Chapter 36 - Brothers Separated; Brothers Reunited

 “It was Will, the blond junior page boy,” Raymond reported to his royal master. “He helped Courcey escape. But he says he has no idea where the traitor went.”

Prince Felix, his composure restored, nodded petulantly. “I shall dispatch Odin at once to track him down. After all, it’s down to his carelessness that Courcey got away in the first place. He can stay out there until he finds him again. As for the boy, I take it you will have him put to death?”

Raymond nodded smartly. “I know exactly how to deal with him, your Highness. I’ve wanted that particular brat out of my hair for a long time now. It will give me great pleasure to put an end to his time in service at the castle once and for all.”

The sun began to sink slowly in the west. Raymond had wasted no time. A sleek grey charger had been saddled from the castle’s stables and he sat atop it, a fine black riding cloak round his shoulders, long leather boots enclosing his silver-hosed thighs which in turn clasped the stallion’s flanks. The drawbridge was lowered and he trotted across it, over the moat and out of the castle grounds.

He glanced behind him. There, tight blue arse bobbing up and down in time to the rhythm of the horse, was Will: ankles and wrists tied together under the animal’s belly, fair head dangling, the cruel butt plug still lodged within him, the soapy residue of the suppositories lathering his arse crack and bubbling through the material of his tights, making them slick and moist. Every muscle in Will’s body ached from the stretching he had experienced on the rack, every jolt of the animal was painful, and his guts had never undergone such wrenching torture.

Had it really been nearly a year since he’d first entered the castle gates, Will wondered, ironically in exactly the same fashion that he was now leaving them – bound and slung over the backside of a horse? What things he had experienced and seen! And now it was all over, he knew that well enough. Raymond had won and was finally free to exact his revenge. Will could only hope that the end, when it came, would be swift, and that when Raymond did decide to slit his throat and dump him in the nearest ditch, his death would not be a lingering one.

On they rode. Raymond did not speak, merely glancing behind him occasionally to appreciate the sight of Will’s bouncing blue buttocks, the base of the plug obvious between them. Suddenly, Will experienced a jolt of recognition as they passed a familiar hedgerow. Sure enough, Raymond steered his steed down a curve in the path, and before long, they had reached a smattering of wooden huts with straw roofs. Will swallowed hard as he raised his head to look around him. For the first sixteen years of his life, this had been his entire world. He was home.

The little village seemed deserted. No children played in the late afternoon sun. There was no happy chatter among the neighbouring farm workers. This was hardly surprising. Finely dressed visitors rarely brought good tidings with them. Indeed, the most recent had been the Viking giants who had terrorised them all and chopped off the hand of Honest Eric the thatcher.

A door opened and out stepped a young man, maybe twenty-seven years old and presumably the bravest of the villagers. He had light yellow hair on his head and across his upper lip: although the attempt to grow a moustache was not altogether successful, given its fine wispiness. He was of medium height and was good-looking in an unremarkable way. His body was clearly trained with physical labour and his face tanned from the sun. He was clad in the traditional hessian smock and woollen trousers of the peasantry. Peering out from behind him, and clutching his arm, was a woman. She was in fact no older than her husband, though her sour, down-turned mouth and long, greying hair made her appear so.

“Who is it, Jack?” she hissed.

“I told you to stay inside!” came the reply.

The woman displayed no intention of obeying her husband’s command, so Jack cleared his throat and addressed the finely-dressed youth on the impressive stallion. “What can we do for you, my Lord?”

“I am called Raymond StClare and I am the Chief Steward at Castle de Montford,” announced the proud young man. “I have a question for you, peasant. Is this creature known to you?”

Raymond turned his steed so that the villager could see the spectacle of Will, bound in that most undignified fashion.

The peasant called Jack screwed up his eyes to peer at the strange sight: a blond-haired young man dressed in a beautifully embroidered blue doublet and the tightest-fitting hose he had ever seen. The hose encased the short but well-muscled legs with a shimmering blue sheen. The youth was fixed firmly in place, so his head dangled upside-down and his firm arse cheeks were pointing skyward. The blond lad raised his head and Jack gasped in recognition and surprise as he looked into those big brown eyes. “Will? Is that really you?!”

