My Name Is Not Eave

I was with your mother once.

Trees.

She was young, too. So was I.

Back against bark.

Now I'm not young.

A hand in her trousers that wasn't hers.

But you are.

It never did anything. It was always lazy. Or disinterested. Just there, cupping her, begging to feel some warmth. It never came.

The woman was in her mid sixties, grey and short. She'd turned up to the Livery as a temporary trainer. She always wore leather over a figure that had gone bad years ago, always the muffin top over the trousers, always the constricted fat that was still there no matter how tightly she packed herself into it. She looked akin to an over-filled sausage.

I still think of her.

Especially when she looked at Carrigan.

The same height. The same hair. Almost the same jaw. If she put her hair right, that was easy enough. The only thing she didn't have was the eyes; those black, burning eyes. These were green. If she wasn't feeling imaginative, she asked her to close them.

Carrigan preferred that.

Today, the over-filled sausage would say the wrong thing. Everything she said had been based on fact. And this last, uttered fact would be fatally, assuredly wrong.

They were stood as they usually were. Carrigan Alexston was sixteen, and this was the sixth time this harpy had stood with one hand down Mereavus' daughter's trousers and another stuck in her own. She only ever moved one - the one in her own too-small trousers.

She had a manservant by the name of Vincent. He was a man who stood no taller than Carrigan herself, dark haired, toned with that thick-legged, narrow-hipped build of the equestrian. His job was to stand with a horsewhip against the redhead's throat, daring her to move. Each time he seemed excited; perhaps Carrigan would squirm. Or fight. Or do more than stand there impassively whilst his pudgy mistress grunted and groaned her spending into her hand and muttered memories of bedding the late Lady Alexston. Every time she didn't, he grew pouty.

Today, the three had gone out for a ride into the nearby woods. Three horses stood nearby. The woman was rigorously working her hand in her trousers, and Carrigan was leaned against the tree with her eyes closed.

Especially when I look at you.

Vincent looked as bored as Carrigan.

"You... look so much like your mother," the woman panted, licking her top lip in an attempt to be lascivious.

*

Carrigan remembered that much. The rest was blank for a good few months afterwards. Something had been eating at her for eight weeks. She could never quite tell what. When she was told of the disappearance of her superior, she reacted with the same surprised face as everyone else.

The opium pipe had touched her lips for the first time. A flourishing party endured around her, and she relaxed back onto the divan. Her relaxation didn't last long. As her eyelids fluttered shut, it came to her. Memories flooded the party from her senses.

She had the whip. She could feel its uneven weight in her hand, the movement of the tip of it as it quivered in her grasp. She felt the rush of air as she brought it upwards. The curve as it whacked into a cheek. The straightening when it released.

She watched the sapphic whore stumble backwards, and saw Vincent grin out of the corner of her vision. He made no move to stop her. The woman stumbled back, and turned to flee.

The crop came down on the backs of her knees. She squealed and went down on them.

The thin and flexible whip came down on the back of her neck. Across her shoulders. Along the backs of her hips. It ripped open leather and left fresh, narrow lacerations. Carrigan half expected them to pour fatty sausage.

She cried out every time. Vincent's smirk split his face.

Carrigan didn't stop. She tore open the riding clothes with every stroke, taking satisfaction in the sound of the resounding whacks and the ripping of skin that came after it. And her shrieks. Her shrieks were beautiful. It was the most beautiful this woman had ever been.

A hand gathered the tight bun on the back of the woman's head into its grasp, and that smooth, Sarmagh brogue-ridden voice purred into her ear. "I am not my mother."

She yanked, and the woman spun onto her back, groaning as leaves and soil rammed their way into her wounds.

It carried on coming. Once across one cheek. Once across the other. Once across the eyes that watched her like a perverted hawk. The woman screeched and lifted her hands to cover her face, her knuckles receiving the next punishment.

"Carrigan, please!" she squealed, turning onto her side to cry into the dirt. "I won't say it again, please just stop!"

Carrigan kicked her onto her back.

Vincent kept grinning.

"Please! I won't touch you, I swear, I promise you I'll not touch you!"

The whip came down on her stomach.

"You'll still look at me," the far younger girl answered, her natural, athletic strength coupled with a rage that exploded out of her being in a rain of lashes. "You will always look at me! You'll look at me and equate me to her, and I am-" Thwack. "Not-" Thwack. "Her!" Thwack.

The woman cried.

"I don't care if she fucked you! You and half the women in Nharati; what, you think you were special? You think she gave a damn?"

The crying turned into an uncontrollable, shouting weep.

"Let me tell you something," Carrigan said to her, crouching with one heel in the dirt and her hand taking hold of the woman's jaw. "Everyone my mother ever loved died. Usually slowly. Usually betrayed. Usually in agony."

She grinned at the older woman and met her eyes with those vivid greens.

"So, if you're sure she loved you," she sneered. "Then she has unfinished business, and I am her heiress."

The woman stared at her.

"It's time to put out those eyes of yours."

She tried to rise, but was struck down in another hail of fury. She continued trying to crawl backwards across the floor. Carrigan rammed her boot heel into the curve of her ribs, and loomed over her.

"Carrigan, please, it was just one time, just once, I just wanted to relive it, I-... I thought you'd be a sapphist, too, I thought you might like it!"

"Stop assuming I'm like my fucking mother!" the redhead spat back at her. "Even if I did like cunt, I'd not want yours! I can smell it from here, you rotting, trout-clefted sack of shit! Stay still. I said, stay fucking still!"

The rage was undeniable. The woman knew Carrigan had strength, she had to, for her work, but not this much. This was becoming inhuman for a sixteen year old with a slender build that had yet to reach maturity. Her eyes looked half mad. This was not the sprightly, apathetic girl she knew. It couldn't be.

She stayed still in the hope that she'd calm down.

She didn't.

Her boot moved, balancing on the balls of her toes with her heel hovering over the woman's left eye.

"It's time to put out your eyes," she hissed.

"No! Carrigan, you can't-"

She was halted by her own scream. The heel came down and into her eye socket with all of the girl's weight, crushing the woman's eye and puncturing her pupil. Blood spurted momentarily, and then set to leaking. Carrigan lifted her heel, and poised it over the other eye. The woman closed it as though her eyelid might prevent it with some sudden shield.

It didn't.

The third poise was over her forehead, but the woman couldn't see it. She could only shriek, and dig her wounds into the earth.

The third sink was slow, and hard. And ended it. The screaming stopped with a sickening squelch after fragile bone cracking.

Carrigan stood with her heel impaling the woman's forehead.

Vincent kept on grinning.

And when she remembered, she grinned, too.