I was astounded by the extravagance, watching the seemingly endless parade of dishes. First came the rich, herb-encrusted roasts of boar, venison, and fowl. Then followed pies so large that they needed two servants to carry them. Sheer enormity soon gave way to the fantastic as mythical beasts on golden platters made their entrance. Heads and torsos of peacocks were sewn onto the haunches of pigs, the feathers and plumes remaining intact. It was monstrous yet beautiful.
“How is one to eat that?” I whispered.
“These were creatures created in the kitchens only for the amusement of the guests,” the king, or rather, my husband Edward replied. “That’s the fabled Pavosus. Can’t have a proper feast without one or two of those.”
The servants presented it before us, and I marveled such barbaric artistry, though my practical peasant side deplored the senseless waste of such animals. I didn’t have long to mull over my morals, as the feast began in earnest, and I was forced to sample every dish. At least, I would not go hungry again. I found myself unexpectedly thankful for such small mercies.
Another parade began after the main courses were finished. Tottering towers of confectionary and cake perfumed the air with vanilla and cinnamon. I even saw chocolate for the first time, and I was eager to sample it. After the pastry came servants bearing golden bowls of exotic fruits, and I exclaimed in pleasure when a page placed a dish of figs on the table.
I had never tasted a fig before and my mouth began to water, curious of the fruit’s fabled sweetness. I reached out to pluck one from the dish, but Edward brushed my hand aside. Instead, he picked up the fruit and held it to my lips.
“Your first time?” he asked, and I knew he was asking about more than my culinary experience.
“Yes,” I said, suddenly irritated and nervous. “The life I lived before did not allow for such frivolities. The more extravagant the pleasure, the higher the price there was to pay. For such as me, there was only work and death, and death was often a blessing you prayed for.”
He chuckled and took a delicate bite of the fig before returning it to my lips. “You are so droll. Only work and death. One might say that about any station in life, especially one that holds the responsibility for an entire kingdom. Yet, we are born craving pleasure as well. Why else would we work?”
“To sustain ourselves,” I replied. “To provide food and shelter.”
“But are not food and shelter pleasures in their simplest forms?”
I stared at him, uncertain as to how to answer.
“Taste the fig, Laila,” Edward commanded gently.
I did as he asked and was rewarded by a burst of crisp sweetness with an undercurrent of honey.
“You must learn how to take pleasure in your life,” Edward said, setting down the fig and caressing my cheek. “And I shall have the pleasure of being your most devoted teacher.”
I shivered with new and nameless sensations at his touch. It was not like the rush of exhilaration I had experienced with the stranger. No! I would not think of him. I abhorred him. I abhorred Edward. I abhorred myself. Blood bound me to one man, and a ring bound me to another.
Edward’s smile deepened at my reaction, and I reminded myself that done is done. My only choice now was to embrace the choices I had made. Grabbing a fresh fig from the dish, I sunk my teeth into the supple flesh. A seductive combination of velvet sweetness filled my mouth. I wondered if what awaited me later tonight with Edward would be equally as satisfying.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, turning from me to watch the entrance of the entertainers. “Now, this shall be a real treat for you, my love.”
An old man carrying a lute came to stand in the center of the room and bowed deeply to us. It took me a moment to realize he was bowing to me because I was a queen now. He looked so impossibly frail and bent that I worried the weight of the lute would cause him to topple over. It was difficult to detect which of the thousand wrinkles on his face were his eyes and lips.
“Who is he?” I asked as the man tuned his instrument.
“The most celebrated minstrel in all the kingdoms. Voice like an angel, and tales that will cause you to tremble.”
I was about to ask further, but Edward placed a silencing finger on my lips. I resisted the urge to bite it off. The minstrel closed his eyes and a hush fell over the room. Then, he sent a commanding hand sweeping down the strings, creating such a mournful sound my very soul shook.
A maiden once lived in dire scarcity,
Wishing to be free from such misery.
A scheming witch hearing her plea,
Offered to rescue her for a fee.
His words tore through me as his hands continued moving swiftly up and down the shaft of the lute. Strings bent and cried out in unison with his seductive voice.
“Give me your child,” the witch demanded,
“And I will I save you from your soot and ashes.”
Under cover of night she took such a deal,
To trade her firstborn for a life she’d hold dear.
I tried to focus on the melody and not the words, but his voice burned each note and letter onto my heart. The tips of my fingers where the stranger’s magical quill had drawn my blood began to tingle.
The witch threw back her head and cackled with delight,
Happily changing the young maiden’s plight.
Yet, once fair maiden had all that she wished,
She refused the steep price with a wave of her wrist.
My fingers stung now as if I had plunged a hundred needles into them. The verses cracked my composure, and I bit my lip to stifle a groan.
The price is too high, she claimed undaunted,
Her dear child no longer unwanted.
I swore that the fire was burning the flesh of my fingers away. If I were to dare to look down, surely all I would see were char and bone. My heart pounded and my breaths grew shallow and suffocating.
The witch unpleased by an act so brazen,
Took vengeance on the ungrateful maiden,
And cast her back out to her soot and ashes.
