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y'know what, gently caress it, I might be able to pull this off. in, gimme a three card spread
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Mar 26, 2024 15:44
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 10:21 |
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Righteous Arrogance [2451] Two different men had taken the newly-debuted queen for a fool. They were angry she thought anything worthy of herself they did not designate her with. As if she was not allowed to squirrel away thoughts, desires, hopes, a self of her own behind her blue eyes. As if—for the crime of her sex—she had needed to be humbled and learn to accept the rule of a man without protest, and marry without any knowledge of who she would be yoked to. As if she had not seen from her childhood what came of marrying for elevation instead of compatibility and affection. Her elder three sisters had each blindly accepted the wealthiest noble whom asked for their hand without knowing anything of them, and they had each paid dearly. She only saw them at festivals now, if then; they had no time free to attend their natal family anymore with the duties that came of being noblemen’s wives. The light, joy, and youth had dimmed from each of their eyes as heirs and spares and more came from them, all their personal joys removed and repressed until they saw themselves as others had wanted them: vessels for the linage they were chained to til death took them and buried their names with them. She had vowed it, a young woman not old enough to be debuted, while seeing her second oldest sister sit meekly next to her spouse at the third’s wedding feast. How others spoke only of her sister’s talent in bearing sons—no speak of the daughters—and the way her smile never reached the blue eyes they shared. How the girl she remembered whistling tunes every step only rose long enough to perform a short, unmodified song on command from her duke, with no more soul in her notes than a mechanical nightingale before she sat meekly again with no further word. How she was, for all she had been, no more than an ornament, a doll, a golden woman and no more important to her husband than the ruby ring on his hand. She had had told herself, shedding the angry tears over her light supper she’d repressed at the dinner feast, she would not find herself in the same fate. She would never shrink herself to fit into the golden cages women of nobility found themselves in after marriage. *~*~* Last year, when she had come of age, her noble father had insisted she prepare for marriage with all haste lest she become too old to provide sons—no mention of daughters—to her husband’s line. She had been presented to man after man, none of them knowing she had found ways to research the history of each man brought before her before they arrived. She had spoken to the staff where others had not—for as the youngest she had found rapport with those whom kept her in comfort—and learned in shadows what the nobles hid away, the flaws buried under layers of silk and velvet like a hard pea beneath a score of mattresses. And when the men came in gold and silk to take her soft hand away with them to their gilded cages to become their nightingales, she sang a different tune, and called each on their fatal flaws in coded tongue to their face, so they would know she was aware of the skeletons buried in their fields. A wine cask, she had snapped, for the one constantly addled by spirits, and it mere coincidence he was as short and stout as the barrels he tapped dry before stumbling to his chambers. A fighting cock, who ordered innocent animals to battle to destruction all to merely entertain him, and watched with pleasure as his already red face went as scarlet as his tunic and he made a hasty retreat. Long and thin with little heart in him, to another; his staff, she had been told, wore lashes under their livery for the sheer failure to be invisible and silent to his beastly ways. And pale and white as death himself—her own face pale at the memory as she spoke to him—to the man twice her age, thin skin pulled over unfeeling features, who had lost three wives in childbirth and sought a fourth to make the son he sought, and yet every daughter never seeing the sunrise after their birth. She earned a reputation with her accurate tongue. Haughty, the nobles called her where her father heard. Arrogant. Proud, as if no woman had a right to think more of herself than of a future wife and mother. Her father’s pride, the nobles said, wounded with each arrow’s insult she flung into those who offered to take her hand simply because she was beautiful. Insults! As if she didn’t do more than speak truth to men who didn’t wish to hear it. Prudent, said the working women, in the dovecote and laundry and kitchen and gardens when she had vented her frustrations over stews and roasts and pottage. Take the time to find safety over security, for it was harder to bury a baron than a butcher when he treated you poorly, as they spread butter over brown bread to share as they spoke the realities the nobles did not. The last straw reverse spun from gold thread had been when she had stared into the green eyes of a man known to set bushes alight and send burning thrushes flying out to deaths rather than flush them with dogs, and called the point-chinned man what he was. Her disgraced father had, at the man’s quiet departure, furiously vowed to marry her to the next beggar whom came through his doors and asked for her arrogant hand. Better a beggar, she had told herself while confined in her quarters for a month, than a beast. A “beggar” had come, and she had been dragged down from her rooms to marry him and sent out only with what she could carry in a sack in one hand, and both father and spouse had taken the queen for a fool. *~*~* He did not have the hands of a beggar. His fingertips and palms had been tellingly soft, the first time he had gripped her thighs and consummated their marriage roughly on a straw-filled mattress under a thatch-roof hut he had called a castle when she had balked at the poor construction. A fiddler did not have soft fingertips, if they played for their meals as often as he claimed. Nor did he have the talents of even a stable boy, sitting arrogantly on his wooden throne at the head of their imbalanced table and mocking the “queen”—refusing to use her name—for not setting a fire fast enough with the damp wood he had dragged in from outside the next morning. He had barely gathered enough food for two in the hut, and most of it improperly stored and rat-bitten; mealy flour, slimy meat, moldy vegetables. When she managed to produce something edible from the piss-poor larder, the man who had contributed nothing ordered his wife to serve him first with a tone she knew too