Her Majesty’s Poison Taster

The poison taster stands behind her queen’s throne, eyes downcast. She is the only thing in the hall that is drab and unadorned, denied even the fine livery that the serving maids and footmen wear with pride. Her purpose is to die, and when she does her thick black robes will contain the mess.

Around her throat is a band of plain silver. The queen wears one too; gold, studded with polished bezoars and staring agates. It vanishes into her finery, just another thing to sparkle and shine; her courtiers easily forget it. The poison taster never does.

On feast days the poison taster’s needle plucks delicious slivers from a dizzying series of dishes. Meats dripping with fat, soft and buttery; thin-sliced fish laid on beds of fractal greenery; tropic-grown fruits dripping with juice, force-ripened by the court’s alchemists. Savory pies and sweet pastries and the delicate structure of anti-breads, grown in the deep caves that once gave the queen’s ancestors power.

The poison taster has always hated alchemists; she rejects anything that bears their touch.

After feasts—after the dancers and musicians, after the comics and mediums, after brandy smooths negotiations and cigar-smoke binds promises—the poison taster follows her queen through the castle’s busy hallways, closer at her heels than any other servant is permitted. Her duties are not yet done.

The queen’s hand is a ring of hot iron around her throat, tight enough that she can hardly breath.

“Why,” the queen hisses, “do you always deny me my empire’s fruit?”

“Grace, please—”, she stammers. The queen does not relent; the poison taster’s metabolism is slow, and she was trained to survive anaphylaxis’ swelling. This is nothing.

“I can smell them on you,” and so she does, and sees the gloss of half-dried juice smeared across her poison taster’s lips, “you snake.”

“I wasn’t,” she cringes back against the wall, shoulders hurting where the queen slammed her against it, “it’s not safe—”

“Liar.” Her tongue darts out, tasting; tart and floral, tainted by the slightest hint of salt. Her grip tightens, and the poison taster shudders. “To think you denied me this—”

She tastes again and again, greedily forcing her way between the poison taster’s parted lips; tangy citrus, the sour ghosts of wine, and the poison taster’s own strange absence, like a creature who has never lived enough to die. Her grip on the poison taster’s throat slackens; her free hand brushes her side.

Each kiss numbs the queen’s lips.

The poison taster is stronger than she looks. She easily shoulders the queen’s limp body, and easily lays her out upon her bed, uncaring of how the queen’s elaborate gown snags and wrinkles. It doesn’t matter, really. It’s just a thing.

The queen’s head has fallen to one side, neck angled uncomfortably. Her eyes track the poison taster as she carefully cleans her mouth and pats herself; she hears her humming as she rubs one of the queen’s scented balms into her lips. A jaunty peasant tune, rhythmic and simple; one of the performers sang it at the feast, all those hours before.

The poison taster takes her time before she finally approaches the bed, picking through the queen’s cosmetics; she has already approved each of them, of course, carefully testing for any trace of slow poisons, but now her inspection has an air of transgression. She opens the pots, unscrews of the bottles, sniffs and frowns or dabs a dollop onto her wrists, drips beads of oil along her silver collar.

On the bed, the queen tries to glare.

Finally, finally, the poison taster deigns to approach her monarch. She shucks her robes as she comes, letting them fall to the floor in a dark puddle behind her. Beneath them she wears only a breast-band and loincloth, the undyed wool pale against her skin; no ornaments, no embroidered patterns. Disposable. When she dies they will seal her unburnt corpse in stone and concrete, and everything she ever owned will be entombed with her.

“Your grace,” the poison taster says, perched on the edge of the bed, one hand idly playing with the queen’s hair, “is this really necessary? You know you could simply instruct me to serve, or, or,” she sighs. A blush climbs the queen’s soft neck. “… I suppose this is how it has to be.”

The queen’s mouth is slack, her muscles relaxed. She can offer no resistance to the poison taster’s probing fingers, dipping past her flushed lips to rub against her tongue, her teeth, her gums. Each point of contact makes her eyes twitch and dilate just a little further.

When the poison taster withdraws her fingers, the queen’s lips twitch almost imperceptibly.

Once again, the poison taster takes her time. She always does. Haste is failure’s handmaiden, and failure brings death; her own, and her queen’s. She brings the same care and focus to the slick sheen of saliva coating her fingers as she does to any strange new delicacy; sniffing, considering, and finally tasting, eyes closed, expression worshipful. The moment of communion is holy; she welcomes the coming of death with open lips and eager tongue.

One of the queen’s hands spasms.

“Hmm,” the poison taster says, tapping her clean hand against the bed, “one more moment, your grace.”

