Chapter 31: The First Queen's Day
Blair woke to a warm, wet pressure between her thighs and no memory of being carried here.
The crimson velvet canopy hung above her, embroidered with ravens in silver thread. Jasmine scented the air. Her legs were already open, pushed wide by cool pale shoulders, and Vespera's mouth worked her cunt with the unhurried greed of a creature who had four hundred years of practice and no intention of rushing.
"Oh," Blair said, useless and breathless. Her hips lifted off the silk on their own.
Vespera's tongue circled her clit in slow strokes, teasing the hood back, flicking the bare exposed bud until Blair's thighs trembled. One finger slid into her, then a second, curling forward and dragging along the front wall of her pussy where she was still sore and swollen from yesterday. The ache and the pleasure braided together until she couldn't tell which was which.
"Good morning, wife." Vespera lifted her mouth just enough to speak, lips shining. "You knocked on my door at some point in the night. Or you sleepwalked. Either way, you're here, and here is mine."
"I don't remember knocking."
"I know. You were asleep on your feet in the corridor. Lucien nearly followed you out of habit and I nearly let him, to watch you try to climb into the wrong bed." She went back down, sucking Blair's clit into her mouth proper, tongue flicking fast now, fingers pumping.
Blair grabbed the sheets. The climax built fast, a hot coiling pressure low in her belly, and Vespera felt it and pressed harder, fingers fucking into her in a steady rhythm, mouth sealed over her clit. Blair came with a cry, hips jerking, cunt clenching around the Queen's fingers while Vespera hummed against her and drank every pulse of it.
"You taste better than yesterday," Vespera observed, wiping her mouth with her thumb and licking it. "Being woken with your head full of me suits you."
Blair lay sprawled and gasping, one arm thrown over her eyes. "Is it morning? The windows are dark."
"Made eyes see better in the dark, Princess. It's mid-morning. We have governance. Get up."
Getting up was a process. Vespera dressed her herself, refusing the maids, in a slip of wine-dark silk that left nothing to imagination and no undergarments, per the standing request. She combed Blair's curls with her own fingers, and when they reached the solar, she insisted on braiding.
The braid was a catastrophe. Vespera's elegant fingers, which could pick a lock or a courtier's throat with equal precision, could not make three strands of coily hair cooperate. She pulled too tight in one place, lost a whole section in another, and ended up anchoring the mess with two silver pins and visible satisfaction.
"There," she said. "A queen's work."
"It's terrible."
"It's mine, which makes it law." Vespera kissed the top of her head. "Wear it all day. If anyone laughs, I'll have them flogged."
The audience chamber smelled of candlewax and old parchment. Vespera sat her throne with Blair seated at her right hand on a cushioned stool, slightly lower, exactly at the height where every visiting noble had to decide whether to greet the stool or pretend it wasn't there.
Count Orlov, a Cadaverine house elder with a face like dried leather, made the mistake of looking directly at Blair's cleavage and then at Vespera.
"You've brought the new Made to audiences, Majesty," he said carefully.
"I've brought my wife to audiences, Count. She has a name and standing above yours. You may address her as Lady Ravenwood and pray she chooses to hear you."
Blair folded her hands in her lap and smiled sweetly. "I hear everything, my lord. I used to dust the sconces in this room. I know which courtiers pick their teeth when they think no one sees."
A ripple went through the assembled nobles. Count Orlov went very still. Vespera's mouth curved without opening.
"The petitions," the Queen said. "Read them, and if any of them concern grain tariffs I want them put in a pile for the Arch-Duke to fondle at his leisure."
The morning passed in petitions and disputes. Blair watched Vespera work and understood, for the first time, the machine under the silk. A baron wanted water rights. Vespera granted half, framed the refusal as a gift, and left the man thanking her for his own humiliation. A merchant house asked for protection. Vespera named a price that would pay for itself twice over. Blair took notes on the back of a petition because no one had told her not to, and Vespera glanced at the notes and said nothing, which Blair was learning was high praise.
At midday a tray arrived. Vespera fed her by hand in front of forty nobles, small pieces of cold chicken and figs lifted from the plate between her own fingers, holding each bite to Blair's lips while the chamber pretended not to look and looked anyway.
"You said you'd feed your wife before the court," Blair murmured around a fig, licking honey from the Queen's fingertips.
"I keep my threats. Eat."
By late afternoon the petitions were done. The chamber emptied. Vespera dismissed her secretary with a flick of two fingers and sat back on the throne, and the silence that followed had weight.
