The Killing of Butterflies
Part 3
In Jail
The dank insulated holding cell in which she was placed segregated the Judge from the jail's general population. At her request a blank sheet of parchment was given to her, along with a quill dipped in inkwell. She drafted a brief motion to the duty magistrate, in which she moved that an evidentiary hearing would be held. She argued that before the court irrevocably tarnishes a Lady's reputation by an extreme measure such as an arrest and a murder indictment, an evidentiary hearing should be held, which would allow the court to ascertain Lady Emma's involvement, if any, in the matter of Penurius' death. She also demanded to be released forthwith so that she would be able to duly prepare her case and present it before the court. She sealed it and handed it over to her lieutenant for filing at her behest with the court.
Judge Midonas granted her motion and set a short date for the hearing to take place in two days time.
The prostitute in the alehouse
The Justice had no desire to spend the night in her regal domicile. A respite from perpetual reminders of her office and duties was what she sought. That was why she removed all indications of her identity, namely her Judge's robe, her gavel and the ribbon.
The tavern in which she chose to do her guzzling that night wasn't one of the more renowned or prestigious ones in the Realm, but rather the opposite. The tariffs of the meretriciously looking alehouse could have been afforded even by beggars. The odds of chancing a person she knew and having to make polite conversation were slimmer in this tattered establishment, and it suited her perfectly.
The tavern was rambunctious, compliments of a pack of youth patently challenged by handling liquor. They were drumming the table with their mugs, not unlike some lower order of primates, and harassing a miserable unattended slattern. But the Justice browbeat them to quit and they did.
She sat at the bar. Her head drooped between her shoulders and her tousled red hair veiled both sides of her profile. As she brooded over a mug of mead, contriving her future moves, the Murky Justice felt a feminine touch, a small hand resting upon her broad shoulder.
"May I be of service and alleviate the burning in your loins, Warrior?"
The Justice turned to find an appealing woman who had yet to finish her third decade of life.
"My Lord," She recoiled with a sudden cognizance, "Excuse your poor slave for the obscene propositioning. My deepest apologies"
"Granted." The Justice discounted offhand. "I'm actually surprised you know what I look like. Most of my subjects haven't the first clue." The Justice paused and quickly scanned her mind through countless faceless women she has taken over the years in the hopes of placing her, then quietly added almost embarrassed.
"Have I…?!"
"Unfortunately you haven't, my Lord," came the bold reply.
The Justice raised a questioning eyebrow.
"I remember how rays of sunshine produced asterisks as they bounced off my Lord's golden armor. I remember my Lord's red hair dancing in the warm wind. Valiant my Lord was the day of her enthroning, maintaining her stance before her people with a swordsman's grace. I hadn’t even gotten my first blood back then, but I remember blushing when thinking whether all your legs were as strong as your arms, my Lord." The hazel-eyed woman reminisced as if never before had she shared the cherished memory with another. The woman was sweet and sweeter was her tongue.
The Justice took a hearty draught of mead and signaled the barkeeper for a refill while the sentient woman perched by her side took advantage of the Justice's proximity and studied her troubled visage.
"What is upon my Lord this night?" Her question was softly spoken. "Is it the lurid court hearing?"
"You've heard about it?! Already?!"
"Word of the hearing is spreading faster than a fire in a thistle field." She answered, and then added with a canny smile, "Besides, some of my best customers are members of the legal community."
The Justice simply had to mirror the expression on the woman's face, but shortly after, her face turned sullen again. "There's a woman," she began then dallied a bit to consider her words.
Her companion took advantage of the recess and replied with a hint of disappointment, "There always is,"
"There's a woman I have to find a way to staunchly defend without it conflicting with my duties and obligations as Chief Justice and Ruler," the Justice finally said and downed another swig.
The harlot gazed continuously at the Justice, "I can see into the hearts of Warriors, and I've seen this exact expression my Lord is wearing now on more faces than I care to remember…A gift of my trade." She sounded almost commiserating over her Master. "You lo…"
"Don't be absurd!" The Justice cut her off mid-sentence and left the harlot mute.
The harlot waited a few minutes to allow the awkwardness to pass along with them. "Does my Lord fancy some company to keep her bed warm tonight? Free of charge. It would be my pleasure to fulfill a longtime yearning."
