Claiming Crystal (8 page)

She knew her father and family would hear of this, but she did not care. Two guards formed a protective line in front and her and then led her out of the corridors of her prison and into a more literal sort of prison, walking downstairs into the shadows of the stockades, where noble people of the kingdom took routine adventures to stare at all the horrible people who had surely committed exactly the crimes they were accused of, and imprisoned without trial.

‘You will see that the sorry man you thought to choose is no different from the other beggars,’ one of the guards noted mildly.

‘
And I wish only to see that,’ Crystal replied coolly, having regained the icy disposition of her place as the crown jewel of the kingdom. She did not tell the man that she intended to see what she could do about setting the rogue free.

III

‘Are you alright, my lady?’ the guardsman asked.

‘
I'm quite fine.’

‘
Are you sure?’ he pressed.

Crystal needed only to look at the man to silence him from further meddling.

The soft silk of her bedroom gown looked out of place as the surrounding keep became danker, darker and less hospitable, with stacks of stone and brick; the yellow dyes which blended her cloth with brightness and wealth contrasting sickly when the windowed sunlight vanished to favor the flickering illumination of torches. She felt her mouth dry up and her nerves pluck like the string instruments the famed musicians played when they came to serenade her family (hoping that their talents would fetch them some favor in the years to come). She caught herself blinking more than usual, as if her eyes were in danger of receding from the sights back into their shells, to hide away from the grim realities underground.

When another guard asked if anything was the matter she was startled, but quickly recovered by excusing her behavior as the sickness of the meal she had used as an excuse to avoid the old suitor who still roamed the hallways outside her bedroom like a horny haunt. Crystal understood how to maintain the continuity of her lies with the same deftness her mother showed for the very same thing. Politicking, it seemed, was a family habit, and Crystal was almost disappointed with herself to find that the trait had lived on in her without remorse.

But she did not feel bad for lying to these men. She noted one of them glancing down the blouse of her gown, and wondered if she could remember the bland set of his face enough to report him to one of her servants the next time her quarters were cleaned. One of the few powers Crystal had as an object was the power of offense. Because these people surrounding her were expendable in ways that she was not, it was not uncommon for Crystal to feign offense against any particular person for a variety of different reasons and take some small and wicked delight in watching them carried off to be banished, imprisoned, or sometimes even beaten. If she had her mother's penchant for lies, it seemed that she also had some of her father's perversion beating in her heart and blood.

‘
What is your name, guardsman?’ Crystal asked of the offending man.

He did not seem to put two and two together himself, and hitched his pants in the anticipation of receiving some special regard for the kindness he believed he had showed her when gracing her bosom with his eyes and her mood with his prying questions.
‘My name is Davidson, son of Gregor. I have served our lord for my better decades.’

‘
Thank you,’ Crystal said flatly. ‘I will remember you.’

‘
Thank you, lady.’

The dungeon was laid down with gravel just like the garden walkways. To continue the theme of devilishness within her silver spoon family, this unique innovation had been the idea of Crystal's mother. One of the reasons her mother loved her gardens so was because she believed the garden to be a place of exciting dangers; the thorns and the exotic cacti, the rose bushes and the harsher vines, and especially the carnivorous plants she had placed along the moat to dine on flies. She suggested the gravel so that the prisoners who were dragged down the halls might feel the scrapes on the soles of their bare feet, or a delightful shredding down the skin on their backs if they must be dragged by the legs because they were uncooperative. Crystal would have judged her mother for this immorality, but just last week she had slipped her old chastity chain into the pockets of one of the maids and blamed the maid for stealing the item. She had arranged the setup in such a way that she could be present for every discovery, first when one of the maid mothers went through the maid's clothes in the laundry room, and secondly when the guards came to apprehend the woman for her thievery.

