Page 24 of What Fury Brings (Wrath and Fury #1)

She tugged on his chain, and he jostled forward by the neck. “What you are witnessing right now is not how most in my country behave. It is a select few—the most extreme. Do you fear for these men? Does it hurt you to see their pain?”

“You know it does.”

Olerra nodded. “I want to tell you a story. It is about Amarra’s Chosen, the first queen of this country. Will you hear it?”

He’d take anything to distract himself from what was happening on the streets. He nodded.

So she began:

Once upon a time, there was a queen who wept.

She had four daughters and no sons, and her husband beat her for it daily. One day, he beat her until she blacked out and then fucked her unconscious body. When she came to, in her pain-filled delirium, she called out to her goddess.

Please , she said, let me suffer no more .

She wanted to die.

For there was nothing she could do. She could not smuggle her daughters away from the castle. The law gave her husband full control. She was nothing without him. Could not have a title or property or money or anything else. That was the way of the world. Men were leaders. Women were followers.

If they tried to be anything more, they were punished.

For nothing brought out a man’s anger quite so much as his authority being threatened.

Goddess Amarra heard the cries of her daughter, and she granted her a gift. The next time the king tried to beat her, the queen fended off his blows, and she struck back.

He could no longer overpower her. She was now the superior in strength.

And the queen wasn’t the only one.

All the women in Amarra awoke with a new power. They broke free from the chains of men. And they rewrote the rules. They exerted power over their former oppressors.

From now on it would be a woman’s job to rule. It was a man’s job to endure.

The queen looked upon her transformed kingdom with pleasure.

See how they like it.

“That story,” Olerra said, “happened five hundred years ago, but we remember. The women of my country were once treated the way the women in your country are. Until our goddess took pity on us. She blessed us to overcome our male oppressors.”

“Instead of making the world a better place, your ancestor flipped it,” Sanos said.

“Yes, for that is what fury brings.”

There was silence. Only the sounds of the busy market buzzed about them.

“Imagine that you had an abuser,” Olerra said. “What would you do if they suddenly had no power over you?”

It was a hypothetical question. Olerra obviously had no idea how his father treated him. Sanos wanted to say he’d be noble. That he’d seek justice.

“I’d want revenge,” he said. He’d give his father everything he deserved and more.

“So would I.”

“What will you do?” Sanos asked. “If you are made queen, will you keep things as they are? How long must innocent men suffer for the sins of their fathers?”

“What will you do?” she said, turning the question back on him.

“Let’s say I return you to Brutus. When your brother becomes king, will you bother asking him to change laws that have always benefited your sex?

Would you have even given a second thought to the way women are treated if you hadn’t been brought here? ”

He wanted to argue. To claim he’d be noble, but the truth was he wouldn’t have.

He saw how helpless his mother and sister were against his father, but it never would have occurred to him to change the laws. He would have thought it enough that he could be good to them. Once his father was gone, he would protect them.

But what about other women? Women who didn’t have kind men to look out for them? Was it really right to trust their well-being to imperfect men? Why not allow them the means to leave bad situations?

“You didn’t answer my question,” Sanos said. “Will you change things?”

“The first thing I will do,” Olerra said, “is dismantle the evil in this market and free the men in Glen’s harem.” She tugged gently on his chain.

After fifteen minutes of walking, Sanos’s bare feet were beginning to feel sore.

He’d stepped on a dozen rocks and at least two bugs.

Sweat ran down his chest and back from the sun, but his skin didn’t burn.

His arms ached from holding them so tightly behind his back.

The bindings were uncomfortable. And every new horror the street revealed caused him to tense.

Finally she led him into a building. An arena, of sorts, with a sunken pit in the middle of the room.

People recognized her. Friends waved her over, and the two of them were led to seats near the front.

Sanos smelled the blood before he saw it.

More fighting? he wondered.

He couldn’t make sense of what was before him. Blood congealed on the floor, covering rocks and dirt and every other surface. Sharp devices he didn’t have names for littered the space. A woman hauled a man in chains behind her.

“Did you know that other kingdoms sometimes send their criminals here?” Olerra asked him, leaning forward to speak directly into his ear. Even then, he only just caught the words. The crowd started to get louder as the chained man was brought forward.

