Hey everyone welcome to the story. Feel free to review with questions comments and concerns.
Black-Briar Rose
By
Anni Re
Chapter One: At The End Of The Day
It seemed that all of Budapest had been drawn to the fires and flags of the traveling fair set in the piazza. A girl about thirteen years old watched from behind one of the many tents as the men, women, and children, entered with wide and wondering eyes the secret world inside their own. A world dominated by magicians, acrobats, and freaks. She smiled at them. She loved to watch their faces as they first beheld the fair in the fading twilight leading to a night they might never forget, the curiosity, the excitement, the fear. She tuned and disappeared into her dressing rooms to prepare for their guests.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," cried out a deep voice in front of the curtain that she hid behind. She breathed deeply, always afraid at this point of the evening, knowing the consequences from her managers if she did not entertain the audience, "may I present to you, one of our star attractions, an exotic beauty stolen from the very harem of the sultan of Persia." She chuckled to herself, her history changed with each city. She recalled in particular one story where she was claimed to be an immortal fairy from the forests of Germany who gave up her immortality for the sole purpose of pleasuring men. She frowned, that story was partially true; she was here with one purpose.
"Put your hands together," she snapped her attention back to the voice, "for the empress of erotica, the diva of dancers, Black-Briar Rose." The man who introduced her threw down a fistful of powder, which emitted a flash of light, smoke and sound. In the cloud the man left the stage and she ran to take his place so that when the smoke cleared it would look like the first had transformed into the other. The entire well-rehearsed transition took seconds.
Before the smoke even cleared she leapt threw it creating a gasp from her audience and began to dance. The firelight made her raven hair flash, as well as her eyes as she adopted a seductive look to her face.
The music guided her hips, the bells attached to the jingled as she rocked them. She raised her bracelet adorned arms above her hair, interwoven with gold and rubies and tied back with a ribbon of black silk, and crossed her wrists above her head, clicking the small cymbals attached to her red painted fingers. This action pulled up her already short shirt, revealing her navel and a large and brilliantly red rose that held up her shawl like skirt that came down to the middle of her calves.
The music rose in speed and heat and Black-Briar moved her body faster, more sensually. She stared into the eyes of those who watched her some alight with delight, some drugged with the fumes of the fortune teller's tent they had previously been to, and others who eyed her with a hunger like gleam in their eyes. She decided to pick one of the delighted ones this night, not having the strength to deal with the grabbing and groping of the others and she spun closer to the crowd. Hands reached out to touch her skin as she rushed by her seeking her intended, some were gentle, most were rough.
She spotted her prey in a youth of about twenty who had not taken his eyes off her the entire time she spun around closer and closer. She read his eyes and liked the kindness in them. She stopped her dance suddenly and made a beeline to him, the anklets on her bare feet shaking. She stopped barely an inch in front of him enjoying passively his thunderstruck face. She waltzed around him, pressing her slightly sweaty body to him. When she was behind him she pulled the ribbon out of her hair carefully so that the loop was preserved. She then sprinted out from behind her, dark air flying and then jumped up turning around in the air. In the air she pulled out the rose dropping the shawl reveling an even shorter skirt that ended in the middle of her thighs. She tossed the rose into the air and then slipped the ribbon onto the stem, catching the flower when she tightened the black material. She then as she landed threw it at the man's feet.
The music went into a frenzy and so did Black-Briar doing back flips and cartwheels all over the flag-stoned street that was her stage. She ended her performance with some splits. There was silence in the audience before a second stunned before they began to applaud enthusiastically. The announcer once again came out onto the stage and pulled her off the ground acknowledging her.
The crowds of the fair soon dispersed and the gypsies and outlaws locked their costumes away removed their makeup and went to their sleeping quarters for the night. Only one person remained moving through the now ghost town of multicolored canvases. Black-Briar flitted her way to the back of the fair to the only dark colored tent in the whole entourage. She briefly looked up at the herald painted in bloody red paint before she disappeared into the folds of darkness. The Devil's Child.
Lamplight illuminated the cage and the eight year old curled up in the center of it. She winced at the new marks that stripped his back. His small body quivered his back hair all askew, the crude cloth mask bunched up in the corner as if he no longer bothered to put it on only to have it ripped off again in front of another onslaught of jeering…flawless faces.
She approached the heavy metal bars and reached through straining barely grazing her hand across the top of his head.
He jumped back with a hiss, his disfigured face even more twisted into a snarl. Black-Briar didn't flinch; she merely pulled her hand back.
The snarl left the child's face and suddenly he whimpered longing for her. Black-Briar stepped up onto the wooden floor of the cage, flattened her body, and slipped through the bars to get to the child who was now crying pitiful, dirty tears.
She knelt down and gathered the skeletal boy into her arms and leaned against the bars, rocking him. "There now, little angel," she shushed him, "it's over for the night. No one else is coming." She used the tip of her finger and pulled his head up. She pulled out the cymbals she used for her act and clicked them in front of his face.
The boy let out a watery chuckle and reached out pressing her fingers together himself to create the sound.
Back-Briar looked at the child with excited eyes. "We're leaving tomorrow, little one, to Istanbul. We get a few days off, new places, new faces."
The child sighed and Black-Briar sighed too both conversing silently with each other. Black-Briar settled the child into her body. "Everything will be alright, just sleep now."
The boy turned his disfigured face into the crook of the neck of the only person that ever reached out to him and closed his eyes.
"Rosie…"
So that's the first chapter vague I know but it's supposed to be that way don't want to spoil you too much. Reviews will be loved.