Claiming Crystal

Claiming Crystal

Kayleen Knight

****

Copyright 2013 Kayleen Knight

I

Princess Crystal laid a piece of stone against her skin and finally brought the golden links of the chastity chain around, setting the necklace carefully in place while her servants busied themselves about her hair and dress in the full length mirror of precious glass. They picked at loose strands and needled out loose hemming, working towards perfection. They called her Princess Crystal because that was the jewel of her namesake, and they tended to her every need because that was the sacred job of the house servants of royalty.

Many of the servants had been picked from stocks of men hired from posts of hard labor, their bodies tight and taught with muscles, their bodies dressed immodestly with small cuts of drapery that curtained their cocks and butts with thin lays of fabric that suggested what was behind but did not do so vulgarly or flagrantly. Several of the men were excited to tend to her hair and dress, and their excitements were tall exclamations that throbbed under modest cloth like hearts under drapery. Others were more composed and flat, and they worked the way that the female servants worked, diligent and detailed but without any attraction to the womanish curves that angled her body like a landscape of flesh served to make mouths water and drool for a bite.

‘Tonight will be the last night we will tend to you,’ a female servant reminded her. ‘You will soon be in the care of another, and the servants that he owns.’

Crystal nodded with enough delicacy so as not to disturb the dressing. She did not care for these servants enough to make parting words and niceties. She did not scold them, and she had never been cruel to them even when there was excuse to be, but she did not care for them in the way her mother had cared for them, inviting the servant families to sleep in the stalls or employing their children to work with the family animals and farm. Crystal had bedded several of the men, but they were dutiful in a way that was dull and boring. They had been too inhibited to be daring. No matter the situation, these servants knew that they were only servants, and they did not overstep that role.

‘Did you hear me, Crystal?’ the female servant asked.

‘
Mm,’ she managed to reply, nodding again.

Crystal was as cold and sleek as her name, so much so that she had begun to wonder if her family had put a spell over her to write out the careful letters of her well-chosen birth name along the signature scrolls of her birth rite. Like any other crystal, she was prized. But like any other crystal, she was a possession. People would trade her and sell her and fit her into a different sort of decoration to be given to a man and worn accordingly. Many women, Crystal thought, were like the jewels and gems of the mines that men toiled their whole lives to dig up.

Yes, men mined women in many ways.

The servants fondled her into her proper figure, as was their right, and she allowed them to mold her young body the way that potters molded hot clay. The male servants who had been excited became exceedingly so, occasionally spilling over their cloth and excusing themselves to correct their appearance. Even some of the women became red in the cheeks, blushing, hot and bother
ed to be so near to such a jewel of a woman. One servant took particular joy in tightening the fabric of her dress over her bosom, at first fitting it too tightly just to watch the swell of her breasts as the fabric tried and failed to cup their bounty, and then loosening it and plumping it with the slightest suggestion of cleavage just beneath the stone of the necklace and the chastity chain, which hung like a second and longer necklace pressing shadows and dimensions down across her breasts.

It was important that her appearance would be suitable for the night's ceremony, for she had been named and born in part to fulfill this rite of passage. It reminded her faintly of the day she had her first bleeding, and the maids had hurried to her family and declared her first right of passage into womanhood. The only difference was that no men had touched her on that day, as though she was unclean. That was a day for the female servants to tend to her and tidy up after her, doting like mothers and talking amongst themselves about adult things Crystal had not understood at the time. If the male servants were dull then the female servants were noisy and cold, not because they seemed jealous of her beauty, but because they had tired of tending to it the way her mother often tired of keeping the enormous garden when it was in full bloom. Women, Crystal had come to realize, liked to toil the same way that men did, and just like men, when the toiling was done and the reward was reaped, women turned their backs and went looking for the next job. In many ways people were busy ants who needed to build their hills, but tonight Crystal had become the
job for every able-bodied man and woman within the hold where she was kept like a mockingbird.

Before the dressing she had been pushed out of her room and into the hands of ten women who spent three hours mixing and spraying just the right perfumes on every area of her body.

Crystal sighed, but took comfort in the feeling of the cool necklace stone rising and falling against the heave of her chest. Her family, who did not treat her like family but like property that they had worked for and invested in and therefore owned, always kept her room hot with fires, and heaped with blankets, and any chill was a welcome tickle against her body. The many servants huddled around her did not help with the heat, and she had begun to sweat gently on the napes of her neck and the firm roundness of her child-bearing thighs.

She glanced at a line of strong and nubile young men who passed just outside her room, a line of trotting horses, but she knew they were not for her yet. They would be presented tonight along with the other suitors; showered and dressed and manicured to meet the needs of the occasion and the hungers of the sexual court they would hold tonight in her name and her right. Crystal might have been owned by her family, but she was destined to own many things for herself, including a husband, and this was also her right and too her rite. Women of her lineage were afforded more than any other.

‘There you are,’ one of her maid mothers exclaimed at the doorway, as if she did not know Crystal would be preening in her room just as Crystal was expected to every evening, much less this most special occasion. ‘You look so very beautiful!’ She exclaimed. ‘You will do well tonight. No one will be able to resist you. Come to think of it, no one will be allowed to, but you understand my point.’

Taking this compliment as their cue, the servants stepped away and went to their corners of the room to eat their small meals and mind their small space of business that did not interfere with the wealthy people who owned them. Perhaps, Crystal thought, she did not care for the servants because she recognized that she was a servant alike, owed the ownership of some things but not the ownership of other thing
s. She did what she was told to do just as they did, and she suffered the consequences for her insubordination, just as they did.

