The Alpha Emperor's Courtesan

Switch

I spent most of my first full day copying the words that Rin barked at me as she pointed at various items around the house, but I was so distracted that I didn’t remember most of them when she asked me to recite them to her again before we ate lunch.

She hit me hard across the back of my hands with a long switch - the narrow branch of a tree - and it was so excruciatingly painful that I cried afterward.

She smiled approvingly at my tears, and the fact there was a thin red line across the back of my hand where the switch had broken my skin.

I was furious, but there was nothing I could do to retaliate yet, and I was trying to focus all my attention on how I could find Jax and plan a way to escape this place with him.

If Rin was going to hurt me because I couldn’t remember her words for items I had never seen before, I would remember the words and the pain and the look of satisfaction she had, and I would make sure she suffered ten times the torment that she had inflicted on me when I got the chance.

There were no other girls in the house that day, and I was relieved that Xena did not return when Suki and the three other girls who lived in the house did to eat their evening meal.

I was allowed to join them, and if Xena had been there, I think I would probably have been sent to my bedroom to eat alone.

I sat next to Suki, who was wearing a sheer flowing dress similar to the one I had been given the previous evening because I thought that she might talk to me or introduce me to the other girls.

When I asked her how her day had been, she ignored me and stared at the wall opposite her.

I repeated the question.

“How was your day?”

Rin hit the back of my hands with the switch again, and I dropped the piece of warm bread I had been holding as I cried out in agony.

“Use right words or do not speak.”

It was the most complex sentence I had heard Rin say in my own language, and it made me bristle with anger. I just wanted to talk to somebody, and I didn’t think she should see it as a bad thing that I wanted to get to know the other girls. If I was going to have to do ridiculous things like playing the harp and dancing around provocatively, there was no reason I couldn’t do that in my own language.

Suki didn’t want to talk to me now, anyway. Taking that dress from Xena’s room had marked me out as being a bad choice of an ally in this house, and even if I learned to speak their language fluently overnight, I would probably be ignored by the other girls.

I nibbled at a piece of bread as the other girls talked. I was listening to them and trying to figure out exactly what they were chattering about. I recognized the world gladiator once or twice, and I heard Xena’s name, and ‘Emperor’. That was probably where she was, then - watching the gladiators fight at the Arena as she sat at the side of the Emperor and he thought about how boring she was and how he was looking to replace her with someone new and exciting.

The other girls finished their food and disappeared upstairs, but when I stood up to leave with them, Rin glared at me and pointed towards the switch, which was leaning against the wall.

I remained in my spot and expected her to shout at me for something as soon as the others were gone.

She gestured vaguely at the table.

“Clean. Food costs money, you earn none.”

So, that was why I was kept back. I was going to be living as a servant as well as being abused by this wretched witch of a woman for forgetting stupid words I didn’t even want to know in the first place.

As I stacked up the metal plates and followed her through the house to the kitchen with them, I wondered whether Jax was being treated as badly as this, or if the people he was with were kinder and more understanding of the fact that this was so difficult.

I almost laughed at that thought. Nobody in this city was forgiving. Nobody in this empire was forgiving. They were a bunch of rich, heartless monsters who would stop at nothing to wipe out the people they saw as beneath them; people like my father, who was a great Chieftain, meant nothing to Emperor Caius and the thousands of men he commanded.

While people like me and Jax were losing everything or being slaughtered with no mercy, Caius was spending the night with Xena. He wasn’t thinking about the lives his men were destroyed, he was thinking about whether he’d sleep with that beautiful little b***h or send her back here angry and unsatisfied.

After I had cleaned up the plates with Rin watching over me, she pointed to the stairs.

“More words tomorrow. Bedroom now.”

I wanted to ask her for a blanket so that I wasn’t freezing cold and uncomfortable, but I knew there was no point in that. She wasn’t going to do anything for me if I mimed or used my own words.

At least that would give me something to do for the rest of the evening; I was going to think of all the words that might actually be useful to me and which might help me reason with Rin so that I didn’t have to sleep on the floor with no blanket, and I was going to learn enough that I could find out where Jax was.