The queen had failed in her duties; the woman had died with no son. A sole daughter would hardly be enough to ensure the royal family line.
The king, everyone said, would need a wife.
"Why so shy, my dear?" he laughingly asked her as he played with her hair. She merely lifted herself over him and pressed her lips to his.
The girl watched as pureblood ladies became ridiculous and turned into parodies of themselves, hoping that their outsider blood might finally enter such an isolated family.
It made her sick.
He flipped her over onto the mattress. The feel of his weight pressing down on her felt disgustingly good. Hopefully it would only take this time to result in an heir.
The council was in no hurry for their sole monarch to marry. If he were to die then the Kuran line would come to an end. The imbalance of power would be easily turned to their favor.
The girl watched the scheming nobles with a suspicious eye. As a pureblood, she had been raised from birth to mistrust the sycophants. She knew what she must do to protect her king.
He was ridiculously skilled. She realized that between his substantial age and his late wife, this was easily explained. She didn't like to think about his sister-wife. He touched her just right and she moaned. Any further thoughts on former lovers would wait until the aftermath.
It was easy to get him drunk. He had taken to his cups soon after his wife's death, despairing that he might see the death of his family's closely guarded bloodline. The dilution of Kuran blood was abhorrent to him.
In his stupor it was easy to mistake the girl for her mother. Had there been nothing else, there would have been her strange eyes.
As he dozed off next to her, she knew she had conceived; she could feel the stir of life within her. She slipped out of bed and crept back to her room. Soon she would have a son.
Months later, after she had been taken as the king's second wife (daughter-wife now, not the foolish sister-wife), she birthed a boy.
As she looked into the boy's eyes (they were her eyes, her mother's eyes) she wondered if she really had saved her father's bloodline.
"A father cannot marry his daughter," they said. "…No good can come of such a sin, and the whole kingdom will be dragged down to ruin with you."
--Allerleirauh