well. She watched, stomach turning and eyes hot, as he ate the kingly share of the meal—then, sharp beard glistening with the fat, chided her for not making a feast out of famine before she could take her first leftover bite. When the poorly stored pantry went low—in part because she had wisely thrown out everything spoiled one day when he had been out “working” rather than let them become ill from it—he insisted she learn a trade, for she could not go on earning nothing for the household. She bit her lip til she tasted the tang of red rather than tell him she had spent enough time among the servants’ spaces of her manor home to know it was his ignorance and not her lack of skill which made her crafting efforts fail. His “queen” knew more of wool and willows than he ever did; the reeds were too thick and inflexible to weave baskets and there was no water to soak them, and the wool was not only unclean and unprepared but the lopsided spindle so badly whittled she had spent more time picking splinters from her sore fingertips than twisting the few spans of singles she had produced from such an imbalanced tool. All the while, his hands remained soft. He had sent her out to the market with poorly shaped clay pots, assuming her “pride” would keep her hunched in a corner with her head down rather than a nobleman’s daughter be seen selling next to fishwives and fruitmongers. Instead she had spoken to the other merchants to find the best place to set up a pottery stand, kept her chin up, and sold every lopsided pot he had brought her for a solid week. Her purse had been half full the day a slick-bearded hussar on a thoroughbred had run through a crowded market and managed to damage no other merchandise except the display of pots her “fiddler” had sent her to market with. The horse’s gallop had been too skilled, the rider too in control of his mount, and she had not said anything when she came home with tear tracks and dust in her face, and the green eyes had stared into hers and told her she had no talents and he had “managed” to find room for her as a maid in the palace’s kitchens. It had taken a fortnight of hard labor, and walking an hour home to the hut on the edge of town on swollen feet with aching arms and leftover meal scraps to add to the larder along with the few coins in her threadbare pocket under her dusty skirts before she had heard what she knew already; the king had, it was whispered among the lamenting staff, ruined a poor smart noble girl’s pride and destroyed his new wife’s ‘arrogance’ by keeping her in squalor all this time, to punish her for “insolence” at calling him what he was. She had come home that night, silently cooked the supper, and let the so-called fiddler have the lion’s share of their meal before she lay under the man with soft hands and sharp chin until he finished with a grunt and rolled over to leave her to her thoughts on the rough straw mattress. He thought her humbled and controlled of her arrogance, crowing he would present her in three days’ time at his son’s wedding—she had not known about the son, a failure of research on her part—in front of her own father and the nobles she had spoken “ill” of as one would a tamed wild mare on a golden bridle. To shock her with the knowledge she was a queen and not a beggar’s wife. She had known since the first day she was a king’s wife. He had given it away a thousand different ways, in speech and softness and superiority. But most tellingly had been on the walk for hours to the hut he had made her think her home, when she had asked about the fields and forest and townlands they’d walked past. He’d likely though her silly, so he’d answered with dismissal, slipping his silver-spooned tongue. Missing her sarcasm for self pity when he chided her response, saying she was annoying him for asking for a better husband instead of accepting the “humble” one she had married. She had been quiet the rest of the way, and he had—as he’d done for the months he’d believed her to be cowed—though himself victorious. But unless the nobles spoke as freely among beggars as they did barons, none should have known the epithet she had spoken in a room with only a widowed father and the king she’d flung the arrows at. She let him take her tears for feminine shame and not righteous fury as he told her the cruel days were past, and he dressed her in scarlet and miniver to match his own, and let him have the night and swore he would not have many more. *~*~* The queen had been widowed a year after her presentation. She had spent it with her chin low and her lip bitten, listening as her husband told her stepson how to keep the princess from too much arrogance—how his own stepmother had been too arrogant, but he had tamed her. She had not been pleased with him, and many nights she remembered the straw mattress, the shattered pots, the memory of wood spindle-splinters that hurt so bad she wished they had dragged her to a hundred-year sleep. She watched him continue to take the king’s share from meals, and even though her hands no longer made the meals and lit the fires, she saw the way he spoke to the servants the way he had spoken to her in the hut at the edge of his kingdom. She said nothing until she saw the prince chide his wife for humming idly with the same cold tone she had been, and the young lady’s head bow in sad response. And the queen decided she would not see the light go out in another woman’s eyes and turn them into an empty vessel for a man’s line. *~*~* The king’s hands were soft, the night the queen removed him from the throne; they tried to pull her callused hands away from his neck, slapping at her bare skin until they went limp. *~*~* Her last words to the young king were, if he wished to be a better king than his father, he would not treat the new queen like an ornament, for women had their ways. He had looked into the fire of his stepmother’s glance, and when he said he could have her hanged, she said he didn’t have the proof, and his hands were as soft as his father’s—and he would do right, to leave her to her arrogance. She only hoped he listened, as she gathered her belongings left to the manor home now her own, for her father had no use of it. Such a pity, the nobles had said, he had been thrown from a horse he had tried to break; such a fool, the staff had said upon her return as they welcomed her with warm arms, he had thought he could break a stallion at his advanced age. The same could be said of the late king. She only wished her sisters had been there to see her chin rise again.
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Apr 1, 2024 02:34
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(forgot the cards, here they are:) 
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Apr 1, 2024 02:35
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