The Justice let out a deep heavy grunt as she reached for her inside pocket and retrieved two golden coins, "Perhaps some other time. My mind is too preoccupied tonight." She took the smaller hand into hers, gently unfolded the shorter fingers and placed the golden coins in the harlot's palm. "Take the rest of the week off, my dear."
"My Lord is too kind,"
"Can I trust you to keep this little encounter of ours a secret?"
"My Lord can trust her slave. A good wench is a discrete wench, and I'm very good at what I do."
The mischievous wink she sent was enthusiastically received by the prostitute. She paid her tab and retired upstairs to the room she had reserved for the night.
With nothing but her leather breeches, the Judge climbed into bed and waited for serenity to claim her. Alas her mind drifted to Emma again, to lying with Emma, specifically.
With Emma it was never merely fucking, never purely distilled lust. They were bound to one another by their embroiled sentiments and libertine needs. What the Judge perceived as her separate and individual right to possession that is not shared with any other person was borne by her every touch, as though the Lady was owned in severalty by her. That dark retaining desire was the very thing that fulfilled Lady Emma's sexual aspirations, and made her capable of being utterly sated in this way only by the Judge.
It appeared to be the source and provenance of Emma's craving. The Judge was the only one Emma felt the most anxious around, for she realized the more the Judge craved her, the more dangerous and unpredictable she became. It was that danger that made the Lady's skin hum, her sex wet, wide and willing and her desires seethe, and so she elaborated and further perfected her hazardous habit of sticking her hands inside the Judge's cage. The prospect of the preternatural undomesticated darkness beneath the surface that could erupt at any given moment thrilled the Lady immensely. She had tasted the Justice's leather belt and felt the strength and mass of her arm, but she knew full well that the Justice held back her full-blown viciousness and turpitude for her benefit and wholesome well being. Emma could stand on the banks of the abyss, but wasn't capable of falling unguarded into it.
Perhaps the greatest paradox was that it was the Judge's emotions for the Lady that convoked her demons and the very same emotions that were the Lady's warders against those demons and kept her from graver scathing.
And there was jealousy, of course, which was an unerring inciter of the irate green-eyed monster, for jealousy fuses megalomania and self-abandonment. The Justice's jealousy that seemed to be stemming out of nowhere was limitless. Whenever Emma would abundantly barter love and affection with another, the Justice would do her very best to arrest within her the tyranny of Darkness, which was constantly in search for the flimsiest of excuses to volley forth. More often than not she would succeed. Jealousy is a dog's bark, which attracts thieves, she understood.
She used to tease Emma on occasion; 'I hope you're sensible enough to practice safe sex' She would say, 'Copulating with other Warriors can seriously damage your health' - a polite warning.
She knew Emma would reserve the performing of certain sexual acts for her alone, acts which she wouldn’t perform on others, even though the Judge had never asked it of her, and it made them all the more special to her. The bed was the arena in which the Justice had power.
At the end of the day, the Lady practiced physical fidelity. Still, the Justice hadn’t weaned away from renting innumerable petite blondes so that they would whisper dictated endearments in her ears, such as "My Dark Prince", an epithet which the Lady had called her once, while she would face away from them and whisper 'Emma' into theirs. Except for the night when they were paid extra to service her degrading cruelty.
Preempting Emma had felt like a Pyrrhic victory. Their brittle liaison was far from being stagnant, but rather managed itself in a convoluted fashion, for quite soon after their consummation night the volatile heartthrob Lady had started curtailing her affections, and her attentiveness had begun to wane and corrode into pittance, the Judge sensed from time to time. Their ever-lessening assignations chastened the Judge and the trafficking of her emotions, or so she perceived, brought about acrimony, indignation and the unshakable sensation of destitution.
To her chagrin, the Bencher could never accept that affections have been given so gratuitously by the Lady to others, and yet so difficulty and stinted to her. When it came to bestowing those emotions upon her, Lady Emma seemed to have been less than magnanimous, thus relegating the Judge into a spayed scavenger, a jilted monomaniac.
The Dream
Dreams are visited upon the troubled minds, and the Justice was no exception to the rule in that regard.
