Baron Harzel nodded once sharply, then told Victoria, "Begin." He took Ariel by the arm and walked her over to a nearby wooden pillory mounted on a three foot high metal pole atop a low, wheeled platform. He rolled the platform into position a few feet to one side of Victoria and Anne, where he could see how the two girls were performing while they remained within reach of his whip.

"Thus I may observe how my assignment is carried out by my other students, yet neglecting not your needs, My Lady," he explained to Ariel. Given the choice, Ariel would far have had her needs neglected altogether, but her opinion was not asked. "While they are engaged in this exercise, I can think of no good reason your own education should not continue apace," he continued, unknotting the rope connecting the front of the iron necklace to her wrists, to allow access to her pussy and bottomhole. He pushed her head down into the center hole of the pillory and closed the top over her, leaving the smaller side holes empty, as her hands were still tied painfully high up on her back.

"Now, My Lady, you shall begin to develop expertise in the ways and means of serving a man with your lesser passage," Harzel said. "It is part of the course of instruction for every noble slut who studies under me, and it must be learned perfectly before she may be graduated from my academy." As he spoke his hand was busy between her legs, spreading open Ariel's lower lips and invading her slot.

She automatically tried to resist the sensation of arousal that grew rapidly under the strokes of the Baron's fingers, but he was far too wise in the ways of the female body for her to have any effect on the outcome. In less time than Ariel would have believed possible, her lower lips had swollen into life, her clitoris was as full and hard as an inflated pig's bladder, and every surface of the interior of her sex was coated with greasy lubricant.

Ariel shook her head in despair and disbelief, as her traitorous body once again succumbed to Baron Harzel's will, and she felt the increasingly powerful waves of pleasure build up toward an overwhelming and unwanted climax under his hated touch. Just when she was at the point of erupting, he pulled his hand away. Ariel clenched her hands in fists, ground her teeth together and with a monumental effort of will, forced back a plea for him to finish her. All that escaped from her throat was a "Grrr!" of frustration.

Then she felt a greasy digit probing at her lesser entry. When his forefinger penetrated her up to the first joint, she yelped and, quite involuntarily, twitched her hips away from it. She knew what would happen next, and instantly tried to apologize before it did.

"Please, my Lord, do not....Ahhh!" she began, but before she could get any further, she felt the white-hot kiss of a bull-whip slice across her buttocks and she screamed in pain.

Baron Harzel stepped back two paces, giving him room to employ the full length of the whip. As he began to create a grid of pink welts on the white flesh of Ariel's buttocks, he said, "I am sore disappointed, My Lady, for it was my thought that we had between us settled the issue of who was to be master and who the pupil, and were now of one mind on this question. But I see by this willful display of waywardness that you would yet dispute the matter with me. Surely your disobedience is intentional, for you are no simpleton, and you must know what is expected of you ere now."

Ariel did not respond verbally, as she was too busy shrieking in agony under the stinging strokes to pay very close attention to this lecture. The frenzied movements of her body, however, were sufficiently eloquent to convey the idea that she would strive not to disobey again. By the time he stopped, her bottom felt as if it had been sautéed on a red-hot griddle, and some time passed before the throbbing waves of agony receded enough to allow her to speak again.

"My Lord...Baron...I meant...not to...be in-...subor-...dinate," Ariel panted, "...and I...pray you for-...give me. I desire but to...be your obedient pupil, and to abide by your every dictate."

"Well and properly said," Baron Harzel responded. "Still the proof lies not in words, but in actions, and we shall see. Before your vow may be tested, I must attend to the Duchess of Glastonbury. She is yet not of a mind to undertake the course of instruction decreed by His Lordship the Duke, and she requires more persuasive logic, or so I deem."

It will be recalled that while Ariel was beginning her course in sodomy, Victoria and Anne had been assigned to arouse each other orally. The young English noblewoman had been less than diligent in fulfilling her assignment, and Baron Harzel had not failed to notice.

"Please understand, Princess Victoria, he demands of me a thing I cannot do," the Duchess whispered. "The sin is so black that my body will obey not my command, and my tongue refuses to venture into your secret place."

