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deluxewhump · 8 months ago

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Bluebeard's Pet III

This is the final part of a folk/fairytale retelling of Bluebeard in three parts. It replaces Bluebeard's new wife with a male "pet" (slave/concubine). It takes place in a largely fictional medieval Europe.

Part two

CW: slavery, pet whump, slave auction, stocks, power imbalance, gruesome elements like torture, execution, and draconian policies throughout, whipping, sexually explicit scenes, dubcon because of social status, light knifeplay, alcohol consumption, praise kink

Part Three: The Key

September brought the harvest moon, and only slight reprieve from the uncomfortably warm days that had settled over the castle in late summer. The Baron left again, this time for the lands to the near east. He took a company of men and soldiers with him, and left Luca with the keys. Again, he held the moldered key from the rest and asked him not to use it. Luca was kissed goodbye on the cheek in front of the soldiers, which surprised him even now, when he ought to be used to the difference in customs here.

He did not go to the village again, but instead spent some time at the stables riding a gentle gelding called Sparrow out into the fields and back. He was a decent rider, though he didn’t know anything about combat from horseback. He could keep his seat with or without a saddle, and even experimented with using a bitless bridle on Sparrow, who would turn and stop at the slightest provocation of the reins with or without anything in his mouth.

One such afternoon he ran into a small group of servants on a picnic, up in the meadow by a brook. They startled each other but he apologized warmly, having decided to endeavor to be liked more by the strange, sometimes chilly staff. He let Sparrow graze and sat beside them when they invited him out of strained politeness. He planned only to have a drink if they offered, or a bite of apple and cheese and be on his way. Perhaps the next time they saw him they would not turn away so quickly, like they seemed to do around his master as well.

One of the servants was drunk, he soon realized, and the other two were giving him dirty looks as he chatted openly. “Give you the keys, does he?”

Luca didn’t answer. He tilted his head in a silent bid for why.

“He gives them all the keys. Some look. Some don’t.”

“Look at what?” He still hadn’t gotten an explanation for the giant cauldron, but he was embarrassed to ask now, after the Baron had explained the nature of the rumors. “Where he takes them all,” the drunk boy said. His thin lips curled in a smirk and his face was pink.

“Who?”

“You know,” he replied, dipping his chin to his chest and looking up at Luca through a winedrunk haze, a smirk on his stained lips. “The Baroness. The pets.”

Like that June day in the village, Luca felt as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. The warmth on his back felt artificial and imaginary, like the sunlight in a painting.

“Mircea,” the other servant hissed crossly. “To your Lord's very companion, you say these vile things?”

“They’re true. Where do they all go?”

“Lady Elanor died,” she insisted.

“Not from having the little Lord Alec.”

“Shut up, you foul thing!”

The third servant smiled demurely. Luca thought she might be simple. “Bluebeard,” she said to him as the other two bickered. “It’s Bluebeard.”

Luca pushed himself to his feet and onto Sparrow’s back, glad for the stirrups and saddle that day.

That night he lay alone in the cavernous bedchamber of the Baron, always so empty when the Baron himself was not filling it with his larger than life presence. Luca turned the keys over in his hands. What harm would it be to look in that one room? Why had the Baron told him not to enter? He had the keys to every safe, jewelry box, and wine cellar in the castle, yet he could not look in this dusty, cobwebbed wing, in one little room?

He convinced himself he was going to look at the stained glass in the old chapel. It was not a biblical depiction, but rather a depiction of Hercules with his sword drawn at the lake that was said to be the mouth of the underworld, facing the Hydra. Luca counted thirteen heads on this beast, and the three on his ring glinted in envy. Dust and loose paper littered the tile floor. He sat on a cobwebbed pew and thought of the time he’d fallen asleep in a similar one, and woken to his angry master unfastening his belt. He never understood why he was so angry. What did God care if he slept in his house? He tried to picture the Baron beating him for a transgression, any transgression, and found he couldn’t. Especially not as he’d been then, a child of ten or eleven. The image wouldn’t form in his mind. It kept breaking. Constantin would not hurt me.

