As the girth strap was finally unbuckled, Corinna realised the horizontal bar was almost certainly too short to spread her arms wide and that the cuffs, when closed, looked surely to be too large to prevent her hands slipping through them. It was then that she understood their true purpose, but it was not these that held her main attention, for there had been one other modification made to the saddle, and she knew that once mounted, she would not be dismounting without assistance...Once again a helpless prisoner of the sadistic Lord Fulgrim, Lady Corinna finds herself a naked pawn in his deadly plan to wrest control of Illeum from her father.Fulgrim's hatred for her is such that, regardless of her rank, she is slowly and cruelly being forced into sexual submission as one of the human pony girls so popular among the wealthy merchants and nobles of the eastern lands, and even if her father should eventually yield to Fulgrim's demands, her fate already seems sealed.Only her beloved steward-master-lover, Lord Savatch, still recovering from a near fatal wound, fully realises the danger she is in and he, together with his former lover, the Yslandic warrior princess Alanna and her deadly young female cohort Jekka, must try to reach Corinna before Fulgrim's power becomes all encompassing.