The king pulls you out from under the table

( Author's note: If you're just continuing, it may be worthwhile to have a look through the previous chapters, have added a bunch of images and gifs, don't forget to click like on chapters you like ;) )

He pulls out of you with no warning worth using, and the lead goes slack only long enough for him to unhook it from the table-leg. Staff are already moving because he has lifted two fingers, and they clear trenchers and cups from the center of the long table until there is a bare stretch of wood the width of a woman. Someone says the platters will stain. He tells them to bring the platters anyway.

"Up. On your back. Head toward me, feet toward our guest. If you kick a dish I will put the ring where you cannot think."

You climb because the alternative is being lifted, and the blindfold makes the table arrive as height and heat and the smell of fat. The wood is hard under Sera’s shoulders. You lie down and he takes your ankles and opens them toward the envoy’s chair until the air of the hall is on you, beads still humming, wet from him and from the crawl. Kitchen staff lay food on you the way they would dress a board: a heel of bread on the sternum, roasted birds at the ribs, glazed fruit along the hipbones, a salt-dish balanced in the hollow under one breast. A girl with burnt fingers whispers that the sauce will run if you breathe too hard, and then she puts the sauce there anyway.

The envoy has not stood. His voice comes from the end of your legs, polite and a little tighter than it was.

"You put a border negotiation on a woman’s stomach."

"I put supper on my property," the king says. "You may eat what does not fall."

He plays with the ring.

The first turn is only the supper pulse you already know, and you lock your hips because the salt-dish is a traitor. The second turn makes the clit bead bite and the birds slide a finger-width. Someone at the sideboard sucks air through their teeth. You hold. Bread crumbs stick to the sweat between your breasts. The third turn is the one from the rug, both nipples and the clit together, and you make a sound into the blindfold that the hall cannot pretend is conversation.

"Don’t lift," he says. "If the fruit goes, you go again until it stays."

You try not to lift. The magic does not care. It stacks in the pierced places until there is no separate thought for the dishes, only the order not to dump them and the fact that your body is going to dump you instead. When it breaks it is violent in a way the frame never managed: your back wants the table and your hips want off it, and the squirt tears out of you in a hard wet arc you can hear hit cloth and skin and the envoy’s plate. It keeps coming. You shake and spray again while the sauce runs cold down your side and a bird hits the wood, and you are still trying to pin your shoulders flat so the rest of the layout will forgive you.

The envoy swears in his own language, which is the first uncareful thing he has done. You hear him shove the chair. You hear wine drip.

"That is on me," he says, longer now, court gone thin. "Your copy has a range. If this is the wife who ran, I understand the toasts. If this is a hobby, you have just briefed my coat in front of my secretary."

The king laughs once, not kindly, and turns the ring down to a crawl instead of off.

"Eat around it," he says. "She will lie there through the course. If she comes again and ruins the bread, that is the toast and we skip the cup." He puts two fingers in the mess on your thigh as if he is checking a sauce, and then he wipes them on the inside of your knee. "You will not close your legs. He paid to sit at that end."

You are still blind. Food is still on you, less than there was. The envoy is still wet from you, and he has not been given permission to touch, and the king’s ring is still the only hand that counts. The second course has not been called. The hour he promised is only starting to spend itself.