((this takes place right after the Whispers of Verse thread: http://z3.invisionfree.com/For_King_And_Co...?showtopic=1242 ))

Music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIXreBd85Qo...D2CDDED&index=7

The gardens were a labyrinth of serpentine twists and turns. Anne followed it with the simple minded purpose of a rough river; cutting her way through smaller paths in the hope of being sprung from the mouth of the stream into a wider chasm. She sought that opening with the primal ruthlessness of an elemental entity. Her fingers were curled like talons, ripping several stalks of ivy from the trellis walls as she viciously turned a corner, startling two love birds in the process.

The beating and flutter of wings kindled the desperation within her own breast. Escape. Everything a cage around her. The court. The garden, even her own skin. If she could but penetrate even one layer…sanity might be regained. For Anne feared now this was no spring fever. The anxiety rampant to the marrow of her bones was the christening of her ancestors…a birthright of instability which now worked her into a passion of such proportions that her mind raced for the clarity of pain. Some shock to the senses that would save her.

She breached the inner sanctum of the hedge maze, short of breath. The hazy ease of the moonlight’s cool demeanor set a dazzling scene before her, with a reserved beauty which held her heart in thrall and still with promise. There in the very center, the core of all entrances and exits, stood three proud rose bushes, sheered to the exact height of a man. The light contradicted its tender glow with harsh coldness, making the small glistening dew drops upon the tight buds seem like hard, ungiving silver steel. The breeze flittered through the leaves, stirring like a whisper; dangerously inviting…a lover’s corrosive caress. Anne’s lips parted in a bare, silent sound and she drew in; her resistance worn thin and as easily rent as silk.

A moment’s hesitation was all that wove before her, but in the safety of solitude she knew she could allow herself this brazen act. As if cued by the chime of some invisible clock tower her arms went full about the frame of the tallest of the three bushes. Immediately she was stung and scratched all about her, and unbidden a soft cry sprang out. She quickly silenced herself by biting at the pink plumpness of a newly birthed rose, moaning deliriously as the sweet yet earthly juice of it filled her mouth; her hands grabbing fistfuls of her imaginary figure and clenching tightly, imbedding thorns into the supple flesh of her palms.

She pressed her whole length in, skirts plucked at by hungry stalked fingers of green. Her hair snagged and mussed by the same alien hands, tugging strands of auburn hair free from her braid like an impatient suitor. Breasts scraped raw in parts by the little daggers of the foliage. The blood that was drawn, springing to the surface from tiny, multiple wounds, split her effectively like a seam. At long last…the rapture of the unrefused.

Another thorn tore at her cheek as she tried to bury her face deeper into the perfumed and fragrant heady scent of this being she had conjured up for her salvation, making an explosive gasp punctuate the night like the fire of a musket…petals falling from her teeth and tongue as she tipped her head back, breathlessly.

“Henry!”

(Henry's Clothes)

From his place at the head of the Great Hall, standing before his throne, Henry VIII had watched Henry Percy and Anne Boleyn face off before rushing from the room. Instantly he had nodded to one of his servants, who had scurried close to him. "Follow them," he had commanded under his breath, nodding toward the departing backs. The boy raced off to catch up to the object of his command, and Henry raised his head, dark eyes watching them go.

It had been several minutes before the boy had returned, breathless. "Your Majesty, they parted at the door. I followed the Lady into the gardens. Into the roses." Nodding once, Henry dismissed him, and with a word to Wolsey he slipped through a side door.

Once in the fresh air, still holding his full cup of wine at chest-level, Henry began his slow but purposeful path toward the rose garden. The air outside was so much more fresh, the night so much more peaceful, than it was within the castle walls. Guards followed him, and he let them, but when he reached the entrance to the walled garden, he waved for them to wait there. It was the only way out of the roses, and the only other soul within was Anne's, if she were even still there.

A rustling to his left caught his eye, and he turned his head in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of a skirt rippling above the grass in the moonlight before it disappeared behind another hedge beyond. Intrigued, the King moved forward, nearly at a jog, in hopes of catching sight of the lady's face before she disappeared. Who had he come across? Was it Lady Anne?

Rounding the hedge, the King slowed. The billowing skirt was plunging into the green brambles, and flashes of flesh disappeared into its depths. Amid gasping and the shaking of the leaves, Henry approached slowly.

"Henry!"

At this, the King stopped. Such need, such breathless devotion. Uttering his name. She had seen him--or so he assumed--and called him by his first name, something few dared to do uninvited. "Lady Anne," he called to the tortured roses and the creature within, voice smooth and low in the night. "Do the roses give you better company than the ones you left?" His tone was curious, driven to know what she was thinking, what had driven her so seemingly mad.

With a wild gasp she tore herself asunder from the obliging and eagerly besetting bush, the sudden jerk from its branches snapping a jagged thorn deep into the center of her palm. Breathing sharply within the space between herself and the King of England, she stopped up any sound of weakness that sought to tumble from her lips, and quickly thrust the wounded hand behind her skirts…her fist clenching over it with a wince. She stood there, a bedraggled beast unleashed from a glass and ivory cage. The evidence of her lustful violence lay at her feet, scattered in vibrant and broken brilliance. Passion that decimated living things with its power, whatever was planted in its path unforgivingly, unmercifully destroyed within the blink of an eye.

