Chapter 2

Rhys woke with an unusual feeling in his cock. He looked up and saw Jade lying face down on the bed, her mouth over his cock, moving her head slowly up and down. Rhys knew about blowjobs, but it was the first time he’d ever experienced one. He was tempted to pull her away from him, but she’d started this by herself, and it was her own choice. That and the feeling was amazing.

Jade noticed he was awake and sped up her ministrations until he was approaching orgasm. “Jade!” he gasped, trying to warn her, but she kept at her task until he exploded into her mouth. She paused, still with his cock in her mouth, and he could feel her swallowing. After a few seconds, she started to swirl her tongue around his softening cock and swallowed again.

She released his cock and looked across at him with a broad smile on her face. “Tasty! Did you enjoy that, master?”

“Jade, that was amazing! No one’s ever done that for me before! Wow, what a way to start the morning!”

Her smile grew even more. “I’m glad you enjoyed it, master. The city hall clock has just struck fifteen before nine, so if you want help dressing and getting ready for the ship, please release me?”

“Release you? Oh, you’re all fastened up behind your back! Who did this to you?” Rhys was starting to get angry.

“Silly master! I did it myself! But I can’t release myself, so you must do that.”

Rhys sat up in bed and moved over to inspect the small of her back where her hands and feet were joined. He could see a cross-shaped piece of metal connecting the two silver bands she wore on her wrists to the two she wore at her ankles. In the centre of the cross was a small hole he assumed was for a key.

“Is there a key for this?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes, master. It’s inside me.”

Rhys was confused. “Inside you? Where inside you?”

“In my pussy, master,” she replied. “You’ll have to find it,” and she giggled.

Rhys was a bit annoyed now, but she was right that they needed to board their ship in time. He rolled her onto her back so she was lying on her restrained hands and feet. He put his hands on her thighs and drew them apart before moving closer to her pussy. He knew about the birds and the bees from school and rumours and stories from his friends, but he’d never been this close to a woman’s sex before.

As he moved closer to her, he noticed an odd smell. He knew enough about the subject to know that meant she was aroused. He gently put his hands on her outer lips and moved them apart. He could see her clitoris standing proud above her inner lips. Acting partly from instinct and partly from half-remembered whispered conversations with friends, he put his tongue in the entrance to her vagina and, by luck, felt something metallic just inside her.

He decided to have a little fun at her expense. He licked upwards to her clitoris. Jade stopped giggling and let out a low moan. He flicked his tongue over her clitoris up and down, left and right, and she started taking very short breaths, which gradually got faster. He carried on, and she began to emit squeaks and try to push her hips up at him. And then he suddenly pulled away, reached gently into her vagina and pulled out a metal ring with a tiny key attached. He jumped up, shaking it gently where she could see, then turned and walked into the bathroom.

He could hear her in the bedroom, “Master, master, please? No, master?” but he found a towel, turned the shower on, adjusted the temperature and stepped in. The hot water was lovely. When he’d finished, he dried himself, retrieved Jade’s key and returned to her. She was writhing on the bed, still bumping her hips to get stimulation. He stood above her head, held it and looked down on her.

“Do you want to cum, my little princess?” he asked.

“Yes, master, yes, please, yes...” She was babbling, so to quieten her, he kissed her. He felt his lips tingle – whether from flux or something else, he couldn’t tell.

“Let’s finish the job, then,” he told her and climbed onto the bed to resume his former position. He dived back in and licked her to a climax. Once she’d come down from that high, he rolled her over onto her front and unlocked her wrists and ankles. She stretched on the bed, easing the kinks out of her limbs. He left her for a minute and then slapped her on the bum. “Now, my sexy travelling companion, go and take care of yourself in the bathroom while I see if breakfast has been delivered.”

Jade jumped up and ran into the bathroom while Rhys found his trousers from the previous night and retrieved the key for his trunk from his belt clip. He opened the trunk, found underwear, clean trousers and a shirt, put them on and moved to the door. He unlocked it and stuck his head out into the corridor. There was a breakfast tray a short way down the corridor. He went out, checked it had his name on it – well, the Foundation’s name – and brought it back into the room.

He put it on the table and poured two cups of tea from the insulated teapot. He noticed another piece of paper on the tray. It had a note in untidy Seibjern script – “Apologies, good sir. Every time I came to your door, I was stopped by something. I left your breakfast as close as I could.”

The bathroom door opened, and Jade came out, naked except for a towel wrapped around her head. She hurried over to Rhys and knelt before him, hands on her thighs, palms upwards, legs spread, eyes down, mouth open and tongue out. Rhys wasn’t sure if she wanted him to feed her or whether she was offering another blowjob.

He put his fingers under her chin and gently closed her mouth. “No,” he said, “we’ll eat breakfast together as equals and then go to the ship together too. I’m not ready for that sort of relationship just yet. We need to talk about how things will work between us. We’ll have lots of time on the ship to do just that.”

She looked at him with a frown but nodded, stood up and moved to sit next to him on the couch.

Trying to break the tension, he handed her the note and read it aloud, translating it into Standard. “It seems our barrier worked reasonably well, anyway!” he said light heartedly.

Jade nodded. “Well done,” she said with a slightly forced smile. Rhys noticed the lack of the word “master” but put it aside for later.

They drank tea and ate pastries and fruit together, but the comfortable atmosphere of the previous evening had gone.

When they’d finished breakfast, they both rose. Jade selected her clothes for the day ahead and took them into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Rhys, already mostly dressed, pulled out socks and boots, put them on and then selected a jacket. The bathroom door opened, and Jade came out dressed in a shapeless sweater, trousers, and a set of walking boots. She carried her silver necklace and bands, went over to the bedside table to pick up the silver cross that had earlier connected them and dropped them into her trunk. She closed the trunk and locked it.