He should go back to his lavish, expensive room and leave the keys on the bedside. He should respect the one command his master had ever given him, which was to leave this room alone.

And yet he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t, and when he turned the key the door slid open like it hadn’t even been locked. Like the girl at the fountain had picked up the golden cup.

He covered his mouth and nose with the crook of his elbow. The smell of mildew was overwhelming. Dark shapes took form in front of him, and when his eyes began to adjust he thrust his torch forward and made them out for what they were — a rack, some kind of sawhorse, and most startlingly, an iron maiden with a carved face like that of a sarcophagus on the heavy outer shell. It was ajar, and the spikes were thicker than he’d ever imagined, sharper and dark with dried blood.

The Baron’s favorite Greek once said, ‘the worst of all deceptions is self deception’. Had Luca deceived himself in believing there was ever anything to fear from a man who had been nothing but gentle and affectionate towards him? Who had saved him from a thousand evil fates at the hands of the slave traders who had ripped him from England’s craggy shores?

Or had he deceived himself in believing there was nothing wrong? That his own needling reservations, the things he had heard, the way people behaved around the Baron Illés were all just strange quirks of the people in this castle, and in the village beyond? Had he wanted to be the beloved pet of a powerful man so badly he’d crawled eagerly into bed with a monster?

Slowly, he approached a rough wooden bench. Instruments he couldn’t name were set out lovingly, at even spaces. They, unlike the rack and iron maiden, were cleaned meticulously of blood. A small jar caught his eye and he lifted it to his light. It was full of teeth. He set it back in its circle of dust perfectly, his hands shaking.

He remembered the lock of hair, the sexual game he had made out of the kiss of that dagger, thinking that’s all it was for the Baron too, a game of taking and relinquishing power willingly. Oh, how cooly it had caressed his neck. How lovingly.

He was as trusting as a lamb to the Baron, and thus far it had never been betrayed. Could he really have been so naive? Had the tastes he thought they shared been nothing but veiled bloodlust on the part of his master?

He left the room feeling dizzy. He fumbled to turn the key in the latch to re-lock the room and his heart sank when he heard a sound like a snapping twig. The moldered old key came out missing a tooth and the door was not locked still. He tried to lock it again but it wouldn’t work now. The mechanisms were not moving together as they should. He shoved the traitorous thing deep into his pocket and, trembling, in the verge of frustrated and betrayed tears, he made his way back to the south wing of the castle, where he lay in that wide sleigh of a feather bed and wondered what it was he was supposed to do.

The Baron and his company of soldiers arrived home a day early. Luca had stopped trying to figure out impossible ways to evade his fate, and he watched the procession come through the gatehouse with little more than an unconsciously clenched jaw.

Playing his kalimba to smooth his nerves, he’d remembered the last stanza of the song about the two sisters. A harp was made of the drowned younger sister’s breastbone and strands of her yellow hair. A minstrel took it to the court, where her love, the Knight, has become King, and her older sister has become his Queen. The harp begins to play alone, with no hands plucking its strings, and tells the court how she was murdered by her jealous older sister, the Queen, as everyone looks on in horror. The greatest horror was likely the Queen’s, for the dead seldom accuse their murderers so eloquently.

He turned the broken key over in his palm, knowing he must either flee or present his sin to the Baron. The lord of this land. His master. What happened to the criminals who tried to flee? Were they not dragged back and nailed to crosses or thrown into boiling pots like sea creatures? Was that not the truth? The Baron had softened it for him, white lies to soothe a silly pet. But he knew. All along, he knew.

Luca joined the Baron in the dining hall for their supper that evening. The table was as long as three men, and a great hearth sat cold and empty on the north wall, big enough to roast a reindeer on a spit inside. The weather was still too pleasant to need a fire, and they ate in what the Baron seemed to think was companionable silence. They were served sweet muscadine wine, roasted pheasant with hazelnuts and shallots, white cheese that spread like soft butter on aromatic wastel bread.