Victoria identified with the other girl's plight, for only a few days earlier she had felt precisely the same way. Since then however, her experiences had given her a very different perspective on the matter.

"I beg you attempt to undertake the task, Your Grace, for though I am in full sympathy with your sentiment, most assuredly Baron Harzel is not, and I should mislike to see you suffer at his hands without need," Victoria answered softly. "Only begin, and soon you shall find not the savor and scent of that place so noisome, and if you then take care to think not upon what you are about, straightaway the task becomes easier still."

As if to demonstrate how easy it was, Victoria bent, lowered her mouth to Anne's mound, and began to lick and kiss the rosy lips. Then she sent her tongue slithering out to penetrate the Duchess' virginal sheath. She probed gently but insistently about, until she felt the soft, protuberance of the other girl's clitoris, rising like a tiny worm from beneath its fleshy hood. With a few well-aimed flicks, Victoria brought the dormant little knob to life. She heard soft sighs, half of protest, half of pleasure, coming from below, so she knew her efforts were having the desired effect.

Now she employed a technique she had learned from Princess Elizabeth. She pressed closer still, half-burying her nose in the soft flesh, until the Duchess' aroused clitoris was within reach of her lips, then sucked the engorged knob into her mouth, taking care to make it rub very lightly gently on sharp edges of her incisors. She was gratified by Anne's reaction: sinuous movements of her hips and soft exclamations of pleasure followed each time she drew the little button in or out of her mouth.

But while Victoria was diligently fulfilling her classroom assignment, the Duchess of Glastonbury was performing less satisfactorily. With a maximum effort, she shut her eyes and willed herself to bring her mouth into contact with Victoria's mound, but she recoiled when she felt a strand of curly hair touch her lips. She promptly jerked her head back in revulsion, and after that, even the knowledge of what Baron Harzel would do to her was enough motivation for her to make another attempt.

She prayed to Agnes, patron saint of young girls, to rescue her. "If you can do naught else, sweet Agnes, I implore you to end my suffering and take me to your bosom in Paradise," she whispered. For whatever reason, Saint Agnes did not intervene, leaving the distraught girl alone to face the wrath of Baron Harzel.

"Stand aside, Princess, that I may serve this impetuous maiden as she seems to wish," Harzel said. He approached the quietly weeping Anne holding something in his hand. It proved to be a four-inch long, realistically carved wooden phallus on a leather strap.

"I bid you open, Your Grace," he ordered, holding the up to the Duchess' inverted head. She looked at the obscene thing, shuddered, then tamely opened her mouth to allow him to insert the gag. Her eyes bulged and she made strangled sounds of protest when the head of the object pressed on the back of her throat. "It will serve two purposes," Harzel said, ignoring Anne's bulging eyes, agonized writhing and other signals of distress. "Primus, it shall forestall you from wearying my ears with your cries, and secundus, it shall serve as practice for the time when you begin to study the methods of pleasing a man with your mouth."

He opened a cabinet, and brought out a new whip. This one consisted of three flexible wires mounted on a short wooden handle. At the end of each wire was a small ball of metal.

"This flail, like the chair, is my own invention," the Baron explained as he swished the three-tailed lash through the air a few times before the wide-eyed Anne. "It was purposed for just such a use as I will now demonstrate on your noble mound."

She closed her eyes and screamed when he swung the lash down to land on the lip of her sex. The scream emerged as a feeble "Uhhhh!", thanks to the Baron's foresighted application of the dildo-gag, but Anne's silent grimace of agony more than made up for whatever was lost in volume of sound.

"One day, while I was disciplining an unusually mischievous countess," Harzel said, continuing to lay into the helpless girl, "it occurred to my thought that I knew no way both efficacious and benign to flagellate this area of the female. Yet, as the organ of reproduction is arguably the most responsive to discomfort of any part of the anatomy, by rights it should be a most promising target for chastisement. And so after some thought, the solution came to me. You will dispute not, I think, the considerable impression it makes upon you, My Lady," he said, stooping low to study the face of the moaning, suffering English girl, "and yet afterwards, in a day or less, you will find your injured parts quite as good as before."

