Chapter 24: The Princess Realizes
The sweat cooled on Blair's skin in slow sheets. She lay across the crimson silk with her head in Vespera's lap and her ankle hooked over Lucien's thigh, and her new heart rolled under her ribs once, twice, patient as surf. The candle burned straight at the bedside. In the mirrors the four of her were all flushed now, all smiling, and she looked at the fourth one and decided she liked her.
"Do the arithmetic," Vespera said, combing Blair's damp curls back from her temple with her fingers. "You're doing it. I can hear your jaw work."
"I'm not doing anything," Blair said, and did it anyway. "Two months a concubine. One writ signed in my own blood. One husband and one wife at the same time, which I don't think is legal in any kingdom I've read about, and I've read about most of them."
"It's legal here," Lucien said. He was stretched on his side, chin propped on his fist, watching her with those burning gold eyes like a man watching a fire he'd lit himself. "I checked the statutes four hundred years ago. Twice, actually. Vespera was the second check."
"You read the marriage statutes before you proposed to me?"
"I read them before I proposed to you," he said, "so I'd know what I was proposing to."
Blair laughed. It came out of her low and rolling in her new voice, and it shook her whole remade body, and partway through it the laugh turned into something else, a pull in her belly, a hot empty ache that opened like a mouth. She stopped laughing. She looked down the length of herself, at the firm carved softness of her, at her own hand moving without instruction to press against her own cunt, and felt the hunger stand up in her like a second spine.
"That's not funny," she said. "That's arithmetic worth billing for. And I want everything. All of it. Now."
"Now," Vespera repeated, amused, dangerous.
"Yes. Feed me. Fill me. Fuck me. Spoil me. I signed, I drank seven hundred swallows, I held an orgasm for a day and a night like a saint. I'm a princess and I have never once in my life been given everything, and I want it, both of you, everything you have." Her hips pressed up into her own palm. "Now, please."
"Four hundred years," Lucien said to the ceiling, "and I have never been given demands by anything in this bed. It's doing something to me I'll deny later."
"Deny it aloud," Vespera said. "It's your custom."
She slid out from under Blair's head and rose off the bed, and Blair's whole body leaned after her like a tide, starving, and the Queen laughed at that, low and real. She crossed to the far door and spoke one word to someone outside, a servant Blair couldn't see, and came back with a silver tray in her hands: honey in a glass jar, thick cream in a bowl, dark bread, a carafe of something red that was not wine. She set it on the bed between Blair's knees.
"You were fed by hand for a month as a concubine," Vespera said, kneeling at her hip. "Now you'll be fed by hand as a princess, and you'll learn the difference, which is that nobody tells you to open your mouth. You open it because you want it. Show me."
Blair opened her mouth. Honey off the Queen's fingertip first, sweet and heavy on her tongue, then cream, a spoonful that Vespera pressed in slowly and let her close her lips around the bowl of the spoon and pull, and Vespera watched that with her burgundy eyes going dark, and Blair understood the lesson was being learned in both directions.
"You're teaching me greed," Blair said around the cream.
"I'm discovering it. It was always in you. I saw it the night you chose a forbidden manuscript over dusting." Vespera dipped her finger again and painted Blair's lower lip with honey, slow. "Now taste your King."
Lucien had moved. He lay between her thighs without her noticing the approach, that speed worn smooth, and his shoulders pushed her knees wide, and the first touch of his tongue on her overspent, hypersensitive cunt made her buck hard enough that Vespera caught her hips and held them down with both hands.
"Oh," Blair said, and the word came out destroyed. "Oh, that's, he's, I just came twice, it's too much, it's perfect, don't stop."
"Order him," Vespera said, feeding her another spoonful while her King's tongue drew long slow strokes through her from hole to clit. "Princesses don't request. Go on. I want to see it."
Blair looked down her body. Lucien looked up. His mouth was wet, his stubble gleaming, and his dark golden eyes over her cunt were the most obscene thing she had ever seen.
"Lick my clit," she said. Her voice didn't shake. She made it not shake. "Suck it until I come on your face, Your Majesty. That's an order."
He growled against her. The vibration ran through her whole pelvis. He sealed his lips around her clit and sucked, and the fresh cut on his wrist was pressed to the inside of her thigh, his blood scent rising with the jasmine, and Blair's back bowed, and Vespera's hands held her down and fed her honey off her own fingers while her husband worked her clit in exactly the rhythm that had broken her at moonrise.
"Greedy little thing," Vespera murmured, kissing her throat. "Look at her. Made three hours ago and already commanding kings."
"She commanded me as a maid," Lucien said, lifting his mouth just long enough to speak, his breath hot on her swollen flesh. "She just stopped pretending it was accidental." He pressed two fingers into her, deep, curling, and her cunt took them with a wet obscene sound, still loose and soaked from everything before, and his tongue went back to her clit.
Blair came. It surprised her, took her mid-spoonful, the orgasm snapping up out of nowhere, shorter and sharper than the moonrise ones, a white crack of it, her thighs slamming against Lucien's ears before Vespera forced them wide again. She cried out. The cream spoon fell on the silk. Lucien worked her through it, fingers relentless, tongue softer now, drawing out every aftershock until she lay twitching.
"That's three," Vespera announced. "We've established the appetite has no floor. Good. Now the princess gets filled properly. Husband. Move."
He moved. And Vespera, who had shed her robe hours ago and never put it back on, climbed up Blair's body and settled astride her face, knees bracketing her head, porcelain thighs soft against Blair's ears, and the smell of her was jasmine and cream and want, and Blair's mouth flooded.
"You know this work," Vespera said, reaching down to spread herself open. "You were excellent at it as a human. Let's see what the making did to your tongue."
