Chapter 29: The King's Second Lesson
Morning came gray through the tall windows, and Blair woke to the weight of Lucien's hand still resting on her belly, flat and warm over the dried mess of the night before. She lay still and counted nothing. That was the whole of her religion now. Her heart landed one slow enormous beat, then waited twelve seconds, then landed again, and she luxuriated in the waiting like a cat in sun.
Vespera was already up. She stood at the tall mirror in a dressing gown of wine-colored silk, winding her raven hair, and her burgundy eyes found Blair's in the glass.
"She is awake," the Queen said.
"She has been awake," Lucien said against Blair's shoulder, "listening to us discuss her like a shipment of wine. Haven't you, little rose."
"I have been resting," Blair said. "A princess rests. She takes what comes next after."
Lucien laughed into her hair. Vespera did not laugh, but her mouth curved at the glass, which from Vespera was a standing ovation.
The table had been laid while they slept. Vespera came back to the bed carrying a silver tray balanced on one hand, an instinct from no century of hers, and sat cross-legged in the ruin of the sheets and fed her wife by hand. Warm bread torn in pieces. Honey on the pad of her thumb. A goblet of blood held to Blair's lips while Lucien held her hair back from her face, and Blair drank without counting, greedily, some of it running down her chin so that Vespera caught it with her tongue.
"You ate three plates and a king last night," Vespera said. "And you woke soft as ever."
"I noticed that," Blair said, working her jaw through the bread. "I was promised a monstrous appetite would ruin me. Nothing ruins. Is this a swindle?"
Lucien's hand slid from her belly up to the underswell of her breast, idle, proprietary, weighing it. "Sit up. Let me look at you."
She sat up. The sheet fell off her and the cold air of the room moved over her bare skin and she did not cover herself, because princesses did not, and because both of them were looking. Lucien looked the way he looked at contracts, at armies, at things he intended to own completely. He turned her chin with two fingers and then her shoulder, and his dark golden eyes traveled down her the whole length, the softened waist, the full hips, the heavy young breasts.
"Do you know what you are now?" he said.
"Yours."
"Besides that. You are not human anymore. Human flesh hoards. It stores every excess as fat against a famine that is never coming. You are Made now. Your body does not hoard, it refines." His thumb traced the curve of her waist, inward, the new deeper hollow of it. "Everything you eat and drink and spend goes into perfecting the line of you. That waist will keep drawing in. These," and he cupped her breast fully, lifted its weight, let it fill his palm, "will keep filling. Your hips, your ass, your mouth. Year over year. For a century at least."
Blair looked down at herself, at the soft tan curves Vespera had spent a month building by hand. "A century of this?"
"A century of more," Vespera said. "I was a slim thing when I was Made. You should have seen me at two hundred." She let that sit, which was Vespera's version of coyness. "The house is patient. So is the body."
"So I get fed like this every day," Blair said slowly, working it out, "and instead of getting fat I get..." She paused.
"Lethal," Lucien said. "I cannot see the end of what you will become. I have stood in the portrait hall of this palace. I have seen four hundred years of seduction carved in oil and marble. None of it will hold a candle to whatever you are growing into, and none of the painters will be worthy of you."
"Flatterer," Vespera said mildly.
"Fact-checker," Lucien said, and took a piece of honeyed bread from Vespera's tray and fed it to Blair himself, watching her lips close on his fingers.
Vespera rose, dressed with the help of no one, and bent to kiss Blair's mouth, tasting of her wife's blood. "The writ governs the day," she said. "There are grain merchants and a solicitor and a fortnight of court to prepare for, and one of us must govern it. I have decided it is me, because Lucien sulked through four hours of tariffs yesterday and would sulk through today's worse."
"I would not sulk," Lucien said.
"You would. You did. Amelia has it in writing." Vespera straightened and looked down at Blair in the wrecked bed, and her voice went a degree warmer. "The King has claimed today's lesson. I ceded it. Try to leave him something I can still recognize at moonrise."
"I make no promises," Blair said.
"I know," the Queen said, and it sounded like pride, and she was gone, the door closing on the click of her heels down the mosaic corridor.
