…your pride, calling out after him.

“Wait.” Your voice croaks with thirst.

The man looks back at you, eye brows raised below the rim of his bandanna. You look at him; he’s the old man from the side room roped into carrying you here. He’s clearly dressed as though a servant in his ragged patchwork attire, and his unshaven face is lined and his grey hair, leaving him looking like a beggar who found his clothes as castoffs in an alley. The look is counteracted by a youthful sideways smile that slashes his face as he looks at you, as though telling the world that his fortunes are his own, and his slacker stance is more suited to a teen than an old man.

“Finally speaking?” he asks redundantly, sauntering over to you with his bag and bucket. He tosses the almost empty bag to a nearby chair and picks up the buckets ladle himself, scraping the bottom and gathering the last dregs of the drinking water together as best he can. You kneel as he brings it closer to the bars, clearly intending to water your lips like he did with those in the stocks. Perhaps your little attempt at deception had left him cautious. The little half-filled cup on a stick stops before the bars and he give a familiar instruction.

“Bare em, if you wanna sip.”

He looks at your chest and tilts his head up, gesturing for you to lift your top and show him what you have. It seems such a small, petty request, after all you’ve been through.

You fix him with a flat stair before tugging at your arms, reminding him that they are going nowhere. Naturally, your hands hold your wrists and the ropes to maintain the illusion. The man shrugs with a smile, his little game ended before begun, and he moves the cup past the bars. You could grab it, but how would it help you? Instead, you sip as he tilts its lukewarm contents down your throat.

When it’s empty, he tosses the ladle into the bucket and scoops up the bag, drawing out a final half loaf no bigger than his palm. He holds it out past the bars and you shuffle forwards, leaning your mouth towards his hand, but as you near he draws it away, until it passes back beyond the metal of your cage and rests next to the material of his trousers. He shakes it teasingly next to his manhood. Once more, the message is clear with a gesture, but when you fix him with another flat stair, he shrugs and explains anyway.

“Don’t need hands to suck a dick, right princess?”

The aforementioned dick stirs the grimy material as it grows and shifts beneath it, until he’s **** to slip a hand under his knotted string of a belt and shift the rod free into the open air.

Its curls are as grey as the hairs on his head, and it appears thick despite -or perhaps because of- the reedy hips it sticks out of. You look at it without blushing, sure that it is a poor comparison to Rolands. Indeed, while still sore from the last time such a thing was **** inside of you, the prospect of it happening again is a cold feeling; one devoid of further shame and cored with icy practicality. You’d do it to escape most likely, having been stuck in this cell more than long enough, and while it was refusing a similar service that put you here, the situations are worlds apart.

“Common… I always knew you were a slut. From the first I laid eyes on you.” He says it in a reassuring tone, as though giving you permission to do what you want.

Your stomach gurgles and protests with a hungry ache, but you turn your head away regardless.

“You’ll change your mind darlin.” He takes a bite of the powdery bread, hissing its crumbs as he repeats himself. “You’ll change your mind.”

You watch him walk away, already somewhat regretting the loss of the bread and the heights of your remaining pride. He takes the lantern he brought and leaves you back in darkness, hungrier than you’ve ever been before. You sink to the straw and try to sleep, where the hunger cannot get to you.

The next evening, he returned with more and the same offer, and he smiled like a profit when starvation changed your mind.

Your head bobs back and forth, unaided, gliding lips and tongue across the shaft in your mouth. Your nose briefly nuzzles the tangle of pubes at its base, while its tip gently caresses the back of your throat. You pull back, hollowing your cheeks with suction.

“Oh yeah. That’s it.”

You put your hands on his pasty thighs to steady yourself, angling your head so you can reach the deeper parts of his sitting lap without hitting his gut, which protrudes with a bruiser’s surety, fat rounding the bales of muscle hidden below. If his muscles didn’t put off any wayward brigands, his wide spade hands and grim slab face, both pitted with scars, certainly would.

The carriage lurches, throwing you forward and making you gag.

“Just let me do the talking. I’ve done this before.”

The thin man speaks from the seat next to you, were you buttocks sit at the edge as you bend forward for the man across. There had been several night breaks and even more piss breaks on the long journey, and like the other men joining you, he’d lifted your skirts and enjoyed himself more than once in the last day or so. “And remember, don’t shoot anyone unless I say so.”

