Her eyes widened. The men around them once again began to hoot and holler with robust laughter, and she was already tired from trying to get off his lap. When he grabbed her with both hands and shoved her down acrosshis large thighs, she had no chance of fighting him off, and she knew it.
The only thing she could do was pray and scream for help that would never come. There wasn’t anyone on her side. Her army had been vanquished and her kin had been conquered and were probably being married off against their will at that very moment.
“Help me! Someone help me!” she cried anyway. It was difficult to tell herself to just accept this immense amount of humiliation and let him spank her, that it couldn’t be that bad, and that she would most definitely have worse done to her sooner than she’d like.
“Shut up, woman! You’re splitting my ears!” he told her, and she felt one of her hands, which she was trying to pinch his skin with, pinned behind the small of her back. He began to pull up her skirts.
“Dooon’t!” she quavered, thrashing her legs, trying to find the ground, or his leg, or anything at all to touch or kick. All she found was air. Air that was very cold on her calves.
No man had ever seen her bare bottom, and she had hoped to keep it that way. She had only two layers on, which wasn’t enough to keep her particularly warm even when she was fully dressed, and as he bunched her linens up over her back, she didn’t know if she was going to burn with shame or die from the cold on parts that had no business being exposed to the elements.
“Rahh!” she growled, sounding like a wild lioness in her own ears and biting the man right on the knee. He yelped, picked her up, and moved her further to the side across his knee so that her head was now hanging by the ground and her ass was very high in the cold night air. Then he proceeded to do exactly what she had been trying to escape in the first place: he spanked her.
At least she imagined that he would have called it a spanking. She probably looked like a chastened toddler to the eyes of all the men surrounding them. She, however, knew better. Children couldn’t bear this sort of pain. She felt like she was getting beaten with a wooden oar, and all she could think about was how completely unfathomable this sort of pain had been just moments ago.
Dots were appearing in her vision, either because her heart was going to beat clear out of her chest, or because she was practically hanging upside down, and all of her screaming—which she couldn’t control, she was certain—was making it very hard to breathe.
Certain that she was going to asphyxiate, she began to cry out for Gerhard.
“Gerhard! Please!” she cried out between the loud, rhythmic ‘slaps’ of the oaf’s immeasurably large hand as he heated her backside with one sharp, resounding blow after another. She could barely believe she was crying out for her own jailer, especially one who had also tried to spank her only mere minutes ago. Even if he’d heard her, he would have been unlikely to rescueher, but there was simply no other person to cry for.
“I’ve never seen a grown woman cry like a little spoiled brat!” one of the oaf’s companions said as her voice began to crack and The Oaf adjusted her once more over his knee since all of her otherwise futile wiggling was finally making her fall off of his lap. “Look at her! Like she’s never been laid a hand on in all her life! Smack her good!”
The Oaf did, renewing his smacks although she could feel him shudder with laughter under her body. She did something then that she hadn’t done for years—something she didn’t even think she could do anymore. She cried. Tears began to stream down her face, unbidden and uncontrolled, and she began to hiccup violently as her screams of pain and agony turned to helpless sobs.
Her audience snickered, and it only made her cry harder until the spanking stopped all of the sudden with the shout of a familiar voice.
“Put her down this instant, soldier, or I swear I will run you through!”
She was literally shoved off of the giant’s lap in a single instant. She hit the ground and rolled in the dirt until she found herself looking up at a shadow that only looked familiar when the firelight flickered on his visage. It was Gerhard, standing tall with a sword in his hand. He glanced in her direction for only a moment before regaining eye contact with Arlo.
“What were you thinking?”
“Well, you said we could have the women around here if we take them to wife! I’m taking her to wife! Looks like the lass was trying to escape from the castle!” Arlo said, standing up. Although he was over a head taller than Gerhard, his tone was obviously defensive.
Gerhard narrowed his eyes even as he slowly crouched down to her level. He grabbed her hand with surprising gentleness and helped her to her feet. “You’re not taking this one to wife. She’s not available,” he told him, although his words were hard to hear as she continued to hiccup.
She adjusted her dress and then wrapped her arms around herself.
“She looks available to me! Though she’s a brat, for sure! Spit right in my face, she did! Like some sort of alley cat!” Arlo waved a hand toward her with anger, but Gerhard put an arm around her waist and pulled her toward his hard body.
“I’ve become aware of that, Arlo,” Gerhard sighed, and she realized that he was on first-name terms with this ruffian. His arm seemed warm around her as he put his sword back into his scabbard and began to turn her away from the crowd around the fire. “Now carry on.”
They trudged back in the direction Susanna had run from before, and Gerhard held his body closer to hers than any guard. She still couldn’t seem to calm down—it was as if some sort of floodgates had opened and now she was going to have to let the world drown in her dramatic onslaught of tears.
He moved his lips close to her ear. “Are you alright, princess?”
She took a deep breath, but when she opened her mouth to say, ‘Yes, of course I am, you fool!’ a sob rolled off her tongue instead, which she then swallowed down with a gulp before nodding.
“They didn’t recognize you,” he assured her, as if that was supposed to make her feel better. “They were just drunk, playing around.”
“It—it didn’t feel like playing around to me!” she sputtered, suddenly flashing hot with anger. Instead of arguing with her like she expected, he pulled her even closer and gave her upper arm a consoling squeeze.
Suddenly Rennio stumbled in front of them. She could barely make him out in the light, but his silhouette in the moonlight was indistinguishable because of his wild hair and his robes. “Good!” Rennio panted, putting his hands on his sides as he tried to catch his breath and speak at the same time. “You found her safe! Now I hope you can beat her to death! What were you thinking? You are the worst prisoner imaginable! We told you not to leave the pavilion. At least I did. I told you over and over and over. Not because we don’t want to chase you down in the forest, either. You could have been assaulted by any one of these men, you nitwit!”
“Rennio, enough,” Gerhard immediately chided, walking right past the priest and seeming to continue to ignore him even though he trailed behind.
“She saw earlier what sort of men are out there! They’re not as loveable as I am!” Rennio ranted on, beginning to trudge along at her other side, only not nearly as close as Gerhard was. “Idiot females,” he grumbled underneath his breath, none too quietly.
