Prologue

      The mist was trying to cling to the valley floor but away from the trees the vapour had all but burned off. On such bright spring mornings the sun will always win. The horses still snorted tiny clouds from their nostrils but hers was the only one breaking the stillness, whinnying as it shook its head and chewed on its uncomfortable bit. She leaned forward to issue a terse command into the ear of her mount, and it too fell silent. As always for initiations she wore her bassaris, her long cloak of fox skins. It symbolised new life and the sacrifice that was about to be made for it.

      Beneath the cloak was a simple white cotton gown, but below the swell of her breasts a pentagram had been drawn in blood-red, inverted to represent the goat of lust, its horns pointing upwards at the heavens in defiance. Her hair flowed down her back, darker red than her cloak, with raven streaks running through it. She glared at her prey, her fiery eyes heavily lined in black and further accentuated by a narrow band of crimson painted across them from ear to ear. Her teeth were bared and showed bright against the scarlet of her wide lips.

      ‘You understand why you are here and the nature of your punishment?’ she snarled.

      The prey looked through her fringe with forlorn eyes, unable to stop the tremble in her voice that was due to the morning chill and the panic gushing through her young body.

      ‘Yes, Miss Morgana,’ she managed to whisper.

      ‘Then run,’ Morgana said.

      The condemned girl let loose a sob and looked back at the long slope running away from her, down to the scattering of hedges in the valley bottom that would offer her so little refuge. There was only a gentle climb on the far side, stretching up to the cover of the wood nearly a mile away. Those trees offered the only real chance of escape. She would never make it. She turned to face her tormentors one last time, searching for any signs of clemency, but the mounted Priestess angrily gathered a wad of saliva and spat it at her. And so she ran.

      She had rarely needed to break into anything more than a jog since her schooldays and immediately felt the judder of her belly and heavy breasts. She cursed the extra weight that had caused this sentence to be passed upon her. She had been dragged to this place straight from her bed, and her attire proved only a hindrance. Her slippers flew off immediately to leave her barefoot on the dewy grass. Her short nightgown rode up to flash her chubby bare behind, pale in the morning brightness, though nowhere near as white as the skin of the hunter girls behind her, whose whoops and jeers chased her down the hill.

      Morgana watched her fleeing quarry with rising excitement and turned to her girls with proud delight. They were formed into a line on foot, their seething fuck-hunger palpable. Although they had to await her command they were at the very limits of their obedience. They had to hold each other back with raised elbows, gripping handfuls of each other’s flesh as their desire threatened to boil over, grasping each other’s hair to prevent any breaking of the line before the order was given. Despite their nearly uncontrollable lust any such disobedience would be ruthlessly punished, so they restrained one another out of necessity.

      Their faces were lit with anticipation, none more so than the one gaining her first taste of the hunt. That girl wore the smooth red dildo at her groin, strapped in place over her deerskin leggings. The red of the dildo showed that she was to be blooded that day. All the girls wore the same: tight hide leggings constraining their ample thighs, and loose white smocks, many of which would be ripped off and discarded as they closed in, so that they fell upon their quarry with their chests bare. Their harnessed dildos were allocated by the Priestess herself, all smooth and hard but in varying sizes to signify seniority or current favour.

      They wore ivy wreaths and painted faces, a few with pentagrams charcoaled onto their foreheads, one with a third eye drawn and coloured there, a couple with sanguineous tears painted on their cheeks, falling from eyes smudged with heavy black makeup. They all carried their staff – their thyrsus, to give it its proper name, though most of them privately referred to it as their fuck-stick. It was a rod some four feet in length, topped with a large pine cone. The shaft was wrapped in ivy and the end dressed with foliage, most of the girls opting for nettle leaves. It was their symbol, the staff carried by the legendary bacchantes.

      In ancient mythology they used the thyrsus to strike rocks and trees to elicit water or honey, or plunged it into rivers to turn the flowing water into wine, their lifeblood. Or they used it against the hunted, employing what was in truth a symbol of fertility to trip their victim and beat them into submission, before tearing them to pieces and even gorging on the still-warm flesh. Her girls had not quite descended to such barbarity, but the Priestess still sometimes felt she should reach the scene of the ‘kill’ in good time, just to be on the safe side.

      Morgana turned her head from them and sought the gaze of the Master. He was flanked by two male escorts. They were all tall in their saddles, though he of course was the largest. His frame seemed even bulkier when swathed in his cape. Everything about