In her dream, a thick heavy darkness one could almost touch was ambient like an omnibus cloak. The dream Justice groped the surface beneath her palms till she found a single candle and a box of matches. She struck a match. The small flame nearly blinded her sight at first, and when it simmered down, she lit up the candle. Dispelling the darkness, the light unveiled a bottle of fine whisky, with not a single drop in it. Only then did she appreciate how heavy her head felt on her shoulders. With no recollection of imbibing alcohol, she found herself soundly inebriated and she wasn't too used to the sensation. Barely having any emotions as it were, she was never too keen on desensitizing the few that she actually had.
She gripped the candle and with a broad slow movement of her arm, she illuminated her surroundings. She was situated in the Lodge's bar, only it looked nothing like the Lodge in reality, but in her mind she knew it was. As the cast rays were arcing in the shadows, she spotted Lady Emma standing with a familiar malcontented expression on her face, as if the last person she wanted to see was the Justice.
A lightning, then, tore the firmament outside, and through the glass window it shed silver light on the bar for a fraction of a moment, yet no rumblings of a thunderclap followed. As she affixed the candle erect on the bar, the Justice remembered earlier days when she hadn't cared whether it had been love or hatred she had seen in the malevolent spiteful eyes, believing fire was fire.
"You're drunk".
Underneath Emma's statement of fact, the astonishment in the Lady's voice was registered by the Justice. Emma had never seen her drunk before.
"Quite heavily, I believe. Would you join me for a nightcap?" The Drunkard offered and reached for the bottle, but control over her faculties being diminished by aqua vitae caused her to be wide of the mark. Her glare intercepted the trajectory of the bottle till it smashed against the floor, shuttering into small fragments without making a racket. It reminded her that the bottle had been empty.
"I think you've had enough. I do tolerate the sober Judge better." The Lady pushed back her shoulders.
"Well, I trust she would make an appearance tomorrow around noon at the earliest with one hell of a hangover," the intoxicated dream Justice staggered to her feet. "Would you care to leave her a message?" She finally stiffened her lengthy body to keep from waddling as she covered the distance between herself and the retired assassin.
An uncanny force compelled her to seek the guttering candle amidst the blackness. Intently, she fixated her eyes on its melting wax, as if it was narrating the secrets of the universe to her. She immediately understood the significance of it, as though in absolute lucidity.
Livid, the Judge grabbed Emma's lapel and hoisted her in the air. Her alcohol-induced strength was unrivaled and formidable.
"You used to melt," the dream Lord stated like she had just caught some eluding truth for the first time. She then careened her head slightly to the left as though to better penetrate dream Emma with her glare, "You're not melting anymore," she accused. To the dream Lord and Lady these words made perfect sense. But to the awoken Lord it would have been inscrutable.
Rough hands landed Emma prone on her back atop a table. The hands pursued to further widen the generous cleavage and the tearing of the fabric, like before, made no noise. "Let's face it..." The soused Justice said as she secured one hand over Emma's mouth while the other lifted up the frock and shredded the feminine undergarment as if she had knives for fingers. "This is all you've ever really wanted," she said with a curious smile that was chilling in its gentleness.
The Judge unbuckled her leather belt. "Nothing but a whore you've been with me," she tried not to slur her words. She wanted her words of exhortation limpid. She incapacitated her opponent, which was no bigger than half her size, against the table.
With her mouth throttled Emma was incapable of offering her usual flouting prattles, much to the Judge's delight.
"Love," the well-coiffed Protagonist began whilst leading the distended head of her protruding phallus into Emma's opening, "is tedious redundant blabbering. Lust," she continued and pushed herself into Emma's sex, "is brief and to the point." She withdrew the enormous pulsating assault-organ, and burnished its length with Emma's gush of moisture, but her need to have knowledge of Emma and to share knowledge with her ushered it back into its natural habitat.
The groggy Lord could feel her erection being augmented, becoming harder and stiffer inside the dripping core. She could feel Emma's wet tight depth squeezing against every nerve ending along her meaty shaft.
"I've killed my love for my parents," the first thrust of her member was barbaric and scathing, but the Justice didn't hear a scream. "I've killed the love I had for my brother." She crammed herself into Emma a second time and the friction along her length sent her inflamed arousal soaring. "I've killed my first love for a woman." Even if she had wanted to the Judge couldn't keep herself from driving every one of the many inches of her cock in and out of Emma's womanhood, dipping it forcefully again and again for her selfish satisfaction and hearing nothing but her own crude voice.
