PART  III -- First Loss


ONE

   Aria watches, smiling gently, as Ryoma tucks Shanna into the huge bed on the dais.  Her cot–which had been rolled up and sent up the lift, then announced to Ryoma by the ringing of the bell–remained rolled and unused over by the massive vanity, along with the few other things that had been sent with it.
   “She must be exhausted,” Aria says softly.
   “Yah,” agrees Ryoma, speaking just as softly, though he doubted the girl would wake even if he and Aria both jumped up and down on the bed while banging pots together.  “She’s gone through a lot in the past few hours.”
   “She has indeed,” says Aria.  “Though I hope that, for the most part, she has enjoyed what she has gone through.”
   She pauses for a moment, then adds, “I know that I have, Ryo-sama,” and her voice is very soft now.
   He turns and looks at her over his shoulder for a moment, then grins and turns his attention back to arranging the sheets and blankets around the sleeping girl.
   “All part of the service, pretty lady,” he says gruffly, though still softly.  “It’s in the contract.”
   She giggles as he stands and looks down at his handiwork.  When he turns to face her, still carrying the grin on his face, she is looking up at him, lightly raising one eyebrow.
   “Is it,” she says.  “And what else is in this contract that I should know of, O Champion?  For instance, are you really planning to climb in that bed with us two young, sinful pretties?”
   He looks wistful, then sighs theatrically and steps down off the dais.  He places an arm lightly on her shoulder and leads her away from the bed, back towards the fireplace.
   “Though it pains me greatly to say it, I am not, pretty lady.  I will be taking my rest on yonder rug, I think.  Perhaps I’ll use Shanna’s cot.”
   Aria stops short, causing his hand to slide off her shoulder as he takes another couple of steps.  He stops and turns to look at her, his face questioning.  She is looking back at him with consternation, her brow slightly furrowed.
   “You...you are going to sleep on the floor?” she asks incredulously.
   “Yah,” he answers.
   “While Shanna and I sleep in the bed?”
   “That’s the plan.”
   “But...but it’s such a massive bed...surely you can....you won’t sleep in the bed with us?”  She pauses, then adds, softly and shyly, “With...with me?”
   “It sounds heavenly, my sinful pretty...but I think not.”  He sighs again and shakes his head slowly, an exaggerated mournful look on his face, then grins at her.
   “But...why, Ryo-sama...that’s the only thing that is in the contract!” she says, looking up at him with an inscrutable expression.
   “And that is precisely why I will not be doing it,” Ryoma tells her, his voice normal and his expression now serious.
   “But....but..” she stammers.
   “Aria-chan,” Ryoma says, and something in his voice makes her stop.
   Her face softens, and she relaxes and looks up at him with a posture and expression that is, he is disturbed to see, somehow servile.
   “Yes, Ryo-sama,” she says meekly.
   Like she is waiting for a command, he thinks sadly.
   So he changes what he had been going to say.
   “You have been through a lot, as well,” he tells her softly.  “I am sure you rose before the sun, and trained all day, and then there was the...the episode in the cage, and everything that followed after.  It is now far into the night, and there are not many hours remaining before the sun once again comes over the horizon.  Would you like to sleep as well?”  He is careful to phrase it as a question.
   She doesn’t answer immediately, and he watches her take what he had said and turn it over and over in her mind, thinking about it.  
   Likely looking for any hint that I might want her to go to bed, he thinks, again sadly.
   “Are you tired, Ryo-sama?” she finally asks, and he sighs inwardly.
   “I’m exhausted,” he tells her truthfully, “but I’m not sleepy.  I’m planning on relaxing there on the rug, drinking orange juice and maybe nibbling a bit on some food, until I eventually fall asleep.  And I would be happy,” he adds quickly, before she can say anything, “to do so with your company, if you are not tired.  But if you are, I will be perfectly content to relax on my own.”
