingers down her arm to where her wrist disappears into her breeches. “Would you like that, Mirelle?” the wizard says, very quiet, very careful, searching her eyes, and Mirelle is too hazed to know what it is that answers her; perhaps Mirelle’s lips move, or she nods the tiniest bit. Oublietta, with her other hand, plucks out her blue hair ribbon, and nimbly ties a little bow around Mirelle’s wrist, the wrist of the hand whose fingers are still trembling against her most personal place.
“Dolls,” Oublietta says, and hooks a single finger through the loops of the bow; drags Mirelle’s hand out and all the way up her bedroll, until it lies palm-up next to her face, “only touch when they’re told.”
Mirelle makes an involuntary noise of shock and anguished, previously unimagined heat. Oublietta’s smile glitters.
“Goodnight, sweet,” she says, kisses Mirelle’s hairline firmly, and slithers back to bed.
