I was organizing the ingredients, my usual mid-morning routine. The fire crackled and the evening's stew had begun simmering but the cottage still smelled of porridge. Gran was dropping flowers and herbs into a caldron in the corner, sending colorful sparks into the air.
"Marigold," she called, "come and take a look at this potion."
"What is it now, Gran?" I asked, annoyed because she had been trying to slip various love potions into my drinks for the past week.
"This one is sure to attract a perfect man for you!"
"For the last time, I can find love without magic!"
She opened her mouth to answer, but the door to the cottage flew open and Gran quickly pushed me into the hall before I could see anything.
"Alright, old woman, I was satisfied with our last transaction. This time I need something a little stronger. I'm tired of being audience to the incessant back and forth of the young idiots in my court. It's clear they fancy each other and their union would be beneficial to both their lands, but they refuse to discuss their feelings. I can't stand to hear any more of it! You had better have something for me," the woman's voice was focused and threatening.
"I've got what you need right here, no need to go on huffing and puffing in my house." Gran said coldly.
My grandmother was actually a sweet lady, but she put on a tough attitude for her customers. Truthfully, all manner of folk and creatures pounded down our door for Gran's potions. I think Gran felt safer when her patrons felt threatened by her.
"Yes, whatever. Hand it over." The woman's voice was aggressive and impatient. I peered around the corner of the hall to catch a glimpse of our latest visitor. Her dress was long, ornate and the deepest of black I had seen on fabric before. It looked like it could have been made of the mane of a midnight-colored steed. The collar was stiff and the neckline plunging. Her dark hair was up in a tight, but somehow wild bun that accentuated her intense dark eyes. Her lips were painted dark and an irritated expression covered her face. She glanced my direction and I gasped, surprised.
"Come out, let's have a look at you," she said, motioning to me.
I stepped out from the shadowy hallway and gave a formal, but clumsy curtsey. My dress dragged the floor, calling attention to my petite size and I felt embarrassed to be seen in such ill-fitting attire in the presence of a noblewoman. My pale blond hair fell messily onto my shoulders and I quickly pushed it away from my face.
"Turn," the woman said; I turned around slowly. "Yes, I've been looking for a new girl. She's perfect. I'll take her as well."
"My granddaughter is not for sale," Gran said sternly.
"I don't intend to buy her, you fool. I am offering her a job. A chance to get out of this dingy, old shack."
"It's alright, Gran," I walked over and placed my hand on her shoulder. "I will do as M'lady wishes and return with enough gold for you to retire this business."
"Actually, you can address me as 'Your Majesty'," she said crisply. My stomach dropped; I had just accepted a job from the Evil Queen.
. . .
I reported to the castle the next day. A farmer who was dropping off a shipment of vegetables saved me an hour's walk, so I got to the castle when the sun had barley risen. The guards pointed me to the servant's entrance where I was met by a no-nonsense stewardess who introduced herself as Matilda. Almost as soon as I approached her, she wrinkled her nose at me and said,
"You're from one of the villages, I suppose. Well dear, in the castle, we wash regularly. Before you start your duties, you will follow me." Her tone was matter-of-fact and didn't allow for offense, and she walked away, not looking back to see if I was following. She led me to a large, steam-filled room, and told me to take off my clothes. I obliged and she threw them in the fireplace. Incredulous, I began to protest, but she cut me off.
"Go get in one of the baths over there and wash yourself thoroughly," she said, "If I come back and I'm not satisfied with your cleanliness, I will wash you myself. In the meantime, I will be back with new clothes for you." She then marched out, leaving me to it. It had been almost two months since we had enough time and wood to heat the water for a bath. I had rinsed myself in the river since then, but it had always been quick since I didn't know who could have been watching from the banks. Here, I was completely alone and I reveled in it.
I had been clean for several minutes and was taking the opportunity to simply relax in the water when Matilda returned. She handed me a towel as I climbed out of the tub and dried myself. She then handed me a simple, but good quality shift and dress. Once I had put it on and dried my hair as best I could, she looked me over and straightened a few wrinkles. We walked out of the room and into the hallway where she gave me a large piece of bread and a hunk of cheese.