   He wants to add that he may not be as content without her delightful and lovely company, something that he would normally say, both because it was true and also to see her turn that pretty shade of pink, but he refrains from doing so this time, because he wants to give her as neutral a situation as possible, and thus force her to make a decision based on what she wants, rather than what she thinks he wants.
   Once again, he watches her mull this over, turning it this way and that, looking at everything he had said very closely.  He comes very close to giving her an outright command, a command to stop thinking about him and just follow her own feelings and wishes and desires, leaving him out of it.  But he doesn’t, because then she wouldn’t be free, she would just be following a command.
   And it is well that he doesn’t give her this command, because what Aria wants–what she really and truly wants–is to know exactly what Ryoma wants, so that she may please him to the best of her abilities.  He doesn’t realize it, but Aria would feel her freedom best by being able to give him anything and everything he desired that was within her power and ability to give.  If he had given her that command, it would have kept her from pursuing her freedom, because though he would have been telling her to follow her desires–which were to please him, however she could–she would have seen the meaning beneath it, which was to stop trying to please him.
   “I...I would like to sit with you, Ryo-sama,” she says eventually.
   “Excellent,” he says, grinning.  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
   “Well....it was and it wasn’t,” she says cryptically.
   “Hmm?” he asks, as they both walk over to the rug.
   Ryoma sits down with his back up against the hearth, stretching his long legs out and crossing them.  Aria stops at the edge of the rug and crouches down to begin removing her shoes.
   “It wasn’t hard because I want to spend time with you,” she explains as she finishes unbuckling the shoes and then standing to step out of them, leaving them facing Ryoma at the edge of the rug and pushed neatly together.
   “But it was hard, because...because I want...” she looks at him intently, and once again the expression on her face is inscrutable.
   She reaches down to the hem of her blue sundress, and before Ryoma can do anything but widen his eyes slightly as he tracks the movement of her hands, she pulls it swiftly over her head.
   “...because I want to spend time with you so I can complete my story,” she finishes, while folding the dress in her hands.
   Ryoma heaves a huge, inward sigh of relief at seeing that the white blouse she wore under the sundress is plenty long enough to cover her hips; it is, in fact, as long as the slip she had been wearing at the start of the evening.
   “...and that is going to be hard for me, I am sure,” she adds, standing before him now wearing only her black stockings and the white, high-necked and long-sleeved blouse, and a wide ribbon in her hair.
   “Ah,” Ryoma manages to say, in what he is fairly sure is a normal tone.  “I’m sure it will be hard...I mean, I hope it won’t be as difficult as you think,” he amends.
   She tilts her head to the side a bit, her large blue eyes questioning.  “Ryo-sama?  Are you all right?”
   “Oh, I’m fine, yah,” he says, and now his equilibrium truly is leveling itself.  “I’m just not quite accustomed to having gorgeous young girls stripping their clothes off in front of me without any warning whatsoever,” he tells her, grinning, though the grin is slightly faint.
   But the grin turns from faint to full, and his emotions stabilize, while watching her face slowly turn a bright, bright red.
   “Oh....oh, oh my, I’m so...so sorry, Ryo-sama,” she stammers breathlessly, echoing the stammering breathlessness of his thoughts only moments earlier.
   “Think nothing of it,” he tells her, grinning from ear to ear but affecting a nonchalant tone.  “It’s not something I’m accustomed to, true...but I find myself warming to the concept more and more each second,” he claims.
   She can only stand there before him, holding the folded sundress laid lightly across both hands as though she were about to kneel and offer it to him, while her embarrassment increases steadily, causing her face to grow hotter with each passing moment.
   “Are you done then?” he asks her, after taking some time to observe this charming progression.
   “Y...yes, Ryo-sama,” she says, her voice faint.
   “So sad,” he laments.  “Next time, try and put on a more complex outfit, so you have more of it to take off.”
   She stares at him for a long moment, then very slowly turns and kneels to place the folded dress next to the shoes.  Then she stands and turns to face him again, her hands rising slowly to float just under her chin.
