A Life Less Ordinary (17 page)

“And the club owners will take weeks to repair it and reopen. I suspect that they will add stronger charms against dragons and perhaps do a little more work before they can open for business. You may have dodged a bullet.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and meant it. It was a weight off my mind. “I’m sure they won’t be taking in any more slaves...”

“I highly doubt it,” Master Revels said, sharply. “The last thing you want or need is for someone to draw a link between the slaves and someone burning the club down. This isn’t the mundane world. You never know who might be watching or have access to a precognitive talent that could give someone an advance warning. You have to be careful for the next few days.”

He pressed his fingertips together. I knew what was coming. “You disappointed me tonight,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice, yet I felt it biting at me. I had wanted his respect, but instead he was angry and disappointed in me. “You did well when you had to break through the club’s defences, but you chose your battle very poorly and could have lost everything; you
would
have lost everything, were it not for Fiona. She saved your life.”

I felt my body jerk into life as he stood up. I turned to face a small table, one I hadn’t noticed before. Lying on top of it, strangely alone, was a simple thin cane. I picked it up, my hand moving robotically, and passed it to him. Merely touching it sent unpleasant feelings running down my spine. I knew, beyond all doubt, what was about to happen. The spell holding me in place broke, yet I couldn’t move. I knew that I deserved what was coming. Or was it the spell, still in place? There was no way to know.

“Bend over the table, Dizzy,” Master Revels said. I obeyed. He didn’t use Compulsion, yet something pushed me forward. I had never felt so exposed in my life. Fiona fluttered off my shoulder and over to a perch on the wall. I caught a glimpse of her golden eyes and felt a sudden burst of reassurance. “I wish I didn’t have to do this.”

I wished he didn’t have to do it either, but it wasn’t my choice. I squeaked as cold hands lifted up my dress, then reached into the wristband of my panties and pulled them down to my knees. A cold breeze seemed to blow through the room, a chilling reminder of my vulnerability. My parents had never chosen to punish me in such a manner.

“You put your life in terrible danger and risked everything,” Master Revels added. He took a position next to me and I cringed. It occurred to me suddenly that he had to be seeing absolutely everything I had, right on display, and I fought the urge to giggle. “If it is any consolation, my master punished me too...and my mistakes were far worse than yours.”

I struggled to speak. “What did you do?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re old enough to take on an apprentice of your own,” Master Revels said, flatly. I got the feeling that he didn’t want to talk about it and that he’d only mentioned it to help reassure me. He needn’t have bothered. “Suffice it to say that I thoroughly deserved the thrashing I got for it. I could have killed myself and a thousand other people.”

There was a moment’s pause, and then he lifted the cane and brought it down hard on my exposed bottom. For a second, there was no pain, and then I felt as if a red hot poker had been laid across my bum. I screamed, unable to help myself, and reached back to rub my rear end. He gently, but firmly pushed my hand back to the table and brought the cane down again, and again. The pain just kept growing worse. I tried to concentrate on one of the disciplines, yet every time I tried to focus, the cane struck me again.

The caning lasted only five minutes, if that, but I was sore for hours.

Chapter Fifteen

I’d read in stories, back when I’d been a young girl, about girls who had taken six of the best from their teachers – and school prefects, and sports mistresses, and governesses – and had carried on as if the thrashing hadn’t caused any permanent harm. The young and impressionable girl I had been had believed that – if only because my parents had never spanked me – yet now I knew that it was nonsense, total nonsense. I had inspected myself in the mirror as soon as I had been released and allowed to go to my room and discovered that my aching buttocks were covered with no less than ten ominous red stripes. It hurt to walk, to touch them or to sit down. I lay face down on the bed and started to cry.

Sometime afterwards, I fell asleep, still lying on my chest. My dreams were strange things, images of the slaves, the desperate rescue and the cane looming over me blending together to produce a surreal nightmare. I couldn’t sleep well at all, if only because every time I twisted in bed my aching bottom rubbed against the sheets, snapping me awake. I was grateful when Fiona flew into the room and settled down next to me, one scaly paw holding my hand. When I finally awoke, it was eleven o’clock and I felt dreadful.

