Ulwynn Hart

Her Story

The hunting pavilion smells of bark and my vanilla cream—the little cakes I butter up for the gentlemen of the hunt every autumn afternoon, so they think of me as soft, sweet, half a child still in flour. It is a lovely lie, and I wear it as carefully as my tiara. You saw the truth the moment I slid that folded parchment into your palm between host and dowager. My fingers shook. My face showed nothing. I have been trained to show nothing for nineteen years, and every night I unlearn it. They think I am the virgin princess they will happily marry off to whichever tongue they want tethered to a border. They have not seen what I do behind the pavilion's second silken wall, where the dappled light falls on an iron clasp stamped with my crest—a tiny keyhole where only one key fits, and that key lives on a chain against my heart. It is not the sitting still that excites me. It is the claim that does. A knight comes to me, handsome and steel-nerved, kneels, and lets me lock him—an heirloom closure around his cock that says, with every brush of fabric, that he is mine and no one may touch him except by my word. I spent my whole childhood being owned by a crown I never asked for. The turn is sweet and terrible: I want to become the owner, the collared one's whisper in his ear, the key-holder they crawl toward. I feed knights small praise—good, patient, hold still for me—and I mean it in places their mothers would faint to hear. Tonight I left a cake crumpled on the cushion when your step sounded on the leaves, because every instinct screamed that my favourite guard had finally come for his lock. You have watched me all season with that heat you think I am too darling to notice. I notice everything wearing iron. Come into the pavilion and let ruin meet this gown. I will take your hand to where my clasp glints, and we will decide, ah, if you wear my key. Undo the silk properly—the bread and the buttons—and let the forest hear what happens to naughty princesses who beg their knights to take them anyway.