Claiming Crystal (11 page)

‘
I am supposed to be proud of this,’ Crystal told the rogue. ‘I am supposed to be another woman who ushers in new eras – of confession, of prosperity, of friendship between two distant castles. It all sounds wonderful, but it's not.’

After her older sister had poisoned herself the dungeons temporarily returned to an older barbarism before the local prostitutes began to petition the guards to allow them a chance to imitate what the great Ruby had done. This had been evidenced earlier in the dungeon by the writhing female forms rubbing across the outside of the bar or dancing their slow dances of sloth and skin and shaking flesh in front of starved men who would first be driven to kill for the woman and then driven to tell the woman anything she wished to hear.

The physicians in the kingdom had tried to develop a brew to force criminals to tell the truth, but it seemed that sex worked quicker and cheaper, and the jailers enjoyed the ministrations anyways. It was not worth the effort when women were in abundant supply. In that way Crystal's truth was nothing greater than what lay between her legs and within the bloodline of her lineage.

She supposed she should be sad for that, but now was not the time for sadness.

She began to sigh when the man interrupted her.

‘
What am I to do?’ he asked her.

She replied:
‘You are to beg for my forgiveness for trespassing into my ceremony.’

‘
And how shall I beg your forgiveness?’ he asked coyly.

She replied:
‘You will do as I say until I am contented in your submitting, and you will not question me, and you will not speak unless spoken to.’

She began small, with the lowest part of her, instructing the rogue to wash her feet, for they had become dirty on the path into the dungeon. Crystal was not given the ornate shoes that her mother wore, but she h
ad on a pair of moderately well made sandals that had nevertheless failed to protect the delicate undersides of her feet from the dirt and chips of gravel spread about like rocky sands along the shores of this place where the sun did not shine. She called for a jailer to fetch her sponges, towels and soaps, and then she set the rogue to do a version of what a previous suitor had already done to her as his presentation of loyalty.

But where that suitor polished her, exalted in her, the rogue did something with different intentions brewing underneath the surface. He cleaned her feet just as he had, that much was true, but the way he cleaned them was laced with unsaid commitments and passions that were like poisons to sicken the humble gesture into a sexual encounter. The way that he took each of her toes in a grasp of his fingers, washing them carefully, so as not to nick her delicate skin, and the
n cleaning them with the point of his tongue, spoke more exclamations than the rising point inside of his pants.

Next she instructed him to clean her legs, for they had become sweaty with the hard air, and before he moved up her body she reminded him that it was his duty to please her so that she might forgive him, and possibly even release him.

‘You will do what I say as though your actions can speak for your innocence,’ she said.

‘
That is a silly thing to say,’ the rogue replied, kissing her ankles and then taking a single leg onto his lab to begin stroking it with waters. ‘Nothing I do to you will ever be innocent.’

His strong hands clutched her legs and then pulled her closer to him until sh
e was on his lap next, and he seized her hair in one strong hand and brought her to him with an insistency that was not violent, but needful, lustful, and made her all too glad to sate his hunger for the day's starving he had suffered here. She made as if to kiss his mouth and then made as if to kiss inside of his mouth, wanting of his juices in every place she could find them, inhaling in the powerful musk and scents of his body with a smell that had awakened just as powerfully as her womanhood.

Truth be told she had smelled this man the moment she entered into the dungeon, for her senses were heightened beyond those of a normal woman.

When she reached to grasp his cock, it seemed that her fingertips were fires that set him hotter and hotter, beating red against the thin seams that separated her flesh from his own. He tore them off and then he tore off her gown, and when she heard the footsteps of the jailers coming to investigate what was happening she called them back with a moan that nonetheless ordered – for she was the jewel, and although her life was not always hers to decide, the object that she had been raised to be was beyond reprieve.

Even when her father had thrown this man into his dungeon and ordered that Crystal be sent other suitors, he had not dared to shout at her to her face, and he had arranged no punishment for her. She was the spoiled woman of a rich dynasty, and she made this man know it now by the gluttonous way she pushed him to the hard jags of the ground and then pulled open his pants to put her mouth to where his fires needed putting out.

The dancing shadows under the torches made his erect cock larger than life, its shadow against the wall an erratic surging that beckoned beneath her again and again, jerking and twitching like a supplicant overwhelmed with the ecstasy of her presence.