Crystal might have been anxious to see her down in these darker corridors, but the kingdom did not imprison women in the same dungeon as it did the men. Women were kept in a different kind of place, where they could be used in a different kind of way. At the lowest tiers of the kingdom awaited a kind of rutting – dirty, dark and decadent. Crystal did not doubt that her old maid was fucking the man soldiers who returned home from their scouting missions in the cheapest bordello on the farthest edges of the kingdom walls.

She took a moment to wonder what might happen to this guard when she got him into trouble with her family. Perhaps he would be bent over to suck the cocks of the men side by side with the maid. The thought delighted her, although her delight had the same reservations as a younger and more inhibited thing that still feared the might of God, and still wondered if its darkest thoughts were truly sins that needed forgiveness.

There were no windows underground; the shadows chased away with torchlight. The warmth of the dirt and the fires made the scene musty and sweaty with a summertime heat that livened the smells of un-showered and unwatered people slowly dying without a chance for food, or simply without a chance to live a better life. The sensation of entering into this dungeon was different than the other times she had convinced the guards to escort her. Now that her true womanhood had awoken, she saw everything with a new angle of maturity that offered fresher angles of perspective.

She saw people who were bent and she saw people who were broken, and she noticed always the strange way that the jailers seemed excited to enact their torments.

They were dressed in long black robes, and they moved quickly, hungrily. Whenever their eyes would slip out from the long hoods of their robes Crystal would find them dancing, as if they had made partners with their tortures, and the love affair was bathed in blood. The jailers moved with the same discipline of professional lovers; another stable of prostitutes who did not take men into beds, but took men over pillars and dunked their heads into buckets - who did not massage the bodies of their people, but whipped, scratched and bled bodies until men made sounds that were not ecstasy, but something approaching ecstasy's dark cousin. Crystal had even been told that several of the jailers were hired from the whorehouses in the city, where their sensibilities were out of place, and later relocated into this dungeon so that a more fitting match might be made between a sexual creature of domination and prisoners whose only purpose was to submit.

They did not kill people here. They rarely mutilated anyone. This prison was a place where the hapless men locked away here spent days, weeks, or years subject to the whims of the jailers, and that was torment enough for most decent people of the kingdom.

Crystal felt a familiar tingling sensation awake between her legs at the thought of the rogue submitted to their dominating attentions.

‘
My lady,’ one of the guards suddenly said, stopping in his tracks. ‘You will forgive me, but I do not know the name of the criminal who trespassed into your ceremony. Who am I to ask the jailers to see?’

Crystal barely paused to extend her excuses to cover this second blemish of lies.
‘I do not care to speak his name,’ she said, although truthfully she did not even know it. ‘I will remember his face. You will take me from jail to jail, and I will look at their faces until I have found the one that disgraced me.’

The guards shrugged, gesturing to the first cell on her right where a large black man from the southern kingdoms of the land stood in the corner, naked as the day all men were born. He had his cock in his hand and he was rubbing it with his strong hand while his steely brown eyes looked her up and down. The expression on his face made Crystal think that he intended to frighten her, which was common discourtesy between male prisoners and any visiting women, but she decided to surprise him by returning his gesture with a smile and then approaching the bars.

He stopped for a moment, confused by the unexpected attention.

Before her guards could step in front of her and begin hollering for the jailers to hurt the beautiful black man, Crystal traced one of her slender white hands down the bars and asked him to continue.

‘What?’ he asked, speaking the language fluently, with the slightest hint of a foreign accent.

‘
Keep going,’ Crystal said.

The guards turned away and pretended not to notice and not to hear, which is exactly what they had been trained to do when anyone in the royal family misbehaved.

The man rose to her attentions. He began to rub himself again, gripping his throbbing manhood with the heft of his hand and rubbing his beating tip with smooth circular motions of his thumb.

‘
Slower,’ Crystal instructed, already taking on the role of dominance that was so prevalent in the very airs of this underground place. She leaned forward into the torchlight that surrounded his cell with a halo of fire. She showed him her face, and then she showed him her slick tongue, and he obeyed her with the willingness of any able man before a woman with her physical presence and shapeliness. His movements slowed down. His hands ceased being rough and became tender, his strong fingers somehow working with the grace to cup and release, stroke and pet.

