to memorise them all. Valtiori would ask her about them in the morning and she would invariably confuse morticlaw with mandrake or moth venom with butterfly semen and he would tell her icily to raise her skirt and place herself across the table.
He was a harsh taskmaster but in truth she savoured every stinging kiss from his riding crop. The punishment had a strange alchemy of its own, transforming pain into pleasure. She felt herself grow hopelessly wet each time she was made to expose herself and she couldn’t help the way her hips rolled in response to the pain. She absorbed it, felt nourished by it, and she found herself craving more. On rare occasions she even made deliberate errors to earn a whipping. She suspected she wasn’t fooling her master, however, as these contrived punishments were always distinctly more severe.
The first time he poisoned her he gave her no warning at all of what to expect. She wasn’t even sure that he knew. But the burning sickness the potion induced kept her away from her duties – and her studies – for an agonising period that felt like years. Delirious, she stood apart from herself, watching herself as she lay wrapped in blankets by the fire and confessed her love for her master, her undying loyalty and her shameful lust. He listened quietly, without speaking, until she wondered if she had in fact died and become a ghost. But no, he responded to her words with kindness, telling her to sleep, to dream.
And he was there in her dreams, undressing her, stroking her, examining every feverish inch of flesh and kissing away the bruises from her most recent chastisement. His fingers sought the dewy slit that hungered for sensation, tickled the sensitive little bud just above it. Her body was an experiment itself, he told her, his to play with. She gasped and spread her legs wide, eager for his touch, desperate for every new sensation, even if it was only a dream.
Then his fingers were inside her, his palm pressed hard up against her sex. Colours burst behind her eyes and she ground her hips against him to increase the stimulation. Her nipples stiffened into taut little pebbles and he swept his fingers gently back and forth across them, sending jolts of ecstasy through her.
She was there, in the moment, and at the same time she floated above the scene, watching. She knew her master’s ways intimately, knew each little twitch of an eyebrow or slight curl of his lip. And she had never seen him so tender before, so gentle and loving. He kissed her, pressing his warm lips to hers and enfolding her in his arms. He reached down to unfasten his trousers and she sighed with bliss as the warm hardness of his cock at last pressed against her cunt.
Yes, he called it her cunt, spoke the word in his deep silky voice. Auren had never braved such a rude word, such a frank description. It was something only pleasure slaves and their masters were allowed to say. Perhaps this was another transformation, then. From village girl to apprentice, thence to pleasure slave.
He dabbed her cunt with a slippery ointment he’d taught her to make from orchid nectar and honey. A single grain of pepper gave it the spicy tingle she felt spreading through her as he eased himself inside her inch by slow inch, filling her completely. She closed her eyes as she surrendered to him, wrapping her trembling arms and legs around him and clinging tightly as he fucked her. His apprentice, his subject, his slave, his lover.
She lost herself completely when the pleasure reached its peak. Her body seemed to implode with the force of blissful sensation, leaving her panting, exhausted and dazed. She closed her eyes and basked in the diminishing little pulses, mesmerised by the sense that she was floating. When she opened her eyes some time later she blinked in confusion at her surroundings and realised she was back. Back in the world and back inside herself. She was curled up by the fire and Valtiori was sitting at his table, writing something in his leather-bound journal. Glancing down, she saw she was still wrapped in the blankets, still clothed in her nightdress. Had it all been a fever dream? She had never found the courage to ask.
The memory had warmed her on cold nights when she lay alone on her pallet, kept from sleep by the distance between her and her master. She had never seen inside his bedchamber but she couldn’t help fantasizing about how it might look, what it might contain. A big comfortable bed, certainly, which she could slip into without waking him, to curl into his arms as a cat might do. But of course she had never dared. Such presumption might anger him enough to turn her out.
Now, as this newest potion numbed her tongue and made her eyes water, she had the sudden terrifying thought that he could do much more than that if she ever truly displeased him. It was not unheard of for apprentices to perish as a result of the experiments of lesser alchemists. If he ever wanted to be rid of her it would be easy enough to achieve. No one would question such an ‘accident’. But even as she played the fear out to its morbid conclusion, to her sisters dabbing their eyes at her graveside, Auren knew her master did truly care for her. And it wasn’t her place to imagine herself occupying a grander station in his life than she already did.
Valtiori muttered a curse under his breath and for a moment Auren feared he had read her mind. He peered closely into her eyes, not liking whatever he saw. Or didn’t see. He took her hand and laid it in his own, as though measuring her palm. Auren trembled as the contact made her pulse quicken.
With no idea what he was looking for, Auren was powerless to help. The potion had done something to her, that much was certain. But unless he asked her directly, she knew she was not to offer observations.
He turned away then and went to his desk, where he began writing something in his journal. Notes on the failed experiment, presumably. Theories on what ingredients were missing from the potion that would make it work.
Auren listened to the scratch of his quill on the page and wondered what he had been trying to do to her. She had fantasies, of course. In one of her favourites she imagined him turning her into an animal, a little cat perhaps. One that could sit in his lap. He could stroke her soft fur as she purred and rubbed her head against his hand.
She thought she could actually feel the vibrations of a purr as the numbing sensation spread from her tongue to her lips and down her throat. Then her body began to tingle. It was surprisingly pleasant and she closed her eyes as the sensation began to scurry through her veins and into her hands and feet. One sleeve slipped from her shoulder and she reached up to cover herself, surprised at the heaviness of the material. Her skirt seemed to be dragging the floor as well. She lifted her leg to kick free of it and her foot came out of her shoe with surprising ease.
Opening her eyes, she was startled to see the polished wood of the table leg entirely filling her field of vision. Confused and disorientated, she looked down at herself in time to see her dress pooling around her like a mountain’s worth of fabric. She must have made a sound then because she heard her master’s chair creak as he turned to look at her. When he spoke his voice came from somewhere far above.
‘Excellent,’ he said, sounding pleased, ‘it has worked!’
Auren’s fear vanished at once as she realised what had happened. She was not a cat, but she wasn’t much larger than one. And she was getting even smaller by the second.
The floor shuddered with heavy footsteps and Valtiori towered above her, godlike in his sudden new stature. He was smiling.
Naked, Auren clutched at the fabric of her dress, trying to cover herself. But it was too heavy to lift. Her underthings had slipped away as well, too large to fit her tiny frame. She wrapped her arms round herself, blushing to the roots of her hair.
‘Don’t be afraid, little one,’ Valtiori said softly.
His voice sounded so different to her tiny ears. It was deeper and more resonant and it threatened to make her bones vibrate if he spoke too loudly. She peered up at her master, feeling more helpless and at his mercy than ever before. She pressed her legs together, sending a hot little pulse through her sex.
Valtiori
