Claiming Crystal (7 page)

Crystal had not spoken about her life with her servants and maids, and certainly did not plan on doing so with her suitors, but that was both because she did not consider them people used to listening and also because she did not consider her life a story worth telling. She had been born and she had been raised, but she had not become an adult, nor an individual, merely an ornament of the kingdom, and what ornament spoke of itself with the long soliloquies of a performer who believed anybody cared about the experience of a simple crystal jewel?

‘
You are being too hard on yourself,’ the queen told her when she heard the undertones in Crystal's voice, reaching across the table to pat the woman on her thigh. ‘You may not be worthy of the great stories of our time, but who is? You are a slave to your family just as I am a slave to my ambition. We all live in the shadow of another, and we will worship something that will not care to worship us back. Does that make sense to you, girl?’

This time it was Crystal's turn to leave a suitor with silence. By then the conversation had ended and the arousal of the meal had taken their course – Crystal and the queen found each other, and began to explore and enjoy the differences in a woman's body with the relief of two likeminded ladies who had had enough of men for a time. They did not begin their lovemaking with the reckless passion of the men, overturning the table, smashing dishes, throwing one another atop the furniture and rutting their way into ecstasy, but they moved slower, surer, having known their own bodies since birth and understanding its nuances with the assuredness of all sexes who pleasured their own

Crystal was not so much taken with the woman as she was taken with the excitement, for the queen was scarcely older than she was, yet seemed infinitely wiser. ‘I have had many people,’ the queen said in a low and throaty voice, parting Crystal's legs to begin working a far more erotic area. ‘I have made love to the most prim girls you would ever meet, and they have broken for me. You, too, will break for me. You will enjoy it.’

Before Crystal could begin to defend her position and her honor the queen took both with one swift kiss to her vagina, the lips parting the folds, the queen's tongue entering into regions whose sensitivities had become engorged on the awakening of a lover's true sensibilities. She felt the climax coming, much too quickly, and was both alarmed and relieved when the queen seemed to sense the climax as well and gently worked her off it before beginning anew, climbing anew to that perfect peak, and then once more slowly letting Crystal down off the highest ground of ejaculatory lovemaking.

The queen was playing with her, Crystal realized, but in the heat of these actions she did not care to be offended by the disrespect of the game. She delighted it in, and whether that was the food she had eaten or the ecstasy of her sensation, Crystal did not care, and would not split hairs over when they finished, sweating and tired and happy, laid across each other like two sisters who had introduced themselves to each other completely and were now wholly comfortable in ways both vulnerable and voyeuristic.

‘
You are lovely, aren't you? The queen asked, smiling to herself, and Crystal hadn't the breath to respond. ‘I should let you know that I don't care about the outcome of your ceremony,’ the queen added hastily. ‘I came because I knew your family would welcome me, having seen what I have accomplished, and being people who respect the worth of another. I only came to enjoy you, Crystal. I have heard many things about your pleasures. I would delight in all of them,’ and then the queen came to her again, more eager than before, parting and tickling, prickling and teething, and kissing what she had been bitten too hard. ‘I'm a naughtier woman than you should be used to,’ the queen said, almost to herself, and then returned to the lower regions where her mouth could be felt more freely and heatedly.

****

It was a day to remember, if the pall of arrangement which hung over each and every suitor did not spoil the occasions. Crystal quickly realized for herself that there would be no normal suitors to celebrate the occasion, and the final one she saw that day unsettled her to no ends. There was a certain level of strangeness that did not charm her, rather made her guarded, and this was an unfortunate example of that.

He was striding down the halls towards her bedroom when she saw him. She mistook him firstly for her father, with the same royal airs and the same age graying his hair and making his face sag with the frown of someone who had to do many things he did not want to do, and decided that he must in order to ensure his rank. Crystal then mistook him to be the father of one of the suitors. It did not occur to her until that he was a suitor himself until she saw the old grin of his rotted teeth.

The old man was one of the arrangements her family had handpicked for this day, officiated to be her husband even though he was more than likely three times her age. Images of the horrid marriages she had seen other lesser girls auctioned off to when they reached their first puberty flashed across her mind's eye, and she found herself turning away from him on feet she could scarcely feel, hurrying back into her room, closing and then locking the door.

When he later knocked and begged entry, she refused him, excusing her absence with
an excuse of illness from the banquet the queen had prepared for her. Eventually the old man left, grumbling something about an old whore and her stew, and then Crystal collapsed upon her bed and fell away, not into dreams but memories.

She quite suddenly felt claustrophobic with the trappings of someone who lived within orchestra
tions that were bigger than they were. She had tried to run away when she was a little girl, and then once more before her second awakening, but she had not gotten far. These things that were bigger than her saw farther than her, and moved faster than her, and they would capture her if she dared to leave their confines without their permission. She was trapped in the same way of prisoners, although she was told that she was free, and although she had gotten used to her trapping, and sardonic with the realities of a noble borne life, she occasionally found herself faced with humbling moments like these, when the excuses she told herself became quiet little voices, scared and child-like, that did not convince but actually made her despair for her future.

It was a good thing to be fed and watched over and tended to, but when one was fed and watched over that meant that one was owned, and when one was owned that meant that one's actions were not their own to decide. The life of a peasant, without food and without care, was horrid for its ruthlessness, but also freeing in that carelessness which let children go wherever they chose it, for the world did not care for them the way the world of this kingdom seemed to care for Crystal. It was a difficult royalty to complain about, for Crystal had heard stories about the famines and murders that plagued the poorer class every day of their wretched lives, but misery was not a thing for class – it was a universal balance that gave people without the freedom to have anything, and gave people with everything the confines of retaining that wealth at all costs.

