Chapter 30: Supper for a Spoiled Wife
The knock came twice, soft, then the doors opened. Vespera walked in first, and behind her a line of butlers filed through with trays held high, steam curling off roasted fowl, glazed fruit, pitchers of warmed blood in silver urns.
"Careful with that tureen," Vespera said, without turning her head. "If it spills on my carpet, one of you will be scrubbing it until the sun rises."
Her voice was silk stretched over knives. The butlers bowed in sequence and set the long table that had been carried in beside the bed, close enough that Blair could reach it without leaving the silk. Blair lay where Lucien had left her, on her side, her ankles crossed, the humming crystal phallus still seated deep and buzzing its low patient note through her hips. Her voice had gone somewhere hours ago. Her body had stayed behind, throbbing.
Lucien rose from his chair to pour. "Wine or blood, my Queen?"
"Both. Alternate the glasses and don't confuse them, you did that at Dante's wedding feast and I've never forgotten." Vespera turned to the staff. "That's all. Leave the service doors open on your way out; the smell of pheasant will follow you, not me."
They went. Doors closed. The chamber emptied of everyone but the three of them and the candles.
Vespera walked the length of the room slowly, wine-colored eyes moving down Blair's body like a hand. She stopped at the edge of the bed. "So. He left it in all day."
"He did," Lucien said, amused. "And she came so many times she lost the ability to perform simple arithmetic. Ask her what seven plus three is."
Blair managed a sound that was not a word.
"Oh, look at her." Vespera sat on the bed, took Blair's chin in cool fingers, and tilted her face up. Blair smiled at her, slow and crooked, eyes half-shut and swimming. "Loopy as a drunk kitten. Did my husband overfeed her, or merely enjoy her?"
"Both, I hope."
"Both," Blair echoed, dreamily, and Vespera laughed, low and genuine.
Then the Queen's hand slid down, over the soft curve of Blair's belly, past the swell of her hip, until her fingers found the silver filigree base. She turned it once, deliberately, and the hum spiked. Blair's back arched off the bed. Her mouth fell open. Her whole sex clenched around the crystal and her hips stuttered through another release, thin and weak and endless, her thighs shaking against the silk.
"Ninth, or fiftieth, who's counting," Vespera murmured. She drew the phallus out in one long, slow pull, unrelenting, letting Blair feel every ridge of it leaving her, until the tip slipped free and the crystal lay glistening on the silk, still humming, wet from a full day. Blair's cunt fluttered around nothing, open and swollen and leaking, and she whimpered at the loss.
"Kindly," Vespera said, looking across Blair's spent body at her husband, "our good girl has been very patient with you. So be kind to her now. Feed her. She'll fall into the pheasant if we don't."
Lucien set down the wine. "I am always kind."
"You marked her from throat to knee like a tomcat claiming territory. That is not kindness, that is vandalism with fangs."
"She didn't complain."
"She couldn't speak, Lucien. That's rather the point."
Blair giggled. It came out of her without permission, a small hiccup of sound, and both monarchs turned to look at her. She pressed her fingers over her mouth, amber eyes wide, red-ringed and shining.
"Apologies," she slurred. "Everything is very funny right now."
"What is funny, Princess?" Lucien asked, settling onto her other side, close enough that his warmth pressed along her marked thigh.
"You. Both of you. Married four hundred years and you bicker like scullery maids over a mop." She hiccupped again. "I love it."
Vespera's eyebrow climbed. Lucien's mouth curved. The Queen picked up a fork, speared a piece of pheasant in wine glaze, and brought it to Blair's lips.
"Eat, drunkard."
Blair opened her mouth. The meat was warm, rich, falling apart on her tongue, and she hummed as she chewed, wiggling deeper into the cushions between them. Vespera fed her the next bite, then the next, timing each forkful to Blair's chewing, while Lucien tilted a glass of warmed blood to her lips between courses so she drank in slow swallows. The overstimulation had left a low sweet ache everywhere, and every swallow of blood spread warmth through her like brandy.