Will, desperately ashamed at being viewed in this predicament, nodded sadly. “Yes, Jack, it’s me.”

The sour-faced woman squeezed Jack’s arm. “Will?” she whispered. “Your brother?!”

Raymond raised one perfectly-curved eyebrow. “Then I am in the right place. Good. Know this, peasants. This miserable urchin was given a chance beyond his wildest hopes and dreams. He had an opportunity to rise far above his station. An opportunity he did not deserve. But his lack of moral fibre has revealed itself all too easily. He has disgraced himself and betrayed his King and his country. He merits death for what he has done. However, I have determined to grant him a fate worse than death. He has had his taste of luxury, and now he is to be flung back into the gutter. You may blame him that you are taxed so heavily and suffer so in these harsh times. His apostasy resulted in the mutilation of your neighbours. I am done with him. He is yours to punish as you see fit.”

Raymond brandished his bejewelled knife, and in two sharp, slashing motions, cut the ropes that tied Will to the stallion. With a thump, Will’s fatigued and aching body fell to the ground.

“After all this time, I am finally free of you. Goodbye and good riddance, goat-shit!”

And laughing with pure abandon, Raymond wheeled his horse around and galloped back to the castle, secure in the knowledge that he would never see Will the junior page boy ever again.

Once the coast was clear, other villagers began to emerge from their homes to view the curious spectacle. Jack stood over the prone form of his younger brother, a stern and slightly sickened expression on his face. His wife knelt down and touched the fabric of Will’s tunic. Her eyes glistened avariciously.

The neighbours jostled round, gawping silently. Jack busied himself untying the cords that bound Will’s wrists together, then did the same for his ankles. As he did so, his hand brushed against the silken lustre of Will’s tights.

“What the hell are you wearing?” he demanded through gritted teeth. “This garment would not look out of place on some high-class prostitute! Everything is on show. Your legs – your arse! It leaves nothing to the imagination. It’s positively indecent!”

“What’s that at his crotch?!” jeered one of the onlookers. “I told you those folk up at the castle were filthy perverts, didn’t I?”

Will instinctively rolled over onto his front to conceal the humiliating steel cage that even now kept his dick locked in permanent softness.

However, lying on his front served only to draw everyone’s attention to his hosed bottom instead. “And what, in God’s name, is this?” demanded Jack, prodding at the wide base of the plug lodged in Will’s sore and aching hole. “Answer me, damn you!”

“It’s – it’s a butt plug,” mumbled Will, and in that unfortunate moment, his body convulsed in a last desperate attempt to free itself of the tortuous soap suppositories nestling within him. With a desperate grunt emitting from one end of him and a squelching fart from the other, the plug was propelled from between his buttocks, rapidly followed by the gunky white residue of the bars of soap.

His elder brother grimaced in disgust as the plug, coated in a slick layer of soapy lubricant, and the gloopy white mush of what remained of the soap lay trapped and confined within the constricting bright blue fabric of Will’s tights, sitting obscenely between the crack of his buttocks; the thick, white ooze pooling there and now slowly beginning to dribble between the young man’s thighs.

Will looked away in shame, unable to meet the gaze of the very folk he had known longest in the world, realising that they would be looking at him with varying degrees of amusement, pity and revulsion.

“You’re a disgrace to our family,” muttered Jack. “Now pick yourself up and get inside!”

He rose to his feet and addressed his neighbours. “All right, everyone. The show’s over for today. Get back to your own affairs!”

Jack hurried his wife and his youngest brother inside the hovel, and with relief, slammed the wicker door shut behind the three of them.

“Well, I never thought to lay eyes on you again,” he said tersely. “We have a lot of catching up to do, it seems.”

Will nodded in dumb agreement.

“This is Lizzie. She’s the daughter of a Dunchester mercenary. We married in the Spring. She has a sharp tongue, an eye for a bargain and she rarely smiles. But then we’ve had precious little to smile about this past year.”

