Claiming Crystal (2 page)

These were not wealth bred men.

These were not well bred men.

The out of place man was the exception in more ways than one, and she felt herself warm for him (in more ways than one).

She had variously noted in the years before that men were like horses, because she had noticed that the most beautiful horses in the stables were the wild ones the riders had found in the deeper forests and mountains. She had kept several ponies for herself when she was a girl, tending to their hooves and their manes, brushing their teeth and combing their hair and doting over the little horses the way a girl dotes over all her things, but their beauty had been delicate and pampered, easily blemished by a day in the rain or a poor night's sleep. The wild horses she had seen her suitors rope into the stables had been strong and hardy; their beauty was resilient to the weathers around them, for they had become beautiful in the open and the cold, the wild and the rough.

This man, she suspected, was another wild horse. She saw it in the way his black hair danced with the breeze, dark against the firelight and playing shadows across the angles of his face, which did not flinch from the fires the way the noble born did as they gestured for their subjects to fan them and cool them, or conversely warm them with blankets and sentiments if their temperature or temperament was too cold. Most of the suitors were fretting men. She knew this because she had been raised among fretting men, and she knew this man was apart from that because his beauty stood against the wind and the fire and the dark and the light like a thing apart, a new element that could be colored but never conquered, and then she had to set herself against smiling when she remembered the way the wild horses would leap the fences, refusing the stables their confines.

She would remember this man. She would ask for him in the morning, when the head servant of the house would knock on her door and ask for her to choose.

This was a ceremony that women in Crystal's family underwent each generation. Crystal was a woman of lineage, and the women of this particular lineage underwent two adolescents courtesy of two unique puberties that ripened her body; once in the ways of other mature women, and then again, a second time, in ways that most women were not ripened.

The first growing was common to every woman around the age of puberty, and thus the first was known to all, and it did not have the kind of extravagant ceremony that presently showed itself before Crystal tonight. Girls bloomed into women and women of age were married off to men of age, and it was the proper rite throughout the land owed some livestock and presents and contractual unions of marriage, but little else. This puberty was common, and it suited commoners.

Crystal, on the other hand, was a jewel. She was uncommon. In a word, she was a royalt
y of womanhood. The fervor of her first bleeding and maturity had died down after the discovery of this lineage. While most women were married off as soon as they reached womanhood, Crystal's arrangements had been halted in preparation for this second puberty that took place roughly a decade after the first, heralding in a new kind of maturity.

Crystal's mother, it was said, would live well into her hundreds. Crystal herself was expected to look young and prime for the better part of sixty years, as if this second puberty was a kind of rejuvenation that revivified the tightness and plumpness of her prized parts.

Now Crystal nodded to the sightseers who marveled at her body, and that was the only acknowledgement she needed to give them even though there were very many sightseers who marveled at the majesty before them. Tonight she would be held above common people, not for her royalty of her name but for the royalty of her body. Tonight she became a very special kind of whore, and she would not be called after such vulgarities, but praised with titles of wife and mother and queen and goddess. They all knew who she was, what she was, and they desired her like the hungry people they had been told to be, and she, the sitting statue of meat that made wanting animals out of both men and women.

Every woman in Crystal's lineage had a second awakening that ripened her body and her senses in different ways than the rest, and tonight was the celebration of her the second puberty, a growing unique to her bloodline, in which her body would bloom in further ways that tendered the bodies of these unique women into prized wives for the rich men of this land. The breasts would not always grow and the fine hips and thighs would not always become more firm and voluptuous, because this second puberty did not temper the growths of the first, and its work was far more beautiful than a simple livening of such objectifications.

This second puberty kept its own special sphere in the temple of a woman's body.

She could already begin to feel it itching deep inside of her.

Crystal had been told many stories about this final entrance into adulthood by her birth mother, her sisters and several of her cousins (although her cousins bloodlines had been diluted, and not all of them awoke this second time). She had already begun to feel her body tingle with the readiness of a bud in its season, but she was not nervous. She was ready. She had spent the last five years enjoying herself with the male servants, and on occasion an adventurous female, and she had ridden the horses of the stables and walked the gardens built around the kingdom like moats of rainbow flowers that kept attackers at bay for the calming tranquility of natural beauty.

Yet Crystal scarcely paid attention to the many suitors as they made their individual presentations for her, and she was strangely relieved when the wild man she had been watching out of the corner of her eyes declined to perform and simply remained in his place, watching her with an intensity that was different than the boorish expectancy of the others.

Yes, she would remember that man.

She would ask for him in the morning, and she would spend the night before asking for him in private and intimate ways.

The ceremony itself lasted for hours, and by the end of it Crystal was far too tired for the excitements of the occasion. She had watched so many rituals of presentation and lectures about the wealth of this man and the spoils of that man, promises and gifts and keepsakes and foods, and she was positively bored of the entire charade and eager for something plainer to stand out amidst the foolish extravagance of people who simply wanted to have their way with her. Was a woman's body really for such divine spoils, or was it better suited for the wild ecstasies of the wild horses that so many men reminded her of?

She would consider that as she considered the only man who caught her attentions. Throughout the entire ceremony he had not given her a single gift. He had simply remained seated at his table and ate his food and drank his drinks. She very nearly laughed when she realized that he had not actually prepared the banquet for her, but for himself, and made absolutely no gestur
e to share the food with her or others.

It was, after all, a rather long ceremony full of rather dull people. Once or twice she thought she saw him smirking in the firelight – a gentle expression that contrasted beautifully with the hard stoicism of his face.