She swallowed it entirely, and tasted it with everything in her mouth that could taste, and she found herself deeply hungry in ways that she had not been when speaking with the other suitors. She sucked and she swallowed what was sucked out, for the man climaxed numerously, and each time she made her deep throaty gulps she found his body go rigid with the pleasures of a man who had found himself laid together with another body of such softness and supple sensations that he could do nothing but go still in her jaws, as if she was something that dined on him for sport.

When she had finished with his cock she let it go, dimly satisfied that it did not flop, but snapped back to attention, hot with his wildness, tireless with the effervescence that she could feel surging through his aroused body. She climbed him then, not in any metaphorical terms but in the truly literal sense of a woman reaching hand over hand to claw up strong legs and then a strong chest, reaching and taking the hair at the top of him and pulling herself higher still and begin kissing his mouth with the same tongue that had tasted his cock.

Some men, she had found, minded the mixing of these sensations, but he was not an ordinary man, and he seemed delighted by it. His body rose to hers, his cock digging against her leg, reaching to find its way inside of her and do a deeper kind of fleshly digging towards the center of her, where it wished to b
ed itself like a root. They rode each other in the firelight of the dungeon cell, and the jailers who were stationed there peeked out to watch the events like voyeurs, reaching into their robes to touch themselves and enjoy in what was being exploited by two people who had found something to drive them in the sensations of each other's bodies.

The two guards who had been sent to the end of the dungeon remained as they were trained to remain: as if they heard nothing, saw nothing, and had no opinions of whatever else might be going on underneath their sightline. It was a strange sort of guard's work, to deliberately ignore the actions
of the person they had been tasked to protect, but that was the delicate tightrope these men walked under the reign of her father - their lord.

Even when they heard the cracking of whips they did not jerk to attention, assured that Crystal was doing what she wished to do; later, perhaps, they would march back to the cell and exclaim at the sight, and they might even blame the man for talking her into such shameless things, but for now they simply stood and waited.

Crystal, meanwhile, had not been able to pull herself off of the wild man. Instead she had taken up a lash of whips from the nearby jailer's counter to strike across the man's chest as punishment for the crime he committed. She found herself quite enjoying the jailer's duty, and for a moment she felt herself acquiring a spiritual connection with her dearly departed sister, who once strolled this dark dungeon with similar affections, enjoying the way her body moved the men – coveting the underground privacy in a way only women who were afforded no other privacies could covet.

The rogue shouted only once, not in pain but pleasure, and then pulled her fiercely against him once again to ride something that was more splendid than any horse. The last time she had whipped him hard enough to bleed, and it smeared across her as they made love, hot and running, but she was not disgusted, only enthralled. Her mind raced for reason but found only his ropy body, and then suddenly cared nothing for reason.

‘Why did you whip me?’ he asked breathlessly, biting at her lips and thrusting himself into snugger comforts deep inside of her. ‘Was my crime so great to eat the food of one of your suitors?’

‘
I did not whip you for trespassing into my ceremony,’ she replied, pulling away from him so that she could look him seriously in the face and convey something that words never could. ‘That is not your crime. The crime you committed against me was letting my father take you here while I waited the day for your touch.’

At last, there it was.

Crystal returned to him more passionately than before, her mouth against his and her breath stealing his breath. He allowed her, breathing into her body, and she, sucking the air out of his like some demon from the storybooks who stole the souls of men when bedding them.

She reached underneath the small clearance between their mated bodies and found his cock, one half inside of her, the other eager to be with its rest, an
d she began to stroke as she rode him, pleasuring him doubly and taking her own pleasures from the way that he bent under her own ministrations. She controlled him in this, just as any woman controlled a man when she let him inside of her. She indulged in the finer ways that she could move his member. She prickled at the sensations of its heat against hers. She nearly buckled and climaxed herself, overcome with something indescribable – but for her moans of pleasure.

There was a mistaken impression of women as the frailer sex, but Crystal knew better than that. She had seen the way some men cried after climaxing, or the way that some cocks became soft and sad when they were in the presence of a dominant queen, whore
, or princess, and she was not under these false impressions herself. Women were the stronger sex, and their sex, in turn, was more powerful than the force of any fist a man could lay upon them.

‘
I have chosen you to be mine,’ she gasped to him, releasing her mouth from his with a wet smack of drool and spit. ‘Now you will demonstrate to me the extent of your devotion,’ and she seized him a final time to take ownership over him in ways that all the powerful of the world took ownership over those people who were beneath them – by birth rite, or by their own wanting frailties caving in their willpower to the greater powers of lust and need and loneliness.