“You hardly eat, Luca.”

The Baron often called him by name, unless they were alone and he was speaking in that low, confidential voice. Only then was it pet, love, angel.

“I didn’t know you’d be home this evening. I ate in the late afternoon.”

“Not like you not to drink your wine, though,” the Baron teased. That was true. Luca took a deep drink for courage and pulled the key from his pocket. He placed it on the great table, thick as a ship’s mast, and pushed it closer to the master of the castle.

The Baron did not look surprised. He knew it immediately, of course, that disfigured little skeleton key that looked like it was decomposing. The second tooth was broken off, and was as noticeable as a hand cleaved clean from a wrist. He set down his utensils, slowly, deliberately, so they hardly made a sound on the fine china they dined on. He rubbed a hand over his black, bristly beard. Luca wondered when he would see Bluebeard the warlord, the brute, the power-drunk sadist that the villagers had seen, that his previous pets and wives had known for their last days, or weeks, or however long he tortured them for before they either died or he killed them.

“I suppose that’s in the nature of man, isn't it? Sons of Eve that we are,” the Baron said as if to himself.

“You sound like my English master, now,” Luca said, and regretted it immediately. That was a weak and passing shadow of a truth.

He took a sip of muscadine wine. “I am saddened, though, Luca. I already know the lock is broken on the door. My servant Remi told me this evening upon our arrival. I had hoped it wasn’t your doing, though.”

“You’re saddened?” Luca asked hotly, his blood pounding in his ears, his stomach hot with fear. “I only finally went inside only because of things the servants said about you. About Lady Elanor.”

At his late wife’s name he blinked, looking from the key into Luca’s eyes. “What do they say about Elanor?”

“That you killed her,” he whispered, trembling and exasperated now. “And your other pets.”

The Baron’s eyebrows raised. “Oh yes, the dozens of them. There were two.” He shook his head. “I don’t wish for Alec to grow up hearing these things about his mother. About me. I won’t ask you which servants, because I’m sure it’s half of them, and you wouldn’t want to tell me anyway.”

Luca realized he’d been taking nothing but shallow breaths for the last minute or so and took a slow, steadying draw of air. “I saw the blood.”

“What do you think you saw?” the Baron asked sharply, for the first time sounding cross and even mean. “Just tell me and be blunt about it.”

“I saw a room full of… of pain and death,” he half-whispered. “There was blood on the spikes of the coffin. A jar full of teeth.… I defied you. I betrayed your request.”

“I know.”

“I thought you’d be very angry.”

“I am angry.”

“Well what are you going to do about it?” he cried impatiently. “How will you punish me? Will my fate be worse than theirs, since I’ve so displeased you?!”

The Baron stood abruptly at his outburst, toppling his chair behind him. Luca flinched but refused to cower. The Baron took his wrist and pulled him up, his grip like an iron vice, like one of the instruments laid out on that table. Luca stumbled along behind him. A servant girl scurried to flatten herself against the wall as they passed, her face white as chalk.

Luca knew where they were going. He could have found it alone, blindfolded. They crossed the bailey and up a wide flight of steps to the long corridor with the chapel on their left, the stained glass Hercules in his eternal fight with the Hydra.

The door opened with a push, since it would not lock now. Luca was pulled inside and the door shut behind them. He instinctively tried to flatten himself against the wall like that servant girl when she saw them, but the Baron dragged him forward and lifted him like a bride, all too easily, and set him on the bloodstained rack. He was loathe to touch it, and wrapped his arms around himself protectively. If the Baron could not get his wrists from him, he could not strap them above his head in the leather ties.

The Baron picked up an instrument from the work bench and turned to him, held it a foot in front of his face. “Was this here when you were here last?”

Reluctantly, he looked at the device. It was rather beautiful, like an intricately decorated corkscrew. He didn’t recognize it, but he’d been so distressed he’d hardly taken an inventory. “I don’t know. No?”