She was so happy she could barely stand it. She kept blinking up at Vespera's face, then turning her head to blink at Lucien's, smiling at them both like a fool. Neither monarch told her to stop looking.
Between the third and fourth bite, Vespera set the fork down. "Now. While she's pliable and cannot flee, let's settle her week. It needs settling. The court convenes in ten days and I will not have our schedule collapsing the moment the Arch-Duce arrives with his entourage."
"A sensible Queen," Lucien said. "Go on."
"Seven days. Three for me, three for you, and one that belongs to her alone." Vespera's fingers traced idle circles on Blair's bare hip. "We'll call mine Queen's days. She sleeps in my bed. Wakes in my bed. Attends me while I govern if I wish her pretty and present at my side, or amuses herself in the library if I have council. And when my day's work is done, she asks me to fuck her, and I fuck her however I please, for as long as I please."
Blair's whole face flushed darker. "And I get no say in the how?"
"None whatsoever. That's the privilege of it. You get me undivided, and I get you entirely." Vespera brushed a curl off Blair's forehead. "You wanted everything the house owns, wife. This is the ledger it comes in."
"And my days," Lucien said, "mirror hers. She wakes in my bed. She sits beside me while I read, or rides with me in the garden, and at night she comes to my hand and my mouth and my cock as often as either of us can manage. I have waited four centuries for a day that belongs to someone I want in it. I intend to use every hour."
"The day alone is hers," Vespera continued, ticking it off on her fingers. "Princess days. She reads, she explores the east wing, she sleeps until dusk if she likes, she summons whatever food she wants. If she wants to be fucked she can demand it of us, and we will attend, provided the court isn't burning."
"And the seventh day?" Lucien asked.
"The seventh day alternates. The day that falls in my stretch is mine even if duty steals me; the day in yours is yours. Which brings us to the unhappy probability that one of us will, eventually, be called away on our own day." Vespera paused. "Dante has already begun hoarding grain tariffs into week-long councils. The man has discovered scheduling as a weapon."
Lucien's eyes narrowed. "He wouldn't dare schedule over my day."
"He absolutely would, and I would assist him out of spite if you marked my wife's knees again." She turned back to Blair. "So. A contingency. If duty steals one of us on our day, the other of us does not simply absorb the day. Instead, our absent spouse leaves a gift."
"What kind of gift?" Blair asked, wary, still chewing.
"A custom set," Lucien said, and there was open delight in his voice, the delight of a man watching a trap close, "of crystal plugs, made to order by the same glasshouse that made the duchess's phallus. Enchanted to vibrate. In two pieces."
Blair stopped chewing.
"They stay," Vespera said sweetly, "from the moment your spouse leaves, until the moment your spouse returns. No removal. No relief granted by the present spouse, that's the cruelty and the elegance of it, we each keep our own day intact. You spend the whole day full, humming, and waiting."
"That's barbaric," Blair said.
"It's romantic," both monarchs said at once, and then glared at each other for speaking in unison.
Blair swallowed her mouthful of pear and looked between them. Her body, traitor that it had become, clenched visibly at the thought, her spent cunt giving a small tired pulse that all three of them saw. She felt the heat climb her neck.
"I hate that I want it," she admitted.
"You don't have to want it," Lucien said, gentler. "Refusal rights hold in the bed and out of it. Say no and we burn the idea tonight."
"I didn't say no." She poked the fork toward the pheasant. "I said I hate that I want it. There's a difference. Feed me."
Vespera fed her. The meal went on, course by course, and the schedule took shape over Blair's head like a treaty being drafted aloud. Mornings on a Queen's day meant tea in Vespera's solar, and Vespera braiding Blair's curls herself, badly, until Blair learned to do it for her. Evenings on a King's day meant poetry in Valdorian and Lucien's mouth between her thighs while he pretended to still be reading. Princess days meant the library, and letters to Marta every quarter, and the freedom to walk the whole palace now that no one would dare glance at her wrong.
"What about the court?" Blair asked, around a bite of glazed pear. "Ten days. Dante knelt to me. The old houses expect a fight."
