Addie Claims Her Power

Image by Alexandr Ivanov from Pixabay

The weeks passed.

Because the fall of the Patron’s Daughter was a slower progression than I anticipated, my escape to an unknown future was delayed.

I couldn’t complain, however. I was growing my fortune, and the Sorcerer was thorough in teaching me how to use it.

Really, the Sorcerer was a most splendid mentor. I would never have been able to navigate my way to a new life without him.

Even with a fat purse and a beautiful face, had he not passed on a wealth of instruction on where to go and how to comport myself once I got to the Capital City, a lifetime peasant like me would have been doomed.

Some basic math was the most important thing he taught me. I learned how to count, how to add and subtract.

Such knowledge to one who had been an indentured servant all of her life was priceless. There was no way I would ever have been able to understand the value of money if he hadn’t done that. The Sorcerer went over the differences in the value of gold, silver, and copper coins until I recognized the differences in my sleep.

He also drew various maps of the Capital City for me, and showed me many drawings of its more distinguished areas.

It was intimidating.

I had never seen such majestic buildings in my life. And the size was massive, many times larger than the village where I grew up.

The belief that I could ever feel at home there was beyond my imagination.

Yet the Sorcerer was patient, breaking the Capital down to neighborhoods and districts until I saw it as nothing more than a collection of villages.

He didn’t stop until I knew that city by heart, and could mentally find my way through avenues and streets I’d never seen.

Only then would he introduce me to the best neighborhood where a girl like me could land.

I would arrive in the Capital City with no papers, no name, and nobody to introduce me.

Therefore I had to choose those parts of town where no questions would be asked so long as enough money was handed over.

The part of town where he directed me was right next to the grand avenue of the elegant arts where the theater, the ballet, the opera house, and the symphony all lined up.

Yet on the street behind it were homes where art was an act of decadence.

The underground cabarets, the hidden gambling houses, the private gentleman’s clubs, the secret bordellos, and even a molly house for men who desired men found their home there.

The Sorcerer directed me to the most exciting and the most scandalous neighborhood in the Capital City.

But I get ahead of myself.

Before I could arrive to such a sumptuous future, I had to finish my business in the mundane dreariness of life as I had always known it.

Those last weeks of working in the fields were the most agreeable of my life.

I no longer suffered the bitter rage that kept people at a distance. For the first time, I got on well with those I worked in the field with.

I’m sure it helped that the crew I worked with was spared the humiliation of overwork from the Patron’s Daughter.

Strangely enough, her routine of haughty rides past those who slaved away in the fields now occurred more often than once a day.

Perhaps it wasn’t so strange.

After she had subjugated herself to the Brute who degraded her mercilessly, she had to compensate her pride.

And who better than the peasants who were at her mercy.

This was during harvest.

The most brutal months of year when we were worked pitilessly.

It was the time to pick more fruit and vegetables than was humanly possible, as well as making jars of preserves of whatever hadn’t sold at market.

The work was relentless and the expectations from our patrons were absurd.

This was a family who had more than enough jars of preserved fruits and vegetable to eat from for generations, yet from the yelling insults of our overseers one would think they faced famine in the winter.

They could have fed all of us all year on what they harvested and preserved, but of course, they didn’t.

We could scarcely keep up with their demands.

During this time, the Patron’s Daughter decided to impose her very particular ideas about how the peasants should pick to preserve the integrity and freshness of the produce.

Of course, her way would take three times as long as the fastest of us could do, thus making a near impossible chore intolerable. And her methods resulted in severe consequences for the team of workers she chose to persecute that day.

Before she had been a nuisance. Now she was a tyrant, and her nastiness had become hideous.

What did change was that she dared not indulge herself at the expense of my crew.

She tried, though.

The first time she screamed at me to pick fruit in a manner that would have my fingers bleeding within an hour, I let her have it without saying a word.

I simply looked into her eyes and brought to mind in vivid, excruciating detail the memory of the Patron’s Daughter in that whorish corset, with her breasts bobbing and her hips bucking while the Brute pummeled his engorged manmeat down her throat as the Patron’s Daughter groaned and suckled, spittle frothing at her mouth.

Then I sneered at her.

Her face went white.

She left my group without explanation, ostensibly because the group next to us was even more incompetent.

The Patron’s Daughter never came near us again after that.

Everybody I worked with noticed. For the first time in my life, everybody wanted to work alongside me.

Since we were never subject to the petty tyranny of the Patron’s Daughter, my crew brought in the most harvest every day.

Although that did not bring us anything in the way of reward or privilege, at least we weren’t punished and beaten as the other groups were.

That was my last season as a laborer, and the hard work was almost pleasant.

Perhaps the novelty of having power over another was the cause, but I actually reveled in how much strength and stamina I had.

I was actually considered pleasant to be around, rather than ugly Addie, the pathetic wretch who wanted more than she could ever have.

For the first time in my life, I had the respect of my people.

I enjoyed that very much as I planned my desertion.