Claiming Crystal (6 page)

‘
It is not filth,’ the seducer snapped, nearly dropping the cups in surprise. ‘It is cleaner than the waters under your kingdom! It is healthier than the nectar of the fruits you grow in your mother's gardens!’

Crystal watched him carefully, unmoved by his temper. She had plied him intentionally to see whether or not he would react. She had been suspicious of him, just as he had told her that she was, and she had prodded his cool exterior to see if anything lurked beneath that she mig
ht find unworthy of her union. ‘Why is it not filth?’ she challenged carefully, watching the way his face tried to recollect its prior appearance. She had momentarily broken the illusion of his seduction to measure him as a man. She allowed herself to enjoy his magic, but she was no fool to forget the fact of the magic and buy into his show.

‘
Do you find the rich virgin soil dirty, Crystal?’ the seducer asked seriously.

Crystal thought on it.
‘I do not know,’ she answered honestly.

‘
You are not a gardener, but if I asked your mother this question she would be no less distraught than myself upon your accusation. She would tell me very pointedly that virgin soil is the cleanest and most pregnant content on God's land. She would show me all the things she has grown from it, and she would surely throw a man in the stockades if he had the arrogance to see the soil staining his armor and hastily wash it off with a look of disgust on his face. Do you see my point?’

Crystal nodded.

‘Do you wish to continue?’

With a smile, Crystal nodded again, and then the seducer resumed his massaging work. His hands wer
e not as rough as the rogues, for this wealthy suitor had doubtfully used his hands for very much other than plying the softness of human bodies, but they were dexterous, and they explored in between things that most high born people did not dare to explore.

‘
My name is Victor Lamous,’ he whispered, hands moving around the circumference of one of her thighs, slicking it with the alternatively warm and cool sensation of the seed spread. ‘If you choose me, ask for the name.’

****

The next man who came for her was not much of a man at all, but she did not know that until she first heard him speak. If the earlier suitor's voice had been melodious and feminine for its musical quality, this man sounded high pitched and child-like.

He was dressed ornately enough, but it was the weave of his hair that surp
rised her upon first impression. Later, upon discovering that it was a wig, she would chastise herself for not noticing the offset lushness of his mane earlier – the way that it contrasted somehow with the skull that peeked out at the folds of its carefully applied decoration. He was not an ugly man, not in the fashion of the time, but he had made himself up with the prissiness of a prince of a spoiled royal brat.

That was her first impression.

That impression began to change like warmed clay spreading into new shape.

He spoke to her in a high and pleasant voice, and she felt something different in the nearness of this man than other men, but she was naïve to mistake that difference to be a kind of connection that she should explore further. The two of them met while she was walking the corridors where she sometimes went to get her morning exercises of drudgery, walking as quickly as she could around and around the confines of her small dungeon-like hold.

When he invited himself into her quarters she took him by the hand and escorted him politely into her bedroom the way every good woman should a potential suitor. It was only later, recalling the interaction with the hindsight she used to reframe many of the strange happenings that made up the history of her life, that Crystal would come to remember the highness in his voice was not a simple tone of manners, but something deeper and more biological to the body of the man. He never told her explicitly, and she never saw between his legs to know for sure, but she suspected the man to be a noble eunuch whose manhood had been taken from him when he was younger and yet grown; yet matured into the kind of hungry and greedy thing which overcome most men of age.

He was different, and his difference had been done to him; committed like an atrocity.

He gave her no impression of wanting to enter into her and seize her, the way the rogue had – the way the seducer had suggested as he molded her body with the strange and invigorating oils he produced from the bodies of twenty strong men and women. This one was gentle. This one wanted her, but in the submissive way of a woman, embracing her body and kissing her within every inch, cleaning with the warmth of his tongue and nibbling with the soft dullness of his teeth but never showing her the hunger that she so associated with men of his age and status.

He slipped a hand into his wig, and was overcome again, this time by the fineness of the hairs which made it.

He seemed more preoccupied with using his mouth than his cock, and that was the reason why she first began to wonder if he had a cock to use at all. Many of the noble people in faraway lands often seemed shrouded in a kind of violent nature that spread stories of people being burned at the stake, ceremonial mutilations, tattoos and branding, and all sorts of horrific yet intriguing prospects that made the rest of the world seem a barbarian savageness warring about the kingdom of her family – the last vestige of civility in an uncivil world.

He was gentle, this one, and when he was finished with tasting her he smelled her, rather like a child frolicking in a garden and picking at every flowe
r and bush at which he dared to glance. When he was done smelling her he felt her up, testing the weight of her muscles and her roundness and her sex. When he was done with touching her he placed his head to her breast and listened to his heartbeat, for he was a man of his senses because the strongest sense that God gave a man had been taken from him at a young age.

This was the way he knew to enjoy women.

She knew from his own exclamations of pleasure.

This suit
or enjoyed her very much, oftentimes expressing that enjoyment with the kinds of soft joyous sounds that Crystal expected to hear from virgin girls but not suitors of world-weary dynasties trying to assert their dominance by marrying a jewel like her.

She found that she liked this man, although made no attempts at enjoying his body in return.

Crystal was a woman fond of strangeness.

Once he was finished with his pleasures he took to washing her, not because she was dirty to him, but because he considered the washing a kind of polishing - for she was the precious thing that people owned and sold and wore when they decided to wear something beautiful to enhance their own stature. As before, the sheer sensation of the hot warming water splashing against her flawless white body, sluicing through her crevices and hardening her nipples with the female erections of pleasure more subtle than the brutishness men could ever fathom.