The vein in her neck pulsed clearly, the swell of her breasts straining against the fabric of her bodice…a fleshy seas that rose and fell like waves that brought men to their deaths. Trying to withhold her panting by breathing through her nose only heightened the tightness in her chest, continued to quicken and increase the pace of the incoming air and she was forced to split her lips…rough bursts expelling from her. The quietest roar of sound imaginable.

Her eyes glowed with inhuman fire, sparked from family honor and decorum, the ashes of which had doused her intrepid spirit, only to see her rise anew like a phoenix. She was revealed like an burning ember amongst coal. Hot blooded being…an echo of the older times when the women were priestesses to the moon, goddesses of nature, worshipped in naked form. Women born to the wrong time, the wrong place.

She stared him down with that gaze, irrefutable in the knowledge she was set apart and she could not hide that truth from him in the surprise of his company. Here an now she was a queen. Not his, but a queen all the same in every sense of the word. Never before had Anne leveled such a telling glance, but facades were useless in the realms of shock. He had found her out in a savage garden, a savage way reserved for those who had the keen sense to discover it.

The silence lengthened in an unendurable stretch, until at last when her breath was controlled enough, her eyes finally blinked…clouded that fire from view though it struggled to remerge with greater potency. Her knees bent, her head bowed…locks tumbling over her shoulders creating a protective veil, and she sank low. Her voice roughly hushed, the hint of unattained pleasure rife throughout, “Your Majesty.” She licked her lips, trying to form an eloquent equation for the relentless pursuit he had witnessed her partake in.

Her mouth quirked lightly in a bare, cruel touch of amusement so acute it emblazoned a path like a slash of a sword. Honesty had arrived. Barbaric and scalding, she would spare him nothing in her answer. She doubted he could even understand a desire that was denied…the struggle to stay sane in the turbulence of terrible passion. He who had everything given to him on a silver platter, encrusted with jewels…even his easily won bride.

“Some favor roses for their softness….some for their beauty…” Her face tilted up, catching the soft light like moon on water, “…I because they draw battle in return for blow.”

Her head cocked at a fearlessly bold angle, yet continually subtle, taunting him but with such an art one might be confused as to the nature of her words. They seemed to play about the air, as well as several meanings. "For what purpose are you here, Majesty? Beauty or Pain?"

With curious gaze, the King tried to decipher what went on in her mind. The way she had thrown herself with abandon into the bushes seemed to be the act of distress, of a need to hide from the world...and yet she did not cry. There was no semblance of weeping on her face; instead there was a fierce intensity and boldness there. It perplexed him, and drove him to wish to know more.

She gave him that defiant stare, and his eyes narrowed not in anger but in curiousity as he returned. He would not be the first to break the look. As a man must do an animal, he was determined to show his dominance in their gaze. And sure enough, she was the first to look away, curtseying low. But somehow she left Henry feeling that she broke because she chose to, not because she had to. He watched her back curve, her hair spill over her shoulders, and he heard her murmured greeting.

“…I because they draw battle in return for blow.”

"You come seeking pain?" The King's question went unanswered, and he was not surprised that it did. Somehow he felt that Anne Boleyn would only ask the questions and only give the answers which she wished to give away.

"For what purpose are you here, Majesty? Beauty or Pain?"

Feet making no noise on the grass, he began a wide arc around her, eyes taking in the dirt crushed onto her gown, the twigs and rose petals in her hair. "For curiousity," he answered, voice heavy on the spring air, thick with the smells of blooming flowers all around them. "I saw you leave with another," he said, coming full circle around her. "And yet he is nowhere to be found, and you left to throw yourself in the dirt. Have you become a woman scorned, Anne Boleyn?"

She rose artfully at the first of sound from his mouth, presuming she had been relieve of her prostate position, and whether she rightly thought this was the case or not, onces she had straightened she did not revert for a second time. Let other men worry about standing gratuitously tall over His Majesty’s height. She was the matching size in comparison, almost equal in stature and therefore committed no faux pas in remaining herself.

Neither her eyes or head sought to follow him as he moved about her, like a great cat stalking prey. Her skin was already alerted with small bumps of both chill and heat to his location at any given point. His voice like a guiding North Star. There was no need for vision. She could feel him clearly enough in her bones to put to shame any visual confirmation. She merely stood in wait, her lashes calmly collecting the night, her lips glistening with the wetting of her tongue seconds before.

She gave the barest twitch of limbs at the mention of his having caught her in conversation with Henry Percy. The smallest flame of unavoidable rage infiltrating her eyes at the thought of someone other than Henry knowing and partaking in that part of her, but she hid the telling flash swiftly with a crooked smile. “If I had, your Majesty, there would be no call to question it.”

As her own defense to throw him off the subject and the scent of blood in the water, she teased at him mercilessly, her eyes sparking with dark, delighted mirth, “Perhaps I did away with him. Perhaps I shall do the same to any man unfortunate enough to meet with me this night.”