Chapter One
Title: In progress...temporarily, the Prince and the Wench. I promise to think of someting clever later.
Author: Me. MINE. No stealing. I bite.
Rating: The work as a whole will be NC-17. This particular chapter is only PG.
Note: This is a work in progress, and has not fully been edited. I just wanted to post it properly so I feel accomplished. Feel more than free to email or comment with suggestions, corrections, the like.
Summary: In which we meet the Prince.
Bright colors flooded the grand foyer and trickled up the curving staircase. The steps were so broad that three coach-and-four could have driven abreast and not disturbed the green draperies over the banisters. Manservants stood motionless amid the crowd, painted white pillars holding long, tri-branched globes of light so that not a single courtier stubbed a gilded toe. Maidservants moved gracefully among the throng, lights on their coal-black heads, covered torches in each hand, prismed mirrors on their shoulders, chests, ears, mouths. They cast rays of color on the walls, on the attendees, and on each other.
The castle blazed with costly light. Wine accompanied the talking, grain malts, monk-made drink, and food. Musicians competed ferociously with the sea of voices, sawing away grim-faced at lutes and dulcimers, and the occasional grand lute. Horns played at the castle door, greeting coaches and pedestrians alike, while further in the trills of clarinets like thick brocade spilled over those seeking to quench the thirst earned by a long trek from the gates. Many passed no further, dining on roasted hog and beef flank until they could no longer move from the tables, eventually swiving where they were while grain-malt maids walked among them, their canisters low and flat.
The more ambitious joined the lower nobles, bastards and lords, ladies mingling with favored merchants and rubbing sateened elbows with disfavored knights. They made quieter merry with small fowl and sweetmeats, wines and monk-drink, retiring to chambers later in the evening with spouses of their own, watchful eyes on their debutantes and ingénues. They discussed earthly cycles and trade winds, and spoke in hushed voices of the state of their liege. They drank his health there at the top of the grand staircase, and more than one watched narrow-eyed those few admitted down the dark and tapestry-muted hallway into the inner sanctum, the grand ballroom, the impromptu throne room for an invalid monarch.
In comparison to the masses raising their coarse voices and plain glasses in toast below, those admitted into the direct presence of the king seemed few indeed. To the king however, there existed entirely too many. He reclined with pinched visage at the head table, his feet elevated beneath the cloth on the back of his old dog, whose gnarled half-face and unpredictable digestion imprisoned him behind walls of dark green linen upon such occasions. The king himself would rather have joined the animal instead of sitting in stately display. He didn’t care what sort of things the court ate or drank; they slopped it on each other and the linens, and it was far too costly to spare anyhow, especially on such folderol. He took no pride in the grandness of the rooms made available to his best (and inebriated) guests, annoyed that they would be used for the worst sort of debauchery and adultery. The servants would be forced to neglect him for weeks so that they could properly wash all the bedding, no small task even for the army of his castle. He hated that they looked at him as if he couldn’t see them looking; he hated that they talked of him and laughed as if he wasn’t present. He hated the jewels on their fingers, ears and throats, for they winked at him coyly and said, “This one does not merit our attention, for soon he will be dead.”
The king hated the court. He sat there with loathing, stewing silently, until he snapped quite suddenly at his queen to leave off fussing with his hand. He knew quite well that she meant the rhythmic patting to comfort, but he had also noticed that the weaker he became, the more rhythmic tapping the queen felt necessary to do. She huffed at him, her rheumy eyes clouded with blue-white fluid and a good deal of insult, and folded her still-tapping hands in her lap. She looked away from him and made a prim little moue as tendrils of the dog’s digestive woes drifted out from under the tablecloth. The pinched look only intensified the wrinkles around her mouth, until she seemed some sort of ragged wood whose grain whorled into a knot of a mouth.
The queen heard the conversations around her just as well as her husband. The courtiers no longer made an effort to hush their predictions, their denouncements, their short-sighted opinions, their ludicrous notions of election. Nonsense; but then, who of them cared that she heard? Already she and her mate had lost tooth and claw, and no longer could they feed the pack. Any day now it would turn on them; at the first sign of hunger, any excuse to depose the wise, strong-willed man she married and follow her wretched, cursed, monster of a son. She closed her eyes wearily. She had known from his birth what a weak, compromising, sneaking thing he would become; nothing like the stern directness of her husband, whose inquisitions still frightened the monks on the outskirts of their borders. He permitted no threat to fester, no vermin to grow, suffered no insubordination to exist - except in the form of his heir. Not until the day the gods struck him down, that is.