The Duchess of Glastonbury did not believe this for an instant. To her, it felt as if a blacksmith was hammering blunt nails into her vagina, and she was convinced that by the time he was through with her, there would be nothing left but a few gobbets of bloody flesh clinging to her pubis.

In fact, the Baron had spoken no less than the truth, for when he halted the punishment after a quarter-hour which felt to the girl more like fifteen centuries instead of fifteen minutes, the only visible signs of the whipping were numerous clusters of little red dots on and around her lower lips from the lead balls, and an equal number of barely discernable pink lines inscribed in the surrounding flesh by the wires.

Anne herself could not see the affected area from where she hung, and in any case, the lack of visible injuries did not make the perceived fireball of pain between her legs a single degree cooler. Only very slowly did the pulsations of excruciating agony lessen, and it was a long time before she was able to make intelligent conversation again.

When he judged she was able to both listen and answer, Baron Harzel unstrapped the gag and drew it, dripping with saliva, from Anne's mouth.

"Now, Your Grace," he said, "what say you? I shall renew now the choice I presented before: you may elect either to obey or else continue the correction with my invention." He wagged the little whip.

"I...I will obey you, My Lord," the Duchess answered, "even if you command me to sever my own finger and make of it a wergild, before willingly would I undergo another such correction."

He studied her. "Almost am I tempted to put that to the test, for I deem you speak not idly, but would do as you say if I but gave you a sharp blade and the order," he said. "But as when you before petitioned me to take your life, I am constrained. Your noble spouse would thank me not if I mutilated your loveliness in that wise, so we must leave the matter unproven, I fear."

He shook his head. "No, Your Grace, I shall give you no such charge," he continued. "I shall be well satisfied if you but complete the far easier task I have put before you. Princess," he said to Victoria, "you shall apprise me of the Duchess' progress, and you shall perform with fidelity, lest you find yourself in her place."

"It will be as you say, my Lord," Victoria agreed. "Is it your wish that I continue as before, pleasing Her Grace with my tongue?"

"Nay, Princess. I fear the Duchess would be thereby distracted, and the task is one which she already finds irksome enough," he answered. "Begin now, Your Grace, and cease not until you have my leave." He returned to his former position behind Ariel as Anne craned her neck forward and began to inexpertly but vigorously lap at Victoria's secret parts.

"Now, My Lady let us take up the lesson again," Harzel said as he settled into place, and reached down between her thighs. "If I recall aright, we were beginning your initiation into certain intimate practices of the ancients." As he said this, his hand covered her virginal mound, and his fingers became active within, and once again, as if her body was no more than a clockwork automaton under his control, she began to become aroused and produce copious quantities of slippery juice.

As usual, Baron Harzel combined this practical demonstration with a lecture on theory. Ariel believed that this had less to do with his desire to further the education of his charges than it did with his fondness for hearing the sound of his own voice. As his fingers, now well coated with Ariel's cream, plunged in and out of her anus, stretching and lubricating the tiny ring to ready it for his ramrod, he talked continuously. Ariel paid little heed, as her attention was primarily drawn to the increasingly painful way her rear entry was being forcibly opened by first two, then three, of Harzel's fingers.

"...so it is plain that this practice was valued by both the Romans and the Greeks for reasons of both tradition and utility," Baron Harzel said, as he crammed his thumb and two fingers into Ariel's asshole up to the second joint, drawing a startled yelp from his victim. "Nor are the benefits any less in modern times, for thus may a maiden begin pleasing her noble husband before their nuptial day, while retaining still the mark of her virginity."

He pulled his fingers out of Ariel's bottomhole, and pressed the broad, sponge-like head of his stiff cock against it instead. "There are still other advantages to the practice of sodomy," he continued, now using his powerful thumbs to spread wide her rear hemispheres, and so widen the opening he was assaulting with his rod.

