Rose held up her skirts as she ran through the open grass in the darkness. During the day, she walked this distance in the light with ease, but in the night with sin in her heart, it felt very far. She reached the next cluster of trees and held onto the hard trunks as she heaved for breath. Her breasts pressed against the material in the front of her finest dress. Sweat beaded and ran down between her flesh there making the place where her compressed bosoms met slick. As her breasts rubbed slippery together and the front of her dress rubbed rough across her chest, her nipples grew hard and visible in the moonlight. This was not a dress for running, but she did not want to be caught by her father or the lord that begrudgingly granted her father the square of land upon which he smithed.
She left the hard wood that supported her and stuck close to the foliage as she pressed onward. She could see light through the windows of the palace. She was close enough to hear laughter – women’s laughter, and music. She heard strings and a plucked instrument – maybe a harpsichord. She wouldn’t know a harpsichord by sight and knew little of it by sound, but that was her uneducated guess.
Behind the great house, the mountains loomed as dark, judging shadows. They were covered by snow much of the year and left this land trapped to its own resources much of the winter. Tonight, the air had an unusually sticky, warm wetness. In the era when kings and knights bought land in blood off the end of the sword, those mountains were great protection.
Now, kings and lords traded lands and lives with clasped hands and the scratching of quills through ink. Her father had told her this land had changed to the hands of another king in just such a deal and that’s what this grand ball was about. Nobles of a new king positioned above her father’s lord were come to be wooed and wined and danced and more.
As Rose reached the wall and peered through the bars of the closed gate, the music and laughter sounded the same as other parties she had snuck this far to hear through the walls. Under the charge of a new king, crops had grown the same, animals fed the same, and her father’s hammer rang off hot iron with the same, crisp tone. Somehow she thought the party must be different. She had worn her finest dress because she planned on this night to go further and find out more than her previous spying quests.
Rose seized the edges of the stones on the gate column and began to climb. She climbed often as a child in clothes better suited for such play, but she was eighteen seasons old now. She was more shapely and now wore a dress designed for things other than play. Despite her disadvantages, her hands found the top edge of the wall and she let out a high-pitched squeal contained in her. It wasn’t a joyous sound nor exactly one of contained pain. It was a sound she had heard from the woods as she followed older girls sneaking off with boys. Once, she had followed another peasant girl with the lord’s son Thomas. Rose had snuck close enough to see that time and at Thomas’s command the girl had removed the fleshy shaft that stood stiff like the trunk of a tree and she had used her mouth upon it. Rose had touched herself where the weak tingles had started.
She wondered if Lord Ramsey’s son Thomas would be at this ball as well. Perhaps he would take another girl aside for ungodly commands of the flesh. Rose felt weak and she slipped. She let out another high groan and the sound made her feel naughty and dirty. She heaved herself back up and over the stone wall. Her skirts caught on the rough blocks and pulled up as she let herself down on the master’s side of the wall. They drew up high enough that the night air teased the sweat that coated and glistened over her bare buttocks and exposed sex. Her breathing came heavy and lusty as she dropped to the ground and recovered herself with