His wife’s expression became, if it were possible, even dourer.

“A copper piece a month we were supposed to get,” Jack continued. “That was the price Mother settled on for selling you to that nobleman! Whatever happened to that?”

“You didn’t get it?” mumbled Will.

“For a while, yes. Then it all stopped. Nothing.”

Of course, thought Will, that must have been at the time of Alexander’s disgrace and imprisonment. It was no surprise that no payments had been sent since then. “Where are Mother and Father?” he asked, looking around and taking in the familiar sights and smells of the mean little hovel.

“Dead,” replied Jack unsentimentally. “Father worked himself into the ground not long after you abandoned us. Couldn’t cope with the extra workload you left him with. Mother followed him to the grave soon after.”

Will nodded numbly. “And Daniel?”

With equal brevity, Jack informed him that their middle brother had signed up to join the King’s futile foreign adventure, and for all he knew, was very likely dead as well. “I hope to God the three of them are together and in a happier place now. They had precious little joy in this world.”

Will looked sadly at the only remaining member of his family. He and Jack had never been close: the ten year gap between them an insurmountable obstacle.

“And what news do you have, brother?” asked Jack.

Will shrugged. How could he begin to explain? To hope to make Jack understand the bizarre perversities of his time at Castle de Montford? “You don’t want to know,” he mumbled.

Jack let out a long sigh. “You’re probably right. You look as if all you’re good for nowadays is to be a rich man’s slut. Well that’s all in your past now. The question now, is what do we do with you? I suggest you start by cleaning yourself up and getting rid of that thing sitting between your arse cheeks.”

Jack was too ashamed to allow Will out of the door, so it was decided that he would assist his new sister-in-law around the home, in feminine tasks that would better fit his whorish experiences at the castle. Lizzie wordlessly acquired his fine embroidered tunic and would have done the same with his tights, had not Will objected so strenuously.

“Elizabeth, do you really want to wear them, given where they’ve been and what acts we can only imagine have been committed in them?” asked her husband.

“I can’t afford to be proud,” spat the wife. “They’ll come clean in the wash. And they’re finer than any stockings you’ve ever given me. I’ll be the envy of all the women in these parts with those to grace my pins!” She hitched her skirt up to show her pale, thin calf in what she intended to be a flirtatious manner.

“She can’t have them,” said Will implacably, outraged that the gorgeous garment could possibly be wasted on her stick-thin legs. Besides, they were his last reminder of his time at the castle. Under no circumstances was he prepared to relinquish their glossy lustre and return to the miserable, rough hessian trousers of his childhood.

“You have the tunic,” sighed Jack. “Let him wander around in his slutty hose if it makes him happy.”

Will smiled at his brother, a small victory in their new household arrangement. Meanwhile Lizzie glared at him with enmity in her dull, grey eyes.

Night fell. Odin the Viking had been on the road since mid-afternoon, dispatched with alacrity to seek out and return Alexander Courcey to face the wrath of his royal master. There had been no sightings in the immediate vicinity of the castle. Odin strongly suspected that his quarry had wisely, and with considerable caution, avoided any populated areas. A week or more had passed since Courcey’s escape, and the trail had most definitely gone cold. The one ray of hope was, that as far as he could tell, Courcey was still on foot. Odin - travelling on horseback – would have the distinct advantage.

He was just thinking about the necessity of setting up camp for the night when a sound reached his sensitive ears. There it was again. It was a voice: a hoarse cry for help. At first, he ignored it and made to turn his steed in the opposite direction. After all, he had no time for distractions now. Every second he spent away from the castle allowed that slimy little whore Raymond to worm his way ever deeper into the affections of the Prince. Nevertheless, something instinctively told him this was a curiosity he should investigate.

He rode closer to the sound and came across a small stone cottage shrouded in darkness. He tethered his horse outside, drew his sword and tentatively pushed the door open. He struck his flint and held it up high to illuminate the room. A bizarre sight met his eyes.