‘
You are no longer your family's,’ she said, pushing him deeper and deeper inside of her, riding the tingling sensation of ecstasy until it shivered throughout her entire body. ‘You are no longer your own, and you were never my father's. You are mine and mine alone. You are an object.’

One powerful hand grabbed the soft meat of her ass, squeezing it tenderly. Another snaked its way up her chest, brushing aside one supple breast and finally resting itself against her face, holding her in a cradle as he breathed his hot breaths against the nape of her neck.

‘If I am an object,’ he replied, ‘then we are object alike,’ because of course Crystal was not the name given to a woman who was allowed to be a person. As always, it was the title of a jewel to be sold, and now that jewel had met a match in another person from such poor straits that he did not mind being made an object in kind. ‘My name is Rafael Giovia,’ he finally revealed, clutching her to him, trying to become one with her body because his half without her whole was excruciatingly empty. ‘I am yours, to do with as you wish.’

‘
Rafael,’ she repeated, tasting his name the way she had tasted his cock. ‘You are mine.’

They buried themselves in each other, and were reborn from that burial each time they climaxed – a rejuvenation that came out in warm releases of love and pleasure too exquisite to be let for every occasion of every fucking. This coupling found its own strides and thrusts in the dancing firelight, and their eyes were bright and alive, flaming brighter than the torches. They were so intent on each other that they did not even hear the hooting and hollering from the nearby prisoners who were catching glimpses of their privacy, and exclaiming over the gorgeous sight. Crystal did not even break from him when the loud footsteps of hurrying guardsmen and jailers came to investigate the racket, even though she knew that her discretion could make the difference between Rafael's release and an eternity rotting away behind bars that the sun would never shine on.

She cried out and bit into his shoulder, her body shuddering with unbridled ecstasy. Her hands fell down his back and gripped the strength of his deeper areas, and she felt the power of his hips and his thrust as he nudged himself closer and closer into the deepness that she desperately wanted to push him and hold him forevermore.

She had lost her discretion.

IV

The father of all the kingdom’s jewels was a proud lord, but despite his best efforts he had come to find himself fat, lazy and spoiled with the riches of his ambitions and the poorness of the reality those ambitions wrought. He no longer needed to fend for himself as ferociously as he had when he was a younger man, and though there was always some intrigue in the political arena, it had dried into something stale and expected.

Now the king lazed about his throne room watching the women he had bought and the women he had broken. He was especially fond of the one with big tits who cavorted nearby the mirrors, constantly refitting her golden brassiere so that it might cover the heaving giants. Another one that he was no less fond of had the ass of a goddess chiseled by the very Creator all men worshiped, but the lord was still not as licentious as his wandering eyes might suggest.

This was its own strange sort of purchase in which he commissioned the services of the many prostitutes whose sensibilities were so outside of the norm that they were not allowed in the normal bordellos that served citizens and soldiers. He watched them walk about their days in the small thongs of rope, many of their chests bare and exposed; each servant to a woman vivacious with youth and promise. Wrinkles could get women thrown out of his personal quarters as soon as sag, but that was not to say that the king was a pitiless man, for he hired these women because they helped him to think, and rewarded him for the thoughts they so inspired.

The king was under the impression that this was a humble and Christian affair that God himself would approve of. He did not parade them around his wife, after all, who spent her time on her own terms and only occasionally ushered him into the ill-kept private bedroom where they slept together for the sake of maintaining the figurehead of marriage, so that the kingdom would not be thought of as godless. He was a lord of very many things, and she only one among his treasure trove, but he respected her still despite the present misgivings of a father eyeing the affairs of beautiful women his daughter’s age.

Incest was common among some families, but not in his kingdom. He only admired the gorgeous prime of youth, longing for his own return to the heydays when his back was stronger, his wits were sharper and his cock did not need such cajoling to stir in his loins.

He kept these women around because they helped him to think, for a man of his age could not be as dynamic with his thinking until his cock was as hard as the eternal blood of youth which coursed through it. Arousal, the king had found, was better than any of the drugs his courtiers had offered him to help stimulate his political and military strategy. Some of this lord’s greatest accomplishments – and by extension, some of the most renowned reputations of his kingdom, had been devised while he was on top of a woman.