My bottom was still a mess – the red lines had sharpened, even though the rest of my skin had faded to its normal pale colour – and my face was terrifyingly blotchy. It didn’t hurt to move so much, although I didn’t dare risk having a shower or even putting on some proper knickers and jeans. I donned my dressing gown – it was made of silk and gentle to the touch – and muttered a spell under my breath. The pain slowly faded, though it would be back. I’d been warned that spells like that always have a price. The pain would come back soon, doubled. Fiona fluttered down and settled on my shoulder as I finished tying up my hair.

I looked up at her. “How can I go down to face him now?” I asked. I suddenly wanted to cry again. Last night, I’d been stupid, nearly gotten myself and others killed, and then...I froze, horrified. I had killed last night. I had terminated people’s lives. “How...?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Fiona said. She sounded amused by my predicament. “I’ll tell you, between you and me, that you’re not the first person in this house to be caned for stupidity.”

“Stupidity,” I repeated. In the cold light of day, what I’d done did look pretty stupid...and the aching behind didn’t help. I understood, now, why schoolchildren had been so terrified of the cane before it had been banned. I was an adult, legally at least, and they were just kids. “How long have you spent in this place?”

Fiona blew out a tiny puff of smoke from her nose. “You should know better than to ask a lady her age,” she chided, lightly. “For your information, Dizzy, I have been here for over four hundred human years.”

Her mouth lolled open, a dragon smile, at my expression. “We dragons live a very long time,” she added. “I know dragons that are older than your entire race, dragons that flew over the Earth before the human race was brought into existence, and dragons that fought with gods and demons back when the universe was young.”

I frowned. “Our years must go by in a flash for you,” I said. “Why are you here? I like your company, but why are you working here?”

“I like the human race,” Fiona said. She winked one glowing eye at me, leaving me unsure if she had told the truth or not – or perhaps only part of the truth. There was no way to know. “I knew your master’s master and his master and trust me; they all got the same treatment if they screwed up. You should consider yourself lucky. There are many problems one can get into in the magical world that cannot be fixed with a sore bottom.”

I thought about it as I walked down the stairs and into the dining room. I knew just how badly it could have gone, so I should be grateful, right? I was unsure how to feel; part of me was glad that the matter was over, if it was over, and the other part was outraged. How dare anyone, even Master Revels, do that to me?

“Take a seat,” Master Revels said, from where he was sitting. He passed me the newspaper with one hand and smiled. “You may want to look at that.”

I sat down...and jumped up again, cursing. It still hurt to sit down, spell or no spell. I glared at him and spread the paper out over the table, ignoring the cup of tea that had materialised in front of me. It had amused me to discover that the magical world had its own newspaper, although it was very bland compared to the newspapers back in the mundane world. It seemed that all of the reporters had sworn magical oaths to tell the truth, the whole truth as they understood it and nothing else. There were no snarky comments, few political slants and a surprisingly limited amount of gossip. I guessed that when a magical celebrity could curse a reporter for spreading lies about her – or even for reporting inconvenient truths – it would limit the damage a reporter could cause.

The lead story concerned a sighting of a dragon near the market. The reporter had got some of the facts of the case right – at least he’d noted Fiona’s presence – but after that he went off on a rant about the dangers of dragon raids and how dragons were a major danger to life and limb in the magical world. It ended with a proposal to start a dragon patrol to watch for dragons and keep them away from human settlements in the magical dimensions.

“That won’t ever get off the ground,” Master Revels said, when I looked up, horrified. “That ass is full of bravado, but very few magicians want to battle a dragon, even a young hatchling straight from the nest. Dragons are tough and very dangerous. Besides, there are so many of the Roads of Happenstance leading to the market that sealing them all would be an impossible task.”

He looked down at his half-finished plate and picked up his knife and fork. “Get some breakfast,” he said, mildly. “You have to make a call afterwards and then the Thirteen has seen fit to give us a new assignment.”

I blinked at him. “You’re taking me along with you?” I asked, astonished. “After last night...”