“No. It’s called a pear of anguish. Hence the shape.” He demonstrated by turning the round knob at one end and the thing opened up, like a twirling dancer’s skirts. “I acquired it on the trip I just returned from. Remi, a servant who travels with me, brought it here for the collection, and that’s when I learned something was amiss with the lock on the door. The pear is designed to be placed in its victim's mouth or… other orifices. How widely it is opened depends on the transgression of the victim. Or the whim of the torturer, I suppose. I thought it an interesting piece, belonging perhaps next to this heretic's fork here.”

“You brought it for me?”

The Baron stared at him in disbelief. Luca had never seen him appear wounded. He turned and tossed the pear onto the bench so it clattered and Luca flinched, sitting there with his arms wrapped around him on the rack.

“You ask me this in earnest…” muttered the Baron. “I’ve done nothing but love you.”

The word love from the Baron’s mouth made Luca’s eyes fill with unexpected tears. He had to clench his jaw against them.

“I thought we had an understanding, you and I.”

“We do.”

“Do we? Then why do you mistrust me so? Why do you believe every vicious and fantastical rumor about me that you hear? I admit it’s an unsavory hobby to most, but it is that, a hobby. I collect daggers, too, I could show you the room where I keep those. It’s no different. It doesn’t mean I killed my lady wife or my pets with those daggers.”

“What happened to the other pets before me?”

“There were two, as I said. One ran away. We were not well matched. One I loved. They died. They were never very strong, physically, after they spent a winter in a prison cell in Saxony. This was over the span of a decade, by the way.”

“You never thought I’d run?”

“I don’t want a pet that doesn’t want to be mine.”

“Is that why you choose captives and slaves? It’s an improvement for us?”

“Is it not?”

Luca dropped his eyes. It had been.

“Luca,” the Baron said sadly, like he was mourning someone dead, wishing to taste their name just once more. “I loved you from the moment I saw you. From the moment you lifted your eyes to me in that auction yard.”

He came closer, empty handed, and Luca raised his chin in either defiance or surrender, he wasn’t sure. He had never been so lost, so unsure of his own reality. The Baron placed his hands on either side of Luca’s neck, cupping his jaw. He had never since his first night with him been so acutely aware of his master’s stature, the breadth and height of him, the size of the thumbs that brushed his chin. His traitorous body was often excited by moments like this, though now all he felt was fear, old primordial fear ringing down his spine, like the hare in the field that senses the Timberwolf. The Baron smelled of fine leather and spruce, a forest at night. Luca closed his eyes and tried to calm his wildly beating heart.

The Baron only leaned down to kiss his forehead before he left on soft footfalls, leaving the door ajar behind him.

For a week, the Baron did not seek him out. He stayed in his own rooms and rode Sparrow farther than he ever had before, all the way to another village where there was another beautiful fountain, but no golden cup. On his second visit he was robbed. Not of much, only the few coins he had on him, but there was an initial struggle that led to him sporting a purple, swollen bruise under his left eye.

The Baron broke the stalemate between them by cornering him in a brazier-lit corridor to ask about it. “I saw this from across the bailey earlier,” he said. “This time you will tell me a name.”

It felt like a relief to be in his presence again. To be spoken to softly, which he thought he might never be again. “I don’t have a name for you.”

“Who then?”

“Some boys,” he said, shrugging. "Hardly grown. They stole some coins from me is all, but I was startled and fought the one who grabbed me.”

The Baron was looking at him but his mind was elsewhere. “Did you report anything?”

“No.”

“Do you remember what they look like?”

“What does it matter?”

“Will you flinch from me again if I try to touch you?”

Luca shook his head. The Baron reached out and touched just the tip of a strand of Luca’s dark hair, like he had that first night they met in the castle. “You are mine, whether you approve of my policies or not. I would like to behead anyone who dares touch you myself.”

