I Woke Up Married to the Cursed King

Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Let’s Go

What can I live with.

Elian sat with it for another minute.

Then he had his answer.

I can live with them knowing it’s me, he thought. I’ve been doing this long enough. I’m confident enough in what I know and what I can do. If they want to come for me directly — fine. One to one. I’ll take those odds.

What I cannot live with is them going after him because I was too careful about my own cover.

That’s the thing I can’t fix if I get it wrong.

He looked at the pot.

So.

He stood up.

* * *

He went back inside and got what he needed. Mango leaves — he always had them now, they’d become as standard as the salt. Turmeric paste. He wrapped the leaves around the pot carefully, coating the silk in turmeric, making a barrier between his hands and whatever the wrapping held.

Then he picked it up.

And walked.

Not quickly. Not furtively. He walked through the service corridor and into the main passage and through the east wing at his normal pace, the wrapped pot held in front of him, visible to anyone who cared to look.

People looked.

The first maid he passed glanced at it, glanced at him, and moved on. The two footmen near the main staircase clocked it and clocked him and exchanged a look behind his back that he felt but didn’t turn around for. Edmund appeared at the end of the corridor, took in the sight of the consort carrying a clay pot wrapped in leaves and turmeric, and produced the expression of a man who had decided some time ago that his role was to facilitate, not to question.

"Your Highness," Edmund said.

"Edmund," Elian said pleasantly, and kept walking.

Three more maids. A groundskeeper crossing from the side door. Two of the kitchen staff who’d come up for something and stopped in the doorway.

Every face. He made sure of every face.

See it, he thought. See me carrying it. See me taking it out into the open. Whoever you are, wherever you are in this palace — see this.

He went to the courtyard.

Set the pot in the direct sunlight.

Prepared the water — a basin, turmeric dissolved until it turned deep gold, lime squeezed in, chilies, rock salt stirred through until the water felt alive with it. He placed the pot in the basin and left it there in the sun and went about his day.

* * *

He came back as the light went orange.

He built the fire himself. Small, specific, the right kind of heat for this purpose. His master had taught him that fire, like most things, had intention — you couldn’t just burn something and call it done, you had to burn it with the purpose of ending what it contained.

He held that purpose clearly in his mind as the pot caught.

The silk burned first, then the clay cracked, then whatever was inside met the flame and — for just a moment, briefly, the fire went a color it shouldn’t have been. Not dangerously. Just wrongly. The color of something releasing that had been held a long time.

Then it was ash.

He stood and watched until there was nothing left.

* * *

He went back to his room and sat at the desk and counted what he knew.

One: the pot was gone. The working it had been feeding was disrupted. Not destroyed — that required the body — but weakened. Another thing between the curse and Caelian, removed.

Two: whoever buried it now knew it had been found. The concealment was broken. His master had been right — the belief that it was buried was part of what made it work. That belief was gone.

Three: they knew it was him. They’d known someone was working against the curse. Now they knew who. The consort. The nobody. The illegitimate child married off to a kingdom nobody else wanted.

Hello, he thought. Now you know.

Four: Sable still hadn’t sent word. He didn’t know what she’d found in the east, or if she’d found anything. He was still missing the body. Still missing the name behind Veylan. Still missing the full picture.

He sat back.

So, he thought. Here is where we are. The protections are stronger than they’ve ever been. The pot is gone. The nightmare entity is gone. The bracelet is holding. And the person behind all of this now knows that someone in this palace has been dismantling their work piece by piece and just burned their buried working in the open courtyard in front of half the staff.

He thought about what came next.

They would escalate. He knew that. Patient people who got rattled made moves they hadn’t planned, and unplanned moves were sloppy, and sloppy was something he could work with.

Come on then, he thought.

He looked at the window. At the palace grounds going dark outside.

You want to escalate? Let’s see how far you can go.

I’m ready.

He wasn’t entirely sure that was true. But he’d said it to himself with enough conviction that it almost felt like it was.

That was usually enough.

* * *

He cleaned his hands.

Stood at the basin in his room and scrubbed the ash and turmeric from his fingers and watched the water go grey and thought about what had just changed.

The working was disrupted. Not destroyed — for that he still needed the body. But the concealment was broken. The person who buried it now knew it had been found. Their confidence in the working had a crack in it.

And cracks spread.

He dried his hands.

Thought about the morning. About carrying the pot through the corridors in full view of every person who happened to be passing. About the faces — the maids, the footmen, Edmund with his small professional bow.

Any one of you, he thought. Any one of you could be the eyes I just showed my hand to.

He didn’t know which.

But one of them had seen. And one of them now knew that whoever was protecting Caelian had found the buried working and burned it in broad daylight without hesitating.

Good, he thought. Let them think about that.

He sat at the desk.

Picked up the pen.

Put it down.

He was tired. The kind of tired that came from sustained fear and sustained work and a week of sleeping badly and a night of sitting with broken beads scattered around him on a balcony floor.

He was also, underneath the tired, something that felt dangerously close to hopeful.

You panicked, he thought, at whoever was out there. You pushed the spirit to possession because you were scared. Scared people make mistakes.

You already made one tonight.

Keep going, he thought. I’ll be here.

He closed his eyes.

Just for a minute.

Opened them.

Picked the pen back up.

Back to work.

* * *

He went back to the records in the evening.

Not Veylan’s records. He’d read those enough.

The palace’s general history. Who had been here. When. Under what circumstances.

He was looking for the edges of something he couldn’t quite see the center of.

Someone close, the sending had said. The master is close.

Close as in the palace. Someone who moved through these corridors without anyone thinking twice.

He wrote a list.

Long term staff. Council members who had frequent palace access. Anyone who had been embedded here for decades.

He stared at it.

The list had a lot of names on it.

He narrowed it.

Access to Caelian specifically, he thought. Physical access. Close enough to touch. freewēbnoveℓ.com

That narrowed it.

Eastern connections, he thought. Or connections to someone with eastern connections.

That narrowed it further.

Patient, he thought. Someone patient enough to wait twenty years.

He looked at what was left.

Not many names.

He looked at them one by one.

One of them snagged.

He didn’t let himself look at it directly. Just — filed it. The way you filed something that wasn’t ready to be examined yet.

Not yet, he told himself. More evidence first.

He closed the records.

Went to bed.

The name sat in the back of his mind and waited.

He went to the kitchen before bed.

The cook gave him leftover bread without being asked. She’d started doing that. He didn’t know when.

He ate it standing at the kitchen doorway, looking out at the back of the palace grounds.

At the outer wall where the egg had vibrated.

The body is there, he thought. Somewhere in that ground.

I burned the pot. I disrupted the concealment. The next step is finding it.

Soon, he thought. Soon.

He finished the bread. Thanked the cook. Went to bed.

He set the pen down.

Looked at the wall.

Soon, he thought. Very soon.

He looked at the ash.

Nothing left.

He dusted off his hands.

Went inside.

One less problem.

Not enough less.

But one.