“Better remind Mark.” The man to your personal North West keeps his eyes closed as he speaks, rocking sleepily with each movement of the carriage. He shows no signs of deference, simply excepting the order and offering a suggestion. They are all professionals, as far as criminals can claim a profession, but he seems the most experienced of the lot.

Another lurching bump has cock knocking on your throat, but this time a thick set hand lands on the back of your head, holding you there. ‘Finally’ you think as the cum lathers your mouth. You swallow all you can, an act made challenging by the ring gag, but you do it well enough. The gag’s a simple thing, made of good metal and thin leather straps, and while hardly necessary for you after the training of the brothel, on a road this bumpy, you’re glad not to be accused of biting on accident.

Hands pull the straps from the back of your head, undoing the knots, and when you take him from your mouth, you hand the ring to him.

“Told you.” It’s directed at the others, who had told him a carriage ride blowjob was a good way to lose his dick. More likely, they just didn’t want him doing you in front of them.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

You wipe your mouth as the felacioed man opens the driver size window behind his head, revealing a strong wind and the seated buttocks of two men.

“We’re here.”

“Keep going. We’ll turnaround and camp in a clearing further on.”

The clearing was situated in some woods on a hill, providing a dry spot from the boggy surroundings. It’s a misty day. Your time spent underground had made you long for the sky, but here, even outside, you still feel confined in the wispy walls.

The other carriage trundles to a stop, more a wagon for its two passenger seats and canopied transport bed. They haul the men out of the box storage on the back, pulling the ragged forms to their feet and marching them around the transport. When their exercise is done, stale bread is thrust into their hands, as well as yours, and you all begin to eat ravenously.

“The hand over is in the morning. We’ll keep watch with two guards on shift, watching both roads.”

The clearing is on a road, somewhere in the principalities. The north part of it you would wager, from the cold misty weather and hilly marshes. It looks as though it was once paved, but a fuzz of green moss covers much of it, showing traffic to be a rare thing here. Your two fellow prisoners -Bafford and…Crowain, you think- look at you with hollow pitying eyes. You had not seen them since the ship, yet for the last few days you had exchanged glances with each stop. Those weary veteran eyes had long since made your measure; taken from the loose fitting dress and the bruises and the two month bump at your belly. They were always back in their box before the others started, but they have ears. They knew your roll, for this journey at least.

The others hand out rations to each other, similar bread to yours, but spiced with meats and cheeses that leave your mouth watering. They drink as well, wafting the heady smell of spiced wine that sours the stale taste of your ration of cloudy water. None of them get drunk though. There isn’t space in the supplies for indulgence, nor is there the inclination on the eve of such an important day.

The day you are freed; no celebration for them.

A rough hand picks you up by the crook of your elbow and tugs you to the wagon, throwing you against it, and you stop yourself with outstretched hands, placing them on the carriage door and leaving them there to steady yourself. You know the drill. The only thing different about this time are the watching eyes of your fellow prisoners.

Cool air assaults you as your rear skirts are pulled up and lain upon your lower back. The empty wagon under your palms barely moves as you’re pushed against it, beginning the steady rocking of its compartment with his familiar steady fucking. His hands hold your hips as his cock gently hammers you, and you let your mind wonder, first considering -as you’ve been doing more and more lately- what effect such things will have on your baby. You resist the urge to stroke your ballooned belly, wanting to remain as stable as possible in your shaken stance. It’s not like he’s reaching there, though his climax clearly will, so the babe is safe in that regard. As for the seed, well, it can be no more harmful than all the same that you’ve swallowed, and that must surely feed the baby growing inside. Perhaps that will mean the baby will grow into someone as uncaring and lustful as the man inside you, but that seems the less likely cause should it be the case. Children naturally take after their parents after all.

The man squeezing your buttocks and breathing heavily is not the father. You don’t recall him from those men in the first days, after being introduced in the brothel, and you’re fairly certain one of those early beasts was to blame. Then again, there was a time on…day three? That you were blindfolded for a party with many guests, so you suppose anyone is possible.