When the suitor took a most delicate sponge from his belongings and began to wash her down, she nearly shrieked, such was the joy. He removed bottles of perfume and soaps, and he began to lather her, remarking on the beautiful dried tones of colors that were still on her back from the earlier massage, mistaking it for paints, or a rudimentary kind of tattooing, and Crystal laughed, an she did not make fun of the man when he seemed puzzled by her laughter and wasn't sure whether or not to be offended. She patted his head as he might a child's, kissed him on the forehead and then told him to continue his flattering – because she quite liked the way that he flattered her.

He washed her hair, working in a soap that smelled of apples and peaches squeezed together into the sweetest juice. He soaped her up with another lather that reminded her of the roses her mother took such delicacy to grow and tend in the gardens, and then he removed sharper things from his belongings and began clipping her nails, cleaning underneath them, manicuring her and beautifying her with a skill that struck her with the same contrast that the man who knew the art of seduction had struck her with.

Here was another male who seemed to know a woman's art, and instead of wooing her away from thoughts of the rogue, it only made her return to them; the only man among these suitors who seemed to be a man at all. She was not offended by these feminine exploits. Crystal found them rather charming, but in the same playful way that she found some of her servants charming on the occasions when she would ask them to her room and bed them to kill time on another endless night when she was instructed twelve hours of beauty sleep followed by three hours of morning preparation.

The maids would do her hair like this man was do
ing her hair, but they would not luxuriate in it so, even though the males often became hard and hungry. This man seemed positively overtaken with her, polishing her body with more and more vigor, as though he was the kneeling devotee exhaling the alter of a goddess whose only mortal representation was a statue that he tirelessly washed, cleaned, perfected, honored. This man, she knew, would be a splendid husband exactly because he did not seem to want to take anything from her, only give, and receive in the light of that giving.

By the time he finally finished his beautifying rituals and turned off the water, lifting the softest towel of fur from the bottom of his belongings and draping it over her like a ceremonial award for some competition she did not even know she had partaken in, they exchanged some pleasantries.

‘Whose family are you from?’ Crystal asked with the soft and throaty voice of one whose body was still rushed in its own experiences.

He considered this carefully. There was a chance that her father had instructed them to withhold their naming, but the previous suitor had not been shy, and she waited impatiently until he found his tongue.
‘I am the youngest son of the Dilmuth family from the cold coastal lands of the northern lands. Do you know them?’

‘
I know of them,’ Crystal said.

Personally speaking, she knew none of these places. She was a prisoner, after all.

The cold coastal lands of the north held a kingdom whose warriors were known for their bloodshed and whose kingdom was famed for his iron fist and not the delicate touches this man so clearly exhibited.

‘
I could not pleasure you the way other men may pleasure you, lady,’ he told her hesitantly, ‘but that is not always a bad thing.’

‘
Indeed it's not,’ she replied.

She asked him what he had done to deserve such a punishment, but he declined to answer her and simply continued to towel off her body. It seemed that although this man did not have a man's hunger, he still had a man's sense of stature over a woman, and see
med perfectly comfortable dismissing her question and returning his attentions to honoring the female form standing in front of him like the first woman stepped out of the very Garden of Eden.

****

The next suitor surprised Crystal in more ways than one, and that was a fairly shocking thing in itself considering the two non-traditional suitors who had come to her with feminine tricks and charms. This would be a day for womanish arousals: first of all, the next suitor was a she, as if symbolically completing the feminine trail that had begun with the man of seduction and looped with this powerful monarch from somewhere to the east where several queens ruled in lieu of their kings.

Crystal knew less about the region and its people th
an she did about anywhere else, and her ignorance made her uncomfortable and shy, which was unbecoming and very uncharacteristic. She even found herself blushing on several occasions when the suitor asked her academic questions about the geography and politics of things, but the monarch queen seemed to understand this and did not make a habit of it throughout the duration of their encounter.

The queen, Crystal discovered, was kind as well. She treated Crystal to a meal as a preliminary step for the night of passion her flashing dancing eyes promised whenever they caught Crystal's stare.

‘I am a cook by trade,’ the queen said, serving Crystal with gourmet dishes of greens and salads topped with spices she had never seen before in her entire life – so exquisite was the taste that Crystal found herself practically in love with the food, and pondering whether or not to propose to the dishes instead of the queen.

‘
I became the woman I am today because of my food,’ the queen continued, serving Crystal a loaf of baked cornbread that had been topped with a puddle of syrup whose smell reminded Crystal of the seducer’s seed – a reminder which made her more ravenous still, surprising Crystal by the ferocity of her arousal against the dainty revulsion that would be more appropriate in a lady of her position. ‘I poisoned my predecessor,’ the queen said suddenly, seating herself beside Crystal, and smiled when Crystal turned with a questioning state. ‘But I do not fancy poisoning you,’ the queen admitted. ‘You are more useful to me alive than dead, although that is not something I can say about everyone I meet.’

The queen neglected to mention that much of the food portions were aphrodisiacs, and by the time they had finished their first portion they were horny and talkative, their mouths still slicked with the tastes of oysters and lobsters, fine greens and fruits and dressings. Crystal found herself talking about her upbringing and family with more openness than she normally would have given the occasion, her inhibitions lowered quite as though she were drunk.