I wanted nothing to do with Culiar, Rirth, and the dozens of boys who ogled me like I was the next meal at eating time. My focus was solely on my sparring, to become the best physical version of myself I could be.
By the end of my first year with the Firehold, I had been on the Floorboards, the surface, a handful of times. The Beneath was all I knew.
I hit a new growth spurt when I neared fifteen summers. My body had been thwacked and whacked into a muscular, powerful version. My breasts grew annoyingly larger—they could only negatively impact me during a fight by getting in the way—and my hips widened. My stance was sturdier thanks to that, as Lukain approvingly pointed out.
One of the few days when I walked the Floorboards with Antones as my guide and handler, and Jinneth tagging along, I saw my reflection in a puddle of water. Based on where the exit of the Firehold led up to the grate aboveground, I inferred we were in the western district of Nuhav.
The puddle was the first time I’d seen myself in a year. There were no mirrors in the Firehold. The shocked expression on my face in the murky-brown water said everything my words couldn’t.
I didn’t recognize myself.
Lukain had convinced me to cut my hair short, to my ears. Long hair could be used as a handhold against me in the ring.“Mitigate all possible advantages over you. Keep that hair short. Press those tits within your leathers as flat as they’ll go. Cut your nails—you won’t be scratching and clawing, and a bent nail during a sword brawl is a stinging pain you won’t be used to. It will niggle and distract you.”
I took his advice and now realized what he saw in me, because I saw it in myself in the puddle. My face looked determined, pale from lack of sunlight, and drawn. My eyes were bright with life and anger.
No one called me “pretty” anymore, though the boys in the Firehold didn’t hold back from vocally admiring my body with lurid words and barked advances. I shunned them all. After a while, they stopped, because I had ceased letting their words get a rise out of me.
My arms were bulky, stacked with corded muscle straining against my tunic. I was taller than Antones now, and he was not a short man. Where before I had come to Lukain’s neck, now my eyes were level with his chin.
I grew into a fierce, fiery young woman. During eating hours, I was given a wide berth by many except the most daring. I had a reputation as a silent killer, even though I had never fought anyone in the ring. It was legend built on my mysterious practices with Master Lukain, where everyone wondered exactlywhatwe did when it was just the two of us behind closed doors.
Lukain never asked for sex. He didn’t linger on me, leer at me, or make any overt moves, no matter how sweaty we became during our training.
That being said, there was tension between us I was starting to see as I aged. When he took his shirt off during sparring, my body heated in a new way. I struggled to focus—perhaps his intent—sneaking glances at his sculpted chest and arms as we fought.
My feelings for the violent, wicked grayskin became bold and lurid in my mind. I wondered if he felt the same way about me after molding me out of fresh clay. It was the idea ofwhat could bethat danced in my mind—imagining the position I could find myself if I stayed part of the Grimsons forever.
I constantly vied with two conflicting notions: fighting my way to freedom; staying to become Lukain’s mistress once I was older. It was the last gasps of childhood, I knew, and a silly idea, since Master Lukain had never shown a romantic interest in me.
Yet, during the deepest hours of night when everyone slept in the stuffy quarters together, I found new ways to relieve the anxiety and stress of those torrid thoughts. My hands disappeared between my legs, I pulled my covers tight, and kept my whimpers and moans deathly silent as I discovered an obsessively pleasant sensation. It was training of its own, learning how my new body operated.
As many Grimsons aged, they formed romantic bonds where before things had been platonic. It was not unusual to hear moaning coming from a training room where young men were supposed to be “sparring,” or for a lovely lass to sit and rock back and forth on a man’s lap during eating hours, right in public for everyone to see.
Antones had to break up the sexual deviancy. He had no qualms doing so, putting transgressors in the rot-house for a day or two.
One night, after a young lady got caught riding Rirth’s cock in the eating hall, sending Rirth to the rot-house, I spied that same girl being led to the rot-house in the wee hours—while I was sneakily training with Jinneth—so she could be mounted all over again.
In a corner of that room, allowing her entry into the cell, was Antones. He acted stern and stoic when Lukain was aroundbut he was not against “helping out” the young, promiscuous members of the Grimsons.
Antones explained his position during one of our monthly outings in the Above. As we leisurely strolled the streets, my body soaking up nice summer sun for the first time in a month, I asked why he let the young men and women fuck in the Firehold.
“Two reasons,” he told me. “First, it’s a way for the grimmers to reduce anxiety and frustration at their lot in life. You are slaves, Sephania, as am I. What better way to forget that for a few days—become obsessed with living underground, even—than by plunging yourself between a pair of legs?”
His words made sense. In short, if Lukain kept the people happy, allowing them to form intimate relationships, they wouldn’t revolt or complain about their status.
“The second reason?” I asked, glancing over at a merchant selling brown-skinned melons who IsworeI recognized but couldn’t place from where.
Antones shrugged his stout shoulders. “The women have to learn somehow. As you well know, the Grimson girls have a goal of marriage, breeding, and status building. It’s why we provide them with nice clothes . . . like this.”
He stopped at a trader with bundles of gowns stacked high under an awning. Perusing the stacks, he picked out six dresses he thought looked nice, and then gave the merchant some coins from his purse.
We were in a bazaar, surrounded by busy people and thick dust clouds. The sun was stifling, hotter than I’d felt it in years.
“. . . And it’s why we let them fornicate with each other,” he continued on a few minutes later, once he had the dresses slung over his shoulder. “We have means of making sure a girl does not get pregnant, by the way. Should you ever need one.”
I blinked at him. “I won’t.”
Antones smirked, scratching at his day-old stubble. “It would not do well for a fighter to be with child, I admit.”