The relief she had experienced when she first realized that she would not be arranged to any suitor after her first puberty had been a turning point in Crystal's life. The notion of the arrangement had very nearly killed her, not physically but spiritually, and now that low feeling was rising up again from the pits of her stomach where unpleasant things stewed away like the cauldrons of witches who thought to cast spells of horrors and fears and suspicions. She had to practically bite her lips to keep herself from imagining the many orchestrations she would fall into if she arranged herself to another noble, entering into their schemes and plans, finding yet another confine in yet another kingdom, where she could have her fun with her servants but otherwise remain behind the bars of very ornate doors, watched by trained guards and instructed to live a very particular life for a very particular reason.

Crystal was a jewel, a symbol of worth, as all noble people were, and maintaining that symbol took the discipline of a passionless person. It was no longer so many of the high
born took the poor and peasant for their secret mates, enjoying their hungry passions, and taking pleasure in the way that their arousals starved the same ways as their bellies. For noble people who had always been fed and tended to, the hungry passions of love were distant things that could not be inflamed by two people who ate with the same silver spoons.

Even the gentle man who had his very manhood removed showed signs of his noble breeding, and it was like a poison sapping the live out of these people until they became nothing more than machinations doing what they ought to at the cost of nothing, in order to gain wealth that was nothing, so that they might become someone who was nothing. It was enough to stir a woman into a restless night's sleep, but luckily the food the queen had prepared her made Crystal tired before the stroke of midnight, and she finally dropped away from her thoughts and entered into a distant sort of dreaming where many faceless people passed before her, presenting themselves like peacocks, displaying their feathers and doing their dances of mating, but perpetually faceless, without characteristics that made them human, and when she awoke in the morning she felt the slightest sensation of crawling skin on the back of her neck.

Perhaps it was the morning draught.

Perhaps not.

But whatever chill had overcome her upon waking also informed her of the day’s events, for no sooner had she crept to her door and placed a single ear against its wood than another ominous pall made its cloud known to her.

Eavesdropping was something she always did in the early morning hours, hoping to catch the conversation of the guards outside and learn what was in store for herself or her kingdom's many subjects, for she had variously caught word of hangings, banishments and royal presentations that were sought to impress messengers and emissaries in the months before her coronation ceremony for the arranged marriages. She was never told directly about any of the plans her family had for the kingdom outside of her, and the slit underneath the door to her bedroom was in many ways the only small window she had into the lives of others outside of her. As it happened, these men were speaking about the rogue wild man she had bedded out in the open stables before the maid mothers could talk any sense into her. Initially she mistook the tones in their voice to be the soft lilts of jealousy or envy, but the longer they spoke their muffled gossip the more she realized they seemed outright nervous about the subject of conversation.

She pressed her head against the length of the door alongside her single ear. She went very still and very quiet, so that her breathing would not interrupt. She even held her heartbeat, as she had been trained to do by the many physicians who came to see her, and the healers who taught her meditation and other techniques to keep her temperament cool for the many challenges that a woman named after a jewel would face in her lifetime.

‘
...they say he was...’

‘
...they left him right where...’

‘
...no good ruffian...’

Crystal was about to stop her eavesdropping, assured she was only listening to the bickering of two men who were talking just loudly enough so that one of the house servants might hear and relay their disapproval favorably to her family, so that they might win favor with the lord for criticizing the rogue he also did not approve of, when she heard mention of the dungeons that lay underneath the kingdom's ground, and felt that familiar rise of trapped dread cage not only her gut, but her heart as well. It seemed that her father had put the man in the stockades with the other crooks, thieves
, and murderers.

‘
...deserved as much for what he did...’

When Crystal finally did pull away it was a mercy for herself; pity for the woman who was owned, and who was prevented her coveting if that coveting was not approved by the owners nor their committee. Her choices were not hers, and when she forgot that simple rule of slavery life she was reminded in the most brutal terms imaginable.

****

No one came to see her for the rest of that day. The seclusion was a relief, although Crystal was not young enough to make the relief for reprieve. Her family had surely arranged more suitors than the four oddities that had already showed themselves, and lacking that, the four suitors she had already met probably had more things to show her yet.

It was a blessing to be left by herself, for whatever little time she knew that she had. She teased her thoughts, waiting to see what might surface, and was somewhat dismayed to find images of the roguish wild man rising when other thoughts could only sink. It was not that she feared for him in the dungeons of this kingdom – a man such as that probably had seen his fair share of prisons, and handled their torments with the same good cheer with which he had handled the lecturing of her father the day before. She was simply preoccupied.

The image of the wild man locked away called to her.

By midafternoon she summoned some guards and asked to be taken to the dungeon. Knowing that this request would make the men suspicious of her true intentions, Crystal had a good excuse readymade to assuage their worries. ‘I have overheard that the criminal who stole into my ceremony is locked away there,’ she admitted. ‘I wish to see him and renounce his advances. I also wish to see what happens to fools who act in ways they are not supposed to act.’

One of her maid mothers would not have bought the story, but the guards were all too easy to sweet talk.
‘I'm glad you have finally come to your senses,’ one of them said, as though he was personally exasperated by her rebellious spirit.