Claiming Crystal (16 page)

‘I wish to have a private meeting with them,’ the mother instructed. ‘Do you understand?’

The servants nodded. They knew better than to go against her word.

The last person who thought to betray her by selling information to one of the lord’s scribes had been exiled. ‘This is for the sake of my daughter,’ the mother punctuated – an added threat in case her messengers did not live up to their prior reputation.

****

The king was, unsurprisingly, the last one to know about his daughter’s plans. By the time he heard what she intended to do he was on the precipice of his own sort of panic, in which he paced around his throne room barely paying attention to the nude bodies that moved for his pleasure, reaching out to touch him, yearning to be of service. He slapped away their hands. He slapped away their breasts and he slapped away their butts.

He wanted to be left alone, for once.

He had recently discovered a debt within the kingdom’s bank, and a lack of
well-trained soldiers thanks to the decade of peace they had seen since conquering their last enemy and entering into a period of securing regimes with the daughters of his wife’s special bloodline. His advisors had been hiding the information from him, assured that they would find some way to solve these problems before anyone needed to bring it to the attention of the lord. They feared his wrath as anyone with a head on their shoulders feared his wrath, but in their fears they had been stopped from telling the only person with the knowledge to actually solve the turning tides of his family fortune.

Later that night he would reflect back on this with some humor, reading the ironies deep underneath the situation that made his entire evening seem an orchestration of some playful demon who laughed and danced as people stomped about in the futility of their own machinations. He very nearly brought himself to the brink of a panic attack thinking about all of the troubles he had to sort out, and the fact that he was not actually able to act until his damned daughter made her choice for suitor. It seemed wholly unfair to this lazy, spoiled man of later years.

He ordered several drinks and calmed himself with a fat chicken one of his men had killed for trespassing into his wife’s gardens. The animals were not allowed to pick through the careful arrangements of flowers, and while the more expensive stallions and livestock could be forgiven, chickens cost little more than a slave, and tasted much better.

By the time news of Crystal’s plotting reached him, he was chewing on a mouthful
of meat and wine and nearly choked in surprise. He exclaimed to hear the news – a riotous, booming exclamation, his voice like a roar that made every single messenger, scribe, and advisor within the area jump. Several platters of grapes and onions were spilled as every person with the slightest wit became afraid for their lives. The wrath of a king did not serve the messenger well, and although his messengers had already retreated several paces so the king could not strike them without moving from his seat, their breath had become bated, their expressions still, stoic, waiting for the strike and frozen in fear when no strike came.

Their lord was not known for his patience.

The new men he employed had different impressions of him when they would observe their lord thoughtfully watching two women rubbing their peaches together to slick their thighs and arouse his intellectual potency, but the king who sat in his throne room was an altogether different and more quiet man than the king who stormed about the castle demanding that everything be in its proper place for a variety of reasons both sensible and petulant. If truly this news struck him the wrong way, he would not return with a simple strike of his fist, but the strike of a sword or executor.

Even the women had silently retreated to the other side of the room. They continued their spastic sexuality, but the smarter ones were watching their lord like rabbits who sensed disturbing movements in the grass.

Underneath the king and queen of this kingdom was an intricate web of sub-politics that went on between the head house servants, the maid mothers, the lower maids and servants, the guards, and other menial workers who were employed to do certain duties, and the information the queen had uncovered about Crystal had not been long for secrecy. One man had told another man, who told another man, who told another man, and eventually one man who spied for the king overhead and made haste with the message that the king’s awakened daughter had planned to reconcile the controversies of her wedding with a lunatic gambit.

The king saved his kingdom by selling his daughter to a single man, but Crystal had planned a twist on that old rite. Crystal’s ambitions had been for larger things, and just like Rafael, she had seen something in reach and so extended her hand to grasp it firmly.

‘My lord?’ one of the messengers ventured.

It was not until the king’s roaring voice became a thing of uncontrollable laughter that anybody had the faintest idea how humorous the news had struck him. He held his sides and very nearly doubled over laughing, such was his relief, and now even the women that he paid to ignore such changes in atmosphere began to stop their dancing, stopping their rubbing and gyrating if only to look towards their lord with curiosity, concern and worry. He was not a man with much of a sense for humor. This was new behavior, and newness was dangerous when dealing with the whims of the royal class.

No one present in the throne room had ever seen the man act this way before; the majority of them had never even heard his laughter, and they feared this ushered in a new era of some madness that would possess him to behead them all and then decorate his new throne room with stakes of their mutilated bodies - such things had happened between ill-tempered kings and their servant class before.

‘My dear, foolish daughter!’ he exclaimed, gasping for breath and red in the face with a jolliness that offset the impressions everyone in the room had of the man.

Crystal had dared something even he would not have dared, even in his younger days of hell raising and mischief making.

****

Exactly how daring Crystal’s plan was remained to be seen, since the entirety of its wager rested on her ability to possess people as jewels were supposed to possess people. It came out of no higher aspirations that would make her father think of his own political plans, nor out of the same habits which drove her mother to improve her situation – Crystal’s decision was moved by her own independent desires, awakened just days before and already trying to grow beyond the ceiling of prior limitations.

As with the lust that Rafael could not quench – so too ideas that could not be put out, no matter the doubts which washed them like water to douse fires. Crystal was not naïve in her offerings, and she did not expect people to bend to her will simply because she had her mother’s lineage. There was more to owning a person, and declaring that person’s future, than simply ordering them. Crystal remained confident in her ability to produce whatever her suitors wished to have to convince them to enter into a bargain that offended their pride upon the altar their kingdom’s political power.

