"Next."

As the word reverberated in her tiny workspace, Noci quickly clasped a paint-splattered hand over her mouth.

Just as swiftly, she let her pigment-smudged palm fall to her lap.

Why pretend? ’Twas not the first time in her twenty years she had ever spoken out of turn, and unless she took immediate action, ’twould not be her last.

She crossed her heart with a purple-stained finger. "I, Noci of Nowhere and Everywhere, do hereby promise to refrain from all inappropriate fits of chattiness -- after this last conversation with myself, of course -- under penalty of...under penalty of..."

Hmm. What constituted a suitable punishment for breaking a self-made promise?

A day of fasting, perchance?

A grand idea! She was always half-starved, anyway.

Or...or...she could illuminate manuscript pages from dawn until dusk.

A fine solution! As ’twas, she painted all day long now.

Then again, she could instead give her garb away to another less fortunate.

A charitable gesture -- what could be better? And with only one faded tunic to her name that charitable gesture would leave her naked. No complaint. To her way of thinking, and her way of thinking was all that concerned her, nudity was more reward than punishment.

Hmm. She tapped her purple-stained finger on her chin. Heart crossing was a nonsensical business. For, really, where was the sense in penalizing herself for letting herself down when letting herself down was its own worst punishment?

After recrossing her heart, she began again. "I, Noci of Nowhere and Everywhere, do hereby promise, under penalty of absolutely no penalty at all, to keep my mouth shut -- after this one last time, of course -- for the remainder of the afternoon."

There! That should cover it!

In celebration, she threw her arms out wide, wide enough to embrace the whole wide world and everything in it, from spiny hedgehogs to bristly men...

Hmm. Bristly men. Whence came that thought?

She shrugged. No matter. Her mind was always a whirlwind, and she never could pin down her scattered musings. Still and all, the comical picture of a man as bristly as a hedgehog cheered her to no end.

Without further ado, she completed the next colorful border of drolleries, set the illustration aside, and then grinned at her pet, a black-and-white rabbit prominently featured in the whimsical drawings.

Hmm. ’Twas only right to praise her model for doing such a grand job. But how to pay the compliment when she had given her word not to speak?

An oath was solemn. Sacred. Not even under pain of torture would she break a pledge. Though, strictly speaking, a self-made promise hardly counted.

Bugger it!

She kissed the rabbit’s pink twitchy nose and, breaking her self-made promise, cried gleefully, "Well done, Allhops!"

Long, floppy ears wiggled in reply.

"Aye, my precious darling, you have every right to be proud of yourself. Posing is a tedious occupation. Never could I accomplish such a feat. Sitting quiet for more than a trice vexes me sorely. Patience is not my strong suit." From the girdle at her waist, she pulled a carrot, freshly stolen that very morn from the gardens up at the fortress. "Here. Take your reward and go play. I have more painting to do."

On the right-hand side of her scribe’s board, a worktop built from a stout ash tree, stood a tall stack of vellum. Caressing the soft animal hide with her fingertips, she placed the next manuscript page for the "book of hours" before her. The text was already inscribed but in need of illumination. In this instance, the illumination consisted of filling in the first letter of the first word of the first paragraph with pigment.

Noci squinted. Why, she could barely see the letter’s pinpricked outline!

Before transferring their creations to vellum, the good monks always sketched them first on a wax tablet. Next assignment, she would ask for those initial drawings.

A request she would need to make through the creative use of subterfuge.

The monastery had no idea they employed a woman as their scribe, a revelation that would go over as well as a fart in church during a high-holy day service.

And speaking of churches -- the good monks were also unaware she painted their manuscripts in a pagan temple, where once barbaric Saxons had offered human sacrifice to appease a whole host of bloodthirsty deities. Even if the monks survived the first disclosure, for sure, the second would give them an apoplexy.

Then, there was the small detail about where their payment went. In this instance, their coin went to support a wizard and his followers, of which Noci counted herself one.

Was it any wonder she hid her true self?

As no amount of sprinkled holy water would change her, the kind thing to do was to keep her identity from the good monks.

"’Tis for their own good, after all!"