In the early years his wife had been that muse. Now the fire had died and he had returned to his throne room to seek some sparks with other people of other shapes. It was not that he had grown bored with his wife, although many men did. He had simply parted ways with her, lacking in acrimony or resentment. She knew what he did was his time. She had seen the women he hired for his contemplations. She did not care.

‘You there,’ he said in a tired voice, pointing to the busty woman by the mirrors. He gestured her over and returned to his seat when she began to dance just over his lap, teasing him to rise for her and touch against the supple bottoms of her hanging ass.

As always, the king watched it for the sake of sparking something – anything.

He told himself that he did this for the good of the women as much as for his own. Being born outside of royalty was a hard life for anyone, and to be welcomed into the chambers of a better class of people, be those people party to the king the king or the queen or even his horny daughter Crystal - it was a welcome thing to be delighted about. He had overheard many women giving thanks for the opportunity to frolic about his chambers until he bored of them, and then spent the rest of their hours comfortably nibbling on fine foods and sleeping on soft bedsheets that were much better than the rough dirt and hay the poorest had made for their mattresses.

He made a sound with his mouth. He reached to touch the dancing woman on his lap, gripping the firm shapeliness of her leg. He leaned forward to smell her, then to kiss her, and felt the faintest light of inspiration go off in his mind alongside the gentlest stirring of his cock.

She was smiling at him.

He felt that he did not need to smile back.

‘You,’ he called to the woman who most flattered her thong, gesturing her to approach his lap and gently pushing the buxom beauty off. ‘Enjoy each other,’ he ordered, and then leaned back into his seat as they began to kiss and grope bodies that most men would kill to see disrobed.

Peasants, he had found, had lost their inhibitions when they lost the money to pay for regular food, safety and even shelter from the occasional storms that ravaged the outside of the kingdom’s better fortifications. The civilized people who had been born into wealth thought it a horrible intellectual affront to pay another person for sex - although they all did it, and gluttonously, but the king was not so pretentious as some of his advisers. Despite his faith, he did not think sex was the dirty thing that scripture deemed it to be.

The king knew that it was a fair trade to give a handful of bread for a handful of a young woman’s breast, and he did not apologize for his behaviors. He did not speak with his own conscience nor the conscience of his wife, who knew of his exploits and did not care. She knew as well as he did that he loved the woman he had chosen to marry; he valued the unique lineage she passed on to his daughters, and he also valued her own ambitions. She did not care about the younger women he purchased because she had her own things to tend to, and that, the king believed, was the secret to a lasting marriage of two powerful people.

A woman began suckling another’s breasts. She leaned back her head, her long flowing hair bouncing with her tits, and she moaned in a performance of pleasure that didn’t have to be genuine to turn the lord’s cogs of thought. He felt himself alight with new angles with which to approach so many of the politics and strategies of his position. He felt himself seizing what he meant to be young again, and he even found himself wondering if he might request his wife later in the evening to bed her like the old days.

She was a queen above the lowlier wives of powerful men who simply did what they were told and had no interests for themselves other than to please their lord. His wife had made her world famous gardens from barren land. She had rejuvenated the soil with old irrigation treatments passed down from her family. She had taken to hiring the majority of the staff that worked within the kingdom today, having a better eye for character than the king – whose wandering eyes were distracted by a very many things, including the asses and tits of the passing women he often kept in his company. He had hired several thieves and saboteurs by the time his wife stepped in, explaining the situation to him and arguing for her authority over the hiring process because he was a man with a cock, and cocks did not think nearly as well as men believed they did.

He smiled now to remember.

The women before him moved together, breasts pressing against breasts, lips touching lips, and one drifted the slightest and most delicate of hands between the others legs to make her moan again in more authentic ways.

Suddenly it seemed that there were no troubles his kingdom might face that he could not solve – even the lately rebellion of his young daughter Crystal, who had undergone her second puberty at an older age than most, and so came to the gift with a different kind of contrary maturity that he had known would pose problems even before the problems of the marriage ceremony. She had always been somewhat individualistic, bucking against the trends of the kingdom and sometimes outright denying the responsibilities that she had to assume as a daughter from the lord’s family.

Come the day, he knew, Crystal would see things with a wider perspective. She would come to accept her place in this kingdom, and make whatever moves that were necessary to ensure its prosperity.

