Von Diita
She was the Copper Queen-- not because she was less than gold but because she was stronger. Her rule was as fair as perfect scales, the kingdom ticking along like a well-made clock. And if her subjects wondered that she did not marry, well, taxes were low and war was far away. That was good enough for them.
But some of the lordlings were ambitious (or their mothers were, which amounted to about the same thing), and they pressed her. "Such a waste it is for a beautiful woman not to marry," they said. "Think of the happiness the world is deprived of."
"I have no time for such things," she said. There was the tiniest, tiniest stress on the phrase, but the lordlings were tumbling over their tongues trying to persuade her, and none of them noticed save one.
Some rulers went to their gardens or to their libraries to hide from the world-- but this young lord had seen that this queen did not. Instead, she went to an old workshop, formerly belonging to the palace clockmaker, who had died almost ten years ago. It was there that he found her.
"Was he your father?" he said. "The clockmaker." The old king had been a widower, and his only son was killed in battle. Nobody knew quite how their queen had come to power.
"In a way," she murmured. The gears in the room whirred and ticked gently. "He made me, if that is what you are asking."
He glanced up at the strange phrasing, tilting his head at her, and she smiled. "Oh, you're clever, aren't you," she said.
"Not so clever," he said. "I have been living at court during all your reign, and I never once suspected."
"Well," she said. She smiled again. "I'm fairly clever, too."
"Such a pair we are."
"I can't have children, you know," she said. "I cannot be a wife to you in every sense of the word."
"I'll build us children," he said. "There will be clockwork kings and queens, dynasties of them, all as wise and beautiful as you."
If an automaton could have blushed, she would have done so.