"Now," she said, "You are one of the Lady Queen's newest maids. You will work in the Queen's Wing getting her majesty anything she requires and assisting her in whatever she asks." She was leading me down a series of halls and staircases and I shivered with cold as I chewed the bread.
"Before you begin, you need to have a talk with someone, just to make sure you understand everything," she said as she stopped in front of a thick wooden door with heavy iron fittings. Matilda knocked quietly and a woman spoke from the other side,
"Come in, Matilda." She entered the room and shooed me in as well. We had entered a small office with a merry fire crackling in the hearth. One wall of the room was covered in books, and in front of that was a figure sitting at a desk. Although she was cloaked in shadows, I could tell that it was a woman, taller than me, with auburn hair and piercing grey-blue eyes. She was wearing a black shirt that opened gently at the throat.
"Thank you, Matilda, that will be all for right now," she said, not looking up from the paper she was reading. Matilda curtsied and left the room, firmly closing the door. She sat in silence for a moment before she looked up from the paper.
"Take a seat over there, Marigold," said the woman, pointing at the chair across from her. I sat, realizing that this woman was not to be trifled with.
"How do you know my name, M'Lady?" I asked. She looked up and smiled, but her smile was not comforting.
"Firstly, my name is Ayleth, just Ayleth. And you are here so that we can have a little chat."
"You see," she continued, standing up and walking over to the fireplace, "I like to have a little chat with all of the newly hired staff. It is my job to make sure that you understand something." As she walked past me, I noticed that she was wearing black leather leggings and had a wicked sword sheathed at her hip.
"You see, if it is your intention to harm the Queen, you and I aren't going to get along. In fact, if I am concerned about you in any way, you will find that this castle can be a rather hazardous place. Do we understand each other?" I nodded vigorously, not daring to speak.
"Good," she said with another cold smile, "You can go back upstairs now. You will find Matilda waiting for you." I very quickly stood and exited the room, not daring to turn back until I saw Matilda ahead of me.
"Now that is out of the way," she said, as though nothing had happened, "I will show you around." She gave me a tour of the kitchens, the library, and the other major areas and made sure that I would be able to find my way around. Finally, she showed me up a tower to a large and open room near the top. The room contained every ingredient that could be used in a potion. There were several stations that were covered in papers and various sets of vials, bottles, and scales. I could see a pile of dishes on the corner of a table. The overall effect was that of a tornado having hit the room.
"And this is your domain, my dear," said Matilda with a laugh in her voice. My face must have reflected my horror because she stifled a chuckle as she left me to the chaos. I was overwhelmed by the disaster, but took a deep breath and circled the room. Once I had decided on my plan of attack, I began picking up papers, making mental notes of where each stack came from. I worked for hours, filing, organizing, cleaning, and dusting. Matilda checked in on me and gave me some food at some point, most of the candles in the room had burned low by the time I stopped working though. I had managed to put a dent in the mess, but I was exhausted. If only I could put my head down for a moment, I thought to myself.
. . .
I awoke with a start and felt incredibly disoriented. I was in a horribly messy room and the sun had just peeked over the eastern window, which had probably woken me. The events of the previous day came back to me as I straightened up and stretched. Sighing, I stood and made my way down to the kitchens. Once I had finished with my breakfast, I gathered a few supplies and returned to the tower. I cleared some space on a nearby table and placed a large bucket of wash water there. I gathered the empty vials and bottles and the different mortar and pestle sets that littered the room. Before washing them, I cleared a mostly empty shelf for the clean items I did wash.
The process of washing those took me about three hours. I had to change the water almost a dozen times to keep remnants of various ingredients from interacting. At one point, I almost dropped a vial of dragon's blood into the water that had already been contaminated with powdered willow root. The resulting explosion would have all but destroyed the room, but I managed to catch it before it made contact with the water. After that, I was meticulously precise. When that was done, I turned to the shelves of ingredients and began my work. There was no discernable organization for the cluttered shelves, so I began to alphabetize the ingredients like I had in Gran's shop since I was a girl.