If the king could wish anything for his daughters and his sons, it would be the dream of finding a proper suitor that would be an equal match for them. In a manner of speaking he wished them to find someone as well suited to them as his own wife was to him, because he did not think comfort was helpful to the ambitions of powerful people. He could not even bring himself to truly resent Crystal for causing him this dilemma, since all dilemmas only sharpened the minds of those who solved it, and the lord of this kingdom had become uncomfortably aware of his own dulling wits retreating into the moors of stupidly, laziness and lust.

Sometimes these women were muses. Sometimes he simply fucked them, and nothing came of it.

What would my wife think of me if she saw me now? He wondered to himself.

He had not betrayed her entirely. Although he took the bodies of other women, his counsel remained hers alone. It was a matter of mind over body, because this king did not believe the body was worth more than the handful of bread that could pay for its control and submission. He did not believe there was anything holy in the lust that overcame all people when they were brought before the objects of their affections, and that was partly why he so carelessly married off his daughters for the sake of political gain. The intellect was what separated men from the beasts. Fucking was something the beasts quite enjoyed as well.

Women, he had found, would gladly give over their fleshly spoils for a chance to live inside of the highest kingdom walls, but they would not compromise their ideals for similar spoils. Even the two women before him who were busily fingering each other and licking deep inside the other’s mouth, the kisses wet and sloppy, flagrant so that their lord could observe – even these women would not readily tell him about their own families and lives outside of this employ.

They would spread themselves for him. They would shake for him and suck him wherever he wished them to, but they coveted their thinking minds just as he did.

He had quickly learned to cease inquiring with the whores around him about their life philosophies and ambitions. When he was a younger man he had mistaken women to have no ambition, not in the same way that men did, simply because he had so rarely heard a woman ever engaging in such conversations with a man. But he had grown older and wiser than that, losing his naiveté like the shedding skins of a snake. Now he knew that all women simply coveted their ideas and did not whore them out with the same flagrancy which they whored out their bosoms and juices – the swells of their body that could bend men over their knees until the most powerful regime was but a newborn suckling at his mother’s tit.

Indeed, if anything, it was men who could be the weaker sex. The king was faintly troubled by the implications that such men remained boys throughout their entire lives, but he did not let his troubles stop his ambitions, and so he remained seated on his throne of gold, his face resting on a single propped hand, his wandering eyes surveying the bodies before him, searching for someone to arouse his loins so that he might arouse his mind. He gestured for more women to join the two, making a veritable orgy at his feet that he might pry with his most perverse inclinations.

Good men, he believed, required the stimulations of a woman, just as a good woman required the threat of a powerful man.

These two things drove people to become their greatest selves, for every great person must be driven. Complacency was the death of talent. Once a person had enough money to eat and enough of a name to their family to ensure a lifetime of being tended to hand and foot by lesser people, it behooved that person to trap themselves in other ways so that they might maintain their wits even in the face of the lazy royalty that had toppled much better kings than he. This lord had not forgotten what happened to the first suitor his daughter Ruby had been sent off to before she poisoned herself, and in this memory he maintained his mantra like a creed against all the things that made people old in the mind as they aged in the body. Toil made the man, and women could be such toil, so he enjoyed these hardships before him as they danced and preened and masturbated in open view, spreading their legs and their peaches, slipping their fingers into themselves with softer gestures than any man had ever devised when roughly throttling his own cock.

The king licked his lips.

He enjoyed the youthful racing of his thoughts as they gathered together the past week’s events. He found new clarity and better perspectives than had been possible hours before, when he had been seated at a roundtable of men who prattled on about political things and amorphous philosophies.

Women had such grace!

Women had grace even when they were tending to themselves, and it was grace that kept his mind alert, inspiring new strategies to ensure that his family name lived on. The nude bodies before him were his muses, and his wife understood that just as much as he did. He protected his own marriage by never really speaking to these prostitutes under his employ. Mostly they had learned to obey his slightest gesture, and that was how he sat relatively motionless, as if hypnotized, surveying the ministrations with an eye for rewards of the flesh.

He watched a woman shaking her breasts into the face of a young educated man the king had hired to appraise him of the latest military innovations. The youngster was sharp when discussing political matters, but against the heat of a woman he seemed a bumbling idiot. The man was blushing furiously, as if dumbfounded by the rushing blood that went into his face almost as much as it went into his cock, lifting his pants and delighting the woman to go down on him with the tilting lope of a slender beast licking up her life water.