A fate surely worse than a thousand lashes.
I saw the stranger within the song, there was no denying it anymore. All it would take was one mistake before all I had gained would turn to dirt...or straw.
Thankfully, the song ended with that. Trying not to cringe outwardly, I looked down and saw my hand, perfect and whole. The burning had vanished. My skin was cool and soft. My heart slowed, returning to steady and fluid thumps.
The old man took several seesawing bows to the thunderous applause of the court. My world once again became calm, though the warning in the song had taken up residence with my doubts in the recesses of my mind.
It was only a song. A coincidence. Resolve pounded through my veins that I would not make the same mistake as that impuissant maiden. My deal with the stranger would stand. Giving up everything I earned because of a change of heart would not be how my tale ended. Popping another fig in my mouth, I reminded myself that I was no poor maiden. I was a queen, and had I not promised to wield my power for the good of my people?
“That song pleases you, I see,” Edward remarked, his gaze fixed on my mouth.
“Very much,” I replied. “It reminds me of what I don’t want to be. Weak.”
His eyes darkened again, that hunger common to all men shining through. Weakness would be to delay any further the fulfillment of at least one of the promises I had made. If I truly didn’t want to be the maiden, to be weak, I had to own it fully.
Steeling myself, I placed my hand on top of his and said, “I think it time we depart, you promised me new sensations, and I don’t want to miss a moment.”
His fingers wrapped around my hand, and we stood from the table. Cheers erupted as we departed.
“All hail the king and queen!”
He led me back to his apartments, which were across the hall from the queen’s chambers where but this morning I had stood relishing a reprieve from the noose. After tonight, those
chambers would belong entirely to me.
Edward’s rooms were exactly as I imagined, as dark as his soul, and as masculine as the mask he wore. Not surprisingly, everything was done in heavy wood and the motif of crimson and gold ruled. A massive, curtained, four-poster bed stood near a roaring fire. My husband nodded curtly to the two pages who stood silently in the doorway, dismissing them. With a final bow, they closed the doors behind us. Despite my resolve for courage, my heart skipped a beat.
Edward prodded the fire several times with the poker, large plumes of sparks rolling up into the chimney. His features grew more handsome in the play between light and darkness.
“I won’t deny how loathsome a creature I first found you,” he said, plunging the poker deeper into the crumbling wood. “Weaseling your way into making yourself my queen. Holding my gold for ransom.”
As if I felt any different about him, but I pushed my animosity away. Now was not the time. I didn’t particularly rejoice at the idea of intimacy with Edward, but I wouldn’t be ruled by my hatred of him. I would hold firm to what I had won. Tonight, he would take my innocence, but I would conquer a king. I admit that there was a certain viciousness about the idea that electrified me.
Standing up and moving from the hearth, he approached me and cupped my face in his hands. The green of his eyes glittered in the firelight. The heat from his fingers fed the flush in my cheeks. I closed my eyes, savoring my coming triumph.
Slowly, he slid his hands down my neck and shoulders until they circled my waist and drew me to him. His breaths were hot on my skin and stirred something restless inside me, something…unfinished. Through my eyelashes, I saw the shadows playing over his face. Yet, perhaps the shadows were tricking me, for it was another face I saw in the darkness now.
The stranger.
The ghost of his memory made me shiver with twisted desire. The stranger’s features grew vibrant and clear when I closed my eyes. I could see his pale skin flushed with lust. The storms raging behind his eyes wanted me and nothing else. He refused to leave my thoughts, even though qualms of disloyalty flittered weakly around him.
Edward’s lips grazed mine as he continued to speak unhurriedly. “I wanted to crush that skull of yours. Keep your insolent mind from ever forming another insolent thought again.”
I only felt the stranger’s lips skate down my neck leaving behind a trail of fire. Edward’s words melted away as I fell further into my fantasy. Yearning built heat within my core, growing hotter with every touch. Edward’s large hands no longer roved over me, only the slender fingers of the man who liberated me. He moved down my body and unlaced my gown, exposing my thirsting skin. I gasped as he gently caressed my naked breasts just as the thread that spun through his hands.
“But,” he whispered, and I no longer knew if it was the stranger’s voice or Edward’s I heard. “I see how wrong I was for ever having thought such a thing. We are the same, you and I. We both will go to any length to get what we want.”
I thrashed against a million hands as the stranger sucked my nipple into his mouth.
“You are perfect, Laila,” one of them said.
Flesh blazed between my thighs and I rocked myself against the firm body pressing into me. As he lowered me to the soft bed, my lips were finally taken in a deep kiss. The stranger rolled his tongue in my mouth, and I grabbed his hair, pulling him tighter to me. Gasps echoed through the black as his hardness pushed into me, causing a warm sensation to ripple through my body. Waves of pleasure crashed over me as I moaned into the sheets.
“Pain is power,” the stranger’s voice rang through my head, and I realized he wasn’t really there.
Yes, I reminded myself as I opened my eyes and saw Edward making me his.
Pain is power.
Chapter Seven
Whorl:
noun: The weighted part of a dropspindle that helps it to spin.