I was close to done when I noticed how dark it was getting outside. I went down to the kitchens again to find out where to get new candles. I staggered under the weight of a large box of them as I returned to the tower, a piece of bread stuffed unceremoniously in my mouth. I looked around as I re-entered the tower. Three long worktables were freshly scrubbed, rows of equipment lined one shelf near the large washbasin that stood beneath the north window, and ingredients that had once littered the tables and shelves now stood uniformly ordered with charcoal markings on the shelves to show where they belonged. A small group of vials holding ingredients sat on the floor next to an almost full shelf. I finished organizing the ingredients as I ate the last of my bread. As I began replacing burned out candles in their holders, I looked over the room once more. The only thing left to do was to organize the various papers on the desk and the room would be ready for more use.
The door slammed open and the Queen entered, muttering something under her breath. She let out a gasp of surprise as she surveyed the room. I calmly finished replacing and lighting the last of the candles.
"What the hell have you done?" she asked me wildly, "Do you have any idea- You could have destroyed- What kind of idiot are you!?" She was livid and stalked towards me as she shouted the first half of various questions, seemingly unable to complete a sentence. My temper flared.
"I've done the job you hired me for, you chaotic royal pain! Do you have any idea how much of a disaster the disorder in this room could have caused?" I was shouting back at her. I was yelling at the Evil Queen and I was most likely dead, but I couldn't seem to stop.
"I have spent almost two days straight cleaning up this mess. What kind of alchemist leaves her room in that state? If the wrong ingredients had mixed, everyone in this castle could have been blown to pieces!" When I had started shouting, she reeled backwards in shock. She stood very still and listened to my tirade, the expression on her face unreadable. By the time I had finished, the expression had changed to a mixture of disbelief, anger, and was that amusement? I couldn't tell. I was breathing hard and shaking a little.
"Did you just yell at me?" she asked, still, it seemed, in shock. I steeled myself; if I was damned, then I might as well get a word in.
"I did, Your Majesty, and I'm not sorry. You hired me to be your assistant in this room, but the room was unusable when I got here. Did you know your notes on the properties of raven claws are almost unreadable because they were underneath a candle? Or did you notice that that there was an infusion of wormwood and beetle shells only a finger's length distance from that unicorn hair when I came in here?" She went white. That combination of ingredients could have turned anyone nearby into a tree, including her. She seemed to think about what I had said and looked around the room again. Finally, she walked calmly over to me and said in an even voice,
"You did well. If you ever yell at me again, your head will be removed from your neck faster than you can say, 'impudent'." I nodded and curtsied to her, determined not to tempt death any more today.
"Now then, I need my notes on dragon scales," she said crisply. I found them and spent the next hour gathering various ingredients and materials she requested. She glared up at me when I began cleaning up the things she wasn't using still, but I kept eye contact and raised my eyebrow and she looked back to her work without a word.
. . .
The Queen came into the tower every other day or so. I moved a small cot to a dark nook of the room so that I could be there when she needed me. Her timing was often erratic, and if I wasn't around, she would often rifle through ingredients and make a mess in the time it took me to get there. It seemed that most of her experimentation was theoretical, but occasionally I would hear her muttering about empty-headed oafs or idiotic dwarves. After that first encounter, the Queen was always polite to me and would occasionally muster the civility of a please or thank you.
As I grew comfortable with my new routine and life, I began to recognize a pattern in the Queen's habits. I could tell when she was going to ask for a certain ingredient or when she needed to eat something. I also started noticing smaller things about her. When she was very focused, she would squint her left eye some. She was constantly talking to herself very quietly when she worked, and when something in an experiment went well, she would smile in a brilliant way that lit up her face.
She would come in various different dresses and corsets, all of which highlighted her magnificent breasts, none of which looked comfortable. One day I noticed that she had almost set her sleeve on fire while heating redbud essence and I put my foot down. I scavenged the palace for a changing screen and a small padded bench and talked to the palace tailor, who never seemed to sleep. When she next entered the tower room, I was waiting for her near the door.
