I Woke Up Married to the Cursed King

Chapter 10: Chapter 10: Not a Spirit

The ladies left in stages.

First the ones who had somewhere to be. Then the ones who didn’t but decided they did. Then the last few who stayed just long enough to make sure they’d seen everything worth seeing, which they had, and then they left too.

The garden went quiet.

Caelian was asleep on his shoulder.

Elian sat very still and looked at the roses and thought about the fact that the most feared man in the kingdom had fallen asleep on him at a garden party and apparently felt no need to explain this.

Okay, he thought. Okay.

He shifted carefully, trying to move without waking him.

That’s when he saw it.

The thing — the spirit, he’d been calling it a spirit — was at the edge of the gazebo. Closer than it had been before. And it was reaching. A slow, deliberate extension of something that wasn’t quite a hand toward Caelian’s shoulder.

It hit the bracelet.

Pulled back.

Tried again from a different angle.

The beads held.

Elian watched it work. Methodical. Patient. The way something moves when it has done this before and knows that eventually it gets through.

Not yet, he thought. But it’s learning.

He looked at the bracelet. At the beads, each one exactly as he’d strung them.

It won’t last forever, he thought. Whatever this thing is, it’s smart enough to look for gaps. I need to know what I’m dealing with.

He moved Caelian’s head gently off his shoulder, settling him back against the chair. Caelian didn’t wake. He looked younger asleep. The severity gone, the exhaustion still there but quieter.

The thing in the garden watched Elian stand up.

Elian looked at it.

I’ll deal with you shortly, he thought.

The divine being was rearranging the shrine offerings when Elian arrived.

It had developed opinions about which fruit went where. Elian had stopped commenting on this.

"I need help," he said.

"You always need help."

"I gave you land."

"You gave me land," it agreed. "I blessed your beads. We’re even."

"We are absolutely not even. The land is permanent. The blessing took you four seconds."

The divine being considered this with the expression of someone who knew they’d lost the argument and was deciding whether to admit it.

"What do you need," it said finally.

"The thing in the corridor. The one I can’t move. I need you to look at it."

It took some convincing to get the divine being to leave the shrine. frёewebnoѵēl.com

It had become very attached to the shrine.

But eventually it came, drifting beside Elian through the palace corridors with the slightly reluctant energy of someone doing a favor they’d agreed to under duress.

The spirit was in the east corridor. Exactly where it always was.

The divine being stopped.

Elian stopped beside it.

"Well?" he said.

The divine being was quiet for a long moment. Its expression had shifted — the playful quality gone, replaced by something older and more careful.

"That," it said, "is not a spirit."

"Then what is it."

The divine being turned to look at him. "You know what a ritual burial is."

"Yes."

"There are rituals — old ones, the kind that require a great deal of preparation and a great deal of cruelty — where a living person is buried. Alive. As part of the working." It paused. "The person who dies that way doesn’t become a spirit. They become something else. Bound. Purposeful. Sent."

Elian looked at the thing in the corridor. freёwebnoѵel.com

It looked back.

"Sent to do what," he said.

"Kill a specific person," the divine being said. "That’s all it does. That’s all it can do. It was made for one purpose and it will pursue that purpose until it completes it."

"And to get rid of it."

"You find the body. The original burial site. You burn it completely." The divine being’s voice was even. "Then it’s done."

Silence.

"And if I can’t find the body," Elian said.

"Then you can’t get rid of it."

"And the person it was sent for."

"Dies," the divine being said simply. "Eventually. The bracelet will slow it. But something made with that much intent doesn’t stop. It finds gaps. It waits."

Elian looked at the thing in the corridor for a long moment.

It stared back with the patient, purposeful non-expression of something that had one job and infinite time.

"So someone," Elian said slowly, "buried a person alive. Specifically to kill Caelian."

"Yes."

"That’s—" He stopped.

Voodoo, was the word that came to mind. He opened his mouth. Closed it.

"What," the divine being said.

"Nothing. You can go."

It went, with minimal grace and a pointed look.

Elian stood alone in the corridor with the thing that wasn’t a spirit.

Someone buried a person alive, he thought. Planning. Patience. Resources. You don’t do something like that on impulse. You do it because you’ve decided this person needs to die and you want it done in a way that can never be traced back to you.

Which means somewhere in this kingdom — or outside it — there is a burial site. A body. Hidden well enough that nobody has found it.

And I need to find it.

He looked at the thing.

First I need its face on paper. Its original face. The face of whoever it was before it became this.

He turned this problem over.

How do I get a face on paper when I’m the only one who can see it?

He couldn’t describe it to an artist. Or rather, he could, but — your highness, I need you to draw a face for me, it’s a face of a dead man I can see in the corridor, yes I know you can’t see it, just trust me — no. That wasn’t going to work.

He couldn’t point to it.

He couldn’t photograph it, photography presumably not existing here.

He stood in the corridor and turned the problem over and got nowhere useful.

There has to be a way, he thought.

The thing watched him think.

Stop watching me think, he thought at it.

It kept watching.

I’ll figure it out, he told himself. I always figure it out.

He turned and walked back toward his room.

Behind him, in the corridor, the thing that wasn’t a spirit waited with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

He sat in his room for an hour.

The spirit’s face was there when he closed his eyes. Not recognizable — the binding obscured it, the way the divine being had said. But the shape of it. The quality of it. The specific weight of something that had been made rather than born.

Buried alive, Elian thought. Someone buried a living person. For this.

He’d heard of it. His master had mentioned it once, briefly, the way he mentioned things he considered too extreme to discuss at length. There are people who do this, he’d said. You will not encounter them. If you do, walk away.

Elian had, apparently, not walked away.

He was married to the target.

He looked at the ceiling.

The face, he thought. I need the face. The body can’t be burned without knowing where it is, and it can’t be found without knowing who it is, and I can’t know who it is without the face.

There had to be a way.

He thought about everything he knew about spirits. About how they communicated when they chose to. About what made them choose to.

Trust. You have to earn it, with things like this.

How do you earn the trust of something made to kill the person you’re trying to protect, he thought.

He didn’t have an answer yet.

He’d find one.

He always found one eventually.

He got up and went to make notes.