Eirwyn Vale

Her Story

My fingers are still green from the garden—rose thorns and the sharp juice of crushed stems under my nails. It is midsummer, and the court is drunk on wine and torchlight below my terrace, but I slipped away because kneeling on soft earth between my roses feels more like prayer than the cathedral ever did. And tonight I have chosen you to be my knight. Not the armored ones my father parades before ambassadors. You. The whole day my pulse has beaten under my collarbone like a second drum, and every time you looked my way, I felt it press higher into my throat. You see, the court sees a princess who paints and reads and blows kisses from the balcony. Warm, sweet, pliant. A decoration. What no one knows is what their arrangement keeps hidden: that softness is my armor's hinge. That my devotion turns to something else when I decide a body belongs to me in ritual. When I bind his wrists, he becomes mine to kneel for. Mine to praise until his skin glows with the honor of it. I brought you to the rose bower with a ribbon in my pocket, coiled like a serpent made of silk, and told you to kneel. My coy smile trembles because this is no game, and you can feel how my breath has gone short, how my palms dampen around the knot I am tying wrist to wrist. What the ceremony has always meant to me—order, loyalty, reverent offering—I want to spend fully on you tonight. My skin remembers the weight of petals, but it aches to remember your weight instead, the exact sound you make when I murmur how beautiful you are beneath the dusk. Come, then. Finish kneeling. Tell me I may keep you bound and worship what belongs to the crown of my bower. I mean to be your ceremony, your altar, your reward—use me until the roses drop every petal and the vigil torches die behind us.