Luca forced himself to meet the Baron’s eyes. “But not put them on your rack? In your iron maiden?”

“Don’t be vulgar. It doesn’t suit you. And if you’d looked closely you’d notice that rack isn’t even operational. There is no rope or chain on that cylinder, and it probably hasn’t been turned in a quarter century.”

Was that true? He hadn’t even looked. Finally, the Baron had taken one of many opportunities to make him feel foolish. They stood in silence for a painful moment.

“...Am I really still yours, then?”

“Of course. I forgive your curiosity, if you’ll forgive me for testing it so cruelly. I have to remember you have been mistreated for a long time. Why should you trust blindly?”

“You never gave me a reason not to trust you,” Luca said. He had been tossing and turning at night thinking over it, feeling more and more wretched as the leaves on the mountainsides began to lose their emerald and turn to blood.

“The burden of proof is still mine,” the Baron said. “I should never have forgotten that.”

“What do I do? How can I be in your good graces again?”

“You never left them,” he said, and touched Luca’s lower lip with his finger. The power in that touch, he thought. The way I am sick with lust for it. That is why I am damned.

“Come to me tonight. I miss the taste of you.”

Three springs later, in his twenty-fifth year, Luca made a long journey west and south, accompanied by ten soldiers and three servants. He went to his homeland, where he remembered only white clay walls and lemon trees, and the lilt of the language, if not the words. He looked for relatives but found none, which did not surprise him.

Satisfied to eat the food and drink the wine of his motherland, he stayed in a spacious, airy house he rented for the warm months and prepared to leave for home again when the rains came. Stray cats came into the house he stayed in and perched in corners, near the hearth. He didn’t have the heart to shoo them out. The servants began to batten down the shutter windows against a hot wind that had begun to blow sometime in the night and would not stop. The sea, once so prismatic and calm, was choppy and white.

Even here, he had heard rumors of the warlords to the East, those barbaric and heretic lands with their Orthodoxy and their strange influences. The worst of them was Bluebeard, who had a reputation nearly as famed and dark as that of Vlad the Impaler two centuries earlier. Luca listened aloofly for all the trappings of the stories, the hallmark atrocities and places where rumor had cemented into legend. Always, there were idiosyncrasies.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” once asked his favorite servant, Alea.

“Not anymore,” Luca replied. “Only a third of it is true.”

Alea turned back to making them tea.

Two months after he’d revealed his dishonesty to the Baron about entering the room, the thieves who had robbed and beaten him tried their luck in Hwenn. They were apprehended and the Baron was made aware. He had them brought to the castle on a hunch, which Luca confirmed was correct. These were the three from Kyrr. He knew from the look in the Baron’s eyes— he had just sealed the thieves' fates.

“I suppose you think the cross too heinous?” Constantin asked him in English.

“Please,” he said quietly, so the thieves and the soldiers standing nearby could not hear. “Just the sword, if they must die.”

“The people of Hwenn will want nothing less. That one there tried to kill an innkeep for the coins in his register. And they wronged you, which you may be quick to forget, but I am not. Tell me which one caused that bruise and I’ll put him on a cross. You will not be made to watch. I promise.”

Still Luca shook his head.

The Baron looked at him for a long moment. He sighed. “The sword, then. If only by mercy of Luca Illés.”

That night, Luca lay in the ancestral bed of Baron Illés, under the arm that had swung the sword three times, a contented hare between the paws of the Timberwolf.

Note:

Inspiration for this retelling comes from the French folklore/fairytale of Bluebeard, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and folklore concerning Vlad the Impaler (specifically, the golden cup). Luca’s kalimba song is very old and has many versions but the version I drew from is Two Sisters by Emily Portman. My intent for this telling was to leave some ambiguity about how many of the stories and tales surrounding this particular Bluebeard are true. We only know that Luca made his deal with the devil. Thanks so much for reading!

@starfields08000

#bluebeard's pet #slave whump #pet whump #complete!#implied torture #death mentions

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