"The old houses can watch me feed my wife by hand in front of all of them," Vespera said, "and choke on it."
Lucien laughed. "My Queen has developed a taste for scandal in her dotage."
"I am four hundred years old, Lucien, my dotage is theoretical." She topped up Blair's blood glass. "The writ is sealed, the making was witnessed, Dante knelt, which I still intend to interrogate him about, and the Candle did something no Candle has done. The houses will posture. Then they will send gifts. Then they will pretend they always approved. Vampire courts are cowardly that way, all blood and no spine."
"And if one of them isn't cowardly?" Blair asked.
Lucien's hand found her marked knee and squeezed. "Then they learn what two monarchs and a princess with unprecedented eyes do to houses that reach for our wife. Eat your quail."
She ate. The plates emptied. The pitchers drained. At some point Vespera tipped the last of the blood into Blair slowly, watching her throat work, counting the swallows under her breath out of old habit and smiling when she reached the last one. Blair's eyes had cleared somewhat, the drunken euphoria settling into a warm steady glow, though she still lay between them without any intention of moving.
"Am I really to sleep in three different beds a week?" she asked. "I only just learned which side of your bed the cold draft comes from."
"You'll learn both beds," Vespera said. "And on your own day, your own bed, in your own wing, with your own door locked if you want it locked. We spoil you in company, Princess. We also leave you alone when alone is the luxury."
"That," Blair said quietly, "is the part I didn't expect."
"What part?"
"That you'd give me a day I don't have to be anything." She looked down at her plate. "A concubine gets kept. A princess gets a schedule and a locked door and a library. I keep waiting for the catch."
"The catch," Lucien said, "is that we're selfish. We want you well-kept and well-read and well-fucked, in that order, because a dull wife is a curse and we've both met them."
"A catch is something taken back," Vespera said, and her voice had lost its teasing edge. "Nothing in that writ comes back. Write that down somewhere in your stubborn head, because you'll doubt it in ten days when the court sniffs at you, and you'll doubt it in a century when we quarrel about something stupid. The writ holds. We hold."
Blair looked up at her. Then at him. Her eyes were bright, and not from the climaxing.
"I know," she said. "I just like hearing it."
"Sap," said Vespera.
"Wife of the blood," said Lucien, at the same moment, and kissed her temple.
Vespera stood, gathered the last small dish of honeyed figs, and sat back down cross-legged on the bed in a display of informality she permitted herself nowhere else in the palace. She fed Blair a fig by hand, watching her lips close around her fingers, and let them linger a beat longer than feeding required.
"One amendment to the schedule before I let you two alone," she said.
"Go on," Lucien said.
"On Queen's days, I wake her with my mouth. On King's days, you wake her with yours. On Princess days she wakes alone and may do as she likes, including lying in."
"Accepted. Counter-offer." Lucien reached over Blair to pluck a fig. "Whoever is outvoted on a duty-stealing day owes the absent spouse one full night upon return. No schedule, no court, nothing interrupts it."
"Accepted. Our first four hundred years were wasted on parlor politics." Vespera licked honey from her thumb. "Blair. Your days are set, your beds are set, your gifts are ordered. Anything you'd change, say it now."
Blair was quiet for a moment. Then she sat up, slowly, wincing at the raw sweet ache between her thighs, and looked at both of them with the steadiness creeping back into her amber eyes.
"Princess days," she said. "I want one rule. If I knock on either of your doors at any hour of a Princess day, you let me in. No reason required."
Vespera tilted her head. "Even at dawn?"
"Even at dawn. Sometimes a person just wants to not be alone, and I'd rather walk to you than lie there wanting to."
The Queen was silent a moment. Then she reached out and took Blair's hand, and squeezed it hard, once.
"Then it's law," Vespera said. "Knock and we open."
"Law," Lucien agreed, and took Blair's other hand.
Blair lay back between them, fed past full, fucked past counting, scheduled like a kingdom and held like a treasure, and smiled at the ceiling.
"So," she said. "Who's carrying me to whose bed tonight?"
Both monarchs reached for her at once.