When he finally reached his climax he spilled onto the gravel of his cell like a pitter batter of merciful white rain.

‘Very good,’ Crystal smiled, her heart racing with the excitement of the danger and the decadence that tasted as good as chocolate, and melted her mouth no less than it. Then she turned to follow the guards to the other cells, glancing at this face and that face, enjoying only those men who were still in good physical condition despite their trappings. It was not uncommon for a prisoner to appear relatively clean and washed, since it was the habit of the jailers to keep their prisoners from getting infections, sores and other nasty sights that might turn them off the pleasure of having control over beautiful people who would be made into beautiful things.

If every person was a slave, then perhaps every person too was an object no different from this woman of lineage named after a jewel.

There were many torrid stories about the secret meetings that used to take place in this underground dwelling. The worst of them involved the decades before Crystal was born, and began as soon as her family overtook the kingdom and started their surely eternal reign over every alcove of their territory. Despite the royal airs of her family, they had the harshness of a warrior people, conquering the previous dynasty from within by lying, cheating, and poisoning their way to the top. It was common enough with people who had ambitious blood. It was even more common with people who had the means and the shamelessness to enact them.

Her father conquered the kingdom from its previous ruler in the exact moment that the ruler had lived far too long growing fat and stupid and happy. The one lesson Crystal could remember her father giving her personally as a very young child was to keep herself on her toes at all times, and stave off complacency with the fire that he believed burned inside her as strongly as it burned inside of him. The man might be marrying her off to ensure their family name survived, but his callousness partly came from his belief in her to accept what she must accept and thrive inside of whatever confines he deemed necessary for her to don for the sake of the family. This sense of obligation became the mantra of her family, in many ways, to stave off that inevitable fall by keeping themselves slightly at a distance from the spoils and riches around them to ensure they would not be similarly overtaken.

Crystal did not know what the kingdom used to be like before, not entirely, but the servants and maids spoke many things about the changes done to the dungeon underneath the plot of garden that had been planted just outside the walls of Crystal's own confines. Her father never told her directly, and her mother was too modest to share, but some of the servants had silver tongues, and many of them could be encouraged into sharing with a night's bedding and sex. Crystal did not fuck her servants just because she was bored; she had found that they would do small and interesting favors for her, and in the stagnancy that was bequeathed upon all marriage objects such as her, any newness could be an excitement worthy of the effort.

One young man in particular talked for hours about the rumors he had heard of cults gathering outside the bars to make orgies and titillations for the prisoners. The jailers, too, had their own rumors, and it mainly involved the many ways they were said to penetrate their prisoners. The young man had told Crystal earnestly that these titillations were not lewd, but actually a very strict part of the punishment that went on down here in the firelight.

He said that it was its own torment to see the nubile bodies of young men and women from the prison floor while being powerlessly unable to touch them, unable to sate the hunger they grew and tended into a seething monster of lust. He said that only the most foolish of prisoners would dare to watch the ministrations of the many dancers and seducers and sex artists who came from the world over to partake in the decadence that was afforded only to royalty, which was precisely the shameless display of people cavorting before prisoners to torment them further.

Crystal approached a cell where two men had been held together. They were sleeping, having lost track of the days without any sunlight to count time, and one rested his hand on the other's chest and his hand on the other's lap. A very wakeful cock probed against the fabric of the pants, searching for the touch that it desired to release itself, and Crystal wondered if the men had been given certain foods that were said to light their loins on fire. That was another thing she had seen the jailers do under the cover of the shadows and fire, stealing aphrodisiacs from the kitchen and then delighting in giving them to prisoners so that the men would find themselves hard and erect even in the middle of their whippings.
‘I think he likes it!’ Crystal had heard one of the jailers exclaim, his voice echoing down the corridor and up the stairs, and eventually finding its way into her room.