There, hanging from the rafters, were two well-built young men, arms tied above their heads, two pairs of muscular legs encased in the same large pair of brown tights. Presumably they had been abandoned there for some time, as the room smelt of piss, and tell-tale wet stains ran down the legs of the hosiery.

“Praise the Lord!” sobbed one of the men, his auburn curls flopping into his exhausted face. “Please, Sir – we have been swindled and misled. Will you do us the great favour of freeing us?”

Odin considered the request for a moment, and then pulled up a chair and sat down, a dark grin on his brutish face. He spread his leather-clad legs wide and rubbed casually at his codpiece. “You seem to have ended up in quite an unusual predicament,” he observed. “Whoever tricked you certainly had a wicked sense of humour.” With a gravelly chuckle, he added, “You look fucking ridiculous.”

Arthur and Stanley went as red as beetroots as the stranger continued to laugh freely at the sight of the two of them, bare-chested and joined at the butt.

“You’ve clearly been hanging here some time if you’ve both had to piss your tights. Maybe I should leave you there for a while longer to entertain me. I could make you dance for me. You think you could manage that?”

“Please, good Sir,” begged Arthur. “As you are a good Christian man, untie this rope for us. We’ll do anything.”

Odin rose from the chair. “You’re lucky I’m in a hurry. I’m tempted to ransack your home and leave you here for the amusement of your next visitor,” he remarked.

Odin’s head almost touched the ceiling in the humble little cottage, so it was no effort for the Viking to reach up and unthread the knots that Alexander had tied so assiduously to the iron hook. Both brothers sighed with immense relief as their tortured arms – stretched taut for so many hours – were finally allowed to sink to their sides.

“There,” smirked Odin. “Now you will be able to pull off that giant pair of tights that you’ve been forced into!”

However, the brothers’ faces only blushed a deeper shade of crimson.

“What is it? Why don’t you step out of those humiliatingly sissy tights of yours?” And with that, Odin yanked at the waistband of the hose and pulled it down to the brothers’ knees. Two pairs of cocks and balls were exposed, but still the brothers remained jammed together, back to back. “What’s the meaning of this?” he asked.

“Our… our…” stammered Arthur. “Our bums have been glued together. We can’t get free.”

Odin immediately erupted in guffaws of laughter. “You mean you’re stuck arse to arse!” he exclaimed. “Come along now, surely two such strapping brutes can wriggle yourselves free?”

The giant continued to laugh uproariously as the brothers attempted to do just that. Arthur reached down to pull his feet free from the brown hose, but as he did so, the weight of his brother fell against him, and he toppled onto his front. Stanley – like some bizarrely conjoined Siamese twin, landed heavily on top of his elder brother.

Eventually the two of them somehow managed to roll onto their sides, but like an upended tortoise, could not succeed in getting back on their feet. Panting and gasping, they were too ashamed to look Odin in the eyes. With a contemptuous snort, Odin drew his sword, and, the unhappy smiths cowering before him, slit their piss-moist hose along the seam, leaving the brothers prone and naked on the floor. They could move their legs freely now, but still they had to scrabble around for several minutes before they could co-ordinate their connected bodies and crawl to their feet.

Odin encircled the two naked men. “The glue will come loose eventually I suppose, but I imagine it will be painful – you’ll probably lose some skin, and your asses will be red raw for a few weeks.”

“I don’t care!” blurted out Stanley miserably. “I’ll do anything to get that ginger bulb out of my backside!”

Odin raised an inquiring eyebrow. “So he stuffed your butts too – and with ginger? What a bastard. That must be stinging your bumholes really badly, boys, I guess. All that ginger juice coating your cunts? Your visitor has certainly left you something to remember him by. I wonder why he went to so much trouble.”

Suddenly a pained expression crossed Stanley’s face. “Of course!” he exclaimed.

“What is it?” asked his brother.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He wanted to buy Fallow, didn’t he?”

Stanley waddled over to the window, his older brother with no choice but to follow him. “Look! That thieving bastard has stolen our horse!”

“He was on foot?” asked Odin, his heartbeat quickening. “Tell me – what exactly did this visitor of yours look like?”

