Free Hope by Emma South

I was cursed.  Unlike other people who might use that word, I had the facts to back it up.  I may have looked like an innocent woman in her early twenties but I was over a thousand years old.  Let me tell you my story.  My name, or what I called myself, is Mary and I was born in the year 983.
    Reading about my home in history books or watching documentaries on television just didn’t capture what it was really like.  None of them got it right.  I couldn’t begin to explain the crushing hopelessness of the poor.  Every day you worked on the same piece of land for the rich people like all your ancestors as far back as anybody could remember.  You would do this until you died and then your children would take over.  There was no chance of anything else.
    So maybe you could understand why I grasped at what I thought was an opportunity to better my life, and the lives of my future children, no matter how unusual or vague it may have seemed.  When a man who called himself Sylvester, though that wasn’t his real name, came to our hovel accompanied by the lord who owned the land looking to recruit ‘suitable’ young women I was seized and presented to him.
    Sylvester dismounted from his horse and walked forward until he stood in front of me.  With a wordless glare at the two men in the service of our lord he had me released from their grip and they each shuffled a few steps away.  He slowly walked around me as if memorising every detail of my rag covered body.  Three laps around me were completed before I ever heard him say a word and I would never forget his hypnotic voice as long as I drew breath.
    “This is no place for a great beauty such as you, is it?”
    “I… I do as my lord commands, sir.”
    Sylvester walked to my rear and leaned down to whisper to me.  His impossibly hot breath blew on my neck and I shivered despite the heat.
    “What if you could be more than this?  I can give you riches and luxury.  If you can help me.  I have a need.”
    His hand slipped through a rip in my shabby clothing to cup my breast and I felt a strange vibrating energy from within it, sending tingles into my nipple.
    “What do you think, pretty thing.  Will you do anything I wish?”
    “If… if my lord grants it… yes.”
    My lord nodded his agreement and I honestly don’t know what emotion I felt more strongly, relief or fear.
    “There’s just one little detail I need to check first.”  Sylvester whispered.
    Quick as a snake his fiery hot hand was between my legs where no man had touched me before.  I gasped but was powerless to move.  Once satisfied that I was intact he released me and I nearly fell to the ground, breathing heavily.  Sylvester walked back to his horse and mounted again.  Searching inside his coat he fished out a jingling pouch and tossed it to my lord before they turned and began to ride off.  Sylvester called over his shoulder that we would leave in the morning.
    That night was the last I spent with my family.  In the years afterwards I could have gone back but given what Sylvester did to me I thought that would have been a disaster.  I often wondered about them though.  The next day I joined a group of other young women who were transported to Sylvester’s private lands.
    At first, it was wonderful.  His riches seemed to have no limits and all that was apparently required of me was to wear revealing clothing as I went about my own business pursuing my own interests around his cavernous house.  To be honest, my new clothes were no more revealing than my previous scraps of material had been.  The outfits were simply made to be that way rather than exposing my skin because of being threadbare and ripped.  I secretly thought they were beautiful and those few weeks were heavenly compared to the life of toil I had just come from.
    Then came that accursed night.  Us women, some no more than girls really, were marched through a door that had always been locked until that point and