"What?" she said, surprised at finding me in her path.
"You need to go change," I said in as authoritative of a voice as I could manage.
"I don't need to change my clothes," she growled irritably, "And I'm certainly not going to go back to my rooms to change into something you approve of." I simply looked her up and down, pausing pointedly at the long elegant sleeves that all but dragged along the floor. She looked down, getting my point and huffed at me.
"It is a waste of my time," she said. In response I pointed at the changing screen and held up the clothes I had draped over my arm. They were black and sturdy, but made of a beautiful silky fabric that almost shimmered in the light. She sighed and rolled her eyes, but took the clothes and disappeared behind the screen, muttering about meddlesome blondes.
When she emerged from the screen with a scowl on her face, I found it difficult to breathe. The leggings looked as though they had been painted on her in the best way and the shirt dipped and folded in just the right places to accentuate the curves of her body. I became intensely aware of a sudden heat between my legs and felt my cheeks go red.
"What is it now?" she asked me irritably, seeing my face. I shook my head vigorously and turned around to hide my embarrassment.
"Nothing, Your Majesty," I forced myself to say calmly, "What can I get for you to start today?"
After that day, I began to notice less innocent things about the Queen. I would find myself staring at her as she bent over the worktables or her desk. My breath would catch in my throat when I saw the way her breasts moved as she ground ingredients with a pestle and I found it hard to focus on what she was saying when she moved her gorgeous lips. I had been with women before despite Gran's constant attempts to find me a man, but it wasn't something that I talked about. It was also certainly not something that I was supposed to be thinking about, not when the Queen was involved. I suppressed my urges for almost two weeks before it happened.
It was late and I was changing out the candles in the room again. The Regina, as I had begun to call her in my mind, was on the other side of the room, engrossed in her latest experiment. One of the trickiest candles to change was high up on the wall. In order to reach it, I had to stand on my toes and lunge to grab it from the holder. I had been admiring her figure and had been so distracted by it that I didn't realize that the candle was still lit until I took hold of it. Hot wax showered down on my shoulder and onto my breasts. I hissed audibly at the pain of it, but felt some pleasure from it too. The feeling was new, but unmistakably arousing. I glanced at Regina, hoping she hadn't heard. She was looking up from the worktable and over her shoulder, her concentration broken.
She realized immediately what had happened to the candle, but my face was hidden slightly by shadows. She raised her eyebrow at me and spoke,
"Since when are you reckless enough to change the candles while they are lit?"
"I was distracted," I said, grumpily, hoping that my tone would end the discussion. It didn't.
"You got distracted?" she said in disbelief, "You're the one who is always telling me that distractions in an alchemy lab are dangerous. And don't think I haven't noticed the mistakes you've been making lately. I don't know where your head has been, but if this keeps up, I will find someone else to do your job. What the hell has you so distracted anyway?" I blushed red at this question, my tongue frozen in my mouth. I couldn't tell her what I had been distracted by and I couldn't think of a good lie.
"Well?" she demanded, straightening up and strolling towards me. Nothing. My mind was a blank. She was only a few feet from me now, and as she turned the corner of a table, the light of the fire illuminated my face. I hadn't been prepared for this, but I did my best to hide the forceful desire burning through me. I didn't do it quickly enough. What she saw on my face, in my eyes, was enough to make her stop in her tracks about a foot away from me.
"Ah, I see" she said with a smile that made my knees feel weak. "Don't worry, you're not the first girl to become preoccupied with my absolute flawlessness. What do you think caused the mess in here? You were quite right to caution me."
She frowned but continued with a dark sense of pleasure in her voice, "Poor dear knocked over a shelf of ingredients forcing me against it and turned herself into a caterpillar. I suppose I should let her out into the garden when she emerges," she finished her explanation as she motioned to a glass jar with a single cocoon inside.
