Free The Empress's New Lingerie and Other Erotic Fairy Tales by Hillary Rollins Page B

obedience. She attended to her duties and comported herself with all the propriety befitting her newly exalted station. But she was restless and unfulfilled, for despite his reputation, she found her husband’s appetite, at least insofar as it applied to her, rather pallid. He rarely came to her bed except to conceive an heir. And while a tour of the castle revealed that the private halls and chambers were outfitted with a variety of indecent devices—whips and harnesses and complicated rigs for flogging—the fixtures in the queen’s suite were as comfortable and ordinary as those in a picture book.
    It seemed the king regarded marriage as sacred and therefore not in the least bit sensual, reserving gratification of his more piquant tastes for the legendary lost ones of the village, the legion of silent slaves who padded naked and barefoot through the lower depths of the castle wearing the same irons and gags and nipple clamps that had once adorned the miller’s daughter, carrying out the grunt work of the household by day while satisfying the proclivities of their exacting king by night.
    Because the last time she was allowed to venture into the cavernous underworld beneath the castle was when she’d been locked away in the dungeon to spin, the queen never actually laid eyes on these shadow slaves. But her ears confirmed their existence when, in the depth of her loneliest nights, she heard their far-off cries of anguish uniting with the climactic screams of her lord and master as he used their bound, prone, and tortured bodies to absorb his passion and his rage over and over again. During these times she would recall the details of her own voluptuous episode in the dungeon when the strange little man had flagellated her naked rump so thoroughly her filthy secrets were purified. She remembered how he had lashed her like she was a misbehaving colt and he a severe jockey bent on training her wayward hindparts with his birchwood crop until she begged and pleaded for mercy and finally passed out from the force of her hunger for such a beating. She remembered, as she rolled herself between furious fingers until the soapy wet bubble of her lust expanded and popped between her legs, the whistle of his rod as it split the air. She remembered the crack as it landed, the burn like a cattle brand on her great hams as wood bit into skin, the taste of the leather in her mouth, and the humiliation in her excited gut. But what she never remembered, because it had seemed so far off and preposterous, was the devil’s contract she’d entered into with her harsh instructor. So it came as a cruel shock when, after the birth of her first child, the little man showed up for his due.
    â€œI come for the child,” he said blandly, as if it were commonplace to take a babe from its mother’s breast.
    â€œNo, please, I beg of you,” said the queen. “I’ll give you anything else you ask, but not my child!”
    â€œWhat have you that I could possibly want?”
    â€œWhy, I have everything! I am the king’s wife and all the riches of the kingdom are at my disposal.”
    â€œAye, you are indeed the king’s wife, but you only achieved that lofty station because I spun spool after spool of straw into gold! So you must realize that riches of that sort are nothing to me; I can simply spin them whenever I want. No, Your Highness, the only way I shall grant you clemency in this bargain is if you can guess my name. I’ll give you three chances, and if you can’t call me by my proper name, the child is mine.”
    â€œIs it Balthazar?” asked the queen.
    â€œNo,” he replied.
    â€œIs it Alouisious?”
    â€œWrong again!”
    â€œIs it…Rumpelstiltskin!?”
    The little man searched the eyes of the beautiful queen and there he found the same craving for correction that he had seen there when she was nothing but a doomed miller’s daughter. With a twist