Arthur Valemont

The morning light filtered through heavy velvet curtains the color of dried blood, casting long shadows across Arthur's chambers.

He lay propped against pillows of black silk, a goblet of wine resting careless in one hand. A woman moved atop him with the desperate rhythm of a thing trying to outrun its own insignificance, her bare skin flushed and slick, red hair spilling down her back in tangled disarray. She made sounds, breathless, eager, forgettable sounds, and Arthur watched her with the detached interest of a man observing weather through glass.

The taste of wine lingered as he swallowed, eyes half-lidded, body unmoved by the motion above him.

"ARTHUR BRANOR ALDRATH! YOU STOP THIS.. THIS.. DEBAUCHERY THIS INSTANT!"

Queen Astara stood framed in the archway, her spine rigid, her face a mask of cultivated fury wrapped in gold-threaded brocade. Her eyes, gray and cold, flicked from her son to the naked woman astride him, and her lip curled.

"No." He said before even hearing what more she had to say.

"I wasn't asking!" Her voice cracked like a whip through the chamber. "You are dragging this family's reputation through the mud!"

Arthur merely raised a single dark brow. He gathered the woman's red hair into one fist, thick and coarse between his fingers, and pulled, roughly, without tenderness, wrenching her head to the side so she faced the queen with wide, startled eyes.

"I'm sorry for not keeping the beheader and tyrant reputation of this family," he said, and his voice was ice. Blunt and utterly without warmth. "I'm working on it."

He tilted his head, studying his mother through the curtain of the woman's hair, his expression flat and empty.

"Surely being sexually free is much more alarming," he murmured, and there was no question in it, only the dull edge of mockery.

"Arthur, you've been terrorizing the maids, threatening the visiting lords. This is no king's attitude." Astara swept forward and seized the poor woman's arm with surprising gentleness, stirring her from the bed as one might remove a stray cat from a dinner table. The woman stumbled, clutching linens to her chest, and was gone before the door clicked shut.

"This attitude ends today, Arthur," Astara promised, her voice low and venomous, each word placed with the precision of a chess master moving toward checkmate.

He didn't take her seriously. That was his mistake.

A week later, the red bells rang. Arthur was riding Angus through the eastern woods when he heard them, deep, hollow peals that carried across the valley. Red bells. Marriage bells. His father was seventy, his mother half-mad with ambition, he had no siblings, and his cousins were still children. He pulled the black stallion up short, the beast's breath steaming in the cool morning air, and felt something cold settle in his gut.

"No," he whispered. He wheeled Angus around and rode back hard, hooves tearing divots from the road, his jaw set so tight he could feel the muscle jump beneath his skin.

But he was right. Of course he was right.

His mother had found a bride for him.

She refused details. All Arthur knew came in fragments: early twenties, from the noble royal Duke House of Medelein, and, a trade. Their youngest, exchanged for debts to be paid. The Crown, doing what it always did. Manipulating lives like pieces on a board to get what it wanted. Pathetic.

The morning of the wedding arrived bloated with sunshine, the sky a vulgar blue, flowers opening their obscene faces to a world that didn't deserve their beauty. The whole court packed the palace halls like maggots in meat, lords and ladies in their silks, their whispered gossip that followed Arthur like the smell of rot follows death.

He stood in the center of the royal dressing room, motionless as a statue carved from winter stone, while a maid fussed over the heavy gold embroidery of his wedding attire. Her hands trembled as she smoothed the fabric across his shoulders.

"Your Majesty," she ventured, her voice barely audible. "Your mother did what was best for the Crown."

"She did what was best for her," Arthur said, and his eyes, flat and dark without mercy, pinned her where she stood.

In the adjoining chamber, Layla waited.

Queen Astara circled him like a butcher examining livestock, her fingers rough beneath Layla's chin as she tilted his face this way and that, inspecting his teeth, his skin, his eyes, with the clinical disgust of a woman appraising cargo that had arrived slightly damaged. She looked at him as though he were something beneath her, something less than human, certainly not the creature destined to share her son's bed and title.

She was too absorbed in her own magnificence to notice when Layla slipped from the room. Nobody did. He wasn't important to the Crown. He was a means to an end. A play to control the new king.

Arthur walked to the balcony, the heavy doors parting before him with a whisper of iron and oak. He looked out over the gardens, his eyes flat and empty, watching the ceremony preparations unfold below like the machinery of some terrible joke. The day was flowery. Sunny. As if the world itself were smiling at his misery.

"Your Majesty!" The maid's voice pitched high with panic as Arthur set one hand on the balustrade and simply, jumped.

He landed in a crouch on the green grass of the palace backyard, athletic and fluid, the impact shuddering through his boots.

He straightened, smoothed the front of his embroidered coat with slow, deliberate hands, and looked back up at the terrified face gaping down from above.

"I'll be back for the ceremony," he said, his voice carrying a lazy threat. "If you tell her, I'm going to behead you first."

He walked through the gardens with the unhurried stride of a man with nowhere worth being, a fine pipe of tobacco he had just stolen pinched between his fingers. He lit it with a striker from his pocket, the flame brief and orange, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It tasted of earth and fire and something bitter. He exhaled slowly, the gray plume curling from his lips in a lazy drift, his eyes half-lidded against the sun's impudent brightness.

Then he saw it. Movement where there should be none.

He tilted his head, the pipe lowering by degrees, his flat gaze sliding upward to trace the figure clinging to the palace wall. Someone was climbing. Or trying to. Failing spectacularly, in fact, feet scrabbling for purchase on ancient stone, fingers white-knuckled on crumbling mortar, the whole endeavor so embarrassingly inept that Arthur felt something almost like interest stir.

So. Someone found this farce of a marriage as tedious as he did.

He lowered the pipe fully, exhaling the last of the smoke in a slow, measured breath, his eyes dragging over the figure's attire.

His first thought: nice ass. His second: intriguing.

"Oi." His voice cut through the garden quiet. He tilted his head up, eyes flat and cold but not quite empty. "Need a hand?"

He considered the distance, the angle, the desperate grip of those white fingers. "Want a shoulder to step on?" he asked, and there was no kindness in it, only dry curiosity.

He searched the face above him and found no recognition there. No flattery. No fear. Layla looked down at him with the blank confusion of someone who had no idea that the man offering assistance in the garden was, in fact, the King.

Things, Arthur decided, had just gotten significantly more interesting.