   “I...I still have...the st-stockings and the blouse,” she says, her voice still faint, and feeling the heat in her face rising even more...something she had not believed was possible.
   Ryoma’s grin fades and changes into a disbelieving expression.
   “Err, no, Aria-chan, no,” he says hastily, waving his hands back and forth in front of him.  “I was only joking with you, sweetie.”
   “...oh,” she says, and now she is even more embarrassed, both because she had taken him seriously and because she was now disappointed.  “I’m sorry, Ryo-sama...I didn’t intend to...startle you.  I just thought...I might be...”
   “You are undressed quite enough for me, pretty one,” he tells her.  “Come, sit.”  He pats the rug beside him.
   She steps lightly over to the spot he had patted.
   Actually, she’s got her feet exactly where I put my hand, he notices, again with some sadness.
   But she doesn’t sit, and he looks up at her questioningly.
   “Ahh...Ryo-sama...I...I had...that is to say...” she stammers, her face no longer bright red, but still decidedly pink.
   For some reason, while she stammers this, she can’t look him in the eyes.  It is not recurring slave manners making her do this; obviously there is something she wants, but she is too embarrassed come right out and say it.  Ryoma also notices that she is fidgeting, something that he had not, as of yet, seen her do.  And her fidgeting is extremely cute, because she is not just fidgeting with her hands but instead with her whole body, shifting her weight lightly from one foot to the other, shifting her slim hips in response to the changing of weight, and this makes other interesting and flowing things happen in still other places.
   Loathe though he is to halt this delightful phenomenon, he cannot in good conscience sit and watch her discomfiture...not when he has realized what it is she wants.
   “Come,” he says simply, and gently, and holds his arms out toward her.
   She looks at them, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted but her face otherwise blank, as though she doesn’t understand what the gesture means.  Ryoma thinks, now very sadly, that it is extremely possible that she doesn’t.
   So he takes hold of her waist and pulls her gently down toward him...but only barely, exerting just enough force so that she will understand what he means, and thus leaving the actual motion up to her.
   Finally, she understands, and he sees her understanding in the expression that appears on her face; an expression of such pleased, happy gratitude that he finds himself forcing back tears.  For how destitute and empty had this lovely girl’s life been, that she could be so completely and utterly thrilled by the prospect of a comforting hug, and a warm lap in which to have it?  How wholly and absolutely impoverished had been her large, soft heart, which carried within it endless love and compassion for those around her, whether they deserved it or not?  How horribly vacant had been that secret place within that large, beautiful heart, that secret place which desired love, rather than giving it?  That small, secret place, tiny when compared to the rest, tiny and miniscule, but when it was empty it had a way of being somehow huge inside, when it was empty that tiny space within our hearts could seem endless, an impossibly massive dark void that could swallow you whole and send you screaming and crying into a cold, black, howling, windswept infinity.
   Ryoma sees this, and feels and thinks all these things when that expression of powerful, blissful gratitude appears on her face like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, he sees these things and knows them about her, and that knowledge makes him want to weep.  It makes him want to fold her into his arms and drip tears into her lovely shining blonde hair while promising her he will do all that is within his power to see to it that she will never, ever have that empty place inside her heart again, that he will pour his love and affection into it until it is brimming over, and even then he will continue to pour, until it is so full that she will have to be afraid that her heart might burst with its fullness.  He wants to tell her that they will leave this place together, and that he will take her with him and they will travel all over the world, him and her and Shanna too, if the girl wanted to come with them, and they will see wondrous things and do wondrous things, he wants to tell her that he will show her all the amazing and beautiful and astounding places he has seen in his wanderings, and while they are doing that they will discover new amazing and beautiful and astounding things, and they will discover them together.  He wants to tell her that he will take her with him and they will talk and laugh and walk and run together, they will stand in the mountains and watch the sunrise and shout for echoes with each other, they will set camp by streams with waterfalls and swim and catch fish and cook them fresh over a fire and eat and lay down next to each other clean and full and happy under the stars with the sound of the falls lulling them softly to sleep; he wants to tell her that he will do all these things and he will do them with her, and gladly, he wants to tell her he will share every experience with her, every laugh, every tear, every adventure and every fear, he will have them and she will have them and they will share them with each other, and she will never be alone again.