It was no wonder the man despised his own young; the boy was false to the courtiers and false to his parents. The prince did not root out their secret plots, or shun those who opposed his authority. The kingdom would fail, and rapidly, were his father dead. She glanced at the old man draped over his chair, frail and thin and angry. It was why he would not die; he could not allow his work to fail. She had already resigned herself to support him in any way she could, and if that meant the detriment of her own son, then so be it.
“Good even, your Eminence. I trust the roast is to your taste?” The slender steward appeared at the king’s side, his approach silent and his bow stiff.
“I am certain you did your best, Rudolpho, but his Majesty is simply unable to digest something so rich. Perhaps a dish more simple would be appropriate,” croaked the queen, her hand finding its way to pat her husband’s hand.
“Yes, your Majesty,” he replied in monotone. “I have not seen the young Prince yet this evening. Shall we delay?”
At this, the queen frowned, her eyes narrowing. “What choice have we? The celebration is for him, after all. It would not do to overlook the guest of honor.”
“Yes, my lady. I shall seek him out.” He bowed again, then turned upon his heel and strode smartly away from the dais, the polished heels of his boots clicking on weathered stone. He left through the discreet passageway in the back, where servants came and went as surreptitiously as possible, as befit their station. He had an idea where the prince might be.
A sharp slap of flesh against flesh rang through the stone corridor. A cry followed it, muffled by cloth. Again the slap, and another, and quickly another. The man fell to the floor in a jumble of legs and arms, curling his arms around his head. Rings flashed in the torchlight as they descended again and again, gemstones bruising with increasingly more violent blows. His assailant swung wildly at his head and back, frustration in his grunts of exertion. Over and over he struck, still unsatisfied, until Rudolpho’s sinuous hand grasped his arm firmly.
“No, my lord.”
Wild green eyes flashed at Rudolpho, alight with a rage that threatened to consume the both of them. He did not relax his grip on the man’s arm, nor did he back away. “No, my lord. Not this man. Not here.”
They stood there for some time, the elder restraining the younger, the servant clinging to the wall. The only sounds were the harsh breathing of the abuser, and the muffled, panicked whimpers of the abused. Jade green met dark gray, and the struggle for mastery played out silently between them, nearly tangible in the cold air. Abruptly, the prince jerked his arm out of Rudolpho’s grasp and stalked away.
He strode briskly the way the steward had just come, raging silently all the way back to the ballroom. He knew why Rudolpho had come to fetch and carry him, and his foul mood could be little worsened by yet another ceremonial attempt to attach a woman of station to his title, so he decided to let them have their half-hour and be done with it. He knew his part already. Twice before he had played along, the responsible son submitting to the wishes of his parents, that he be married and proceed to sire heirs as soon as possible. God knew if his mother had a chance to get her claws on his spawn, she’d raise them the way she always wished he himself had turned out, a perfect copy of his despot of a father.
Her years of wheedling and hinting had not fallen upon him without effect; he heard her and noted her complaints, her opinions, her reasoning and her squabbles, and discovered that she might once have been more than a perfect idiot. Unfortunately, a multitude of his father’s quips to the contrary had worn her down to believing herself incapable of anything but the hollow life she lead, a husk clinging to the side of the throne with no more value than a windbreak. Now that her childbearing days were over, what was left? The prince had hoped that his practicality and diplomacy might earn a few gestures of respect, but found his efforts to improve trust and goodwill among members of the court and the city’s many classes were scorned and undone by the very people whose support he most desired. His once tireless attempts to better trade and agriculture were destroyed by unusually wealthy bandits before a single positive effect could be felt.
Fine. Once more he would allow them the pretense of tying him to woman whose power and money could strengthen his father’s position while weakening his own. It had failed twice already, but still they tried. He shook his head suddenly to cut off the train of thought sure to leap unbidden to his mind at the mere mention… No, not now. Now, I must be who they wish to see. Now, I must be the brightly-painted soldier, he reminded himself, not the disappointment that I am. He strode through the door beside the kitchen, lingering in the shrouded alcoves that lined the ballroom before making his grand entrance. He wanted to see her first.