As the man’s hot cum streams into your pussy, you think back to those early days. It was only two months ago, but yes, you still consider them early days. Even the moment Roland fucked you senseless was still from your old life, and the cell and the guard and the boat ride that followed all have a haze of innocence to them now. Even the first night in that dingy underground, **** to dance naked on the stage while they jeered and booed and threw things at the attractive ‘Agent of the Right Honourless Principalities,’ a woman feared and brought low for their entrainment, was a quaint humiliation in your mind. To think you had not wanted to dance then, and cried when they made you. You’d begged for the privilege after they really got started.

Spent, the first man returns to the others and the second takes his place. If there’s one good thing about traveling it’s that no one wants to waste water cleaning shit off themselves, and so you’ve been spared the full treatment. You know that a person has not experienced true suffering until they have been hate-fucked in the rear by a group of men.

And what hate your clients had felt! What aggrievement! Always with a story as well. ‘An Agent killed my brother!’ What’s your throat supposed to do about it!? ‘I once knew a guy who was tricked by an Agent!’ Better hold this ones ankles above her head! ‘A guard caught me doing something!’ better make you scream while he draws blood from your colon!

The last was always particularly bitter, and not just for the act. Many would come to take out their frustrations against the Citizen Guard, of which your order is barely related. The fact is, there aren’t really many Agents at all in the world, and so the number of people with grievances against them is a slim audience at best. Certainly compared to the many who’d matched poorly with expansive forces of the Citizen Guard. Yet, you were sold to take the blame, and blame you they did. Most knew -or were told- the clear difference between Guards and Agents, but the Guard doesn’t take women into its ranks and so the distinction was conveniently ignored. The law was all they saw in you, and it made them want to replace it violently with themselves.

The second man begins to spill himself, his sack rising and falling as his balls are emptied. He was faster than usual, or you just let you mind wonder too far. That had grown more common by necessity, a special niche in your mind to crawl into at times like this. You know that if their plan succeeds and you go free tomorrow, that niche will follow you. You’ll die with it still there, ready and waiting.

Third in the packing order was the man who’s cum still swills in your stomach, and so his place was taken by number four, and then five, and so on. The last man in the group was also the most enamoured with your breasts, and so he didn’t mind the slop trough made of your cunt so much. Swollen and growing sore, twice he had tried to suckle you with moustachioed lips and twice his efforts had yielded no milk. You aren’t ready for that yet. You don’t think so anyway. You stand up straight as he pushes the dress top off your shoulders to rest in the crook of your arm. Time number three proves you right, though it takes him ten painful minutes to accept it.

When they are all done, you wonder if they are going to ask you to fuck the captured Guards. Never before had they been allowed to watch, and now that you stand freshly seeded before them, the group all seem to be looking at the three of you as though matchmakers at a village fair. You’d do it of course. Perhaps sex with someone upstanding would even be enjoyable. You have your doubts though, and anyone who uses your body can hardly be considered upstanding; they would be tainted by the act, and the association with someone like you. It’s been months and you can’t recall a single day someone had not relieved their urges between your legs, or in your mouth, or on your breasts or up your rear. What kind of woman was that if not disreputable?

No offer is made and you spend the night in locked in the wagon as usual. At least it’s warm, curled up in a man’s lap. Wakening occasionally to a ride on morning wood -which oddly enough was an unknown phenomenon to you, even in the brothel- was a small price to pay to avoid a cold night under the wagon bed. The morning of your freedom was no exception.

“Can you prove it?”

The words are shouted outside in the open area, the speaker being clear enough in his negotiations to pierce the closed cabin of the wagon. You feel your time approaching.

“We have a confirmed Agent of the Principalities who will attest to the men’s conditions.”

The equally clear voice, shouted from just outside the wagon, calls back. He was handling the negotiations on behalf of the sellers and his only fault so far was delaying the group a few minutes while he ‘cleared his mind’ down your throat. It seemed to be working though; no one had shot each other yet.

There was a pause before Guards representative responded. “Proceed.” This had all been arranged by letter beforehand. You know your part.