Blair set down her notes. She looked up at the Queen, at the porcelain throat and the raven hair coming loose from its own bad braid, and remembered her lesson from the schedule.
"Your day's work is done," Blair said.
"It is."
"Then I'd like to ask you for something."
"Ask."
Blair stood. Her heart, slow and heavy as a bell, beat once in its twelve seconds, then once again. She walked up the three steps to the throne and knelt on the dais in front of it, amber eyes with their red rings looking up.
"Fuck me however you please, my Queen. For as long as you please. I'm asking."
For a moment Vespera said nothing at all. Then she rose, and when she spoke her voice had dropped into a register Blair had never heard from her, low and stripped of all its silk.
"You're certain."
"Yes."
"Then we go to my chamber, and I'm going to warn you once, because the writ demands I never take what isn't freely given and you should know what you're freely giving." Vespera took her hand and pulled her up. "I have starved for four hundred years, Blair. A marriage of alliance. A bed shared like a treaty table. I am not going to be gentle and I am not going to be brief, and if you ask me to stop I will stop instantly, but you will have to say it in words, because everything else you do tonight I'm going to take as encouragement."
"Good," Blair said.
The chamber door shut. The jasmine and the crimson velvet closed around them, and Vespera turned and looked at her wife standing in the middle of her bedchamber, and something old and starved came off her like heat off stone.
"Undress me."
Blair's fingers went to the lacings of the Queen's gown. She worked them slowly, discovering as she went that the gown had no maids' shortcuts, that Vespera dressed herself every morning like a woman who trusted no one's hands but her own. The wine silk loosened. Blair pushed it off her shoulders and down, over the hourglass figure, the porcelain skin, until Vespera stood in nothing but her own black hair falling loose to her waist.
Blair sank to her knees on the carpet. "Let me taste you first."
"Later. If you're very good." Vespera drew her up by the jaw. "Tonight you're the one being tasted. On the bed. On your back. Arms above your head and keep them there unless I move them."
Blair arranged herself on the crimson silk, arms up, wrists crossed, heart thudding its slow beats. Vespera climbed onto the bed after her and knelt over her and simply looked, for a long unbroken minute, from her face down the line of her throat, the swell of her breasts, the soft curve of her belly, the dark curls between her thighs.
"Two hundred years since anyone lay in my bed," Vespera said. "Lucien has his own wing. We kept separate beds like sensible monarchs. And now you're in it, and you're dripping already, and I haven't touched you."
"You were looking at me like that in the audience chamber. All day."
"I know. The Count noticed. I hope he chokes." Vespera lowered her head and took Blair's nipple into her mouth.
She sucked hard, no teasing, and the ache of it shot straight down through Blair's belly to her cunt, which pulsed visibly. Vespera's hand slid down and pressed two fingers flat against Blair's slit, not entering, just holding, feeling how wet she was, and made a low satisfied sound against her breast.
"Look at that. Soaked from one bite of attention." She bit down, gently, fangs sheathed but teeth sharp, and Blair arched off the bed. "Lucien marked you throat to knee. I'm going to leave my own set somewhere he won't think to look."
"Where?"
"You'll find out." She released the nipple, red and stiff and shining, and moved down Blair's body with her mouth, kissing and sucking a line over her ribs, her stomach, dipping her tongue into Blair's navel until she giggled and squirmed. Then Vespera pushed her thighs apart and looked at her open cunt for a long moment, swollen and pink and leaking, and her burgundy eyes went dark.
"Four hundred years," she said quietly, almost to herself. "Four hundred years of taking what the court offered and tasting nothing. And now this."
She went down on Blair like a starving woman.
There was nothing measured in it. Her tongue dragged a broad slow stripe from Blair's entrance all the way up, gathering the wet, then flattened against her clit and pressed, and Blair cried out and grabbed the pillow above her head because she'd been told to keep her arms there. Vespera licked her in long greedy strokes, then sucked the whole of her clit into her mouth and hummed, and the vibration went through Blair's pelvis like a struck bell. Two fingers drove into her and hooked forward, fucking her fast and rough, the heels of Vespera's hand smacking wetly against her with every thrust.
"Vespera, oh gods, don't stop, please don't stop,"
Vespera didn't stop. She fucked her with her fingers and mouth in tandem, and Blair's climax came up from somewhere deep, a hard clenching spasm that wrung a scream out of her, her back bowing, thighs clamping around the Queen's head. Vespera rode it out, tongue flicking through the aftershocks, then kept going, licking her through it and past it, relentless.
