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Was he taking some of his frustration at Herk out on his little human captive? Perhaps, but no more than she deserved.
"Are you going to be polite, human? Are you going to speak when you are spoken to, and be careful, minding the consequences of your careless words?”
“Yes!” she wailed immediately, just as his hand contacted her cheeks again, covering both of them in a hard slap which brought her up onto her toes.
Konan made a mental note to thank the ship for making the dress short enough that she could be spanked under it without having to go to the trouble of removing it. In fact, it was so short, he could easily bend her over and…
“Konan? The crown?”
He’d almost forgotten that traitorous little bastard, Herk, was still there.
“I can’t take the crown from you, Herk,” he growled, releasing the human. “You’re going to have to deal with the consequences of your betrayal.”
“I don’t want it. I never wanted it. I just wanted the killing to stop. You were out of control, Konan. The palace ran red with blood…”
“The blood of traitors. And you put yourself among them. You chose to side the usurpers. You stole the crown, and now it wears you, brother. You are puppet to its will. I am free.”
Elizabeth stood off to the side, watching them talk. He could feel her gaze on him. She was confused. She didn't understand the complexities and intricacies of the Masih royal house. Almost nobody did.
Inevitably, she spoke out of turn.
“Maybe it chose your brother because you weren’t wearing it. Why weren’t you wearing it?”
“Yeah,” Herk chimed in. “Why didn’t you want it fused into your skull? Didn’t you want to be king? Anybody could have taken it from you. It’s lucky I did.”
“Lucky!? Lucky that my flesh and blood betrayed me before anybody else could? That is not luck, Herk.”
“So, you left the crown up for grabs,” Elizabeth said, talking once more when she should have been silent. “You had a way to ensure it would never be taken from you for as long as you lived. And you didn’t. Sounds like commitment issues. You don’t want to belong to anyone, or to anything.”
“I merely needed to possess the crown. I did not want it to possess me.”
“He’s like this with me,” she said to Herk. “He wants to have me, but he freaks out if he thinks I have him. Hot and cold…”
“That is not true! I have wanted you from the moment I first laid eyes on you, squirming in the arms of my guard. I knew I loved you from first sight.”
“Yes. And you put me in a cage and you whipped me. If I were a crown, I might have glued myself to somebody else’s head too…”
He snarled at the idea of anybody else ever touching his female. “We can discuss our personal issues another time.”
“We can, and we will, but we should talk about them now, because they’re the reason your idiot brother has your crown stuck to his head.”
“What is done cannot be undone.”
Elizabeth walked over to Herk, reached up, put her hands on the crown, and…
POP!
Herk screamed and grabbed at his head as if in pain. “I’m BLEEDING! I’M BLEEDING!”
“You're not,” Elizabeth said. “You’re fine.”
“I am?” Herk pulled his hands away from his head and inspected them as if he had expected them to be covered in bits of flesh and skull. He found them devoid of either. “I am!”
“That... should not be possible,” Konan declared, astonished. There was no way for the crown of Masih to be released from its host. But there was also no denying that had just happened right before his eyes. “How did you do that, human?”
“I’m a narrator. I know stories. Do you know the story about the sword in the stone?”
“I do not have time for strange human tales.”
She pulled the face she made when she thought he wasn’t listening to something important. It was one of irritation and a slight tinge of what might have emerged into a lecture if she had the nerve to lecture the beast who dominated her.
“Okay. Long story short, in the tale of King Arthur, the king only becomes king if he can pull a sword from a stone.”
“How does the sword get into the stone?”
“Not really important. There’s a sword, it’s in a stone, and the stone says that whoever can pull the sword out gets to be king.”
“That seems like poor criteria.”
“The old English were very much into the possession of swords as a basis for power. Anyway. The story goes that everybody gets a crack at this stone. Strong men. Strong women. Passing strangers. There’s no real limitation. There’s also nobody who can do it. Until a guy named Arthur does it without thinking. He touches the sword and it just falls free. Because why? Destiny. This crown doesn’t belong to Herk. It’s not his destiny. It’s yours…” She looked at it, running it through her hands. “Or maybe it’s mine.”