“Shall we go?” she asked Rhys.

Rhys was slightly surprised, but now wasn’t the time to press the matter – they had a ship to catch. Rhys searched the room for anything they’d left behind, finding a sock under the bed and tossing it into his trunk. He locked the trunk, and they headed downstairs. They paused at the reception desk, arranged to have their trunks sent to their ship, and then walked out into the morning air.

The previous day’s sunshine had gone, replaced with a drizzle and a gusty wind. Rhys glanced at Jade, who had pulled her cloak tightly around her and headed down the street back towards the docks. He hurried to catch her up again, and they walked side-by-side, heads down against the damp and cold and pretty much ignoring each other.

Fewer people were around today because of the damp weather, and Rhys felt far more comfortable in the streets. He’d been in Roligvan a handful of times before and had always found it a welcoming place. But after yesterday’s experience of slight claustrophobia, today, the streets seemed dull and perhaps a little menacing. Maybe it was because he wasn’t with his mum this time. Maybe it was just growing up. Maybe.

Eventually, they turned through the dock gates and studied the list of sailings posted on a large board together. Jade pointed at one of the entries on the board. “That one. The ship’s called ‘Skotur’ and is at the Brotfor Quay.” She consulted the map adjacent to the ship listings. “This way,” she said and headed off.

Rhys followed. They wended their way around people milling around and the carts carrying all types of goods and arrived at their ship.

The Skotur was a coastal packet ship, about 50 metrar in length and 10 wide, with two masts flying the Reiland flag. Rhys stepped up to the gangplank and made his way to the ship deck, where there was a sturdy gate with a man standing by it. Rhys thought this unusual – most other ships had someone stationed on the quayside. He heard Jade’s voice from behind him.

“This is a Reilander ship. It likely has slaves on board, and they don’t want them to escape into Free Seibjerg. The security in foreign ports is usually stringent.” She’d guessed what he was thinking.

“Rhys and Jade Niain for the Minshull Foundation,” Jade announced over his shoulder, passing Rhys some papers that Rhys then offered to the man by the gate.

A fake surname and fake papers? Rhys wondered again why that was necessary. The man took the papers and looked at them, then at Jade and Rhys. He gave Rhys the papers back, which he passed back to Jade. The man unlocked the gate and beckoned them through. They stepped on board the ship, and the man quickly closed and locked the gate behind them.

“I’m Stefan Nicholech, chief steward. I shall be your host on your journey to Chatamor. I’m sorry that we’re expecting the weather to break later, so we’re keen to leave to get past the Terava coast before it gets dark. Your cabin is this way,” and he led them away.

“Cabin. Singular,” thought Rhys. “They think we’re a couple,” although he wasn’t sure they were, even temporarily.

The cabin was nice although, perhaps not unusually on a ship, it was small. A bunk bed – Rhys thought that was going to be interesting – a small washroom and toilet and a bench and small table, which Rhys assumed was to eat at. Jade took her cloak off and Rhys his coat, and they hung them up on hooks on the back of the door.

“Explore?” Rhys asked, and Jade nodded.

They opened the door and entered the corridor. It had three rooms on each side and a wooden chair at the end. There didn’t appear to be anyone else around. There was a stair leading up to the open air, which they’d come down to reach their room, and another leading down. Jade looked down the steps, and there was a door at the bottom marked “Crew Only”, so they went back up to the open deck. They walked around the deck and watched the activity on the dockside as some of the ship’s crew prepared to sail. But the drizzle had turned to rain, and they’d left their rainwear in the cabin, so they made their way back there. It looked like they’d spend the next three days stuck in that small cabin as there was nothing else to do on the ship.

Back in the cabin, they slipped out of their damp clothes. Their trunks had not yet arrived, so they wrapped themselves in blankets from the beds, sat side by side on the lower bunk bed and looked straight ahead. This was absurd, thought Rhys. He turned to Jade at the exact time as she turned to him. Both said “Sorry” simultaneously, then hesitated and then said “Don’t...” and stopped, staring at each other before both burst out laughing.

“We need to work out how to live together these next days,” Rhys said. “And maybe longer. I’m a country boy, and you fascinate and scare me equally. You’re a woman with more experience of the world than I’ll probably ever have, and for someone who looks around my age, I find that amazing but confusing at the same time. Can we...”

There was a knock at the door. Rhys got up, still wrapped in the blanket, and opened it. Outside stood a waif of a woman, the top of her head barely level with Rhys’s breastbone, hair cut short and untidily kept, wearing a tunic that came down to mid-thigh and flat shoes. She looked scared and stuttered in broken Standard, “Excuse, sir. Luggage. Late.”

Rhys sank onto his haunches so his head was just below hers and said in Reijik – he’d assumed she was part of the ship crew and spoke the native language of Reiland – “Can you understand me if I speak like this?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry, master,” she said in Reijik, “your luggage has not yet arrived, and the captain says we must leave to keep ahead of the bad weather. Master Nicholech says he has arranged for your trunks to go on the next fast courier ship to Chatamor, so they should be waiting for you when you arrive.”

Now that he was looking up at her, he could see she had a pretty, pixie-like face, but the stand-out was that she was wearing a broad, slightly rusty and dented steel collar with a padlock on the front. She was now visibly shaking.

He could sense Jade coming to stand behind him in the doorway. “What’s your name?” he asked the terrified woman.

“I don’t use a name on this ship, master,” she said. “You can call me ‘cabin maid’.”

“No, I won’t call you that,” Rhys said gently. “What did people call you when you were growing up?”

She looked around, checking whether anyone else was in the corridor. “Katarina, master,” she said in a low voice.