The room settled. Blair stretched, arms over her head, spine arching, completely unselfconscious, and watched Lucien watch her. He was already half hard under his loose linen, she could see the shape of him, and he made no move to hide the fact that he had been hard since he cupped her breast.
"The Queen fed you and filled you with glass yesterday," he said. "Today the discipline is mine. Lay back. Present yourself."
Blair lay back against the mound of pillows and let her knees fall open, her swollen, well-used cunt on display, still tacky with last night's spend, and her whole body flushed with the shamelessness of it. "Like this, my king?"
"Wider. Good. Don't move from that position unless I move you." He went to the tall cabinet beside the bed where the crystal collection lived in its velvet rows, and Blair craned her head to watch him choose. He did not take the fluted dildo or the ribbed plug. He took something she had never seen: a slim smooth crystal phallus, smaller than Lucien, no ridges at all, and at its base a little cage of silver filigree, and when he turned it in his hand it began, faintly, to hum.
Her cunt clenched on nothing. She heard herself make a small sound.
"That one is new," she said.
"That one is ours. It was a gift from a duchess two hundred years ago who hoped to be invited to this bed and never was." He rolled it once more between his fingers and the hum deepened to a low continuous purr. "Vespera taught you over-indulgence with food and glass. My lesson is different. Mine is abundance without end. You will wear this all day. It does not stop. It does not tire. You do not count your climaxes and you do not ask permission for them, ever, because a princess in my care comes when her body pleases, as often as her body pleases, until her body learns there is no ceiling." He came back to the bed. "Do you understand the discipline?"
"I think so," Blair said, watching the humming crystal with wide red-ringed amber eyes.
"Say it back to me."
"I live in over-abundance. I come when I please, as often as I please, and nobody stops it, and I don't count."
"Good girl. There is one addition." He knelt on the bed between her open thighs and pressed the smooth head against her entrance, and she was already slick enough, still loose from everything last night, and it slid in deep in one long easy stroke that made her gasp and grip the sheets. The hum went through her whole pelvis like a struck bell. He seated it fully, pressed the filigree base snug against her clit, and then, gently, worked a single finger alongside it, pressing it tighter against her front wall where Vespera's flutes had spent four hours yesterday.
"Oh," Blair said. "Oh, that's."
"That's the whole lesson," Lucien said.
The first orgasm took her inside two minutes. It came up out of nowhere, the hum sitting on her clit and purring against that spot inside, and she seized around it, arching, crying out, her hands flying to her own breasts. Lucien sat back on his heels and watched with his head tilted, interested, a scholar at a lecture. Her cunt clamped and fluttered around the crystal and the hum did not change at all.
"It doesn't stop," she panted, coming down. "Lucien, it doesn't stop."
"It does not stop," he agreed. "That is the point. Count nothing. Beg for nothing. Just lie there and be ruined all day, wife, while I read to you."
He got up, naked, and fetched a book from the stack he had brought in, a slim volume bound in oxblood leather, and settled against the headboard beside her with her head on his thigh. His cock was heavy along his jaw-line of hip and he did nothing about it, which was its own cruelty. He opened the book and began to read in a voice made for throne rooms, low and even, some old Valdorian poem about a garden that ate its gardener, and below her waist the crystal hummed and purred and Blair's second orgasm crested over her inside a quarter hour, quieter than the first, a long shudder that rolled through her and left her boneless with her mouth open against his leg.
"Beautiful," Lucien said, and did not stop reading.
The morning wore on. He read. He fed her at intervals, blood from the warming jug, bread, cold chicken, sugared plums, holding each bite to her mouth without pausing the poem, and every time her lips closed on his fingers her third orgasm or her fourth would crest through her and she would moan around the food and swallow it all. Her spend was running out of her around the crystal now, soaking into the sheets in a slow warm spread, and the hum simply went on, indifferent, tireless.
"Lucien," she said somewhere past noon, glassy-eyed, her hips moving in small continuous circles she was not commanding. "It's too much. It's, I can't think."