The queen lies on her bed, staring at nothing. She can hear the poison taster doing something on the far side of the room, pulling open an unoiled drawer—a drawer that she has expressly forbidden her maids to touch, lest the precautions she required should take one of them. Her poison taster knows precisely how to avoid the needles, of course, but the noise is unavoidable.

There is a strange peace in not being able to turn her head to watch, as much as she regrets not being able to watch the poison taster. She moves like a dancer, each motion considered, careful; each day she dances with death so that the queen will not, and so much more besides. The blush has long since reached the queen’s face, filling her with a tight, bloody heat.

The poison taster returns, moving soundlessly on the bedroom’s thick carpet. Her lips glisten, dark and oily; a purple drop slides down her chest to pool between her bound breasts, its dark trail somehow accentuating her collarbones’ delicate angles. A stoppered bottle dangles from one of her hands as she pauses directly before the queen, not looking at her; she stretches, and the queen feels her crotch twitch, suddenly demanding.

Sometimes the pretense of unawareness can be powerful, a sly play at voyeurism, at denial, no matter how thin the pretense is stretched. The queen, almost unmoving, is quite affected. The way light plays across her body when she stretches, how her breasts shift and sag when she frees them from that restraining band, so uncaring of the queen’s needs, of the heat burning in her—

She wills herself to move. To stand, to step, to take! It would be so easy, so effortless, yet not even her tongue is her own. She is helpless to do anything except watch as her poison taster unwinds her loincloth and stretches again, the thin band discarded on the floor; her eyes are glued to her hips, to her breasts, to the trail of hair guiding the queen’s eye down, enrapturing her.

The bottle opens with a warm pop. The queen barely reacts, and the poison taster can’t help smiling; something about the expression in the queen’s eyes always gets her. The same focus that she brings to negotiations, to wars, to the subjugation of her client nobles, but—here. Now. Her mind fixated so purely, so transparently, on her base desires; on the poison taster’s flesh.

It would be a shame not to give her a bit of a show, wouldn’t it?

The liquid inside the bottle is thick and almost colorless; in proper lighting it would be faintly pink, but the tint vanishes against the poison taster’s skin. She’s careful not to pour too much, not to exhaust the precious supply, but not that careful. Not as careful as she would be if she was dosing the queen in any other way.

She tilts her pelvis to control the flow, guides it down through her hair’s damp curls; and then, just before it drips down to be wasted in the carpet, she catches it with her fingers, rubs it in, sees the look in the queen’s eyes and spreads herself open to watch how it changes. The queen’s entire body is twitching now, struggling against her chemical chains, but the poison taster takes her time. It would be a shame not to, just as it would be a shame not to let her queen hear how good it feels as she rubs the pink goo into her clit.

It’s not like taking her time will make it less effective. Just messier.

The queen has a horrible, focused look on her face when the poison taster finally crawls onto the bed and crouches over her face, the mix of smells—the only smells her body makes, as far as the queen has determined, though she covers the absence with a careful blend of perfumes—hitting her nose like a mace. The queen wants to dive in; she wants to grab the poison taster and pin her down, to rut into her, to take her—but, as the poison taster settles into position, rubbing herself against the queen’s face, the queen can barely move her tongue.

She can’t even hold her head up; the poison taster has to use her hands and thighs to keep her in position. All she can do is lie there limp, helpless, smelling and tasting and wanting—

Once it would have been an utterly foreign sensation. She had never been helpless since she was a suckling babe, not in battle or negotiation or bed. Rule was her birthright; her father gave her life that she might continue the work of conquest. She cannot imagine what her father would think if they could see her like this, an object for a mere poison taster to rut against—or, perhaps, she can. Her father did not think his heir a daughter; she imagines that his expression, were he here, would be much the same as it had been then, in the moments before she claimed her rule over his fresh corpse.

There are not tears in her eyes. She does not blink them away.

The poison taster’s hands clench in her hair; oaths and prayers drip from her mouth, running down in strands of purple drool to die unheeded on the sheets. Her thighs tense again and again, pressing hard on the queen’s neck; she pants, breathing harder, chasing her death, and then—

There.

The queen swallows spasmodically. She doesn’t have any choice, as her poison taster’s body slumps, exhausted, satiated. Worn out, perhaps. But—how dare she!? With her queen still here, still achingly hard, blood saturated with all desire’s poisons?

She tries to move.

Fails.

Tries again.

One thigh twitches.

She has never accepted defeat. Will never accept it. If she did, she would not be who she is today. No poison, no law, no man or god—

The queen tries, and fails, and she makes herself move anyway; one of the bezoars at her throat crumbles into dust, consumed. It is not a graceful movement, but it doesn’t have to be; the poison taster is unsteady, easy to knock onto her side.