Blair put her mouth on the Queen and found out. Her tongue was stronger. Her senses were ferocious; she could taste the salt and the sweetness and beneath both the faint iron of Vespera's blood, close under the skin, and the knowledge of that closeness made her ravenous. She licked her in long flat strokes and then circled her clit and then pushed her tongue into her cunt and fucked her with it, and Vespera's head fell back and her hands found the headboard and gripped.
"God," the Queen said. "Lucien. Now. While her mouth is busy."
He knelt behind Blair. She felt his hands spread her, felt the broad blunt head of his cock slide through all the wet he'd made her, teasing her entrance, and she moaned into Vespera's cunt and the moan made the Queen shudder above her.
"Ask," Lucien said, just the head of him notching inside and holding there.
Blair pulled her mouth off the Queen. "Fill me," she said. "Fuck me, Lucien, I want your cock, I want it deep, I want you to come inside me, I want everything. Fill your princess."
"Everything," he said. "Yes."
He pushed in in one long stroke, and her remade cunt took all of him, gripping, gushing around him, and the sensation ran up her spine and out through her mouth into the Queen's body, because she was moaning again, helpless, her tongue working Vespera's clit while the King fucked her slow and bottomless, each thrust driving her mouth up harder into the Queen.
The three of them found a rhythm, the way they had found one at the crest, but looser now, greedier, because this was not a rite. This was just a night. Vespera rode Blair's tongue with slow rolls of her hips, one hand braced on the headboard, the other reaching back to roll Blair's nipple between two fingers, and Lucien drove into Blair in long deep strokes and bent forward and put his mouth between the Queen's shoulder blades, and the bed filled with the sounds of it, wet and rhythmic and shameless.
"She's going to make me come with her tongue," Vespera said, and her voice had lost every ounce of imperiousness. It was just a woman's voice, wrecked. "Four hundred years of courtiers and this scullery maid makes me come in five minutes."
"Six," Lucien said. "I'm timing it."
"Shut up and fuck her harder."
He fucked her harder. Blair's world collapsed to sensation: the Queen's clit under her tongue, the taste of her, the drag of Lucien's cock against the place the making had rewired so that every thrust jolted her clit like a struck bell, her own hips rising to meet him without her permission, greedy, greedy, exactly as she'd demanded of herself.
Vespera came first. She seized, thighs clamping Blair's head, and her cunt pulsed against Blair's mouth, and Blair licked her through it the way she'd been taught, slow and thorough, swallowing everything, and above her the Queen made a sound Blair had never heard from her, high and unguarded, nothing royal in it at all, and that sound was worth more than the writ.
"Stay hard," Vespera gasped at Lucien, still shivering. "She hasn't come yet. She wants it. Look at her hips."
They were rolling. Of course they were. Blair ground up onto Lucien's cock with her mouth still sealed to the Queen's spend, and Lucien laughed, low, and shifted his weight onto one hand so the other could reach down and press her clit, and began to fuck her in earnest, fast and deep and merciless, his thigh muscles working, and the pressure climbed in Blair's chest where the knot had lived, building again even after everything.
"May I," she gasped against Vespera's thigh. "Please, may I come, I want to come on your cock, please."
"No asking tonight," Vespera said, sliding off her face, flushed and gleaming, and she kissed Blair deep, tasting herself on her. "Tonight you're royalty. Royalty comes when it wants. Come, Blair."
Blair came on his cock. It rolled through her this time, long and rolling, her new heart hammering its vast beats faster, her cunt clenching around him in waves, and Lucien groaned and drove deep and held, and she felt him spill inside her, hot, pulse after pulse of it, and the feeling of being filled while her own orgasm crested undid something in her that she suspected would never be reassembled.
He stayed in her. He collapsed along her side carefully, still seated, and the three of them lay in a tangled heap, breathing, the candle light standing over them like a witness.
"So," Blair said eventually, to the canopy. "That's everything?"
"That's Tuesday," Lucien said into her hair.
"There's more?"
"There's so much more, little rose." Vespera propped herself up on one elbow. She took a strawberry from the tray, bit it, and fed Blair the rest mouth to mouth, sweet crushed fruit and the taste of all three of them underneath. "You asked to be fed. We've fed you. You asked to be filled. Twice, if we're counting honestly, and we're not, because we're going to be dishonest all night about it. What you haven't asked for yet is the blood."
Blair went still. The honey and the afterglow both went quiet in her.
"The blood," she said.
"You're Made now. Half-made, until the third night closes. Your body is burning through what we gave you at a rate that would frighten you if you could feel it." Vespera's burgundy eyes were very kind and very old. "You'll need to feed from us again before dawn. Not the rite. Just us. Just yours."
"It's the part I've been looking forward to all night," Lucien said, and there was something raw in it. "The rest is ceremony and excellence. This is the part where you choose us, again, with your mouth."
Blair looked from one to the other. Her new eyes could see the pulse in both their throats, the slow immortal beat under the skin, could see it the way she'd never seen anything before, and her fangs ached at their roots for the first time, a dull hungry throb she didn't have a name for yet but understood completely.
"Both of you," she said. "Evenly?"
"Evenly," Vespera said, and smiled, and the smile shook very slightly, and Blair was four hundred years too young to know how rare that was and wise enough to notice anyway. "You learned the lesson the first time. Come here. Both wrists, my daughter of the blood."
Blair moved between them, and Lucien raised his wrist to her lips, and Vespera raised hers, and the candle stood straight and tall over the bed and did not flicker, and outside, three towers away, the old houses' dogs were howling again at something they could not name, and would howl, she thought, for three hundred years.