Augustus took a swig and then passed it to me. It tasted like sweet wine, sort of…but not like anything we had back home.
The High Cleric sprinkled the remainder of the white wine on the sheets and chanted blessings for a fruitful marriage.
The ladies looked at the bed and then at me, with soft excited laughter. I turned absolutely crimson.
Just as I wondered if it would ever end, the court began to leave the room.
“Take good care of her, brother,” Josef said. “She looks like a newborn kitten.”
“I do not!” I said in a whisper. “But—but this is—“
“Shh. Don’t get yourself in trouble.”
“Of course I’ll take good care of her,” Augustus said.
The double doors of the bedchamber shut.
For the first time, we were all alone together.
“Finally,” he said softly, his hands grazing the bare skin of my arms, raising every little hair to attention, “You are mine.”
Chapter Six
Rose
“Tonight, I will master every inch of you,” he said. “And you will probably feel the urge to beg me to stop, but you won’t, will you?”
I had no answer for that. I was trembling and terrified.
“Can I…pray first?”
“Pray?” He looked perplexed. “We have already been blessed by the High Cleric.”
My eyes welled with tears. Suddenly I was so frightened and overwhelmed that I couldn’t hold back.
“Rose, what is it?” He wiped the tears with the back of his hand only for more to take their place. “It’s been too much today, hasn’t it? We’ll go slow. Surrender all your worries to me.”
“What—will you do to me?”
“Do you not know what sex is?”
“S—sort of. I know you’ll— I mean, I’ve seen animals—” I choked back a sob and then whispered, “My friend Caroline told me that I would suffer greatly and that I should…pray.”
His eyes widened slightly. “Your friend was recently married?”
“Just before me. I’m sorry, my lord. I swore to—let you master me. I know I shouldn’t cry.”
“No,” he said. “Don’t cry. I have heard this about humans…that many human men are taught to simply fuck their wives without much thought for them. Or perhaps he doesn’t care much for your unfortunate friend but feels pressure to produce heirs. Either way, I assure you…all faery men know the importance of seduction and pleasure. It is my responsibility as your husband to make sure you everything that is done to you brings you exquisite satisfaction. Let’s see here…”
He moved behind me, with a studious air at first, before he drew me close to his warmth, and lifted the hem of my chemise, his hand seeking the space between my legs. An intense waves of shame and desire swept over me as his fingers dipped into me and stroked my folds, brushing across a spot of such particularly intense feeling that my body jerked against him. “Oh!”
“That is the little bud of your desire,” he said, continuing to caress me there as warm waves coursed over me. “Although there are many parts of you that will bring pleasure, I will be getting particularly acquainted with this little bit of you. Now you see why we had to remove your hair there. Nothing should stand between my hand and this spot.”
This was the place that throbbed when I imagined handsome men whisking me away into a more exciting life, but I had never know it could explode with such feeling as his hand carefully worked up and down.
“You’ll find that everything else becomes more pleasurable once you’ve been stimulated here. So when I fuck you—as I soon will—you’ll be quite eager for it.”
The more he touched me there, the more I began to feel as if I needed that touch, so I could almost believe him.
His other hand tugged at the strings of my corset. “I believe you are more than ready to be set free of this thing.”
“Yes…please, my lord.”
“You don’t have to call me that,” he said. “Just Augustus.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was proper of you. But I prefer to allow you a little informality…in certain ways. Where I can.”
One of his hands slowly worked the knots of the laces free while the other kept stroking my slit, the chemise bunched around his hand. My breath caught desperately around the tight boning of the corset. He couldn’t get it off me fast enough. In fact, he seemed to go very slowly.
“After my father died, my grandfather was somewhat neglectful of children,” he said. “So I was older than I should have been when he sat me down and told me that someday I would have a queen, and what I would have to do to my queen.”
“Oh…?”
“I thought it might be a hard job,” he said. “I have grown up playing with my lady cousins. I couldn’t imagine taking them into the bed chamber and mastering them this way. I wondered how I could possibly be convincing. Am I convincing, Rose?”
“My goodness, very convincing,” I gasped.
“But when I saw you…my heart seemed to know from the start that you were mine. I never thought I would enjoy this so very much.”
“I don’t believe that you ever thought you wouldn’t enjoy it…”
“That is true,” he said. “History was rewritten the moment I laid eyes on you. I was no longer nervous. I always wanted you this way.”
Julia said he had never paid attention to any woman before me. My mind wanted to resist my position, but the heart of it, the surrender to him…I wanted that. I wanted to know I was the only woman he had ever wanted to possess and suddenly I felt a genuine desire to live up to my role. “Augustus…”
“Things we wait so long for don’t often live up to the promise so well.” He peeled the corset away from my skin, and I sighed deeply as I could finally breathe again. It felt like my skin had been sealed away in a crypt for a hundred years. When his hands stroked my ribs, it seemed to put the life back into me. It wasn’t just as if no man had ever touched me like this, it felt like nothing had ever touched me before.