The door opens and you step out, holding the carriage frame and passing the man with the crossbow at the window. Insurance, they said; no one wants this to go bad. Another would be on the roof, and the third in the driver’s seat. You don’t need to look to see them. The area is mostly flat and swampy, with the woods a far distance down the road. A white sheet of uninspiring clouds cover the sky above, and an unusual autumn chill grips the air as its whipped lazily by a steady breeze. The negotiator steps aside at your decent, and you see the others waiting before their own carriage, similarly armed with crossbowmen in Guard marked plate. Two stand before it, some distance away, and you watch as their faces twist in disgust at the sight of you. You know it’s for your full belly and the other signs of your mistreatment -you’d been kept in an underground brothel for months and fucked within an inch of your life, so you hardly look refreshed- but it still knots your stomach with unease to be viewed so. Especially by people whose opinion matters to you.

The man on the right wears a Guardsman’s plate, covered in a traveling cloak that hides his rank and shadows his face in a hood. He has a shield strapped to his back, and his head is a little oddly shaped below the hood. On the left is the only man not dressed in armour; a white robe stained grey with prolonged travel covering his body, and a face full of concern and familiarity. It’s Brother Macaid. The last you saw him, he handed you your ‘beggars dose’ -your Agent stipend- before you set sail to Coronac. He’d introduced you into the Agency. Both feel like lifetimes ago.

He turns to his fellow ardent of justice with a sad expression and nods, confirming that the whore before them was once someone who mattered. You start to cry for seeing him; you can’t help it. His presence –someone you knew from your life before- makes all you suffered so much more… real.

The hooded Guard is far more practical. With confirmation that you were once an Agent, he shouts to you across the distance.

“You may feel that your honour has been taken from you!” Your lip shakes as you look at him. “But can you swear on your word and your oaths that the members of the Guard, Guard Elegin Bafford and Guard Fermont Crowain, are alive and unharmed and with you at this time?”

That last part: ‘with you at this time.’ It echoes in your head, spoken normally, but full of hidden meaning. Technically, that’s not what you’re supposed to answer; you were to say that they are alive and nearby and nothing more. You look at Brother Macaid, who nods the barest amount.

“I…” You swallow, struggling to shout the distance for reasons beyond your sore throat. The men across watch you, the men behind watch them. How should you answer? The past few months had taught one clear lesson: if you do what you are told, if you are a good girl, it won’t hurt more than it needs to. The instructions of the negotiator ring in your ears, as clear and present as the words spoken on your first brothel day, by the first man to beat and sodomise you for your early disobedience.

‘Act like a bitch, scream like a bitch.’

But even as that memory resurfaces, the men before you cause another, older memory to come to bare. The memory of a girl who didn’t do what she was told; who brought justice to people like the men behind you. It was the memory of who you were, the person, or even just the type of person, that your users and patrons and rapists and owners felt compelled to avenge themselves upon.

Your lip stops shaking.

“I can vouch for them being unharmed, but they are not here. They are in a box just in the woods yonder!”

You feel the eyes of the negotiator boring into the back of your head as you tilt it towards the woods beyond the wagon opposite The guardsman doesn’t react at all, save to raise a hand to Brother Macaid, dismissing him. His work done, the white robed man carefully walks about the guard’s wagon and out of sight.

“You have your confirmation! Where is the coin?!” There is a snarl to the negotiator voice, his eagerness to leave more evident for your unplanned reveal.

“I have it here.” The hooded guard tosses up a bag that clinks with coin as he catches it. No doubt the bag is bigger than it needs to be, for added effect. “Let the woman go as a sign of good faith, then I’ll toss the bag to you as a sign of good faith. You then send out the Guardsmen and fulfil your end. Sound good?”

“Toss the bag and then I’ll toss the whore. We’ll send the signal and leave. Our associates with ride down the road and dump the hostages.”

“You’ve got to give me a reason to trust you. Let her go first.”

“No! We do this my way!”

“A compromise then!” The guard captain calls back. “You send out the woman and I throw the gold, both at the same time. Seem fair?”

The guard captain isn’t looking at you.

“Fine!” The negotiator turns slightly to address his comrades. “If he doesn’t toss it by the half way point, shoot her!”