Also the spindle pulley that regulates the speed of a spinning wheel spindle
noun: A circular arrangement of like parts around an axis.
Ever After: Laila
The stranger always appeared whenever the king took me. I heard his voice. Felt his touch. Melted into his kiss. I didn’t know what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. My memories of him were confusing and consuming, but, I refused to examine the matter further. After all, other than this one irritating detail, life truly became all I had wished.
I no longer had to rise with the rooster, plagued in the morning by night’s icy chill. There were no more clouds of dust and dirt from the mill filling my eyes and lungs. Even my hands that were long obscured by calluses from years of grinding stones and gunnysacks softened. Now I bathed in milk and rose petals. I took long walks in the garden, enjoying the reverent bows of my subjects. I ate meat whenever I wished and drank the finest wines.
Ever mindful of my vows to myself, I endeavored to learn the royal history of my kingdom, struggling daily and dutifully with etiquette and a thousand unimportant dates when rich people had done a thousand unimportant things. More than book learning, though, I made it a point to visit orphanages and churches, encouraging charity in my subjects by bringing charity myself.
I must have seen a hundred girls like me, waiting outside the churches and peeking out from workroom windows. Their dry hair, splotchy skin, and leaden gazes were far too familiar to me. The stranger’s sly laugh echoed in my mind.
I didn’t need memories of him to remind me just how precarious my position was. Though they would not dare to do so openly, I could feel the scorn from the other courtiers—born noble to this life and inured to its gifts and challenges. If their bows and curtsies dipped a fraction lower to each other than to me, it was never so in the sight of the king. It did not take a clever man like the stranger to tell me that there were no doubt many plots afoot to oust me from the peacock’s throne and return me to sparrowdom.
The other reminder of my fragile state of fortune was my husband himself. Edward spoiled my joy, though he gave me little reason to feel so. He looked at me with a mix of adoration and lust. You may think it sad that I found the lust easiest to accept and live with, perhaps because I felt it was his only true expression of emotion. The adoration came from his belief that we shared greed as the bedrock of our characters. He adored me as one snake adores another. Yet, I refused to define my nature by greed. Maybe it was sophistry, but I would only admit to an ironclad will to survive.
The king was assiduous in his duties as a new husband, and the results were to be expected.
“Ouch!” I exclaimed as Rosamund tightened my corset.
“Your majesty?” she queried, for I had never complained from the trussing.
“Leave my stays loose at the top,” I ordered. “My breasts are tender this morning.”
“Yes, your majesty.”
Two days later, I refused all eggs, declaring them to be the most revolting of foods, and instead demanding nothing but smoked fish for luncheon…and supper…and breakfast.
A week later, even smoked fish palled, and I became accustomed to becoming ill at the thought of anything but weak tea. I was too tired to pay my visits, declaring the orphans and priests would have to get along without me, for I could not and would not rise from this bed.
At these words, doctors were sent for, though I hardly needed them. Perhaps refined noblewomen would have been mystified by my symptoms, but a peasant is not so easily fooled having lived a life in far closer proximity to birth and death.
I was to be a mother.
“My heir!” Edward cooed, reverently rubbing my belly. “The throne secured at last. The line of my father and his fathers will remain unbroken. You deserve every veneration, my dear.”
He kissed my cheek and did not notice the bitterness behind my smile. His moment of pride and peace would be short lived. His little heir would not remain his for very long, and this thought was all that stoked the feebly floundering ember of my rage.
Perhaps my own pride and peace was quietly
effacing the hard motives and harder feelings that had driven my decisions before this babe took up residence in my belly. Little movements demanded my attention, but I resolutely ignored each one, even as I repeated my mantra that I was doing this child a service. In giving it up, I was rescuing it from a corrupt father and a sham of a mother.
I rehearsed the moment I would tell the king his heir was gone. I reached for and clutched at the thought of his misery to reinforce my wavering will. He would be livid, threaten me and damn me to hell, but in the end he would not touch me. He wouldn’t risk losing his gold over a child, especially not when he believed I could turn it all back into straw with a snap of my fingers. He never need know the rest of the truth about what really took place down in the dungeon. Besides, he could always use my body to produce another heir…and another. I felt sick at the thought.
As I was eating my breakfast one morning, looking out of the window at the rolling hills of the countryside, I felt one solid, determined little kick. It might as well have been a knife to my heart. I was undone. In that small, insistent announcement of my babe’s sentience and existence, my power dwindled back into fear, and I was that insufferably scared peasant girl again, trapped within stone in a cage of straw.
My dreams were no longer soft and easy. Now, there were only nightmares filled with those storms of the stranger’s gray eyes. Every night, I saw his fingers turn to claws, reaching out for my child. Flashes of gold like lightning thundered above me as I begged for forgiveness, but in these dreams, none was given.
“Here’s the cloak you requested, your majesty,” Rosamund said.
She placed the heavy fabric around my shoulders with deference, but her expression was disapproving. I stared unblinkingly at my reflection as I rubbed a hand over my swollen belly.
Spin: A Fairy Tale Retelling (Spindlewind Trilogy Book One) Page 10