Ephemera & Tales

A little smut for humpday - ( this way )

She cried in the night. The treasonous criminal, convicted and condemned for plotting against their Queen and threatening her very life, cried soft hopeless tears when the lamp in her cell was extinguished. The sound of it tugged at Pel’s heartstrings.

The girl was hardly more than a child, perhaps fourteen summers old at the most, thin and gawky like a colt still. Pel told herself firmly as she walked the short distance between cell and chamber that no amount of wide green eyes and freckled cheekbones could testify innocence. It was right that the girl should weep after her betrayal.

As the slow hours of the night turned though, it became harder to hold the prisoner’s guilt up as a ward against the memories. Memories of her first summer’s love, of tumbling skin on skin in the swimming pools with a girl who looked so much like Pel’s traitor charge. Carlean, her name was, all long limbs and slight elegant curves, tangled blond hair and talented hands that had made Pel squirm and beg.

Carlean had never been one for tears. No, she was all laughter and life, moans and gasps and screaming that brought her sisters out in the thunder to see that their youngest sibling wasn’t murdered but instead was lying in the hayloft, face buried in Pel’s shoulder, body quaking with laughter for the blushes and the fuss.

No tears. Not when her mother took a strap to her for the fright, not when Pel kissed those red marks in teenage benediction, not when Pel and her family packed up and moved along the trader’s road in the cool dawn of the next morning.

And yet she cried, and Pel’s heart softened.

It was for her own rest, Pel told herself, that she fixed a short candle stub to glow and gutter by the bars of the cell door, she told herself. For her own comfort that she did the same the next night and the next, through the slow rotation of the seven-day span laid down by the laws between condemnation and death.

It was for her own rest, she told herself, on the final night when not even the butter soft light could keep the hitching panic from her prisoner’s breath; for her own comfort that she turned the heavy key in the lock, set the door ajar and entered. For her own comfort she took the thin body in her arms, and purely for her own selfish desires that she kissed those chapped lips, and smoothed her hands over the tangled hair and smudged skin.

In the thin dawn light, it was for her queen that Pel mixed and measured the poisoned juices, and for her unhappy conscience that she sweetened it with honey. But it was for her heart’s sorrow that she mixed a second dose.

Under the chill gaze of the queen and the three white robed judges, it was for her duty that she held the clear glass to the traitor’s mouth, and for her dignity that she let the breath leave that young body with not a word to comfort it’s passing.

But it was for her own memories and for love that Pel took her dose, unsweetened bitter gall, and lit the last quarter inch of candle in her rooms.

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Originally posted 15th August 2003