Although she resisted the incursion with all her strength, there could be only one outcome. Suddenly her little ring was tested beyond the limit of its strength, and it opened to embrace the Baron's thick, meaty cylinder. Ariel gave a cry of pain and distress.

"Of these I deem the first is as a most reliable sign of submission. When the woman remonstrates not, but performs the act without protest when so commanded, she thereby acknowledges the superior place of her lord, for the act is notably discomfortable, is it not, My Lady?"

"Ugh, uhhh..." Ariel groaned as he penetrated further into her fastness, "...my Lord it is as if you drive home the butt-end of a pike or some such object that equally exceeds the capacity of my bowel to house it. I beg you in the name of Christ the Merciful, if you would not have the death of an innocent maiden marked against your name, stop, cease and take forth from me your weapon this instant, ere I expire from your cruel misuse!"

Baron Harzel chuckled merrily at the ravaged girl's heartfelt plea. "Ever it is so with you noble cunts on your first trial of this act," he told her. "A half a hundred times or more have I heard the selfsame words from the mouths of high-born sluts like unto you, My Lady, but never yet have I witnessed a single instance of mortality from a simple ass-futtering." He savagely jammed two more inches of his shaft into Ariel's narrow back passage, and she wailed in dismay as cramps that felt like the aftermath of a belly-punch spread deeper into her midsection.

Since she knew her pleas would have no effect beyond adding to the sadistic Baron's delight, Ariel promised herself she would not plead with him again, so that she could at least cheat him of that pleasure. But as the pain grew worse, she found it impossible to keep this resolve.

"I beg you to have mercy, my Lord," Ariel heard herself saying. "I will be your perfect slaves in all things, if you will but end this unnatural ravishment."

Baron Harzel's response was to pull back sharply on her hips, burying the full length of his yard in her bowel, until his hairy sack rested flush against the soft curves of Ariel's buttocks. "Nay, My Lady. What need have I to bargain for that which is already mine, and how can you offer in trade a thing which you have given over to me? Surely you have forgotten not that your life is in pledge to me, for I have promised it to the Queen of Neustadt, so that you and Princess Victoria remain among the living only so long as I forebear to fulfill that pledge. If for this reason only, leaving aside for the moment the fact that you are my captive and subject to my slightest whim, you would owe me the sole thing you still possess, the use of your body in my service."

He drew his cock back, until only the first inch or so remained inside her, just enough to keep his shaft in the grip of the girl's tiny rear portal, then rammed his entire length back down her colon, with a single, slow, uninterrupted motion. To Ariel, it seemed he would not stop until she felt the fat head of his prod pressing on the back of her throat from the inside.

"No, no, no, no..." she groaned.

As always, the agonized cries of his helpless young victim were not enough to satisfy Baron Harzel's cruel lust. Indeed, they only served to stoke his fires. His fingers strayed down between Ariel's legs, returning to the interrupted business of arousing his reluctant partner. As before, the inexperienced girl could not control the way her body responded to Harzel's knowing manipulation, and soon her lower body was moving in obedience to the fingers that fondled the stiff knob of her clitoris, stroking the thick pole imbedded in her colon.

Perhaps because of the earlier interrupted session of intercourse, Ariel responded even more readily than before, and despite the growing ache in her belly, soon climaxed, mumbling nonsense words, grinding her hips and releasing a flood of cum on his hand.

"You are a pupil most apt, My Lady," Harzel observed, as her body shuddered in his hands, "perhaps even more so than Princess Victoria, who was not backward in learning this art."

After the final spasm of the orgasm passes, Ariel hung limp and silent hung in her bondage, her mind a black pit of despair as she considered the totality of Harzel's triumph over her. Then he resumed, grasping her slender waist to drive her body up and down on his great cock, as if she weighed no more than a cotton doll, and all thought fled. Each heavy down-stroke forced an involuntary grunt from her.

"You are a most satisfactory fuck, Lady Ariel," Harzel told her. "I can foresee a successful future for you in my service." He jammed himself in to the root, his nails bit into her flesh and she felt his shaft spasm three times as he spurted inside her.