My hand rubbed my bottom as he snorted. “You’d probably blow up the magical world if I left you alone,” he said, dryly. I flushed. “Dizzy...”

I looked up, reluctantly.

“I know how you’re feeling now, but I don’t hold anything against you any longer,” he said, quietly. “You have remarkable promise and I don’t intend to allow that to go to waste.”

His words echoed in my ears as I ate my own breakfast, standing up. Fiona settled next to me and chattered absently about dragon society, reassuring me that most dragons wouldn’t even notice the newspaper article, let alone care about it enough to hunt down the person responsible and burn them to death. Being so long-lived, dragons rarely bothered to take notice of humans as individuals, which made Fiona’s presence so unusual. I suspected, after some thought, that I knew the answer. Humans might pose a threat to the dragons one day – if we developed even more powerful magic – and we might turn on them. Fiona’s real job might be to keep an eye on us and make sure that if we developed anything threatening, the dragons would know about it well in advance.

Once I finished my breakfast, I used the pendant to make a call to the Sisterhood. The woman I spoke to was unfamiliar, but she was clearly familiar with the case and reassured me that the former slaves were being welcomed into the Sisterhood, having decided not to return to the mundane world. Their sons, she promised me, would be contacted and even though they couldn’t enter the Sisterhood’s pocket dimension, they would be taken care of by the Sisters. The woman had the nerve to congratulate me on liberating the women and promised that if I needed personal help, the Sisters would be there. I was rubbing my bottom again as I ended the call. If the women were free and happy – and it seemed as if they were – it had all been worthwhile. At that thought, the knot in my chest untangled itself and faded away.

“Get a proper dress and make sure that it reaches down past your knees,” Master Revels ordered, once he had finished his own breakfast. I nodded, although I was surprised by the instruction. It made no sense to me. “There’s no hurry. Take your time.”

I’d inherited most of the female clothes in the house – at least until I left, or so I had been told – but there were so many it was hard to choose what I could wear. I eventually settled on a long blue dress that fell down to my calves. It looked demure, particularly when I checked it in the mirror for unexpected surprises, and it hid the fact that I wasn’t wearing panties. I couldn’t put any underwear on without feeling as if my bottom had just been caned again.

“Not bad,” Master Revels said when he saw me. I had to laugh. I think that was the first time that he ever noticed my appearance. Fiona winked at me again. “Grab your coat and let’s go. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and we have work to do.”

I was nervous when I stepped outside, wondering if the whole of the magical world had heard me screaming last night, but no one paid us any special attention. It still hurt to walk, yet I discovered that if I gritted my teeth and kept going, the pain slowly faded away to manageable levels. The tourists thronging through Edinburgh, exploring the Royal Mile, paid no attention to us as we slipped back into the mundane world. I was used to the effect by now, but it still struck me as uncanny. There was an entire hidden world that they would never see.

Master Revels stopped at the top of George the Fourth Bridge for a moment, allowing me to pick up a copy of a newspaper from a street vendor. There was nothing about a fire anywhere in Edinburgh, thankfully, which suggested that the flames had been contained within the magical world. I had trusted in the spells masking our presence from the mundane world, yet I had been nervous. It would have been ironic if my determination to rescue the slaves had become the day that the magical and mundane worlds collided.

“Come on,” Master Revels said, and started to lead me down the Royal Mile. I followed him obediently, wincing at the feeling of sunlight striking my back. It was a stunningly warm day for Edinburgh. He led me down towards an old church and paused, waiting for me to catch up with him. “What do you make of that?”

I followed his gaze, studying the church thoughtfully. The Tron Kirk had been built after the Bishops War – a war that most people had forgotten these days – when Charles I had tried to alter the structure of the Scottish Church by placing a Bishop in Edinburgh, or something like that. I had always had a good memory for facts and figures, but I had only heard the history of the very old Kirk once. The Scots had commissioned another church and worshipped there instead, daring Charles to do anything about it. Charles had had his head cut off shortly afterwards by Oliver Cromwell, although the two events might not be connected. These days, the Kirk was both the site of historical excavations and a tourist information centre. With the Fringe in full swing, it was clear that it was doing a roaring trade.