Chapter 35 - A Soapy Confession

          “He has been lodged in the castle all this time, your Highness?” asked Raymond incredulously.

“Oh yes,” came Prince Felix’s smug reply. “He’s been mouldering beneath our feet for the past several weeks. Immured in his very own dungeon. There’s a certain aptness to his demise, don’t you think? The impudent Alexander Courcey spends his last miserable days, shivering and alone in the darkness, as hunger and thirst gradually overcome him.”

The two young men – one blond, one dark – stood at the door to the dungeon, Odin and Ulfgar two paces behind them.

“Now, let us take a final look at his stinking corpse!”

The Prince stood to one side and indicated that Odin should unlock the heavy, studded door. The Viking stepped forward and began to fumble through the numerous keys dangling from his belt.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Felix impatiently.

“I – I can’t seem to find the key,” mumbled the shaven-headed villain.

“What did you say?” hissed the Prince. “Are you telling me you’ve lost the damned thing?!”

Odin spread his hands helplessly. “I’m sure it must be somewhere, your Highness.”

“I want to view Courcey’s corpse,” stated the Prince grimly. “Go and fetch an axe and break this door down. At once!”

It was exhausting work, and even with Odin’s considerable strength, he was grunting and sweating by the time he had hacked a hole in the door large enough for a man to step through.

“That will do,” snapped Felix, as he elbowed the Viking out of the way and lifted first one, then the other crimson-hosed leg through the splintered oak. Raymond followed his royal master, sneering in Odin’s face as he did so. After the bright sunlight of the morning, he took a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloom. He clambered down the steps into the stinking cell, eager to see for himself the pitiful sight of the final resting place of the arrogant Alexander Courcey.

But what a surprise! Save for the smattering of straw on the ground, and the sinister, looming shapes of the instruments of torture, the dungeon seemed to be bafflingly empty. Prince Felix was holding an iron manacle in his hand, but the chain attached to it had been neatly sliced through. Even in the darkness, Raymond could see the pale fury writ large on those beautiful royal features. A fearful screech issued forth from Felix’s full, pouting lips:

“What is this meaning of this?!”

Ensconced in the royal bedchamber, Raymond tried, to no avail, to calm the livid Prince. Felix paced the floor, raging and espousing one paranoid theory after another: Odin had betrayed him and decided to free Courcey in an act of defiance – after all it had been Odin’s idea to leave Courcey rather than killing him on the spot; now Ulfgar was the traitor who had been in league with the assassin in the forest; then both his bodyguards were in it together, and far from terrorising the peasants in the surrounding villages, they had been encouraging them in their murderous intentions! His father’s Arabian enemies had freed the treasonous Courcey; the jealous barons were the culprits; Courcey was a wizard in league with the devil himself and had availed himself of some diabolical magic to file through his manacle and flee to safety!

“I entreat your Highness to calm yourself!” pleaded Raymond. “Leave this to me. I will discover how Courcey affected his escape. He must have had some accomplice here in the castle. You may put your faith in me that I will find the loathsome miscreant.”

Prince Felix passed a bejewelled hand across his fevered brow.

“One thing I can assure you, Sire,” Raymond concluded, “Alexander Courcey is no wizard.”

“A wizard indeed! How could we have been so stupid!”

“Stanley! The spell!”

Aching and sore, their arms sagging with fatigue, their leg muscles cramping, and their arseholes blistering from the stinging ginger, the auburn-headed brothers fell to bickering.

“There is no spell, you fucking idiot! How long have we been dangling here now? Six? Seven hours? It must be three in the afternoon. You’ve let us be fooled by some wandering con artist!”

“You mustn’t doubt him! He said it wouldn’t work if we doubted him!”

“So how long do you suggest we hang here from our own rafters, arses glued together, ginger bulbs rammed up our butts, with our legs stuffed in the same pair of oversize tights? Besides, I’ve been desperate to pee for the past hour!”

Arthur sighed heavily, the awful truth finally sinking in, and tainting forever his pure and trusting soul. “What can we do, Stanley?”