No need to tell them a pagan cruet illuminated their text. No need to volunteer a heretic embedded gold around the haloes of their saints. No need to relate she had learned her scribe skills from a lapsed monk, her own father, a devout man who had loved Noci’s witch mother well, if unwisely. Absolutely no need to divulge she had learned sortilege from her mother and she divined the future from casting bones or from images that came to her whilst painting pictures from the Bible. No need to relate when her parents died a decade earlier, she had taken both trades on the road and traveled the world over.

"Why tell the good monks any of that?" she asked the walls. "’Twould only cause them worry, and causing others to fret unnecessarily is the height of selfishness. Enough for the monastery to know I have a way with pigments. Everyone says so." With a toss of her head, she preened only a bit.

Usually, she drew and painted original decorations. On this occasion, though, the good monks had commissioned her to replace a wealthy patron's "book of hours" lost in a fire and she followed exact specifications. No sneaking trolls into the devotional prayer book. No hiding faeries in the background trees and sprites in the foreground bushes. No disguising imps as angels in the sky. She must do naught to jeopardize this source of income.

Times were hard for outcasts. The wizard and his followers barely eked out enough from their various pursuits to survive. And she made one more mouth to feed. What she earned put bread on the trestle table, with naught left over for luxuries, like shoes and such...

All the more reason to get back to work. The nobleman had offered the monastery an additional sum for a speedy completion of his lost prayer book.

Noci batted her patched veil behind her bowed shoulders. Otherwise, the raggedy ends dropped into her pigment pots.

Even in this pagan temple, she observed all Christian customs, casting off her head covering only in the privacy of her own chamber.

Or, under the light of a full moon.

Or, whilst dancing with wood sprites in the forest.

Drat! She never could lie. Off came the coif, garb, too, whenever the urge came upon her --

And the urge came upon her pretty much all of the time. She did so adore going out and about in the skin, an exhibitionistic tendency she enjoyed far too much to ever curtail.

With a sigh for her lack of discipline, Noci picked up her sharpened quill feather, dipped the point in the lovely blue pigment, a hue derived from indigo, and began applying color to the Roman letter "T."

T...T...T...TTTTTTTTTTT

Her mind stuck on the sound. Whatever did the letter stand for?

T...T...T...TTTTTTtorment?

Nay. Though the echoing sound tormented her royally.

T...T...T...TTTTTTteats????

Nay. Though hers did TTTTTTthrob, and TTTTTTterribly, TTTTTTtoo.

The quill tumbled from her hand. Palms flattened to her ears, trying to block out the mind noise, suddenly she saw him appear on the page, a powerfully built warrior holding lordly court in the large hall of an ancient fortress. Dark hair and eyes, a rich outer tunic...

Of blue. Indigo blue. The color of royalty.

He sat impassively on an oak bench, not a muscle twitching, his swarthy-toned face devoid of all expression. A buxom woman knelt naked between his widely spread legs. With massaging hands and straining throat, the...the...dancer, that was who the woman was... set about assuaging the lord’s turgid flesh.

And she would fail.

The man would come, all right, but no lover yet had succeeded in satisfying him.

Noci could, and the knowledge had her squirming.

In her vision, she saw herself drinking of the warrior’s life force, draining the ejaculate from his tremendously thick cock, swallowing his cum and licking her lips of his salt afterward.

Noci grimaced as her belly clenched. Goddess! What she would give to strip off her garb and race for her favorite Cantonese groin dildo! When soaked in hot water, the plant swelled and hardened, until the stalk achieved the dimensions of an impressive phallus. A light coating of scented olive oil, to ease the penetration, and her frustration would be at an end. Where had she put that olisbo, anyway?

Before she could seek out her carnal relief, another vision popped before her eyes. Though shadowy, this one looked to involve her.

She squinted at the manuscript page and then let out a gasp, as out of the indigo blue, an image took shape.

For joy! She rubbed her palms together. Public nudity.

She had once performed with a traveling acting troupe, and pageantry of all kinds appealed to her sense of drama. Ritualized orgies, most especially those with shifty dragons, set her afire -- in a good way. Throw in a few horny satyrs, add one or two naughty faeries, mix in a stud of a centaur and she could easily swoon.

