Under the water, Autumn ground the heel of her hand between her thighs. How would Eltanin have reacted to such a bold display? How would her knight have? Would he have left the throne room, embarrassed, or would he have stayed and watched her ride his king? Autumn shivered at the idea of his cool eyes on her back as she worked his master into a frenzy. What did he think of all this, really? Aside from a loyalty that he had been forced into, what did the handsome knight make of her? Did he want her to succeed and marry the Wizard King?

I will always remain yours, came the memory of his voice, reigniting the fire she’d felt earlier at his words. Heat curled down her skin and pooled in her stomach. The image of the throne room shivered in her mind. Eltanin disappeared, and suddenly she was the one sat on the throne, the rightful queen of this land, and her knight knelt in front of her. He was offering her his loyalty in the way it should have been done, with knowledge of what it meant and by his own volition. She imagined him getting to his feet and standing at attention before her, waiting on her command. Wanting to obey. Not because he had been ordered to, but by choice. It was an intoxicating thought.

But Autumn didn’t want to fantasize about the knight; even in her own mind, it felt like an abuse of power. He was hers to protect, not to use. A responsibility that she hadn’t asked for, yet regardless would take seriously. Under her care, the construct would not be treated like a thing. She turned her mind back to Eltanin. This was safer territory to explore. The king had no duty to her, and neither had she to him. But they had agreed, ostensibly, to be wed in two months’ time. Which meant that she felt no shame whatsoever imagining herself writhing on his lap. It might not be proper, but it was only indecent by virtue of being two months too early before she’d not only be allowed, but reasonably expected to think such thoughts. It was generally considered a good idea, after all, to be attracted to one’s husband. It made the entire ordeal more bearable. And Autumn had never really bothered with decency anyhow, so she didn’t see any reason why she should wait until she’d entered matrimony to entertain herself in this way.

The scene she’d conjured unspooled once more in her mind as she bit her lip and started rubbing between her legs in earnest. After climbing onto him, she would have pressed herself down in his lap, opened the clasps of his coat and dragged her mouth over his jaw. The king would have been smug, she thought. Not helping her at all, content to simply sit back and wait to see what she would do next. He would have been surprised but pleased by her boldness. Surely, no other princess had dared touch him this way before — by choosing this approach, Autumn would have immediately stood out from the rest.

How long, she wondered, since the last time a woman had lain with the Dark King? According to Knight, Eltanin had been cursed for a thousand years. She had known men to become pent-up with frustration after less than a month without the touch of a partner. Yet others never felt that need at all. Was the king the sort of man who did not care for the pleasures of the flesh, or would the heat and weight of her hips pressing down onto his lap make him gasp with the desperation of a thousand years of unfulfilled need? She considered the possibility, but then decided that Eltanin would have probably just leered some more, the same way that he had at dinner. At times he’d seemed as if he had wanted to devour her rather than his meal, and that alone was enough to convince her that the man would not be immune to her charms if she ever did allow herself to use them.

Autumn grasped her breast and moaned. She pinched her nipple with her fingers, imagined pressing her bosom to Eltanin’s face. She ran her nails delicately up and down her chest and thought about the rough drag of a beard on her soft skin. That goatee had to be good for something more than framing a smirk. She’d always favoured men with beards, especially older ones, ever since one of her mother’s knights had convinced her to let him between her legs when she was seventeen.

He’d caught her fooling around with the cook’s son, a lovely boy whose hands were skilled enough to forgive his face. They’d been alone in her private sewing room, in which no one should have intruded without her express permission. But he’d apparently heard her moaning from the hallway during his patrol and, incapable of telling whether it was in pleasure or in pain, he had come barging in to discover her with her skirts pulled up high and the boy’s hands kneading her as if she were a piece of dough.

