Page 79 of Of Brides Of Queens

Humor filled his menacing voice, for he could tell I lied. “She that inspires,

She they desire,

Should only shimmer

Like a star

Without its power,

Lest starlight steals

All they are,

To build her tower.”

I adopted an expression of faint interest. “I like the rhythm of this verse. Humans are peculiar things.”

“I desire you. You inspire everything in me from fear to rage to hope to joy to ecstasy. Will you steal all I am to build your tower, maiden?” He rose from his seat and walked alongside the table. “Part of me hopes so. There is a monstrous thing that yearns to be stripped down to a state I have not before experienced. To have you do it to me.”

Cold intrigue filled me. I might like to do that to him too.

He stalked closer. Slowly and straight-backed. Powerfully and surely.

King See saw a great deal too much of my queendom.

As he walked to me, I held still when retreat may have been wiser. But he walked to me, and I did not retreat, and so we drew closer than ever before.

I looked up at King See and saw the definite hint of darkness over his jaw. I looked up at him from an arm’s length away, and my chest rose in shallow breaths. His exhales shook.

An arm’s length.

In all of monsterdom, I never expected this to happen. The confusion and hope were catastrophic.

Did I yearn and wish and hope? Absolutely. But to expect such mercies of ancients was a fool’s game. Even if mercy came, we were grossly out of alignment.

“Sir,” I breathed. But what else could I say? “When my queendom was not between us, this might have inspired fantasies of many possibilities. I am overjoyed for our nearness still, yet there is a bitterness to it that sours any happiness to something darker.”

“This is well,” he answered.

See enjoyed the hardening of my heart.

“I close on my prey as a hunter might,” See uttered. He was affected by our nearness. Greatly so. “Yet I have no control of my prey or the capture of her. I just understand as a hunter might that when my hands wrap around her, she will be mine.”

I shivered. “You will not love me, See, and I will not share emptiness with you. You are less mad tonight, and yet your ambition and obsession remain the same.”

He nodded. “They do. Have you considered the meaning of the connection between my madness and your queendom, maiden?”

I had not. “You mean that they are tied together at all?”

“Yes. Just that. If your power had never grown, I would have remained as mad as in the beginning.”

That warranted reflection. “There is something there.”

“There is. Therein lays the answer of what we will be to one another. I was destined to remain mad if you did not expand your queendom. What does it mean that I am more myself, and yet filled with new obsession, as you settle in queenliness?”

I could not say. Not yet. There was a dire importance to his ancient questions that told me they must be answered eventually. “King See, tell me true, do you remain a claiming king?”

His fingers twitched like he would like nothing more than to close the distance between us. An arm’s length was a victory, a bitter victory. Bliss and bitterness always.