A hand shoves your back. The area is a layby off the beaten road, where wagons can turn, and so it is stony underfoot where not made soft by the permanent nearby marsh it is raised out of. It’s like a diorama depicting your predicament, watched by an endless sea of long grass that stretches to the horizon. You walk out, unsteady, feeling the eyes of everyone on you, taking it step by step. The distance isn’t far, your pace normal, but you feel each second, hear each crunch of stone or squelch of mud. The horrors of the past few months drag behind you like an iron cape; a heavy chain ready to break, severing the link between the then and the now that you feel and know and want and dread. What future is there for you, down the other end of this road?

“3, 2, 1…now!”

You run. The bag sails up and through the air, high; higher than it needs to be. You look up, as you’re sure they all do, tracing its flight through the air.

Thwap.

Four bolts loose and streak black blurred lines, felt more than seen, cutting through the air with a half second whistle before impacting with dull wet thuds into four targets. The guard captain rushes to meet you, embracing you like a **** lover in a tale of romance and dashing. Thwap. Thwap. Thwap. He turns hard, throwing himself around to place his back slung shield between you and the distracted men’s final bolts. Thud. Thunk. Thunk.

Guard captain Remial opened his eyes. He was unharmed.

“Wagon team brown! Exit right side and check them!”

Squatting as he was, facing his men’s carriage, he watched as the door opened and a man with a raised shield hopped out. Two more followed, dressed in brown swamp coloured cloth that was wrapped tightly about their forms. Running forward, they passed him and approached the hostage takers caravan.

Silence. Then, “All dead captain.”

He relaxed his posture, which was squatting over the girl with his head raised. They had planned the position, where he would draw fire while his men returned it. The wide shield covered his body, and the cobbled together headwear -little more than an armoured slab of wood shaped and strapped to the back of his head- had resisted the few test bolt they had shot into it. So long as his head was raised, they had no places their bolts could reach. It had been hard not to put his head down, which would have left his neck exposed.

“Brown team! Move out to the woods south of our position. Stay low and engage at Captain Dean’s discretion!”

An unseen thirty five men, some guards and some mercenaries, began to make their way through the marshes. They had decked themselves fully in brown cloth and mud and even tufts of grass and moss under the instructions of the Smiling Thorns, a mercenary company, who’d proven to be a quite resourceful lot.

They needed to kill this group, even at the risk of his fellows; his orders were clear; the Guard could not be seen as an easy payday.

With that, the rest was out of his hands. His job would be the same as his men on the carriage; stand here looking as though nothing had happened. Should the bastards have a set of eyes watching from the forest, he wanted those eyes on the shiny armour of his man atop the wagon. It was all looking good.

“You ok miss?”

He looked down. Dead eyes stared up at him.

“Wha-“

He held the girl in his arms, but she had not moved since he’d shielded her.

“No no no no no no, b-brother Macaid!”

But what could he do? Looking over her, a red blossom of blood had seeped from her side, underneath her arm which had embraced him not a moment ago. A short length of wood, lightly fletched with feathers, poked out of her dress.

The white robed form of Brother Macaid walked briskly over from the other side of the carriage, drawn by the urgency but maintaining the ruse of continued negotiation. Out of sight of the woods, he quickly dropped to his knees, faltering only when he saw her face.

Macaid had spoken highly of her, the whole journey over, though always wracked with worry for her fate, and not a little guilt for his own part in it. As he’d said, she had been too young at the time to be an Agent, but she’d had a fire that wouldn’t let her be anything else, and a sharp mind as well. Apparently, she’d talked circles around the priest until he had **** but to put her forward; he blamed himself for losing the argument.

His face falls with sorrow, but he had no responsibility for this, Remial knew; this was Remial’s fault alone.

Lowering her gently to the floor and into Macaid’s own shaking hands, Remial unstrapped his shield. Two bolts marked its surface. He didn’t know what else he expected to see. The Agent, a comrade in justice, a pregnant woman, was dead, and of all the ways it could have gone down, it went down his way. This was the result.

The plan called for routing the band out, but they could be hiding anywhere. When Macaid found out she was to be used in the negotiation, he’d given assurances that she would assist if asked; this whole mission was approved on that. While he had gasped on seeing her state, she’d done it, just for the asking.

“Oh Anna.” The priest brushed away a dark hair from her face, resting his hand over her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

Guard captain Remial closed his eyes and sighed heavily. He was unharmed, but he knew he’d carry this day like a scar. It would be with him for the rest of his life.

“Damn.”