"Too much," Blair gasped, hips jerking. "Vespera, it's too much, I just came, I..."
"I heard no words of refusal." Her mouth never lifted. "The writ says words, Princess. You want me to stop, say stop. Otherwise open your legs."
Blair opened her legs wider. Vespera made a sound of pure appetite against her cunt and pushed her through the oversensitivity, past the burning edge, until the pain turned back into pleasure and the second orgasm rolled up slow and enormous and broke over her like deep water. Blair was sobbing by the end of it, tears sliding into her hair, arms still obediently above her head.
Vespera rose. Her chin and lips glistened. She crawled up Blair's body and kissed her, deep and filthy, letting her taste herself, and Blair sucked the Queen's tongue and clung to the pillow.
"Good girl," Vespera murmured against her mouth. "Now turn over. Hands on the headboard."
Blair turned, knees sinking into the mattress, gripping the carved wood. Behind her she heard the sounds of Vespera reaching into the nightstand drawer, the click of crystal. Cool glass touched her entrance, broad and ridged, and pressed in slow. The Queen's strap was heavier than anything Blair had taken, seated inch by inch until Vespera's hips were flush against her ass and Blair was panting into the headboard.
"You'll take all of it," Vespera said, and her hand gathered Blair's ruined braid and pulled her head back gently. "Because I've decided you will. Are you with me?"
"Yes. Yes, my Queen."
"Then hold on."
Vespera fucked her the way she governed. Precise, total, without mercy or waste. Her hips drove the crystal deep on every stroke, the ridges dragging out slow and plunging back hard, and one hand stayed fisted in Blair's hair while the other reached around and rubbed her clit in tight circles that matched the rhythm exactly. Blair's arms shook on the headboard. The slapping of the Queen's hips against her ass filled the crimson room along with her own broken cries.
"You feel what it is to be wanted by something that waited four hundred years?" Vespera said into her ear, biting the lobe. "This is the least of it. I could spend a decade in this bed and not be finished being starved."
"Then spend it," Blair gasped, pushing back onto the strap. "Take it out of me. All of it."
Vespera snarled, low in her throat, an actual animal sound, and fucked her harder. Blair came again with the Queen's fingers grinding her clit, her cunt clamping around the crystal, her knees buckling until Vespera's arm around her waist held her up and kept fucking her through it. When Blair finally collapsed forward onto the mattress, Vespera withdrew slow and eased her over onto her back.
The Queen looked down at her, at the wreck of her, flushed and tear-streaked and gaping, and then did something Blair didn't expect. She lay down beside her, gathered her in, and kissed her forehead.
"Still with me?"
"Everything's humming."
"That's the correct state." Vespera's fingers stroked through her curls, undoing the terrible braid entirely. Then, quieter: "You said something at supper. That you keep waiting for the catch."
Blair opened her eyes.
"I want to tell you what I was doing the night before I met you." Vespera's voice had gone very even. "I was signing grain tariffs alone. Lucien was in his wing. Four hundred years, and my side of the bed hadn't been slept in by anyone but me since the coronation. Then you were caught reading filth in my library with your nose in the air, and I thought, there. There's the spark. And I was right, and it terrifies me, and I own it anyway."
"I'm not a spark. I'm your wife."
"My wife." Vespera tested the word like a coin bitten for gold. "Then as your wife, I have one more thing to take tonight."
She slid down Blair's body and lifted her legs over her shoulders, and this time she ate her slowly, luxuriously, licking her sore swollen pussy with long tender strokes, mouthing her clit in gentle pulls, drawing out a last orgasm that Blair felt in her whole body, her toes curling, her hands finally free to tangle in black hair. When it broke over her it was soft and endless, a shudder rather than a scream, and Vespera drank it and rested her cheek on Blair's thigh.
"There's a mark I promised you," she said, and nipped the inside of Blair's thigh, high up where only she would ever see it, a small crescent that Blair would carry for a century. "There. Mine. He has the obvious places. This one's mine."
Blair laughed, hoarse. "I'm covered in bites and I can't walk and you fed me chicken in front of the Count."
"The Count deserved it." Vespera climbed up beside her and pulled the velvet coverlet over them both. Outside the tall windows the palace was dark and quiet. "Sleep here. Your next Queen's day begins in four days, but the bed governs the night, and tonight the bed says you're mine."
Blair curled into her, cheek against the Queen's sternum, listening to the slow distant beat of a four-hundred-year-old heart.
"I'll knock tomorrow anyway," she said. "Even if it's not my day."
"Then I'll open," Vespera said, and closed her eyes.