Archive of Our Own ^beta

He shoves his way through clusters of people in the lower town, torches blaring left and right. Bodies spill out of doorways, some laughing and drinking, others fighting, limbs flailing while they shout and scream and rail, unintelligible. He ignores them, single-minded in his search. Patience may be a virtue he lacks, but Agravaine makes up for it in focus; so his eyes easily sort through the gaggles of heads and torsos, all colours of the rainbow, golden-blonde to flaming red, all the usual tricks and sizes, scantily-clad in skin that clings like starving dogs’ or amply-built so they block a passageway with ease.

Agravaine is a gentleman, but not for nothing is he called la dure main; with his big, gauntleted hands he is able to part the sea of sucking lovers, intertwined in a network of locked limbs through the rooms of the brothel. He passes through the web of flesh like a blunt knife, entering the main, half-lit room, dim enough to hide patrons but bright enough to showcase the goods. 

Blonde hair catches his eye, but only for the likeness to his sister. For a second, his heart stops, and then the flaxen strands are gone in a blur of laughter and a bubble of coarse language, disappearing into a side-room. Most don’t bother with secrecy - communality is the joy of the brothel, but Agravaine has his tastes. He doesn’t doubt that there are a few here tonight who recognise him, not that he cares. It is standard for a man of his stature to frequent these places. Arthur would never have the stomach to cross him over it; but then, Arthur will never find out, since he has his private manservant to fuck him anyway, and the blacksmith’s wench too. The boy has enough on his hands without seeking his pleasures elsewhere in the lower town.

Black hair swings past him, and instantly Agravaine regains focus. He reaches out and grabs the untidy plait as it whips by, yanking the girl’s hair. She stops dead, twisting furiously. Her eyes are blue - blue as painfully cold skies, blue like the sea on a grey day or smashed bottle-glass. His fingers start to shake.

“What do you want?” she says, and the common accent doesn’t phase him, because her mouth sticks out in a certain way and her teeth protrude when she’s angry. He’d like to take out those ruined teeth and fuck the hole they leave behind, but tonight he hasn’t the money on him to pay for everyone’s silence, let alone a mouthy whore’s, so he smiles unctuously and turns his hold onto her into a caress, cupping her cheek without letting go. She looks down at the size of his hand, her eyes shifting suspiciously.

“You, my dear,” he says, without preamble, though he smiles like a purring cat. An uncertain smile tugs on the corner of her mouth, with just a hint of fear. Her features aren’t quite as knife-sharp as they could be - sharpened only by poverty, without the distinctive bone-structure of soured royalty - but if he’s looking down at her he won’t see her jawline. 

She runs one hand over his chest, switching to coquetry. “Well, that can be arranged,” she says, and he knows she is feeling him for knives and other weapons. Perhaps also for money, though she won’t find that easy to steal. He flips a coin from the pouch at his belt into his hand, and holds it up.

“For you,” he says, and then, “for some privacy.” She nods understandingly and he strokes her face, such a good girl, and she leads him into a corner where a dirty cloth covers the doorway of an antechamber, not much of a room, but there is a wall and bench in the corner and low candles burning - really quite romantic. No bed, of course, perhaps the big bed in the other chamber is taken, but he didn’t want one anyway, he isn’t here to sleep. It’s no extra discomfort for him, and it can hardly matter what the whore thinks. His belt comes undone in his hand, the buckle swinging noisily as he fumbles with it. His excitement is great and he can’t quite contain himself, but he tries to restrain his impatience so that she can’t see his weakness. It wouldn’t do to make her proud of her conquest.

The girl is already undressed, so all he has to do is turn her around. A little bit shorter than he wants, but it doesn’t matter. Her long dark hair is tangled and snaggled around her plait, and he strokes it, then tugs it again, running his fingers through her hair. He remembers when he used to muss the hair of another girl, younger, more beautiful, more refined - black, glossy hair that he used to finger, allowing the curls to slide over his hands as she sat on his lap. He lets out a soft noise and touches her hair again, this girl, and the memory fades, because this one’s hair is coarse in texture. But not unlike that other one’s now, as she is today, all bones and broken split ends and flaking lips. It makes him ravenous, he wants her even more.

Unlacing the front of his breeches, he pulls out his cock, tugging on himself a few times to get hard, though there’s no need, he’s already aroused. The girl moves to try and help him but he holds her against the wall with a hand on her shoulder-blades, she’s really too thin for her age, or perhaps too young for her looks, maybe she’s no older than that other one was last time he visited her at the castle, when she wore a dress of cornflower-blue silk and seemed to slip through the room like a blade through butter, he still remembers it, even though now he sees her only in black, always in perpetual mourning for her father. He stands as her father now, he thinks, father to them both, each unbeknownst to the other, Morgana and Arthur, cursed to want their daddy. He holds the keys to the kingdom, he thinks, and slips into this dark wench through the bundle of hair at her thighs. She’s wet, whether with another man’s cum or disease or natural desire he doesn’t know, but he doesn’t care, it’ll do for him. He hopes she’s clean, there is no stopping now, the single-minded search is almost at an end.