“Try bracing yourself, and I’ll see if I can get myself off this fucking plug!”

Arthur planted his legs as firmly as he could, and Stanley tried to pull away from his brother. It was hopeless. Arthur’s stockinged feet could not grip the floorboards, and merely slid helplessly along the floor behind his brother.

“Damn it!” cursed Stanley.

“Maybe we can wriggle free? Maybe the glue will wear off?”

Stanley sighed. “Anything’s worth a try, I suppose.”

And so the two brothers set to writhing and gyrating their muscular asses, gasping with the pain of the stinging ginger root plunged deep within them. The bouncing and jiggling made them feel ridiculous, their cocks bobbing in that massive pair of over-sized tights. Eventually, after ten minutes of fruitless struggling, red-face and panting, they admitted defeat.

“It’s no good,” gasped Arthur. “Our butts are stuck fast.”

“And I need to piss more than ever now.” moaned Stanley.

“Well there’s only one thing we can do,” sighed his older brother. He inhaled a lungful of air. “Help! Help!!!”

“It is not possible to over-state the severity of this situation. We have a Judas in our midst!”

Raymond stood, proud and imperious at the top of the courtyard steps. A soft summer breeze ruffled his dark curls, and his shapely legs, encased in their shimmering silver hose, were planted wide apart; his fists balled at his hips.

He’s loving every minute of this, Will thought to himself.

Raymond continued to address the assembled inhabitants of the castle. “One of you knows something. One of you has given assistance in the schemes of the crown’s most contemptible enemy. If you come forward now, admit your wrong-doing and confess what you know, it will go easier for you. I am determined to discover the truth in this matter, and if you do not confess freely, then I swear to you all, no power on this earth will shield you from the Prince’s wrath!”

They were dismissed with the warning that the miscreant had exactly one hour to identify himself. If this did not occur, Raymond promised more direct ways of winkling out the traitor amongst them. Naturally they all congregated in the kitchen, fevered speculation breaking out in every corner of the room.

Will lingered to one side, dressed once more in his freshly laundered blue tunic and hose. Mistress Olwen, indignant and furious with Raymond due to his impertinent missive, had, in an impulsive moment, stripped Will of his treacle-stained tights and the disgustingly soiled nappy and burned them all. She could do nothing about the cruel steel cage encircling his cock, but, at least, and for the first time in many days, he was not swaddled in a humiliating diaper!

However, that fact was his sole consolation. He’d always known it would only be a matter of time before Alexander’s escape was discovered, and he realised grimly that he alone among his peers knew what on earth Raymond was referring to. Equally, he knew he could not reveal to anyone that he was the guilty party. Whatever mercy Raymond might promise in return for the truth about Alexander’s flight, he knew his words would mean nothing once Raymond learned that his most hated enemy was to blame. Will decided that he must be braver than he had ever been in his life. He resolved to keep his lips firmly shut.

The Prince, feverish and distraught, had retired to bed with a raging headache, so it had been left to Raymond to try and discover the facts behind the former Steward’s mysterious elopement.

The allotted hour passed, and Raymond was honest enough with himself to admit that, frankly, he would have been rather disappointed had the cat among the pigeons come forward and denied him the opportunity of torturing the truth out of the unfortunate servants.

The stunned expressions on the faces of Ulfgar and Odin, combined with Raymond’s certainty that those two buffoons could no more have dissembled sufficiently to conspire against the Prince than they could compose a love sonnet or embroider hosiery, led him to conclude that the Scandinavian ogres were as innocent as they claimed. So it was their brute force that he employed to arrange the castle courtyard to his satisfaction.

Once everything was in place, he summoned the first three of the servants to stand before him. It was, he assured himself, pure coincidence that they happened to be his three former fellow pages: Humphrey, Mortimer and Will.

The young men stared in awed silence as they surveyed the scene in the castle courtyard. Every terrifying instrument of torture that the castle contained had been hefted up the dungeon steps and arranged around the dusty yard. There stood the rack, the thumbscrews, the Iron Maiden, the stocks, alongside numerous other evil apparatus wrought from ironwork at whose purpose the lads could only hazard the wildest of guesses.