But, what was this? Surging boos. Hissing catcalls. A swell of raucous shouts. A branch coming down on her raised bottom...

Where was the merrymaking here? Where was the applause? And why was she allowing the man of her vision to take a birch switch to her bare buttocks, whilst a crowd in a courtyard looked on? And not in high-spirited carnality, either, but in frowning, judgmental disapproval!

She enjoyed a little slap and tickle during foreplay as well as the next cruet, but this was serious punishment. And generally speaking, she avoided pain -- save, of course, the erotic variety -- like the plague. Specifically speaking, her rear was near and dear to her. In truth, she had a healthy appreciation for the wellbeing of all her skin. And welts were so very unattractive...

Exhibitionism. Birching. A large, intimidating, and darkly dominant man applying himself to her bottom. Welts.

Mmm.

A pre-climactic shiver raced through her. Arching her throat and throwing back her head, she began to pant.

Ooooohhh...

Noci swept the leaf of vellum away. Of a sudden, she throbbed all over, most especially her TTTTTTteats.

With no other hand but her own available, she pinched a distended tip. When the pressure proved insufficient, she tugged her muddy-toned tunic and natural linen shift to her waist, revealing garters that held her wool hose secured at the knee. Her flux had finished three days since, and so the upward yank laid her cunny bare.

Bare, save for a slick of passion.

Desperate now, she drove her fingers -- one, then two -- between her parted thighs. She pumped her fingers feverishly. In and out. Up and down. Plunging them to the hilt inside her slippery channel. She diddled her feel good nubbin too.

No use. No use. No matter what she did, ’twas no use at all!

No appeasement came. No surcease in her fiery need. Only emptiness.

Burning, gnawing, greedy emptiness, only he, the wretched warrior of her vision, could fill.

Why him? Why now?

Unfair! Her trencher was already filled; her cup runneth over with things she must do. Keeping the wizard and his followers safe from harm already occupied all of her time.

Not that she was complaining. Not much, anyway. But let some other cruet take on this new endeavor. Besides, though his face remained mostly obscured, this warrior had a fearsome, bullheaded, quality about him. Very off-putting. And he was a lord, and she had no use for idiot royals.

Up went her back, her spine arched just like a cat before a fight. Feeling as she did, threatened and defensive, she would be of little help to this man.

Regardless of her misgivings, a rush of aloneness, a flood of longing, a sea of yearning, rolled over her in great wet waves. She fair drowned in her pining for him. Even her faithful olisbo would be of no help to her.

She withdrew her fingers from her body’s clasp. Her tunic and shift slipped back into place. With her shaking hands anchored on her wobbly knees, she gave herself over to the conflict raging within her.

Fear and eagerness. Resistance and surrender. The sweet balm of acceptance tempered with a bitter denial of her fate.

Always before, her trysts had been playful and joyous. Light and sunny romps that meant naught beyond mutual enjoyment. Interludes ending with laughter and good wishes, and nary a tear of regret at the farewells.

Not this time.

This time, she sensed devastation, annihilation, a vanquishing of her former self.

Since late childhood, she had been on her own, her own woman. Answering to authority did not come easily to her. Neither did the subordination of her own wants and desires, even for the common good. She did like helping those in need, but she was far too selfish for complete altruism, she supposed. To reach the warrior lord, not only would she need to forsake coming and going as she pleased, but she would also need to abandon the work she valued, an occupation in which she excelled and in which she toiled in secret. As a Christian, the lord would never allow her to continue her work, not if continuing her work meant lying to a monastery full of monks.

She felt positively ill. Sick to her belly. Despite her objections, her sixth sense told her there was no escaping this indigo-blue wearing royal. Avoiding what lay ahead would prove as futile as stopping the changing of the tides. This arrogant lord would allow her to hold naught back. He would expect all of her, every part of her.

Noci shook her head back and forth. Woe is me! Does this vision tell me true?

Surely this lord would stop short of eating her up alive, of chewing her up whole, of marking her hitherto silky and unblemished skin with his pearly white teeth.

And then she knew. For, in spite of the cost, beyond all reason, she would come to crave Taracut of Northumbria.

Most especially the bite of his pearly white teeth.