As he fucks her he thinks of Morgana, thinks of all the times she has laid her head upon his shoulder, held him, cried upon him, argued with him with that tremble in her voice and lips, as if he were hers, her own, as when he had used to carry her up to bed last thing at night, when the feast was still going on and Uther was there, uncaring, uninterested in his child, having to hold court, and no one would look out for the lady Morgana because Uther would allow no one to, no one but his trusted brother-in-law. He took her upstairs and held her in his arms, she was drunk because they let her drink the wine though she was barely old enough to be at the high table, only just marriageable age but too soon for Uther to think of her as anything but a child, and yet Agravaine saw her, he knew her, he knew what she was. Even then she told him about her nightmares, and he knew she was something special. And she would fight him like a child though her limbs were long enough to be an adult’s, still slender and barely wide enough to fit those fine-cut sleeves, only the best for Uther’s daughter. All the servants would be downstairs, and he’d carry her over his shoulder or in his arms if she was sleepy so that her silken body would nestle into his side, warm and cosy and smelling like milk and wine and spices, that unique scent of the feast on a fresh virgin. It would make him mad, thinking of all the times he had sat by Ygraine at feasts throughout their childhood, and all the damsels he had nudged under the table with his foot in castles when he was a knight-errant, knowing that he had not come from so far to leave with nothing. But for her he did it all with no reward, no thought of anything in return. His niece would go to bed in sweetest sleep, angelic and unmolested, even if he threw her onto the bed and she let the wine go to her head and giggled and let him tickle her and undo her dress, just that button at the back that she could not reach, where the line of fine dark hair started that ran up the nape of her neck into her scalp. Uncle, hold my hair aside while I kneel for you to undo me. And he would, one hand in her hair, so big beside her head that he could have held her skull in the palm of one hand, the other with gentle, wide fingers attempting to unlace the delicate bit of ladies’ trickery they called a button, slipping it at last through the loop and losing the sacred torture of her warm, fuzzy flesh just by him. Then thank you uncle, and she would go to bed, even in her intoxication aware that he should leave now and let her alone; and he would back out of the room, he had tossed her onto the bed and that was all, no more than that, if he was sweating it was only the heat of the candles and the wine.

God, the sweet torture almighty Jesus Christ liked to submit him to. He fucks this woman hard and fast, she is not Morgana, there are spots on her back and there is no line of hair up the nape of her neck, it starts only on her scalp, he braces one hand on the wall and fucks her harder, yanking her hair. She cries out, in pleasure or pain, real or feigned, he cannot tell, and he pants and sweats and thrusts, running his fingernails down her back, his gloves are off so he can feel her hair in his palm, greasy and knotted though it may be. Of course, Morgana is not really his niece, and he could marry her, perhaps, in another life, except the church deems it a sin for brothers-in-law to marry their sisters-in-law, if that counts as incest then might not this do so too? He can imagine their disapproval, Geoffrey of Monmouth and all their rest, and in his heart of hearts he knows the old dragons of the Camelot High Council will not allow it, incest is not the done thing, no matter how enticing.

This woman’s breasts are slapping against her body, her nipples are dark and brown, he wonders if Morgana’s are, whether they are bleached and pink like her mouth, pale and soft. The black thicket of hair between her legs and under her arms he thinks is probably the same, he would love to put his mouth to that dark bush, but there is no time tonight and he is not catching pestilence of the mouth from some dirty whore.

Sweat runs down his cheeks, he is close, he has been since he came in, it’s a nightly need now, he can’t be in the same hut with Morgana without knowing that he will fuck her double somewhere at night. He moans, murmuring her name. It feels good to say it, say it with anger and pent up frustration and pathetic longing, burying himself in her. There is a sudden heat in his loins and he lets out a cry, quivering, filling the woman with his seed. His orgasm is intense and leaves him straining, grunting, wanting to get as deep as possible. He knows it’s not enough, it’s never enough, not tight enough anyhow, this whore has had enough men that she’s loosened up, her cunt is full of other men’s cum and he knows Morgana’s is not, she is chaste, white as snow, cold and dry and saturnine like the moon, full of black bile, venomous but cool-headed, like a man. He likes her like that, it’s a different creature to the soft little rose who’d put her mouth to his cheek to say goodnight, but he hopes to see her again, one day, when she is restored to the throne, in her former glory. Morgana will have a dress as white as the sun that reflects back the light, and cast off her donkey skin. And he will have her, a caged bird of paradise, all to himself, preening and pretty parrot in the sun of her ascendancy.

With a satisfied sigh he pulls out, a tremor in his thighs. He will feel exhausted in the morning. It is the intensity on his nerves, more than the physical strain. Keeping up this double-act is wearing him out. Agravaine is not a young man. He pays for his time, enough that the girl won’t mention what name he called out in his pleasure - a necessary precaution - and he leaves her behind, looking at him with scared eyes, cold in the corner of the room. Perhaps he can come back here another time, but most likely he should avoid it. The futile search will begin again, tomorrow perhaps or, if his purse is feeling the strain, in a week or so. Agravaine smoothes down his black hair and pulls on his gloves, flexing his fingers. Then he strides out into the cold, a new man again, his boots leaving marks in the mud as he climbs back up from the lower town. As the moon looks down on him, he prays fervently that she and Saturn will have success; that the conjunction of the young virgin and the old killer, the two planets that bring pestilence and death, will remain in the ascendant and bear fruit so that his desire will be sated, no matter the cost. And when he gets back to the castle, he collapses into bed, still thinking of the virgin moon’s touch.