“Your skin is so beautiful,” he said. “So clear that I’m afraid I might see right through it to your beating heart.”
He drew my chemise off. I stiffened a little when I first realized what he was doing, before I told myself to obey. I did have little purple bruises where the corset had pressed into me all day.
He touched them lightly. “What is this from?”
“From wearing the grand corps all day.”
“What—from this?” He glared at the corset which was shed onto the floor like some sea creature’s shimmering shell, diamonds caught by the candlelight. “From your clothes?”
“Yes…Julia, the—the Duchess of Poligari, she told me that would probably happen, but that you might have some ointment for it?”
“Yes. Some healing balm should take care of that.” He opened a drawer of one of the elaborate pieces of furniture and left me standing there, naked and shivering slightly, with the cuffs around my wrists and ankles and the silk cords dangling onto the ground. I watched his back as he rummaged through a few medicines, a linen undershirt hanging off his broad shoulders, half tucked into breeches. Anyway, the linen was thin enough that I could see the outline of his body taper from strong arms to lean waist, breeches and stockings hugging every inch of his nicely formed legs. He had stepped out of his wedding shoes, and something about the elaborate shoes toppled carelessly onto their sides made me smile. It was like looking behind the curtain of a play.
If our lives are a play, it is exactly that.
He looked at the bottle, and then at my pale body, shivering and bruised. “I see,” he said. “My ancestors were so cruel and so clever.”
He picked up the silken cords and nodded at the bed. “Come, my dear one.”
I knew I was supposed to do whatever he wanted, but I was getting nervous. “Are you going to tie me up?”
“Not quite, not tonight. I just want to make sure, as my brother said, that you’ll be
safe tonight and every night. You’ll see. Sit down on the bedspread, there.”
The bed was embroidered with our initials laced together, surrounded by wreaths of flowers. I had never moved around naked before, and I was extremely aware of the soft fabric and the patterns of silk thread brushing my skin. He took one of the cords attached to my ankles and pushed it through a small golden loop mounted to the bedpost that locked and unlocked with a tiny key. When it was locked, the hook on the end of the silken cord was locked in and the cord was still fairly slack, about twice the length of my leg, so I could still move my leg quite a bit. The hook was shaped so it could be pulled farther out, away from the bed, thus drawing my leg out spread eagle, but if I pulled it back in it would hook back on to the mounted loop again and be stuck there, so my movement would be restricted. This fact didn’t escape my notice, but Augustus left the hook there so I had plenty of give. He did the same with my other leg, and then my arms.
“See, you can still move around and roll over in bed,” he said. “No one wants to sleep spread out on their back. But you’ll notice that you can’t quite actually reach any of the loops yourself. Even if you could, you would need the key. All the cords are enchanted to be unbreakable. So the only way to get you out of bed is for someone to break the locked mounts off the bed.”
I realized this was true. I could roll onto either side and curl my legs up somewhat and bring my hands together on the pillow, but I couldn’t move much farther than that. I couldn’t pull my hands down below my breasts.
“What if I have an itch?” I asked.
“Tell me. I’m a light sleeper.”
“What if I have to use the chamber pot?”
“Of course I’ll let you do that any time.”
I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. I looked down at my naked body, the bruises marking my beautiful skin, the shaved pussy that I couldn’t reach my hands to cover if I wanted to. It’s not like I wasn’t warned. But I never thought it would be like this.
“This seems a little much,” I said, unable to contain a growing sense of aggravation at everything I had endured in this place.
He laughed. “Everything in this palace is a lot much.”
“But we’re alone now.”
“Not really,” he said, and I looked around in a panic. Had the courtiers crawled behind the curtains? Inside the wardrobe?
He touched my chin with a finger, stilling me. “That is, it’s quite possible servants are listening at doors. They will certain be checking the sheets in the morning to see if the marriage was consummated, they will note what state we are in tomorrow morning as they light the fireplace, and the court will pay close attention to every interaction we have with one another. And so, to do the unexpected, even in private, is to play with fire…” He glanced away from me briefly.
“Have you ever wished to do the unexpected?”
Instead of replying, he gave me a gentle kiss, so gentle I didn’t even taste his lips.
But this was a sort of reply, I thought.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I trust you, but I’m sure I’m not going to run off in the middle of the night and touch a spindle! Obviously it’s the last thing I would ever do!”
“If your parents thought that was enough, then why did they destroy the entire cloth industry in your kingdom? The truth is, of course you aren’t going to touch a spindle with your right mind. But you could be enchanted. During the day, you’ll be under heavy guard. At night, well, I think you would rather we have some privacy, and that means other precautions.”
“This is just another part of it, isn’t it? Preparing me to be the Queen Who Bowed. Whatever that means, exactly.”
I caught a brief, grim look on his face before he softened, sitting on the bed beside me. “Yes, Rose…I do have to prepare you for your role here. No avoiding that. I’ve tried to make it clear.”
I sat up, as best I could—propping myself up on my elbows, anyway. “In your letters? They were so stiff.”