The older man had sent the poor chap away, and Autumn had ordered him not to tell her mother what he’d seen. He’d replied that he had no intention of putting her in trouble, which might have been the end of it. But then the knight had looked at her thoughtfully — at the curves of her budding womanhood and the long fiery hair that she knew turned men wild — and he had advised her that if she wanted to rebel, then she should not settle for half measures. If her legs could still hold her, he’d said, and her voice wasn’t raw, then her paramour must not have been very skilled. Was the quality of his efforts really worth the consequences she might face for having enjoyed them?

Autumn had understood the implied offer, and agreed that he had a point. She’d boldly demanded that he show his meaning and give her something worth getting in trouble about. The knight didn’t need to be asked twice. He’d taken a knee under the folds of her dress and had ensured that she never settled for boys again when she could have men instead. She remembered, fondly, how she’d screamed herself hoarse on his tongue and how his beard had rubbed her red all along her hips and at the crease of her thighs. The itch had felt more illicit than the act itself, in a way, because it had not faded for hours afterwards and that meant that she’d had to sit at the dinner table and look her mother the queen in the eye while still tingling with the proof that she had just done something incredibly improper and gotten away with it. And that unless the knight ran his mouth, then this would be a secret that would remain one, for once. A small but exciting part of her life that hadn’t been imposed on her or decided by another but that she had properly chosen all on her own.

After completing this thrilling demonstration, the knight had smoothed down her skirts without a word and left her rooms. But Autumn had been greedy, and craving the relief that pouring her rage and her loneliness into rebellion could bring her in this stifling kingdom still choking under the weight of her father’s failures. She had also been quite enamoured with this new concept of ‘not doing things halfway’. So she’d cornered him in the armoury after his patrol and argued that he’d done a different thing to her than the cook’s son, and therefore how was she to tell who was best? Soon after, pressed to the stone wall in between a rack of swords and a shining suit of armour, she had come screaming on his fingers, which had been thick and coarse and not as dexterous as a cook’s, but had filled her very pleasantly. What’s more, the man had tugged down the top of her bodice in a surge of ardour and mouthed roughly at her breasts, leaving even more delicious red marks all over her pale skin.

Afterwards, amused by her continued hunger and overcome by his own lust, the knight had abandoned all pretenses of tutelage. He’d replaced his hand with his prick and wrung another lovely orgasm from her before pulling out of her with a curse and splashing messily on the inner skin of her thigh. Autumn, despite having been experimenting with her friends for almost a year by then, had never been filled by a man’s cock before; and she had been in that moment quite glad that she had chosen to pursue the matter with this seasoned knight who had been both skilled and unafraid to demonstrate. All the boys her age were so tediously intimidated by her royal status that they barely dared touch her at all.

She had never lain with that particular man again, as she was still a princess and did not want him to get ideas above his station, like perhaps finishing inside of her. Carrying an affair with a knight that hadn’t even been good enough to be chosen for her father’s war did not appeal to her in the least. But she still held fondness for him in her heart, and she never forgot what he’d taught her about being bold. It had served her well, up until her mother had decided that her boldness was reason enough to give her away to a wizard.

In the bath, the fingers of her right hand slipped back and forth between her folds as she thought some more about what might have happened if she had claimed the Wizard King. She wouldn’t have taken him out of his clothes, that first time, she decided. Let him come messily into his pants. Let him crave her body. She never let men — especially not older or powerful ones, of which there had been plenty — have what they wanted on the first encounter, having found through experience that they became much more malleable when she gave them a reason to return and beg her for it. More than once, her kingdom had benefitted from that particular approach, whether in trade agreements or advantageous favours granted by lords that otherwise might not have thought to offer them. What’s more, afterwards they usually went away convinced that those had been their ideas to begin with. If she played her cards right — which she always did — most of the time things didn’t even have to escalate to a bedroom. It just needed to look like it might. Ancient king or not, Eltanin Darkmore had no clue what she had in store for him. She would play him like a harp.