The poison taster sprawls out, legs akimbo, eyes blinking as she pulls herself back into the world; her thighs shudder and her cunt spasms, an unforgivable affront when the queen should be feeling that aftershock wrapped around herself.

“It’s wearing off already?” the poison taster murmurs, “but,” her eyes settle on the missing bezoar a moment before the queen cuts her off, struggling to turn over, to move towards her, limbs heavy and uncoordinated, struggling against her body, against her too-large, too-heavy gown, against the layers of fabric and woven gold and jewels that her maids had dressed her in, like a doll, utterly necessary and yet, and yet—

The poison taster’s hand is cool against her cheek.

“Highness,” she asks, “can you speak?”

Her tongue is thick and woolly, still drenched in the poison taster’s cum. She shakes her head, frustration coloring her cheeks.

“Then I shan’t ask how you want me, highness. But,” she murmurs, glancing down at the queen’s voluminous gown, “bear with me, a moment?”

It takes much more than a moment.

The queen’s gown was designed to be assembled around her by a small team of servants, and removed much the same. It, like all her formal wear, is akin to her battle-garb; a symbol, a weapon in its own right. The handful of concessions made towards her body’s needs—to sit, to move, to breath—merely mean that were she to die it would not hold her corpse upright.

Its designers never considered that it might need to be removed from the queen’s drugged body by a single, somewhat cumdrunk, servant.

Mistakes are made.

The poison taster does not succeed at fully undressing the queen; her gown’s various components are still anchored to her body, her undercorset still shapes her body’s curves, and most of her jewelry remains intact (a string of pearls is the victim of the poison taster’s overeager hands). Her remaining garments are still heavy and unwieldy, complicating her movements.

And yet the most immediately important elements are accomplished; the queen’s crotch is bare, and the poison taster is free to nuzzle up against it without having to crawl up the queen’s gown.

Once, before the poison taster’s elixirs took effect, the queen was hard and taut, throbbing with hot blood; now she is softer, plusher. She squishes when the poison taster squeezes her; a bead of perfectly clear fluid drips from her tip. The poison taster inhales, and is entranced; her training has long since become reflex, and the queen’s scent—sweat old and new, the unbearable need that rolls off her in heavy waves, the heat, the delicate balance of humors inside her—

The poison taster could have spent minutes unraveling her queen’s scent, hours teasing new revelations from her taste; she could have combed through her body, searching for hidden dangers as she would with any meal—but the queen interrupts. Her hand on the back of her head, fumblingly gripping her braided hair; guiding her, ordering her—

The poison taster lifts her head to look her queen in the eyes; her arm relaxes, unable to muster the strength to stop her.

“Highness,” she says, smiling, “please, I thought you wanted me properly?”

The queen blushes and glances aside; she should be taking, conquering, not asking! That was how she was raised, how she was taught, how she was—oh. Her blush deepens. The poison taster doesn’t remark on the way her hand drops from her head, or on the way her cock twitches in anticipation.

The queen is already teetering on the edge when the poison taster guides her in; it takes little more than her tight, sticky heat and a few well-timed squeezes to coax her climax into the world. She tenses and shudders as it rolls through her, her body lifting up, head involuntarily thrown back—and then falls back, momentarily spent.

Lips meet hers, tasting of peppermint and aniseed; a mild vasodilator, mixed with the extract of an ill-scented flower. The poison taster’s own blend. Her preparations quickly bear fruit; the queen stirs inside her.

In the morning, the queen wakes alone. Dawn is just beginning to intrude through her bedroom’s windows; two of her maids peer around the edge of the servants’ door, blushing and giggling. They should be used to this by now, but they still play at being too scandalized to meet her eyes and performatively cast their hands over their eyes while they assist her in the bath.

For once, she doesn’t care. She is perfectly satisfied.

She takes breakfast in her boudoir, hoping to stretch the moment out, but the latest round of reports from the empire’s more troublesome holdings arrives before the first course. A colony in rebellion; a village burnt by bandits; a collective of workers refusing to make what is required. Nobles demand reassurances; merchants send gifts and cajoling messages, hoping to affix the imperial rose to their shops’ facades.

The work of empire continues.

She doesn’t notice her meal arriving; she doesn’t notice the black-robed poison taster slipping in, ready to resume her task. Her mind has no space for such trifling observations.

But neither does it make space to fear the poison that could be—must be! will be!—hidden within each succulent morsel and every delicate sip. The poison taster sees this, and knows; and what more could she ask than that trust?