It was their decision, in truth. Would they choose to the benefit of their dynasty, or the benefit of their egos?

‘Are you sure about this?’ Rafael asked.

Crystal did not answer him. She did not deem his doubt worthy of acknowledgement.

She had decided that she would not accept the union of a single suitor, which was the tradition. By count, her father had arranged half a dozen potential suitors to try and win her favor with presentations of their riches, but his ambitions had been limited by the scope of the ritual that dictated she only take a single man. Marriages between many parties was not unheard of; several local noblemen had publicly taken three wives for themselves, and the queen who had come to present herself to Crystal as the only female willing to bend at the knee and the dress to ensure her possession of her jewelry had made her various affairs with multiple men. Marriage allowed this flexibility, but how sure would it stand against the inflexibility of ceremony?

Perhaps she had younger sisters that she did not know about. Perhaps somewhere in this kingdom held a girl named Jasmine, another named Diamond, and maybe several of the suitors who did not win Crystal’s favor would be promised the favor of a younger daughter when she reached her second puberty. Crystal did not know the extent of the world around her, but she gambled on what limited knowledge she did have, hoping it was pointed enough to deflate the egos that surrounded the rite of her symbol passage into another man’s hands.

Crystal had proposed that she accept the unions of every man who had personally presented to her, thereby joining her possession with a total of six other people of power in order to create an enormous cooperative that would ensure the future dynasty of every member. As if that was not ambitious enough, Crystal had also decided that she would not be subservient to her suitors, but they to her, for what man did not secretly want to gamble with his very will?

These were daring people, after all. They had traveled many days and nights just to get a chance to present before her. They were immodest, uninhibited, cock-sure, and rigid with their expectations of entitlement.

‘
If this goes sour,’ Rafael began jokingly, ‘you should consider marrying whatever man brought you all of these fruit baskets.’

The first suitor she sent for was Victor Lamous. She could still remember the massages he had made with the rich seeds of his healthiest people, but now would not be a time for his presentations. Now was the time for her presentations, and she waited impatiently with Rafael for Lamous to show himself, reciting the information she had learned about him thus far in her mind and playing out the situation in her mind’s eye. Rafael, it turned out, had been present when the suitors made their grand introductions to her family and maid mothers hours before Crystal even left her quarters; he had learned about their countries, their problems, and the political dilemmas they wished to solve by earning the worthy hand of this kingdom’s jewel.

Crystal had quickly commissioned him to inform her about the details of each suitor’s kingdom. She wished to take into account their political status in her decision-making – a note that surely would please her father. To be so tactful in quickly winning the suitors over to her side would undoubtedly remind him of his own wife.

Rafael had explained in intricate detail the standings of each suitor; what they offered, and what they hoped to gain. After learning this, Crystal had devised her plan with numerous incentives for each suitor that might sweeten the proposal despite the harm it would do to their egos.

Victor Lamous came with an entourage of courtiers who squabbled about him like hens. At first he seemed pleased to be greeting her at this unexpected hour, but the moment he saw Rafael in the room with her he became suspicious. Unlike Bashir, Lamous had not been one for watching.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he asked.

She presented her proposal quickly, anticipating his reaction and several steps ahead of him when his face made a scowl and he turned to storm out of the room, beyond offended, assuring her that her father would hear about this ridiculous plan she had hatched from the foul eggs of her poison ovaries. ‘You are a disgrace to your name!’ he spat. ‘You are…’

But then Crystal simply reached out to touch the man on the shoulder, and he stopped in his tracks. He glared back at her, but he did not remove her hand from him. The touch was far too tantalizing for such force.

‘If you accede to this,’ Crystal told him, ‘I will be indebted to you. You will not own me solely, but I will own you, and I am kind to the things that I own.’

‘You think a woman can own a man?’ Lamous asked, as if such a question was far too stupid to even require an answer.

‘I do.’

‘And how do you intend to own me?’

Crystal stepped forward, closing the distance between them, and began to kiss him slowly, sensually, allowing her tongue to slip out from between her lips to touch him with wet exclamations of each full-lipped smooch. She nibbled one of his ears, reaching down to his pants, and then she touched her lips to his ear and whispered her proposal once again.

‘You have not seen why I am so treasured in this land,’ Crystal said breathlessly. ‘You have not seen what women of my lineage can offer to men like you. Once you know, you will beg me to own you if only to taste me again.’

When she pulled away she noted that the man still looked doubtful, but there seemed to be new room in his doubt for being convinced.

‘I am from a powerful kingdom,’ he insisted, ‘and I do not share my wife with other men from other countries. You do not understand the politics, woman. Arrangements like this simply aren’t done.’

‘They will be done for me,’ Crystal promised, and then she took him by the sleeve of his shirt, led him to her bed and showed him the substance behind her promising words in a flurry of bedsheets and naked bodies rubbing to together to start their own fires.

****

The second suitor she sent for entered into the room with more immediate caution than Lamous had ever displayed in her presence. The Dilmuth son was not as trusting, and looked to Crystal with a faint expression of betrayal, as if she had led him into the lion’s jaws. He had expected her late night audience to be postponed to the following morning, when he had planned his second presentation. Evidently, the Dilmuth son was not fond of spontaneous things.