“No,” he responded.

“We believe that the punishment should fit the crime. Unjust murderers are murdered. Thieves have time stolen from them in the prisons. And here”—she gestured to the arena—“here is where we deal with rapists.”

Rapists.

The word was foreign to him, but it didn’t sound good, the phonetics rough against his ears.

He deliberated whether to ask what it meant.

He didn’t want to seem foolish, not with his ignorance of all other things Amarran, but by the look of horror on the man awaiting his punishment, he dared not remain in ignorance.

“I don’t know what that means,” he admitted to her.

Her face looked disappointed at the admission. “I forget,” she said. “It is not even a crime in Brutus. How could you have a word for it?” She shook herself. “It is when a person forces sex upon someone who does not want it.”

Sanos’s eyes went wide, and suddenly it seemed strange that his country didn’t have a word for such a thing.

It was what his father did to his mother in the marriage bed.

He’d heard soldiers brag about conquests when they’d find lone women in the streets…

It never sat comfortably with him, but he took comfort in knowing that he was not like that.

His brothers weren’t like that. Despite everything, the Ladicus brothers were nothing like their cruel father.

But then Sanos wondered, had he ever paid an unwilling woman? Someone who was so desperate for money to buy herself food and clothes and a roof overhead that she couldn’t say no despite wanting to?

Sanos felt sick. Worse than sick.

He hated that he’d never given it a second thought until this woman entered his life.

“What did he do?” Olerra asked the woman next to her, gesturing to the man awaiting punishment.

“He was the family friend of some nobility in Ephenna. He was caught in the bedroom of the nobleman’s ten-year-old daughter. The nurse thought to check on her and caught him. He was sent here for punishment.”

A child.

Sanos couldn’t help it. The smell of blood was so rich in the air, he leaned over the stands and vomited into the pit below.

Olerra rubbed his back soothingly. She used a handkerchief to wipe his face before he returned to his seat. She offered him her waterskin to wash down the taste of bile.

And then it was starting.

The sentenced man was dragged toward a large structure in the middle of the room. It was shaped like an X, two large wood beams making the shape. He was chained to each end, hands on the top, feet on the bottom. Then a contraption was rolled over to him.

The device was also made out of wood. It consisted of a single small hole like one would see in a stocks for hands and a head, but smaller. The device also had a metal blade.

A guard produced a knife, cutting off the man’s pants so they fell around his ankles. He spat in her face as she worked, but she ignored it, clearly long used to the treatment.

Then a voice echoed through the room, and Sanos spotted another woman on the other side of the pit, speaking through a voice-magnifying trumpet.

“Revlin Darigan, for the crime of misusing your member, you have been sentenced to lose it.” The announcer nodded to the guard in the pit, who still had the man’s spit shining on her face.

The guard rolled the device until it trapped the man between the cross and it. She yanked on the pulley, which raised the wooden block with the sharp blade attached.

It looked like—

A guillotine.

For a man’s cock.

The sentenced man started to thrash as the woman used a rod to lift his member and place it in the designated indentation.

The crowd started to chant, but Sanos couldn’t quite make out the words.

Sweat ran down the man’s face, and he was spewing venom from his mouth, too far for Sanos to hear. It was probably for the best.

And then, all at once, the blade was released. It plummeted toward the ground and the man’s member.

Sanos shut his eyes at the last moment, unable to watch. It heightened his hearing, allowing him to finally discern the chant.

“Cut! Cut! Cut!”

The scream made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. The crowd silenced as though to hear it better. When Sanos opened his eyes, he couldn’t bear to stare at the scene in front of him, so he looked to Olerra instead.

That was a mistake.

“Look,” she demanded, nodding toward the pit.

He shook his head.

She wrenched on the leash, forcing him forward. His eyes focused without him giving them the command to do so.

Another woman had entered the arena. She wore gloves and a medical coat. She also held some sort of thin tubing in her hands. There was a second scream as she hunched over the bound man, doing something that couldn’t be seen with her blocking his lower half with her own body.

When she stepped aside, the tubing hung from where his cock once was.

So he could still urinate.

Finally they brought what appeared to be a hot poker, to cauterize—

Sanos nearly passed out as the man screamed a third time.