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“Ah yes, my father, who chose females each and every year at the dance, and who bore sons who perished on the battle field because their flashy scales and bright fins did not do a thing for them. When I breed, it will be with a female capable of bearing me a son worthy of the throne.”
“There is a certain sense to your words, sire,” Brimsley conceded, reluctantly. “Shall I have a maid draw you an acid bath before you retire to bed?
“Yes. Why not,” Archon replied. He wanted to wash the lingering scent of two dozen perfumes from his body. He felt as though he had been utterly soaked in the stuff. Some of it was laced with pheromones, no doubt an attempt to chemically hijack him. Those females had come to be fucked by him, and they would have done almost anything to be fucked by him.
Archon had very different tastes. His women did not come to him because they were sent. The handful of lovers he had taken in the past were those he had clashed with. They were willful women, real warriors. They may have been able to dance, but they more often wielded weapons with lyrical alacrity. Archon liked brave, bold, dangerous women, and there was not a female among the dancers who fit that description.
“Anna! A bath!” Brimsley called for the bath maid.
The last female he would see that evening came bustling in with an arm full of towels. She had gray hair and eyes which appeared sunken because of all the wrinkles around them.
Anna had worked in the flying castle almost as long as Brimsley. She’d drawn more baths than she’d had hot dinners, but unlike the old courtier, she was not slowing down. Servants were not permitted to get old and weak, they had to remain sprightly well into their later years. Anna was like a little old tank, doing her duty no matter what. She nodded at Archon and Brimsley on her way to the bathing chamber.
Archon followed her. He was tired of the company of advisors and nobles, and even more tired of Brimsley himself. The old courtier was a relic who never tired of reminding Archon of what his father, a male Archon had never known, would have done in this situation or that situation.
He wanted the power of the crown, but none of the tradition which came with it. They thought he was a brute, but Archon was going to prove much worse than a mere brute. He was going to show them that he was a renegade, a complete maverick with no allegiance to history besides a tenuous genetic link exemplified in the scaling of his body.
Leaning against the bathing room wall, Archon watched the woman prepare his bath with more interest than he’d taken in any of the forced festivities below. She paid him little mind, focusing on the task at hand, donning thick gloves and picking up great big pitchers of acid which she carried across to the gently steaming bath.
When it was ready, he stepped into it and sank into the hot, sparkling water. The acid really worked nicely with the water, reacting with little mineral deposits to hiss and spit and generally chemically beat the hell out of his skin.
The bath maid remained close, in case he needed anything topped up. She averted her gaze from him, and allowed him the closest thing to privacy anybody in the castle had allowed him since his coronation.
“Anna.” He called her name. She was probably surprised that he knew her name, having only been in the royal household himself a short time, but Archon paid more attention than others gave him credit for. That was the only reason he was alive.
“Yes, your majesty?”
Archon ran his eyes over her soft but sturdy body, clad in a gray dress which was designed to make her look deliberately unremarkable. It was not flattering. It was not unflattering. It just… was. Archon was fairly certain that if Brimsley could have made the staff literally invisible, he would have.
“What species are you?”
“Human, your highness.”
That term sounded familiar. “Human. Is that a kind of Martian?”
“We’re often confused with Martians. But we come from a different planet, sire.”
“How old are you?”
“I will be sixty-four in the coming weeks.”
“Too old to reproduce, then.”
“Too old,” the wash maid agreed.
“They’ve had me looking at every single female they could dredge up from every corner of the kingdom,” Archon sighed, floating his fingers through the water. “All twenty-four tribes of my people, all of the women with their own agendas, trying to politically seduce me.” He let his hand swish through the acidic water. “I’m supposed to find that attractive, Anna. The desperate gyrations of what amount to concubines.”
“You know your own mind, sire,” Anna said, bustling about for a fresh bottle of hydrochloric acid. “You’ll know your mate when you meet her.”
