The dressage competition had gone even better than expected. For two days beforehand, Estancia Estanio had buzzed with excitement as visitors had begun to arrive for the great gala day. Visiting pony-girls had had to be found quarters in the stables, visiting masters had been accommodated in the great house. The stables had been busy with comings and goings and, despite the fiat on speaking, the girls had quickly found ways of exchanging news and gossip in hurried whispers, discreet gestures. Interest among the visiting pony-girls in Flame had been intense, because of course she had never been seen on the circuit. Gregor had been careful to keep her final training sessions discreet and had had her quartered away from the visitors so, despite the curiosity of several masters who had come to hear the rumours of Don Estanio's stunning new acquisition, nothing had been known about her until her appearance in the ring on the first evening of the two-day gala.

And that appearance had been sensational. Flame's dressage harness was in soft and shining emerald green leather, perfectly setting off the flawless, translucently white skin and the rich red hair. Her now hard and muscled body shone with the reflecting burnishing oil with which the groom had massaged her before tacking-up and with which she had been recoated just before going into the ring. For dressage, the really good pony-girls wore high-heel display boots rather than the more athletic running boots used for racing - and Flame was by now really good. The heels on her knee-high boots were five inches - incredibly high for dressage work - and caused her feet to arch with a stunning arrogance. The tall arching stance created by the boots was a strain to maintain for any length of time, and in training sessions Flame's thighs had ached for days as she had grown used to learning to balance, then walk, then perform in the high heels. Now the muscles on the front of her naked thighs corded like steel as she walked, her naked buttocks with their livid brand bunched firm and tight.

Flame's tall head-dress emphasised the luxury of the long mane of rich red hair, and her harness jingled, her firm breasts quivered, as she performed her dressage routine. Dressage rules required that in the ring breasts were unsupported either by display bras or corset-tops to the body harness, and Flame's beautiful bosom had drawn every eye. The long, thickened nipples, as darkened and as toughened now as soft leather, had been pulled through narrow, open-frame gold cylinders before being locked in place in extreme, bizarre extension with the thick but lightweight rings, and their colour and rigidity had been heightened by a liberal coating of Gregor's special, fiercely stinging, burnishing liniment.

The fine camel hair brush had come into play lower down, too. Gregor had also applied a liberal coating of liniment to Flame's ostentatiously pierced clitoris and the fleshy clitoral hood which puffed like a cockscomb above the join of the outer labia, thanks to the transfixture of the harness ring which had been fitted through the pony-girl's sex flesh there. Hectically red, the inflamed little stalk jutted like a miniature penis, pulled out and up by the D-ring connected by its cruel strap to the waist-belt of the harness. In the dressage, the biting understrap was used extensively to guide and drill the pony-girl in training and, for the some of the less well trained - or obedient - girls, in the ring also.

Although Flame by now knew her routines as thoroughly as any dancer, and went through them with the same self-motivated quest for perfection, the culture of the ring and the expectation of the judges required that she nonetheless endure the strap's uncomfortable presence. Indeed, so good was Flame, so self-propelled in her enjoyment of her sport, that Gregor was worried that overuse of the strap, simply for the judges' benefit, might put his flawless charge off her stride. He need not have worried. As he prepared her, he warned Flame that she might feel the strap more, that he would have to rig her more tightly than usual, for just this purpose.

In the ring Flame went through her familiar routines, shutting her mind off from the strap's more than usual presence - or at least trying so to do. But try as she might, she could not ignore it. The thin leather pulled taut across her flat belly, and through the close-cropped red hair, pulling hard and steadily on the little gold D-ring and ruthlessly dragging the stretched clitoris up almost vertically against the swell of her lower mound, emphasising the bare and depilated state of the sexual cleft itself. The remorseless pull on the reddened stalk exposed the underside of the little morsel completely and pulled apart the bald and heavier labia at their upper join, leaving her close-riveted hairless sex slit pulled tightly upwards, blatantly visible. Above the upper horizontal stud through the plump labia and the twin round gold balls which sealed its end and held the sex slot tight closed, the softer pink inner flesh of Flame's clitoral hood was also pulled out and up, lewdly displayed.

The constant tugging at the transfixed stalk simply caused the elongated clitoris to swell and stiffen all the more, until its rigid erection was indisquisable, either to spectator or to Flame herself. By half-way through her routine the itching, swelling, tingling stimulation was growing to such heights Flame thought she must soon climax on the spot. As she danced backwards with her high-stepping, artificially elaborate goose-step, her rising knees parting wide in the required, slightly preposterous, manner, the shaven lips of her gold-studded sex and even the insides of the tops of her thighs glistened with her seeping sex oils.

The dramatic climax to the routine, the ultimate display not merely of discipline but of self-discipline, had brought thunderous applause from an audience not normally given to generosity towards those it was there to watch perform. The entire ring had hushed to absolute stillness as it became apparent what was to be done with Flame to demonstrate her total perfection, total obedience, total control. Not a whisper had there been as Gregor, the long trailing coach whip tucked into the waistband of his driving britches, had placed the brimming crystal champagne flute to balance precariously on the rim of the car seat, Flame's immaculate white body already poised and balanced in its scarcely believable backbend.

Every breath seemed to be held as the long whip snaked back then, with a crack like a pistol shot, snapped across the upraised underside of the offered breasts. As Gregor had raised and shown the unspilled glass then, with a flamboyant sweep of his arm, taken a deep draught of the heady beaded wine; and as Flame, her face an expressionless mask, had gracefully uncoiled and resumed her position, upright and stock-still, the livid weal across the underswell of the proud breasts, just below the caged and ringed nipples, dramatic evidence of the authenticity of the whip stroke, the audience had erupted with delight and appreciation of the display.

After that, there had been no doubt who would be champion. None could match Don Estanio's stunning Flame.