A very conflicting set of emotions emerged in my mind. I felt pity for the poor girl trapped forever as a butterfly, embarrassment that Regina had caught me in that state, and a sense of heightened desire thinking about what they must have been doing. I was also annoyed by her ego. I couldn't seem to regain control of my words to express any of this, but she seemed to understand. She continued,
"My, my, my, you really have gotten yourself in a bind here, haven't you? I'll make a deal with you. I am going to help you take care of this, but not here. I don't want to waste my time looking for help and I've grown fond of your system of organization. Do you understand?" I nodded, mouth dry, disbelieving the words even as she said them. She waved her hand at me and I was quite suddenly enveloped in a cloud of purple smoke.
When the cloud dissipated, I found myself completely naked lying on a soft bed of some sort. My limbs were sprawled, leaving me vulnerable. I couldn't move them though, since they had been tied to the corners of the bed with velvety ropes of fabric. The room had no identifying characteristics and the bed seemed to be the only thing in it aside from a multitude of candles.
"Well don't you just look delectable," she said from a corner of the room, stepping out of the shadows. I was still breathing hard and couldn't manage to express a single thought. She was still in the clothes from the tower, but she had unbuttoned her shirt completely so that it hugged her breasts and laid open in the front. I bit my lip, trying to suppress the aching heat between my legs. She smiled and strolled towards me.
"Oh no, my dear. That simply won't work. You see, if I am to help you take care of this, you will need to stop pushing it away. Accept it." I struggled against the desire, the building need, and she got close enough to sit on the bed next to me. She could see my resistance and sighed dramatically.
"It would seem that we have to do this the hard way then," she said with an unapologetic smile on her face, "I like the hard way." Without any further ado, she stood up quickly and moved one of her fingers in a circular motion. I found myself very suddenly now lying on my stomach, still tied to the bed, with my head cradled in a pillow that prevented me from getting smothered. Though I could not see her, I could hear the Queen as she circled the bed. Her fingers brushed against the skin of my lower back and down to my ass, smacking it gently as she lifted her hand again. It felt as though even my skin itself burned for her touch. I shook slightly and she responded with a delighted moan. I heard her voice again,
"So sensitive, my dear. I think this would be the perfect time for me to test something." There was a brief moment of quiet before I felt the recently familiar sting of hot wax against my skin. The small pain was overwhelmed, however, by a wave of intense desire. I gasped as she spilled drop after drop of wax on my back and ass. I arched my back in pleasure, moaning as she did. Just when I thought I would explode, I felt one hand press firmly against my buttocks, grasping and groping it. My heightened senses were overwhelmed when she spanked me harder than she had before. I shook with the power of my orgasm and collapsed against the bed.
Once more, the smoke enveloped me, turning my limp body over so that I laid on my back again. The velvety ropes still bound my shaking arms, but my legs were now free. She stood at the end of the bed, her eyes dark with desire and a seductive smile on her face,
"Now that I've got your attention," she said, "The real fun can begin." She stroked my body with probing fingers, seeming to find every part of me that could melt at her touch.
She brought me close to orgasm three times, each time leaving me just short of release when I started begging. The first words out of my mouth since she had seen my eyes in the tower were my desperate pleas for release. She listened to my begging with a satisfied smile as her fingers inched towards my throbbing clit and dripping center. She held her fingers just short of me, making me almost scream in frustration. Finally, I screamed out,
"Oh fuck. Please Regina, oh please. I need you inside of me." She growled at me in a feral way, no doubt shocked that I had used her name, and pushed two of her fingers deep inside of me. I orgasmed as she entered me, but she was far from done. With her clever fingers, she brought my pleasure to new heights, adding two fingers from her other hand as well and pushing in and out of me at the same time while teasing my clit. I heard myself scream in pleasure and saw stars behind my eyes. My orgasm seemed to last forever, coming to me in intense waves. I collapsed, shaking and moaning in a heap on the bed. The world was spinning and I barely managed to take gasping breaths. She let me recover for a few moments before standing up.
"Now, I think that you have distracted me for long enough, my dear," she said briskly, "Once you are… back to yourself again, come downstairs and we will both resume our work." She opened a door that I hadn't noticed before and winked slyly at me before closing it. I was left alone to recover as best I could before returning to work.