“Poor thing,” murmured a red-headed woman in her prime, her belly gently rounded with child. “Poor little innocent. Does she know?”
“I certainly haven’t told her, if that’s what you mean, Duchess,” sniped the younger woman at her side, flipping long blonde curls over her bare shoulder and quite forgetting how it exposed her freckles. “Goodness knows I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Her laugh narrowed through her nasal cavities and wrenched its way free into the open air, but did not travel far in the press of thick fabrics and stuffed headpieces of their peers.
“Mistress Falworthy, how unkind. Would not you wish to know that your newly-betrothed lord had murdered two wives already?” The red-haired duchess stroked her belly unconsciously, watching a tall woman in blue who sat to the left of the king and queen on the dais. “And the earth on the last one’s grave not even new with grass!” She clucked her tongue disapprovingly.
“Hush, woman,” growled the duke, his lips barely moving beneath the great brown mass of beard. “Hold your tongue before I cut it off. You know nothing of what you say.”
“And yet, we still know nothing about the poor maid’s death,” said another, swirling amber cognac in a fragile glass goblet. His lips thinned as he smiled grimly at the duke, the gold thread in his tunic glistening as he gestured toward the dais. “They have made quite certain of that.”
“I will not discuss it. You know very well what becomes of those who do.” He grasped the duchess’s arm and pulled her away from the small circle of nobles. “And neither will you.”
“A typical response from the North,” sneered the marquis, taking a calculated sip of the cognac. “Shall we expect a hunt to follow? Perhaps a urination contest?”
The duke half-turned to the marquis, his gray eyes remarkably restrained. “Should you ever deign to leave the castle, perhaps you could see for yourself. Until then, however, I fear you must wait for your news like the other old men.”
The marquis went utterly still. “I am not yet without teeth, my dear duke.”
“No one has forgotten, Marquis De Limoge, not a soul.” The prince placed a hand on his shoulder, his face a mask of perfect diplomacy. “Now,” he said in a louder voice so that the rest of the room could hear him, “let us begin the show.”
Author: Me. MINE. No stealing. I bite.
Rating: The work as a whole will be NC-17. This particular chapter is only PG.
Note: This is a work in progress, and has not fully been edited. I just wanted to post it properly so I feel accomplished. Feel more than free to email or comment with suggestions, corrections, the like.
Summary: In which we meet the Prince.
- Chapter One
Bright colors flooded the grand foyer and trickled up the curving staircase. The steps were so broad that three coach-and-four could have driven abreast and not disturbed the green draperies over the banisters. Manservants stood motionless amid the crowd, painted white pillars holding long, tri-branched globes of light so that not a single courtier stubbed a gilded toe. Maidservants moved gracefully among the throng, lights on their coal-black heads, covered torches in each hand, prismed mirrors on their shoulders, chests, ears, mouths. They cast rays of color on the walls, on the attendees, and on each other.
The castle blazed with costly light. Wine accompanied the talking, grain malts, monk-made drink, and food. Musicians competed ferociously with the sea of voices, sawing away grim-faced at lutes and dulcimers, and the occasional grand lute. Horns played at the castle door, greeting coaches and pedestrians alike, while further in the trills of clarinets like thick brocade spilled over those seeking to quench the thirst earned by a long trek from the gates. Many passed no further, dining on roasted hog and beef flank until they could no longer move from the tables, eventually swiving where they were while grain-malt maids walked among them, their canisters low and flat.
The more ambitious joined the lower nobles, bastards and lords, ladies mingling with favored merchants and rubbing sateened elbows with disfavored knights. They made quieter merry with small fowl and sweetmeats, wines and monk-drink, retiring to chambers later in the evening with spouses of their own, watchful eyes on their debutantes and ingénues. They discussed earthly cycles and trade winds, and spoke in hushed voices of the state of their liege. They drank his health there at the top of the grand staircase, and more than one watched narrow-eyed those few admitted down the dark and tapestry-muted hallway into the inner sanctum, the grand ballroom, the impromptu throne room for an invalid monarch.