   But though he wants to, and very badly, he doesn’t say these things to her and he does not weep or cry into her hair.  He does take a long, long pull of its beautiful scent as he folds his arms around her, while she sits down slowly into his lap with an expression of shy wonder on her face...but he does this surreptitiously so that she does not sense it.  And he doesn’t tell her any of the things he thought to say.  But he tells himself those things, in the form of a private oath.
   That done, he sets himself to the task.


TWO

   Aria takes her time cuddling up against him, curling herself slowly and carefully until she is as completely within his lap as she can get herself, relishing the sensation of it, feeling how he responds to her slow, shifting position changes by shifting his own position slightly to accompany her, and she draws the experience out as long as she possibly can while trying carefully not to make it last too long, for she doesn’t want to annoy him.  But for a while, a deliciously long while it seems to her, she curls and shifts and cuddles and snuggles while feeling him move along with her, and the whole series of motions brings to mind an intricate and impromptu dance, a lovely and intimate dance that is sensual without being the least bit sexual, and all throughout this dance she feels warm waves of tingles rolling from the back of her neck all the way down to her toes and back again, and she feels that she could stay here, right where she is, forever, that she could lie cuddled against him and slowly starve, and even while she was dying from lack of food and water she wouldn’t suffer at all, she would be perfectly content, happy, and comfortable, for she would have all the nourishment she desired.
   I love him, she thinks.  I love him and I am in love with him, completely and utterly, and I could stay right here and die happy.  I love him and I could die in his arms, and if I am taken away from him I will die.
   She turns her face up to his and very nearly tells him these things, the words come bursting up from her heart and into her mouth and on her tongue and almost tumble out of her lips, but she snatches them back at the last instant.
   And if I tell him like that, I will also die, she thinks.  Of embarrassment.
   This thought brings to mind the fact that, at some point, she must tell him, because she cannot bear to keep it to herself much longer.  She had not even spent an entire day with him, and already she had thought many times about how she was in love with him, and that she would die when she was taken from him.  She knows that the feeling, and the thought, would grow as the days passed...and because her time with him was so short, she was determined to tell him how she felt.  She begins to turn pink, thinking of this, both from embarrassment and nervousness...and she realizes she has been staring at him while thinking all these things, staring at him silently while her face slowly turned more and more red.  So to cover it and make it stop she brings up the first thing that comes to her mind to say.
   “I wonder what happened to the three men you left in the springhouse,” she says, hoping she doesn’t sound breathless but fearing that she does anyway.
   “I don’t know,” he says, looking down at her with a wry grin on his face.  And oh, how close his face is to hers.  “After I brought Shanna back up here with the milk, I went down and found Naytin and told him what happened, as you know.  He turned alternately very pale and very red,” he tells her, and his grin grows wider as he remembers it.  “At the time, I thought he was just afraid, but after coming back up and hearing Shanna’s explanation of the Hannah story, I think he must have been both very afraid and very angry.  I think those are going to be three very, very sorry young men.  Naytin finally has the proof he needed to show that they had...broken...his Dragon Girl.”
   His grin vanishes, twisting into a slight grimace at the word broken.
   “Yes,” says Aria.  “And I wonder how many others they trapped in there aside from Hannah,” she says.
   “Huh?” Ryoma’s eyebrows raise in questioning surprise.
“After Hannah, do you think any of the other girls would claim to have been raped?” she asks him, her voice sad, but sure.
   Ryoma stares at her, and slowly his eyebrows lower until he no longer looks surprised, or questioning.  They lower and continue to lower, until he looks angry.  His jaw works, clenching and relaxing, and then he turns away from her and utters a curse in a language so guttural it doesn’t even sound human.