“You see,” declared Raymond. “Because of the vile deeds of one single miscreant, everybody suffers!”

It was Mortimer who spoke up. “Raymond, can’t you at least tell us what has been done against the Prince? Maybe then we could work out what it is you need to know?”

“You’ll address me as ‘Sir’” said Raymond, in a voice as icy as the North wind. “And the consequences of the villain’s actions must rest upon his own conscience. Now, with whom should we begin?”

Will sighed deeply. They all knew who it would be.

With a barely perceptible nod to his lackeys, Raymond indicated that Odin and Ulfgar should indeed seize the young man. They lifted him up, one hulking henchman under each armpit and carried him as if he weighed nothing at all. Will’s blue hosed legs hung impotently in the air. In spite of the afternoon sun, Will found himself shivering with fear as he was deposited alongside the rack. Odin roughly stripped Will of his blue tunic, leaving him bare-chested - his iridescent tights his sole concession to modesty. Will took some small consolation in the fact that Raymond’s new task had apparently caused him to overlook that he was no longer diapered as per the Steward’s instructions, but back wearing his customary blue uniform.

“This is your last chance, boy,” purred Raymond. “Do you still maintain you have no guilty knowledge staining your conscience?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Will lied.

“Fix him to the rack,” ordered the older youth.

Will was hefted into the air and then dumped face down on the wooden carcass of the torture device. His arms were stretched above his head and firmly secured to the wooden roller. Meanwhile, his tights-clad ankles were spread as wide as they could stretch and were similarly fastened to the cylinder at the end. The metal chastity device bit into his groin as the weight of his body pushed down on the hard wood of the rack.

Will winced in preparation of the anguish to come as Odin hovered by the wooden handle which, when turned, would initiate the agonising process of stretching his vulnerable body and ultimately yank his tortured bones until they broke.

“Wait a moment!” Raymond declared. “I think the worm needs a little extra incentive, just to concentrate his mind on anything he may wish to tell us!”

Will tried to lift his head to see what new and terrible outrage would next be perpetrated on his vulnerable young body. He watched Raymond lift one of the large wooden buckets, commonly used to scrub the castle floors. Warm water swilled inside the pail and Will looked on in fearful anticipation as Raymond plunged his hand into the receptacle and withdrew a large, slippery bar of white soap.

“These innocent lumps of soap have been marinating in warm water till they’re nice and soft and melting. Let’s see just how many of them it will take for you to tell me the truth.”

Will, pinioned to the rack and unable to struggle free, felt Odin’s thick fingers fumbling with the waistband of his blue hose until it was unceremoniously yanked down level with the tops of his thighs. Meanwhile, Raymond took the first soap suppository and began to push it firmly into Will’s much-abused asshole.

All of the penetrations and invasions he had suffered over his months at the castle, none of them prepared him for the tingling, stinging sensation at his orifice as the bar of soap forced its way into his anal passage. On Raymond pushed, until Will’s poor asslips closed around the curved end of the soapy tablet. Immediately, Will felt it worming its way deeper into his bowels as a second bar began to push his reluctant boycunt wide again.

“How many will it take to clean your filthy conscience?” mused Raymond.

Each bar of soap measured a good four or five inches long and felt almost as broad, thought Will, as the second invader lodged successfully within him. It did not take long for the suppositories to begin their heartless tormenting of his guts.

“Your arse lining will be really irritated by all that soap!” said Raymond. “Your body will be desperate to expel it. And we can’t have that happening now, can we?”

Will felt the inevitable pressure of a leather butt plug penetrating his throbbing hole, boring its unwelcome pathway into him, and forcing both bars of soap even deeper into his protesting body: a body that had all too recently been assailed by the equally aggressive milk and molasses enemas.