In comparison to the masses raising their coarse voices and plain glasses in toast below, those admitted into the direct presence of the king seemed few indeed. To the king however, there existed entirely too many. He reclined with pinched visage at the head table, his feet elevated beneath the cloth on the back of his old dog, whose gnarled half-face and unpredictable digestion imprisoned him behind walls of dark green linen upon such occasions. The king himself would rather have joined the animal instead of sitting in stately display. He didn’t care what sort of things the court ate or drank; they slopped it on each other and the linens, and it was far too costly to spare anyhow, especially on such folderol. He took no pride in the grandness of the rooms made available to his best (and inebriated) guests, annoyed that they would be used for the worst sort of debauchery and adultery. The servants would be forced to neglect him for weeks so that they could properly wash all the bedding, no small task even for the army of his castle. He hated that they looked at him as if he couldn’t see them looking; he hated that they talked of him and laughed as if he wasn’t present. He hated the jewels on their fingers, ears and throats, for they winked at him coyly and said, “This one does not merit our attention, for soon he will be dead.”
The king hated the court. He sat there with loathing, stewing silently, until he snapped quite suddenly at his queen to leave off fussing with his hand. He knew quite well that she meant the rhythmic patting to comfort, but he had also noticed that the weaker he became, the more rhythmic tapping the queen felt necessary to do. She huffed at him, her rheumy eyes clouded with blue-white fluid and a good deal of insult, and folded her still-tapping hands in her lap. She looked away from him and made a prim little moue as tendrils of the dog’s digestive woes drifted out from under the tablecloth. The pinched look only intensified the wrinkles around her mouth, until she seemed some sort of ragged wood whose grain whorled into a knot of a mouth.
The queen heard the conversations around her just as well as her husband. The courtiers no longer made an effort to hush their predictions, their denouncements, their short-sighted opinions, their ludicrous notions of election. Nonsense; but then, who of them cared that she heard? Already she and her mate had lost tooth and claw, and no longer could they feed the pack. Any day now it would turn on them; at the first sign of hunger, any excuse to depose the wise, strong-willed man she married and follow her wretched, cursed, monster of a son. She closed her eyes wearily. She had known from his birth what a weak, compromising, sneaking thing he would become; nothing like the stern directness of her husband, whose inquisitions still frightened the monks on the outskirts of their borders. He permitted no threat to fester, no vermin to grow, suffered no insubordination to exist - except in the form of his heir. Not until the day the gods struck him down, that is.
It was no wonder the man despised his own young; the boy was false to the courtiers and false to his parents. The prince did not root out their secret plots, or shun those who opposed his authority. The kingdom would fail, and rapidly, were his father dead. She glanced at the old man draped over his chair, frail and thin and angry. It was why he would not die; he could not allow his work to fail. She had already resigned herself to support him in any way she could, and if that meant the detriment of her own son, then so be it.
“Good even, your Eminence. I trust the roast is to your taste?” The slender steward appeared at the king’s side, his approach silent and his bow stiff.
“I am certain you did your best, Rudolpho, but his Majesty is simply unable to digest something so rich. Perhaps a dish more simple would be appropriate,” croaked the queen, her hand finding its way to pat her husband’s hand.
“Yes, your Majesty,” he replied in monotone. “I have not seen the young Prince yet this evening. Shall we delay?”
At this, the queen frowned, her eyes narrowing. “What choice have we? The celebration is for him, after all. It would not do to overlook the guest of honor.”
“Yes, my lady. I shall seek him out.” He bowed again, then turned upon his heel and strode smartly away from the dais, the polished heels of his boots clicking on weathered stone. He left through the discreet passageway in the back, where servants came and went as surreptitiously as possible, as befit their station. He had an idea where the prince might be.
A sharp slap of flesh against flesh rang through the stone corridor. A cry followed it, muffled by cloth. Again the slap, and another, and quickly another. The man fell to the floor in a jumble of legs and arms, curling his arms around his head. Rings flashed in the torchlight as they descended again and again, gemstones bruising with increasingly more violent blows. His assailant swung wildly at his head and back, frustration in his grunts of exertion. Over and over he struck, still unsatisfied, until Rudolpho’s sinuous hand grasped his arm firmly.
“No, my lord.”