The men with hard cocks
held their hands in front of their manhood to try and hide their towers so that the mother maid did not notice.

‘
I will make everyone proud,’ Crystal told the maid dully, but not without the conviction and beauty of lilt that was expected of her when answering to one of her maid mothers. There were seven of the maid mothers in total, and they had raised her in place of her birth mother, who mostly tended to the many gardens she had taken as her preferred children throughout the premises of the coastal land where they had claimed their fortune and made their name on the backs of others.

Perhaps
, even her parents were slaves to other things – ambition, if not greed. Some people bowed to men and some people bowed to women, and others still bowed to ideals and philosophies, and it was not her place to feel sorry for one in place of the other. Crystal understood life with the maturity of a young woman who had accepted the parameters of her bondage, and truth be told she was not the adolescent she once was.

****

She was ushered from her quarters and guided out into the evening, and she did what she had been instructed to do. That was the life of a princess; too a slave.

It was t
he evening of her twenty-fifth birthday; an affair of celebrations and gifts that staved off the dark with colored lights, lanterns, statuesque wicks burning like large candles and bonfires laid with the articles of her youth. The clothes she had worn as a baby were put to ash, and the small dresses she had worn as a girl were set alight, throwing embers with the throwing confetti, dancing the air with particles of rejoicing as potential suitors danced for her attentions and potential romantic rivals conspired for her fall.

She was poised atop a throne of wood that had been carved with many faces and long, slender bodies chiseled into the chair legs, and her expression was calm and cold and unaffected. This was tradition, and tradition was without feeling. Should a woman of age make an expression, any expression, laughing at the suitors or smiling to the favored mate, frowning from the fires and heat, grimacing at the heavy ceremonial animal skins and leather that had been heaped upon her, the celebrations would stop at once and there would be scoldings and delays. This was not the night for her to feel anything, for this was the night before her deeper sensations awoke from this second adolescence into the true sensitivities of a crystal borne woman.

Crystal's namesake was more than a name, more even than a description. It was her lineage, and all the men and all the women who did not understand that lineage would learn this night.

The proceedings began quietly, almost erotically.

Men bared themselves. Their bodies had been sculpted, clean of hair or pampered with a lushness of perfumes and soaps. Their every region had been carefully tended to in the hopes of expressing her eye, and the confident ones stood erect, and the lesser ones dangled a sheen of lotion and rich oil that had been laid over them. The blacksmiths of men knew how to break the raw molds of the male form into the perfect chisels of that beauty, and they showed this skill without apology, standing beside rows of their work and beaming like artists at their own exhibition.

Crystal touched the cool stone of her necklace again. She calmed herself against the rising and falling of heaving things. She watched coolly, as was her duty, and she did not betray her station even when a particular man caught her eye and held it for longer than was polite.

She watched one suitor in particular, that much was true, but she only watched, betraying nothing like a smile, giving away nothing in the shine of her eyes. She did not even tip her head to the man as he presented for her in front of his spoils, which were admittedly fewer than the riches and gifts offered by wealthier princes, kings and other official arrangements.

Her maid mothers stood behind her throne exchanging glances and making their own secret guesses and arrangements, should she become indecisive; should the family that owned her request their advice in place of hers.

Should her own opinions prove unreliable.

Should she choose someone she was not meant to choose.

‘I like that one,’ one of the maid mothers murmured, pointing to a tall and deeply black suitor whose body had more definition than most philosophies. He was long between his legs, and his eyes shone in the fire with a brown gold color that was almost supernatural. He reminded Crystal of a jaguar who stood up to be like a man.

‘
His family does not have the means to purchase her,’ one of the maid mothers disagreed. ‘The wealth we receive from this trading is just as important as the meat.’

The maid mothers gawked in ways that Crystal did not, and she felt herself leaning away from them as if to distance herself from their horny old talk.

Many of the suitors had walked out prized horses, spices and gold. Others came with a single officiated scroll that detailed the long and proud history of their family lineage, and they would surely read from these scrolls when it was their turn to approach her and win her hand in marriage. Others still had brought along lines of shackled slaves from the countries their kingdom had conquered, as if to impress her with the backs they had broken and the spirits they had beaten from the hearts of their neighbors.

But this one man – an oddly sort of man – had laid a table down with strange foods and drinks and nothing more. He wore the plain robes of the lower caste and the faint dirtiness of a laborer, and yet she had begun noticing the smallest details of refinement in the health of his hair, teeth and nails, which were commonly overlooked by even the princes. It was rare for a man to be so well groomed, and she did not see any of his courtiers or subjects. It was as if he was simply a cleanly sort of man, a
like that which was not supposed to exist in the first place.

He looked to be a man of dirt and toil, who showed no dirt and injuries for the life. He sat at his table in deep contrast with the suitors surrounding him, and Crystal continued to keep her cool blue eyes on his expression to see if he noticed or cared. The man's coolness seemed a matching temperament with her own, but then she had to touch the stone to settle herself down from the tickling and tingling and flush that was settling into her bosom like a firm fountain of youth ripening her body for show.

She was not supposed to approach these men herself.

One of the suitors who was surely a king or a king's son stood in the most exquisite silks and robes, dangling expensive and heavy jewels, but his hair was but a wig, and his nails were small and womanish and his teeth were as crooked as a tyrant's reign and a suitable yellow
for a lifetime of eating richly and lazing about wealthy rooms of castles.