Emma heard the chill in the Justice's voice; she felt the shaming penetration between her legs and the humiliating betrayal of her body, as her hips bucked up, rooting against the Judge's drillings in her. She turned her head away from the Justice, but the Justice gripped her face in her hand and forced the Lady back to meet her eyes. "You see, when it comes to love," the rhythm of her pounding quickened as did her rasping grunts of cathartic pleasure, "I am the bleeding assassin." She stabbed Emma's cunt nearly splitting it. "The craftsman," another raw jab roved into the swollen slit, "The marksman," the ram that followed her latest words was the deepest yet and elicited an unbridled cringe out of the Lady. The Judge suddenly halted herself, still buried inside the quivering slick flesh.
Never neglecting her gagging hand over the Lady's mouth, she leaned down till she almost covered the prostrated Lady. When her face was but a hair away from Emma's, she asked a question that imbued fear of a previously unprecedented kind in the Lady, for she was presented with something that had never occurred to her.
"How hard do you think it would be for me to kill the love I have for you, my harridan?" The Lord Justice asked as her mouth was at the Lady's ear, and her thick tongue traced its rim. Her voice was staid, low and hoarse and her eyes were extinguished, inert and glazed like marbles. They peered directly into the eyes of the lachrymose lady but couldn't be bothered enough with seeing them.
The assailant's tongue lathe Emma's face, hoarding the sweet salty hypocritical tears.
The Justice's sharp teeth sank into Emma's erect nipple, making the sensitive bud buzzing with heat.
When raging jealousy was upon her, her humanity evaporated like dust in the wind, and all that remained was the body, a machine, operating on its own accord, driving her forward to quell the voices inside her that chanted "Mine! Mine! Mine!".
As she resumed humping Emma's womanhood, the Justice saw a vision of herself chaining the Lady up in the stables, taking a crop to her and with her exacting hand teaching her the very definition of 'Possession', by introducing flagellation that would leave beautiful burning welts all over Emma's overwrought flesh.
In her dream, a hot iron rod materialized in her clutching merciless hand. The scales-shaped insignia on its circled end was her crest, and it disseminated a healthy orange glow like a freshly salvaged ember still ensnaring live fire.
"You should count your blessings. I'm too drunk to hold a dagger steadily enough to carve your tits with…" she grimaced and with a fierce backhand stung the Lady's breast, which the mere sight of provoked and enraged her. "You have grown too independent, too impertinent and too spoiled to mind," the Justice chided.
Maintaining her scowl, her steel grasp put an end to the smaller frame's pointless flailing, leaving Emma with nothing to do but shrink above the table, eyes riveted on the burning metal.
"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the underworld: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. The very flame of the Lord." The Justice recited from the "Song of Songs" and with the incandescent iron rod she reinforced her words by heartlessly stamping Emma's milky taunting breast, branding what was Hers just above the roseate nipple. The sizzling grilling of the guilty flesh, like Emma's shrieks of horror, cries and whimpers of harrowing pain fell on deaf ears, as though the Judge had been submerged under water, incapable of hearing anything that existed outside her head.
The Judge examined the cauterized wound. "Like a birthmark…" She smiled sinisterly, and the virile rocking of her pelvis continued, "You should have been born with it," she said and ran a probing finger over the permanent, long overdue memento she had singed into the appalled and hurting Emma.
Emma's body trembled with sheer fright and the frenzied beatings of her heart were matched by the clouting of her cunt wringing the Justice's dominating cock, vigorously harvesting its spurting zenith. She felt a slap against the lower part of her buttock that rested on the edge of the table, in the way of a man praising a horse who has carried him well.
The Judge abruptly woke with the startle of a severe climax. Her breathing was fast and shallow and the palpitations nearly ripped her ribcage open. She was covered with the sheen of frosty sweat. She lifted the covers to find her breeches had been sullied by the aftermath of the furious involuntary lust-letting. She seated herself upwards and looked out the window.
A crescent moon was still hanging over nocturnal skies. Deciding that the time for rumination was over and an early start was necessary anyway, the grim solicitous Lord departed from the tavern and set out to do to what seemed like the unfeasible.
*****