"You were not meant to think," he said. "That is what the day is for. Thought is a day-wage laborer, little rose. Today you are unemployed." He turned the page. His free hand came down and splayed over her lower belly, over the hum, pressing the crystal harder against her front wall, and she wailed and climaxed again, clamping down on it, her spend pulsing out around the base.
He marked her while she came. That was the shape of his possession and she understood it by the third hour. While her body shuddered he lowered his mouth to whatever part of her was offered, the swell of her breast, the inside of her wrist, the soft of her hip, the side of her throat, and his fangs or his teeth or both sank in shallow possessive bites, and he soothed each one with his tongue and murmured against her skin.
"Mine here," at the curve of her breast, sucking a bruise.
"Mine here," at the crease of her thigh, teeth.
"Mine, all of it," at her throat, over the pulse that beat once every twelve seconds, slow and royal.
She lost the thread of the poem entirely somewhere in its middle cantos. She lay with her head on his thigh and her body was one continuous low fire, the hum inside her constant, her climaxes no longer separable, one rolling into the next so that she could not have said where she stopped and started, her hips rocking, her fingers twisting in the sheets, her voice reduced to a low continuous sound. Lucien read on with his hand in her hair and every few pages he would look down at her ruined, flushed, dripping state and praise her.
"Look at you. Soaked through the sheets and still going."
"There she is. There's my spoiled girl. Take another, there is room."
"God, the sounds you make. Four hundred years and no one has ever made that sound in this bed."
"You are leaking down my leg, wife. Good. Keep going. More."
"More," she sobbed, meaning it, her body obeying him before her mind could. Another crest broke over her and she arched off the pillows, heels digging, and he held her belly down with one palm and praised her through it with his mouth at her ear, and his other hand reached over and pressed the base harder and she came again on the heels of the last, shrieking, hers and no one's, permissionless.
By late afternoon she could not form sentences. She lay across his lap now, he had arranged her himself, her cheek against his hard stomach, his cock against her cheek and ignored, her knees drawn up, the crystal still humming away inside her thoroughly ruined cunt, her spend slicked down both inner thighs and dripping onto the sheets below her. Her skin was marked from shoulder to knee, love bites and shallow fang-marks, a whole dark constellation of his possession, and every one of them throbbed gently in time with nothing at all.
Lucien closed the book. He had reached the end, or he had simply decided the lesson had reached its shape. He set it aside and looked down at his wife, her curls plastered to her damp forehead, her amber eyes barely focusing, her lips swollen from her own teeth.
"Where are you, little rose?" he asked softly. "Can you speak?"
"Mm." A long pause. "No."
"Good. That is the correct answer." He stroked her hair back from her face. "Do you know what today was? Vespera taught you that you take. That was the first discipline. Mine was to teach you that taking never runs out. There is no bottom to what this house will pour into you. You could spend from now until the sun burns out and we would not be finished giving." His thumb wiped a tear, or sweat, or both, from her cheekbone. "And no one will ever come to take it from you. I will burn the world down first."
The hum pulsed on. Her body gathered, helplessly, and broke again, a small quiet crest that made her whimper and shiver in his lap, her twelfth orgasm or her twentieth, uncounted, uncountable, exactly as designed.
"There," Lucien murmured, and his voice had gone rough at last, the king's composure finally fraying at the sight of her. "There she goes again. Perfect. Insufferable. Mine."
He gathered her up against his chest, the crystal still deep inside her and still humming, because he did not take it out, because the lesson was not concluded, because the day had not ended. He rang for the servants with one hand without letting go of her, and when the door opened far down the corridor he lifted his head and spoke past her toward it.
"Supper for three. The large goblet. And tell the Queen her wife is leaking on every sheet in the royal bed and has been marked from throat to knee, and that the inspection at moonrise is going to be extremely interesting."
Blair laughed, wrecked and small, into his chest. "You're going to make her jealous."
"I am going to make her," Lucien said, kissing the top of her curls, "enormously proud, and then enormously jealous, and then she is going to take it out on both of us, and it is going to be the best night of the week, and it is only Tuesday."
Inside her the crystal hummed on, patient as a king, and her next orgasm began gathering itself somewhere below thought, and Blair closed her eyes and let it come.