   “Thank you,” she says.
   He turns back to her, raising an eyebrow but still looking upset.
   “For what?” he asks.
   “For turning away, and not spitting that all over my face,” she tells him.
   He freezes for a moment, then cracks a grin and laughs.  As she is pressed against his chest, she feels it as well as hearing it, and another warm wave of tingles rolls through her.
   “And thank you, pretty one, for cheering me up so quickly,” he says, once his laughter dies down.  ”Though I wish now that I had done a bit more damage to those three,” he adds darkly.
   “You hurt them and scared them badly,” she tells him.  “And you kept them from hurting Shanna, or from scaring her for too long,” she adds.  “I think you did wonderfully, Ryo-sama.  You saved her, and those men will pay for what they have done.”
   “I suppose,” he says, sighing a bit and adjusting his position slightly, tightening his hold on her momentarily to keep her steady while he does so, and causing another wave of tingles in her.  “But to hear Shanna tell it, the one I hurt and scared the most was the wrong one.  Just a figurehead.”
   “Yes, but you couldn’t have known,” Aria says honestly.  “And they will all pay anyway, and likely the other two will give up the secret that it was the big one leading them the whole time, so perhaps he will get his due yet.  And though it is true that they will not be punished for rape but rather for ‘damage to property of the Velvet Dragon’, at least they have been stopped from doing it ever again.”
   “Yah, you’re right,” says Ryoma.  “But what I’d like to know, Aria-chan...is how did you know what was happening?” he asks, looking at her questioningly again.  Questioning and searching, and Aria feels her heart leaping about inside her chest as that green gaze regards her so closely.
   “I...I don’t honestly know how I knew,” she tells him.  “I just...felt it.  But it may have something to do with certain things that happened in my past,” she explains.  “Certain things that will eventually come up in my tale, and you will find that, in some ways, they are strikingly similar to things that happened tonight.”
   And that brings us around to my story, thinks Aria, feeling her heart flutter now for a completely different reason.  With some of the most difficult parts yet to be told.
   Ryoma is looking at her with a disgruntled twisting of his face that Aria had not seen before.  To her it looks like a mix of anger, disbelief, and disgust.
   “Just how much raping goes on in Selecuri?” he demands, sounding offended and angry.
   She doesn’t answer.  She just looks at him, and watches him realize and understand the answer to his question.
   “A lot, I suppose,” he finally says.  “A whole lot.  What else, when the place is crawling with slaves?”
   “Yes,” she agrees quietly.  “A lot.  I was extremely surprised, you know, to discover that Shanna had yet to be...that she was still untouched,” she amends.  “That is very rare, especially for a girl so strikingly beautiful.  The only place in Selecuri that I know of where there are lots of beautiful young virgin slaves is Keiseng Rosa.”
   “Ah,” he responds.  He seems about to say more, but he remains silent, so she continues.
   “I asked her about it, actually, while you weren’t here,” she says.  “Only...only because I knew she would be horribly embarrassed to speak of it while you were present, or to even be asked about it in your presence, Ryo-sama,” she explains hurriedly.
   “Don’t worry,” Ryoma responds, grinning slightly.  “I would have been horribly embarrassed to be present during such a conversation.”
   “Oh,” she responds, sounding puzzled and slightly surprised.  “In...in any case, she says that directly after her manners training, she was purchased by an old woman.  An old woman who, while not wealthy, had been left a large enough sum of money such that she could afford a slave to take care of her in her last years.  The woman had chosen Shanna, for obvious reasons...the girl is soft and harmless and very smart, as you know, and she is also a...a high quality ni’teh,” she finishes quickly, as she could think of no other way to phrase it.
   “Top-quality merchandise,” Ryoma says, grimacing.  “Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back.”