“It was almost impossible to say anything of worth in a letter to a girl I’d never met, especially considering what your role would be now.”
“Tell me my role.”
“You are my princess. My wife.”
“Tell me exactly what that means.”
“You know quite well what it means.” He paused. “You really want to know why anyone would have ever desired such a role, don’t you?” He sprang to his feet and snatched up the little bottle of ointment, dabbing some onto his palm and then rubbing them together. His hands met my bare skin and he worked the ointment into my bruises. His hands were warm and lovely. I certainly couldn’t argue with that. As his fingers worked the healing medicine into my skin, the bruises faded before my eyes.
I still thought it was ridiculous to suffer just so he could make it better. But it almost made me proud to have endured it all.
“The first queen was a very strong young faery who ruled over her own small realm. Her name was Lady Marianna,” he said. “This was in the days when the faery lands were very fractured and primitive. There was a king, of sorts, but his power was not consolidated. Every lord and lady ruled over their own domain. Marianna had many skirmishes with King Enri the third. And yet—they had a very deep respect for one another, and it was said that when they met, they couldn’t take their eyes off each other. He asked their kingdoms to unite and she refused him fiercely. She had no husband because she knew that no matter how strong the queen, people always look to the king for leadership first. They called her the Queen Who Would Not Bow.”
As he touched my skin, his eyes grew more hungry, meeting mine with shadowed yearning. “But then an invading force of humans from the wild north swept in. They were such a large, disciplined army that even faery magic couldn’t hold them back as it used to. They crushed everything in their path, raping and pillaging and stealing. The queen rushed to King Enri and told him, or so the legend goes, that she had always loved him, and that she would marry him and allow him to rule her kingdom, under one condition: that he must unite all the faeries in this land as one so the humans could not take our land again. She bowed to him, and he understood the power of what she offered. He was so overcome with passion that they conceived their first son that very moment, on the dais of the throne room, for all the court to see. From that day on she presented herself as being his treasure, his possession. But there was a strategy to it. She wanted everyone to see him as a man worthy of the greatest respect and of tremendous power. She knew the only way to bring together so many fractured kingdoms was to begin with herself. It was a very calculated submission, a part she was playing. And everyone knew it, but it worked. Marianna and Enri began to direct the court dynamics like a play, offering roles to the major players. And thus we continue today.”
“That’s an odd strategy,” I said. “The Lady of Towers hinted at it a bit but I didn’t realize.”
“You say it’s odd. But you don’t know faeries.”
“That’s certainly true. But I don’t understand why all of this makes people follow the king.”
“Ah, but think about it. When you think of faeries in history, what do you see? Beauty and decadence, no doubt. You might imagine dances under the moon and barely concealed liaisons. Costumes of gossamer that leave little to the imagination. Every word spoken is truth, but better yet if it’s a game. Faeries like their twists. And they say our morals are…dubious.” He gave me a grin that positively battered at my resistance.
I couldn’t believe I had been about to kneel down and pray before this began. There seemed no place for the pious saints of the Osterian church in this room. The stunning blue eyes beneath his dark lashes, even the shadow of his perfect profile the candlelight cast against the painted panels of the wall: every inch of Augustus was so beautiful that I wanted to possess them as much as he possessed me.
“So you have not changed as much as one might think,” I said.
“No. And make no mistake.
Marianna was a powerful queen who relished her role, and so you will be very powerful queen someday,” he said. “Even as you bow to me. But we each must play our roles perfectly. Sometime, you won’t always like it. The grand corps is only the beginning of your trials. But you’ll understand, as you observe the court.”
The soft light brought out golden undertones in his fair skin. His hands traveled away from my ribs, which were now perfectly clear and unbruised again, and up to my shoulders, arms, and hands. His fingers laced with my own, and he looked into my eyes.
I was filled with a sudden sense of wonder, that I would be his, and I thought I would wear the grand corps a hundred times for him. How quickly the memory of pain slips away.
After all, I had always been a princess. I had always belonged to someone. My mother was always scolding me for something or other. So it wasn’t like I had given up freedom. What had I gained, to come here?
The dark locks of his hair falling across his brow, the eyes that drank me in like I was the only thing he’d ever desired…I wanted to bow before them, in such a moment. His mouth cracked open, his white teeth baring slightly like he was trying to restrain himself from devouring me.
“Rose…I must have you.”
“Yes…”
He kissed me, his tongue pressing deep into my mouth, his fingers gripping mine tight while the weight of him settled onto me. I could feel his hard length throb against my pelvis. I tried to bring my legs up around him and jerked against the cords, but I was able to hug his thighs with my own. His legs felt strong while mine seemed so little and soft. Of course men had so many more opportunities to go riding and run around in the woods. Women had to put those things away once they stopped being girls.
If I couldn’t be wild myself anymore, at least I could taste his wildness. He tasted like the faery wine, sweet and rich, the way blood must taste to vampires.
The Surrender of Sleeping Beauty Page 6