Wild green eyes flashed at Rudolpho, alight with a rage that threatened to consume the both of them. He did not relax his grip on the man’s arm, nor did he back away. “No, my lord. Not this man. Not here.”
They stood there for some time, the elder restraining the younger, the servant clinging to the wall. The only sounds were the harsh breathing of the abuser, and the muffled, panicked whimpers of the abused. Jade green met dark gray, and the struggle for mastery played out silently between them, nearly tangible in the cold air. Abruptly, the prince jerked his arm out of Rudolpho’s grasp and stalked away.
He strode briskly the way the steward had just come, raging silently all the way back to the ballroom. He knew why Rudolpho had come to fetch and carry him, and his foul mood could be little worsened by yet another ceremonial attempt to attach a woman of station to his title, so he decided to let them have their half-hour and be done with it. He knew his part already. Twice before he had played along, the responsible son submitting to the wishes of his parents, that he be married and proceed to sire heirs as soon as possible. God knew if his mother had a chance to get her claws on his spawn, she’d raise them the way she always wished he himself had turned out, a perfect copy of his despot of a father.
Her years of wheedling and hinting had not fallen upon him without effect; he heard her and noted her complaints, her opinions, her reasoning and her squabbles, and discovered that she might once have been more than a perfect idiot. Unfortunately, a multitude of his father’s quips to the contrary had worn her down to believing herself incapable of anything but the hollow life she lead, a husk clinging to the side of the throne with no more value than a windbreak. Now that her childbearing days were over, what was left? The prince had hoped that his practicality and diplomacy might earn a few gestures of respect, but found his efforts to improve trust and goodwill among members of the court and the city’s many classes were scorned and undone by the very people whose support he most desired. His once tireless attempts to better trade and agriculture were destroyed by unusually wealthy bandits before a single positive effect could be felt.
Fine. Once more he would allow them the pretense of tying him to woman whose power and money could strengthen his father’s position while weakening his own. It had failed twice already, but still they tried. He shook his head suddenly to cut off the train of thought sure to leap unbidden to his mind at the mere mention… No, not now. Now, I must be who they wish to see. Now, I must be the brightly-painted soldier, he reminded himself, not the disappointment that I am. He strode through the door beside the kitchen, lingering in the shrouded alcoves that lined the ballroom before making his grand entrance. He wanted to see her first.
“Poor thing,” murmured a red-headed woman in her prime, her belly gently rounded with child. “Poor little innocent. Does she know?”
“I certainly haven’t told her, if that’s what you mean, Duchess,” sniped the younger woman at her side, flipping long blonde curls over her bare shoulder and quite forgetting how it exposed her freckles. “Goodness knows I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Her laugh narrowed through her nasal cavities and wrenched its way free into the open air, but did not travel far in the press of thick fabrics and stuffed headpieces of their peers.
“Mistress Falworthy, how unkind. Would not you wish to know that your newly-betrothed lord had murdered two wives already?” The red-haired duchess stroked her belly unconsciously, watching a tall woman in blue who sat to the left of the king and queen on the dais. “And the earth on the last one’s grave not even new with grass!” She clucked her tongue disapprovingly.
“Hush, woman,” growled the duke, his lips barely moving beneath the great brown mass of beard. “Hold your tongue before I cut it off. You know nothing of what you say.”
“And yet, we still know nothing about the poor maid’s death,” said another, swirling amber cognac in a fragile glass goblet. His lips thinned as he smiled grimly at the duke, the gold thread in his tunic glistening as he gestured toward the dais. “They have made quite certain of that.”
“I will not discuss it. You know very well what becomes of those who do.” He grasped the duchess’s arm and pulled her away from the small circle of nobles. “And neither will you.”
“A typical response from the North,” sneered the marquis, taking a calculated sip of the cognac. “Shall we expect a hunt to follow? Perhaps a urination contest?”
The duke half-turned to the marquis, his gray eyes remarkably restrained. “Should you ever deign to leave the castle, perhaps you could see for yourself. Until then, however, I fear you must wait for your news like the other old men.”
The marquis went utterly still. “I am not yet without teeth, my dear duke.”
“No one has forgotten, Marquis De Limoge, not a soul.” The prince placed a hand on his shoulder, his face a mask of perfect diplomacy. “Now,” he said in a louder voice so that the rest of the room could hear him, “let us begin the show.”