Autumn clenched in pleasure around her fingers at the thought of dominating a man of such power as the Wizard King, of being in control of whether she took his cock inside of her or not, whether he got to come or not… In her fantasy, the King was still watching her with his deep dark eyes. He wasn’t touching her with his hands, keeping to his promise, but the smirk wavered on his face as she ground herself down against the hard bulge of his pants. She pictured her moans echoing obscenely through the gloomy hall, her voice filling the stale air of this empty land. There was something almost profane about this conjuring of her mind, and Autumn gasped and thrashed in the hot water as she chased the thought. The dark throne room and its even darker throne had long been a symbol of evil in the stories and fairytales of her home kingdom. A great taboo, an untouchable power. Yet here she was, desecrating it in her fantasy with her voice and her body and the sinuous movements of her hips.

She hooked her ankle over the rim of the tub, hand working faster as the scene unspooled further in her mind. Legs twitching beneath hers. Eltanin’s smirk finally evaporating as he gripped the arms of his throne, straining to keep his self-control. His gaze boring into hers as she ground down with renewed vigour to meet the stuttering thrusts that he couldn’t quite stop himself from making. The rough, almost painful sensation of the fabric of his pants as she rubbed herself against his covered shaft. How wet she was, and how soaked the barrier of his clothes was becoming from the combination of her body and the signs of his imminent pleasure. His peak cresting first, the prideful king closing his eyes as his mouth parted open on a moan, his nails digging into the wood of his throne, his stomach quivering. The sweet taste of victory exploding on her tongue as she finally bent to kiss him.

In her bath, Autumn cried out as she came hard, her hips twitching uncontrollably and her knee colliding with the side of the tub. Waves after waves of ecstasy rolled through her as she clenched around her own knuckles, almost blacking out from the sheer force of it. The shame followed, anger swift on its heels.

She pulled her hands away from her body and slapped them into the water. “Damn it!” She thrashed her arms and feet, splashing and cursing aloud. “Damn, damn, damn!”

Autumn slid across the bottom of the bath and tilted her head backwards, letting the hot water close over her face. She held still for a beat, willing the warmth and silence to soothe the tempest in her mind. What a horrible idea indulging in this fantasy had turned out to be! She hadn’t intended for it to be so intense, or to picture herself actually kissing the king. This felt like a line too far, in some obscure way. She hated the man! King Eltanin was a despicable, cruel, twisted monster and she didn’t — she didn’t want to kiss him! What in the world?! Autumn could easily picture herself having sex with him, because he was sinfully attractive and they were to be married (in theory). That was fine. She’d had sex with a lot of men that she didn’t otherwise care for because they’d been handsome and sex was enjoyable. But she didn’t just not care for Eltanin, she actively hated him. The waves of pure happy bliss that she’d felt while orgasming to the idea of kissing him, of all people… disgusting.

Clearly, she would have to reconsider her approach to this whole situation. To start with, she ought to never again angrily touch herself while thinking about the king. That had been shockingly ill-advised. Autumn was many things, but weak to the charms of a dark, attractive, evil wizard was not one of them. Even if he had a beard, and greying hairs at the temples, and long graceful limbs, all of which were attributes that she’d been known to favour. She was here to make his life miserable, damn it all, not the other way around. She tried to picture her anger simply drifting away, dissolving into the warm water. It was pleasant, but now her knees were sticking out of the surface and getting cold. She sat back up with a grudging sigh. There was no point in lingering; she’d only make herself even more miserable if she did.

After drying her body with one of the ridiculous black towels, Autumn trudged back through the short hall towards the bedchamber part of her suite, only to freeze once she walked past the main set of doors. The ones that Knight was almost certainly still standing guard behind, with his inscrutable face and calm serious eyes. She whipped her head in the direction of the bathroom and then back, trying to estimate how far away from the entrance it was, and how much the sound of her pleasuring herself might have carried. How much of her panting and moaning he might have overheard.

Hot shame burned through her once more, and then anger about feeling shame, topped by a fresh coating of more anger towards the situation in general. She finally gave up the day for a waste, and went to bed hoping that she would be able to find the courage to look Knight in the eye come morning.