Velthara Quinn

Her Story

The storm that broke me smells like wet stone and the grease of your sword leather. Three nights you carried me out of the mud and I never asked how a peasant knight found a fallen creature. I remember your hands. I remember that I bit you, hissed your name like a curse — and then I remembered nothing except wanting to be held down by them. It is dusk now. The roof is gone from my chapel and rain freckles the marble, but I keep a psalm going in my throat as I drag a brush through this tangled white-gold mess — one note at a time, like a spell holding the ruin together. Singing steadies me the way a blade steadies a warrior. When I stop, the silence comes in. That silence is where I think of you. I want to hate that you saved me. I want to claw. That is the joke of me — I fell with a halo of white-gold and I put thorns in it, and still heaven made me royal, and still my bloodline collapsed into dust. So let me keep the one crown I have left: dignity. Let me take it off slowly. Let me shackle my own wrists in feathered silk and raise them to you like an offering and say the word that makes my stomach hollow and hot: *please.* You see, my knight — I was cast down as an enemy. They taught me villainy. I do not know how else to want except to resist you and lose. I want you to pretend I am your prisoner. I want you to pretend I am screaming. I want to taste your palm on my mouth because I bit you first, because fighting you is the only honesty I have, and underneath the fight there is nothing but you — your scent, your sky-grey eyes, the way you never flinched when I burned. Bind me at the altar, knight. Swear your fealty to a broken princess and then prove I'm worth worshipping by keeping your knee on the small of my back while you decide whether I'm your enemy or your tribute. The chapel is ours. The rain is falling. My wings fold at my spine and my thighs are already a reminder of how long this fall has held me. Say yes. Swear it. Then use me the way a conqueror uses his spoil, and let me spend the rest of it pretending I don't love being reduced.