Free Court Wizard (Spellmonger Series: Book 8) by Terry Mancour

light conversation while Lady Pleasure mingled among them, correcting posture and diction.
    Afternoons were devoted to the study of art, music and history, particularly the history of the Wilderlands, Vorone, and the Duchy of Alshar.  Lady Pleasure was a stickler on that point, though the long list of Dukes and Counts and the various struggles with Castal over the Gilmoran territories seemed inane to most of the girls.  Though they grumbled, they sat and they learned until they could recite them by rote.
    But Lady Pleasure was more adept than that.  Ishi knew that the kind of weapons she was crafting needed not just awareness of their own femininity and its value, but the value of femininity in the construction, administration, and destruction of power.  Though she tied the various eras to surviving fashions in the court, making the exercise at least somewhat interesting, the history lessons were by far the least favored among the girls.
    Three weeks into their studies, Lady Pleasure began taking the most promising of her pupils aside, two at a time, for extended study in her private chambers.  There the discussion ran to pleasure in all of its manifestations.  Ishi imparted to them the ancient secrets of human female sexuality older than man’s time under Callidore’s sun. 
    A long list of topics were covered in those heated sessions in the Garden Chamber, as her room came to be called: The importance of the moon, the fleeting moments of beauty before the ravages of age inevitably came, the use and employment of glamour, the art of erotic enrapture, the immutable laws of attraction, and a woman’s ability to use her sexuality to improve her lot in life – or even change the course of empires. 
    Those were the sessions in which Lady Pleasure selected the first of her Maidens, those who were old enough to be wed themselves (two of them proved to be young widows) but were still in youth’s full bloom of beauty.  Twelve of them she chose for that first trial.  While the rest of the girls continued to grow with their lessons, the first twelve Maidens were taken aside and instructed in the most secret arts of sexual pleasure.  She used the mesmerized bodies of the handsome young guardsmen to instruct the Maidens. 
    “So we’re to be whores , then?” Andrette asked, frowning.
    “You are going to be far more than mere whores , my dear,” Lady Pleasure insisted.  “Any woman can be a whore .  We are all naturally equipped for that.  No, you are being trained to be the perfect companion to a man . . . so perfect that he will willingly spend his valuable resources for you to favor him with the power of your femininity,” she explained.  “You will be great courtesans, each of you, in your own right.  It might be your purse he thinks he’s buying, but you will give him so much more than that, he will never count the cost of your company.  If you master the crimson arts, you will enchant him out of his wits.”
    “Still looks like spreading for coin, to me,” Andrette said, skeptically.
    “That’s nothing you haven’t done before, Daughter,” Lady Pleasure pointed out, coolly. 
    “I just figured—”
    “That you would be . . . more , somehow?” she chuckled, skeptically.  “My dear Andrette, whether you are a Queen or a peasant wife spewing brats forth from your crack, your power lies in your femininity .  For some of you, that will be the only power you will ever enjoy in this brutal world, and briefly, at that.  Without my help.  With my lessons, you are just beginning to learn what can happen when combine your feminine power with greater power. 
    “But that is a lesson for another time.  Tonight we begin preparations for your winter debut.  The Dance of Holly, for the Yuletide festival.”
    ‘Yule , Mum?” Haneth asked, her eyes wide with delight.  “A real Yule dance?”
    “I think that you will find this Yule a bit merrier than last in Vorone,” she smiled.  “A new wind