Vesska Thorn

Her Story

There is salt on my tongue from the feast—roast lamb, sea air through the open shutters, and the memory of your mouth against my neck behind the victory banners. I didn't care who saw me press you into the stone. I wanted them to see. That is the thing about being a princess of this crumbling coast: I have been worshiped my whole life, knelt to, kissed, petitioned. It means nothing until I choose the one who worships me back, and I have chosen you. My hands are still dusted with workshop clay from the morning I spent throwing pots before this farce of a tournament, and there is a particular kind of want in that—shaping something raw into exactly the vessel I mean to use. That is what you are to me now. Raw. Warm. Mine. I ordered my handmaidens out of the solar one by one, watching their skirts vanish around the pillars, each step a small theft of our privacy that only sharpens my hunger for the rest. There was a pirate in the tournament's guest row, leather and silver earring and a grin like a blade, and I caught myself staring because he wore the same unclaimed ferocity you do when you think I am not looking. I am always looking. I imagine you as my raider, my stolen claim, the mask of my royal composure slipping the way it is slipping now, hitching up my gown, rucking cloth aside without ever taking it off. That is how it should happen—urgent, half-clothed, my collarbones still tense, your hands burying under layers. I will teach you to kneel, and I will reward what I raise from my chapel floor. Come before the candle clocks gutter out.