A flash of white teeth amongst the chewing gobs of yellow wealth.

Strong and well-lived hands peeling and picking amongst the small and dainty manicures of the highest class.

His shoes were cast off shoes, his clothes were plain and simply draped over his strong frame, and she watched out of a growing corner of her eyes until she caught herself staring fully at the man. That had not been polite. Others had noticed her sightline and followed it to the rogue, and then they had stormed over to his table and begun lecturing him about his conduct, falsely assuming she was staring at him for all the wrong reasons instead of gawking at him like a little girl.

Indeed, she would remember this man. She held the picture of him throughout the ceremonies and then held it closer to her heart as she was escorted away from the celebrations only a few hours before the dawn would wake the daily workings of the more common people. She did not approach him tonight. She did not ask his name, either, knowing that a simple description of him would suit to track down his identity. As the other suitors and servants filed out of the celebration area she noticed them casting scowls and frowns the wild man's way. They would not forget him either, she thought, and that was an interesting thing to note.

A man who stood out from the crowd was not necessarily worth her time, but he was always worth her curiosity, and curiosity, Crystal had found, was a hard thing to muster when you lived as royalty in a place of spoils.

She returned into her quarters that were her confines, and there she laid down to bed and remembered the picture of that man in more intimate ways. She did not feel sore like she had during her first puberty, but rather vivacious, excited, and she spent several more hours cooling those loin fires. By the time she had finished with herself the faintest light was beginning to raise its eye, the staring sun eager to trespass into the eroticism of her bedsheets, and then she finally laid her head to rest and put her thoughts to rest as well.

She fell asleep instantly. The moment her head laid to pillow her mind drifted away into dream, but a strange and muted sort of dreaming that was uncharacteristic of her up to this point. The dreams, she would after realize, came from the awakening of her second puberty, and they were far removed from pubescent nights as a girl and young woman that had been filled with a vivid sort of dreaming whisking her away through snow-capped mountaintops and deep, wet, soiled forests. She had dreamed adventures with her finally, reunions with her birth mother, and different versions of her life that saw her fighting the wars side by side with the men, or working in stables as a simple farm girl with a crush on the boy next door.

But now it was a different experience. There was no bleeding, none at all, but a sensation of such warmth and wet
ness that her sleeping body seemed to both experience and make bouts of hot pools and hot flashes of scented sweats that dampened her skin with the aromas of field flowers. She had seen the older maid mothers suffer their hot flashes, but this was not a suffering thing; it was warm, explosive and sweet, like an arousal. She dreamed of the man eventually, as if led to him by the arousals of these sensations, and that was when the muteness of her dreaming erupted into sensitivities of ecstasy that were their own blooming and flowering, and another stroke of hot flashes and sweat slicked her body and matted her sheets with the impression of her turning, rolling sleep.

She dampened her pillow with joyful tears and dampened her sheets with ecstasies of a lower kind, dripping in the many ways that her body could pleasurably do so. By the time she woke up she was awash in the sweat of the night's niceties. The quality of the sheets had a new texture to it, and the smell of her body and her sweat and the faint aroma of the room mixed together into an incredible sensatio
n that titillated her to no end. Her whole bed was damp, and it smelled of rich watered soil. Her nether regions were damp as well, ripe and swelled with excitement, but they did not smell as those regions smelled in more common women. Her vagina had become a peach, and the juice smelled just as fragrant, promising to taste just as sweet.

She had surely awoken into her second puberty. This was its christening.

She breathed in deeply, and it was even more fragrant than the gardens her mother tended. She touched her necklaces, and they were the only chilly things that remained in the misty sauna of her morning bedroom. Her hair was matted and moist, as if she had bathed during the night. Her body felt primed for something, and although she did not know what that something was, she ventured a guess and guessed right when the tingling of her sex awoke into the horny compulsion of a dog in heat.

She left her room to wash herself in the shower stall, stealing there as quietly as she could, walking on
tiptoes and hoping desperately to avoid the attentions of the guards and servants until she aired out her room of the fragrance and the beauty. She did not want to deal with their admiration this morning. The new sensations that rippled up and down her body made her curiously selfish, as if she wanted to covet this new experience.

She very nearly lost her breath the moment the warm water fell against her skin and tingled her entire being, from her feet up her spine and then settling down across her hair like a warm message, a wave of heat and sprinkling and sensation that was so intense she buckled her legs and soon found herself sitting on the floor of the shower in a rapture better suited to sex and cake than cleaning in a stall. This, she knew, was a sign of the second puberty. It had come as it had been scheduled to come, and now she would be a treasure of the kingdom – greater than any crystal and any precious metal.

Crystal put her hands to her face, intent on wiping clean the dulled expression of awe off her face like a stain, but even the experience of touching her own face came alive in such a sudden and wild way that she could not tame it. She felt her face for the first time in a new way, experiencing the soft lay of sunless white flesh, the suppleness of her cheeks and the pouting swell of her lips. She felt the beautiful angles and textures, and she began to examine herself the way she had examined each new animal and picturesque landscape when she had been a girl, new to the world and still learning all of the senses and sensations that came to her in time, detailing her adolescence with adult articulations. Crystal next slid her hands into her wet hair and felt the pressures of the prodding, prying fingers, the soft tickling pull of parting hair, and the intermixing bathe of warm showering water as it slicked both fingers, head and hair into an experience of such unexpected intensity that she sat on the stall parting her hair until the morning light truly moved across the sky outside her window.