“Ugh, ugh, no!” he wailed as his nubile young muscles strained and tensed in their bonds, his thighs bunching in their blue hose. Then he emitted a scream of pain as the plug passed its widest point, his smarting sphincter snapped shut around its stem, and the thick flared base protruded between his cheeks for all to see. Raymond prodded the base of the plug deeper, pushing the tallowy bars up, up, inside him to further torment Will’s vulnerable arse lining.

Finally, Raymond pulled the waistband of Will’s tights back up to cover his ass. Will knew that the tight, constricting fabric would keep that hateful plug pushed deep inside him and render it well-nigh impossible for him to expel it.

He panted as once more his guts churned for Raymond’s entertainment. Then, into his line of vision, appeared Ulfgar, running a long leather whip through the palm of his vast hand with pointed deliberation. The tail of the whip began to caress Will’s naked back, delicately at first, and then with firmer strokes.

“Turn the handle,” Raymond told Odin.

The henchman obeyed, and Will started to feel an uncomfortable tugging sensation at his wrists. He was suddenly acutely aware of his body: the tightness in his limbs, the painful cramping in his stomach, the cold steel pressing against his cock, the bubbling lather beginning to seep from his stinging arse, the reassuring sheerness of his tights clinging to his thighs and calves and bum. Then, he screamed in pain as the first stroke of the whip lashed across his upper back.

“Confess, bitch,” murmured Raymond persuasively. “It was you, wasn’t it? His favourite pet. You were the one who smuggled Alexander Courcey out of the castle!”

Will gritted his teeth as Raymond indicated that a further turn on the rack was required. Sharp pain seared through his arm sockets, and the ropes at his ankles started to cut through the delicate fabric of his hose and burn his legs. The whip cracked down again, this time on the meaty flesh of his thighs. Will howled in agony.

“Tell me what happened and this will all be over,” Raymond promised him. “I’ll order the whipping and the racking to cease, I’ll pull that nasty plug out of your hole and let you evacuate those bars of soap as well. Maybe I’ll even take off your chastity cage and let you come…”

Will thought of Alexander, his master, out there somewhere and fleeing for his life, and remained firm. His reward was a further twist on the rack and another lash of the whip – this time on his round buttocks. He imagined the reddening flesh of his bubble-shaped bum through the thin covering of the hose. His arms and legs were stretched to their maximum capacity now: surely one more ratchet of the wheel would dislocate something?!

“Aaaaaagh!” he yelled as the soap suppositories shifted within him. Seemingly with a mind of their own, they were determined to escape the velvety confines of his guts. But the cruel leather dong rammed up his bum thwarted their most assiduous efforts.

“You can’t keep this up much longer,” cooed Raymond. “You stole the key to the dungeon, didn’t you? Tell me the truth, you little fucker. Tell me where the key is that proves you betrayed your prince! So help me, if you don’t, every last person in this castle will be tortured on this rack! And they’ll curse your hateful little arse that you put them through it just to save a piece of shit like Alexander Courcey!”

“Stop! Raymond, stop!”

The dark-haired young Steward did as he was bidden, incredulity written across his handsome face. He turned to where the voice had come from, only to see Humphrey, the fat page boy, cringing in the corner of the courtyard.

“Don’t be angry with me,” whimpered Humphrey, “but did you say something about a key?”

Raymond narrowed his eyes. “I may have done.”

“Well if you did, then I might have seen something you might want to know about. I may be able to help.”

“That’s an awful lot of mights and maybes,” said Raymond, a dark threat in his voice.

“It was only yesterday afternoon,” Humphrey informed him. “I thought it was a bit odd at the time.”

“Humphrey! Please! Hold your tongue!” Will pleaded desperately.

“I’m sorry, Will,” mumbled the fat boy, wringing his hands in distress. “But if it means I won’t get tortured like you, I’ll squeal and tell Raymond whatever he wants to know.”

“Clearly your wisdom is as considerable as your belly,” remarked Raymond sardonically. “Now, I’m becoming impatient. Quickly – tell me what you saw.”

“It was a large iron key. Will had it hidden in his bedding. He took it out and dropped it in there.” Humphrey gestured to the centre of the courtyard. “Right in the middle of the well!”