The Emperor's New Pony by Emily Tilton Page A

should have given her a spanking a long time ago, and he had meant it—even if the words had welled up inside him, unpremeditated. Perhaps if Auner had told him to take Princess Edera over his knee when she threatened to do something foolish, everything might have turned out different.
    But actually to do it now, although he knew he had to, seemed impossible, just as it had seemed impossible to ‘soothe’ her three months before at the emperor’s command, and touch her between her legs upon her sweet little cunt. He had no choice: he must remember that he had no choice. Master Morqan had said in the morning, quietly, in Ranin’s ear, that the emperor, watching from his balcony the previous afternoon, had noticed that Edera’s training was not coming along. That the emperor enjoyed the little torture he had bestowed on them by making Ranin train Edera, but that Comnar had plans for Edera—plans to make a special show of her, in the arena, soon—and if Ranin could not train her, Edera would be taken away from him and he would be sent into slavery like all the knights of the honor guard except for Lennar, who waited in the dungeon for a show that Ranin had heard the emperor was planning, though no one to whom he talked could tell him what that show might be, or whether it were the same show the emperor planned for Edera.
    That would be disastrous, and not merely because Ranin would go into slavery, for if he did, the plans Morqan had begun to hint about would never come to fruition for Ranin and Edera. Only Ranin could make the desperate attempt he now made daily, in hints and nods and words under his breath to the stable master, to be part of something that would change his country’s, and his princess’, fortunes.
    “Yes, goodman?” Edera said through her quiet tears.
    “I want you to understand that after I punish you, you will have paid the penalty for going to the parley with the emperor.”
    “What?”
    Ranin heard surprise in her voice, but also a kind of bewildered happiness.
    Morqan, in confirming what Ranin thought he already knew, had got it right. “You need to spank her,” the stable master had said. “It happens with a few of the fillies—usually the ones who have been royalty or high nobility. Their guilt is just so great that I need to release it for them. I take them over my knee and I give them what they need, the way a loving papa does.”
    The man truly had depths that Ranin only began to sense: Master Morqan trained the imperial fillies to the high standard he did only by knowing what lay in their hearts better than the girls knew it themselves.
    He kept stroking her back, fighting against the terrible temptation to stroke the shapely ovals of her bottom, and just barely winning the battle. Sooner or later they would have to face the reality of the situation, and he would have to begin to train Edera’s mouth and her cunt for whatever the emperor had planned, for that made an essential part of filly training in the imperial stables. Comnar had exempted Edera, but nothing in the emperor’s conduct made Ranin think that that exemption would last, or that when the emperor decided Edera would be deflowered, it would be less than a terrible ordeal for both him and his princess. He knew he needed to ready her: his gravest doubt was whether he could keep from deflowering her himself, so desperately did his body yearn for hers.
    Ranin closed his knees to imprison Edera’s legs between his own, and pressed his left hand down upon her back to steady her. She gave a little startled cry. That cry turned into a gasp of pain as he lifted his right hand and brought it down hard on the very center of her little bottom, in answer to her “What?” twelve times, very quickly.
    “Oh… oh… lord… ah! I mean…” Her yelps built into a wail, and then he stopped after the twelfth spank, and put his hand on her bottom, right where he had spanked her. She sobbed as if her heart would break, like a little