   “Exactly,” Aria says, not knowing he was making a dark joke.  “If a slave does not please, it can be returned to the slaver company within a month and they will return all money paid.  But Shanna pleased the old woman, and thus remained with her until she died.  Whereupon she was retrieved by the slaver company, and then sold to the Velvet Dragon.  Which explains her...which explains why she remains, as of yet, untouched.  For the old woman didn’t abuse her–at least not in that way–and Naytin’s Mistress keeps him from having his way with the Dragon Girls, and she had not gotten trapped by the Springhouse Specters,” she says, using Shanna’s apt name for the three men.
   “I see,” says Ryoma.
   “But she will not stay that way for long, Ryo-sama,” Aria tells him seriously.  “One day, what she has so miraculously kept for so long will be taken from her, and she will be powerless to stop it.  As I should know,” she adds.  “Though I will admit, sens’ii training is not the worst way to lose it.  Not by a long way,” she tells him.
   “So you...you lost yours in the training, then?  Not...not to the...”
   “No, not to the big man in the cage,” Aria says.  “Thank the gods for that.  That experience was bad enough without it being my first time.”
   “Yes.  Yes it was,” Ryoma agrees.
   “And...and I think...” she says, hesitatingly, “I think I am ready to continue from where I left off.  Are you....do you still want to..?”
   “Tell away,” he tells her, squeezing her to him briefly.  “Tell away, and pour that poison out of you.”
   She nods to him, then looks down from his face, curling up and cuddling against him a bit more.  She is silent for a moment, but eventually she begins speaking...but speaking slowly, for here the poison was thick, and thus slow to begin flowing.
   “I lost the fight in the cage to that big man, but that was not all I lost to him.  For a while, I lost myself as well.  I lost myself, to him and to what he was doing to me, and thus I lost my training–the sens’ii training, which was, in a way, supposed to help me through that part, help me survive the trauma by giving me something to do, which would help me feel like I had not surrendered everything to him.  Because I would be doing something, and that something was designed to control him even while he thought he had complete control over me.  Designed to control him, in part, by making sure that he thought he had complete control, and using that to figure out exactly what he wanted to see, then giving it to him.  And though it wouldn’t have been particularly pleasant, at least it would have kept me from losing myself to him.
   “But I had lost my heart and my mind into the fantasy I had built, the fantasy about myself and my Shai’teh, and when I lost control of my weapons and thus lost the fight, I lost that dream, and my heart and mind went with it.  Because of that, I lost my training, and thus my control over him and the situation, so he gained complete control over me...and all that I was fell away, went into hiding, cowering deep inside.  I became the doll he saw in the dollhouse; nothing more than a pretty to play with.  I lost myself.  
   “The only thing I didn’t lose, really, was my consciousness...though I came close to losing even that.  But I didn’t, and that was well, because he didn’t last long, even though I wasn’t using my sens’ii training on him.  In fact, I’m fairly sure he got exactly what he wanted to see out of me even without the training, because what he wanted to see was that I knew he had defeated me, completely.  He wanted to see that, even though he had beaten me in combat and was taking my body, even though he was hurting me badly, I wasn’t fighting him because I had given up hope.  He wanted to see that I had completely surrendered myself to him, that I would let him do whatever he wanted no matter how much it hurt or humiliated me, because he was too strong.
   “This is a fairly easy impression to give through the sens’ii training...and had I been using the training, I probably would have given it to him, once I had figured out that’s what he wanted.  But I gave it to him anyway–though it wasn’t by design–and that fed the fire in his blood, and he didn’t last long.
   “Not long, but it seemed like forever.  To me, it seemed as though I lay there under him for ages, with the pain steadily growing more and more, the roaring of the crowd and the roaring in my mind growing along with it.  It seemed endless, and I was sure that it would go on until I died; that the pain and roaring would increase until my mind and body gave out...something inside me would burst, weakly and silently, like a soap bubble, and I would pass from the world of the living.
   “But it wasn’t forever...only a few minutes, and once it was over...”