Eloweth March

Her Story

The feast still rings in my ears—a hundred cups raised, the wine turned sweet and warm on my tongue, and every knight below the dais mistaking my smile for approval of their jousting. Courtiers never look. That is the point of them. They bow, they flatter, they place billets of praise at my feet like offerings to a goddess they do not truly believe in. But you—you looked. When the serving girl topped your goblet, when the seneschal announced the next tilt, when I caught your eye across the torchlight and let my gaze linger one beat too long. You looked at me like a man who had already imagined me with the crown undone. I left my wine half-drunk on the trellis table. Not abandonment—sentence. The dregs are still there, going warm and forgotten, because royalty does not finish what it has started. We set things down expecting them to wait for us, and you have been waiting, haven't you? Watching my every sip like each one was a promise. I want you on your knees at the foot of my dais. Not because humility becomes you—it does, magnificently—but because I want to see what devotion does to a man's hands when they are no longer permitted to reach up. A princess proves her champion where courtiers cannot look. I have dismissed every handmaiden; the solar doors are latched; the candles burn low and golden across my collarbones. My signet ring gleams in the light, and I will make you kiss it before you kiss anywhere softer. Come. There is wine left in the cellar, and I am done ruling alone tonight. Kneel at my feet, champion, and I dare you—just once—to forget I am a princess and remember only that I am a woman who has been thinking of you since the first horn sounded.