I Woke Up Married to the Cursed King

Chapter 4: Chapter 4: What a Con Man Does First

Edmund was an excellent butler.

Which meant, unfortunately for Edmund, that he was also an excellent source of information.

Arjun had spent the morning being personable.

Not warm — warm would have been suspicious. Just present. Attentive. Asking small questions in the spaces between larger ones, the way you fill a cup slowly so it doesn’t spill.

How long have you served the household?

The kingdom must keep you very busy.

I imagine the council has been anxious.

Edmund, to his credit, was professionally discreet.

He just wasn’t discreet enough for someone who had spent twelve years reading people for a living.

By lunch, Arjun had most of it.

He sat with his food — extraordinary, again, he was never getting over the food — and arranged the pieces.

The kingdom of Valdris.

He tested the name in the body’s memory. It landed with weight. History. The particular heaviness of a place that had been through things.

Caelian’s father: dead. War, seven years ago. His mother: died in childbirth. No one else. Just Caelian and a younger brother — the Northern Duke, stationed at the border, apparently by choice.

The council: seven members. Old. Cautious. The kind of men who measured every decision by what it cost them personally.

They’d pressured Caelian into marriage. Stability, succession, appearances. A king without a consort was a question mark, and question marks made investors nervous.

And nobody had wanted to marry him.

Arjun chewed his food thoughtfully.

Nobody from the noble houses. Nobody from foreign courts. The violet eyes and the broad shoulders hadn’t been enough to offset — what? The coldness? The reputation? The thirty-two spirits nobody could see but everybody could presumably feel in some wordless animal way?

So the council had gone looking.

And Elian’s father — illegitimate son, wrong side of some foreign bed — had seen an opportunity. Married his inconvenient child off to the kingdom that nobody else would touch.

Arjun set his fork down.

I ran from one arranged marriage in my own world. freewebnovёl.ƈom

He’d been twenty-three. His grandmother, well-meaning, terrible instincts. A girl from a good family in the next city over. He’d packed a bag and been three states away by morning.

His grandmother had called him seventeen times.

He’d answered the eighteenth.

You will find someone, she’d told him, not even angry. Just certain, the way she was certain about everything. The right one. You’ll know.

Grandmother, he thought now, sitting in a palace in a kingdom called Valdris, married to a man with violet eyes and a death curse, I don’t think this is what you meant.

He picked his fork back up.

Okay. So. Loveless arranged marriage. Cold. Clearly not functional even before I got here.

Can I divorce him?

He genuinely didn’t know. He needed more information. Divorce laws. Succession laws. Whether an annulment was possible. Whether—

The curse, his brain interrupted.

Right. The curse.

He stared at his plate.

That man is dying slowly and doesn’t know it. And whoever put it there is patient enough to wait. Which means they’re still close. Which means this household has a problem that predates me by quite a while.

He ate the rest of his lunch in silence.

Information first, he decided. Divorce later.

Three floors up, across the east wing, Caelian was trying to read a document.

It should have been simple. One page. His secretary had summarized it already.

Lord Fennick. Thirty-two years in service. Caught passing military deployment schedules to a foreign contact. Treason, clean and simple, the kind that didn’t require interpretation.

Caelian looked at the page.

Sign it, the voices said.

He’d stopped being surprised by them years ago. They were just there, the way weather was there. Constant. Seasonal in their intensity.

Sign it and be done.

"Your Highness." His secretary, Aldous, standing two feet away with the patience of a man who had learned to wait. "The tribunal requires your seal before the week’s end."

"I know," Caelian said.

He looked at the document.

Lord Fennick’s sentence was listed at the bottom. Imprisonment. Twenty years. The tribunal had been lenient, citing age and prior service.

Too lenient, the voices said. He committed treason. He’ll do it again. Or someone he told will. Or someone they told. It doesn’t end. It never ends unless you end it.

Caelian’s jaw tightened.

Kill him, the voices said, almost gently. It’s the only way to be certain.

"Your Highness?"

Kill him. He chose this. He knew the cost when he made the choice. This is mercy, really. Clean. Final. No more chances for mistakes.

Caelian set the document down.

He pressed two fingers against his temple.

The pressure behind his eyes had been there since morning. Since the study. Since Elian had backed against the wall like Caelian was something to be afraid of, which—

Kill him, the voices said again, louder. Sign the order. Change the sentence. You’re the king. No one will question it. No one can.

"Give me an hour," Caelian said.

Aldous bowed and collected the papers. He’d learned, over four years of service, not to ask follow-up questions.

The door closed.

Caelian sat alone in the silence of his office.

The voices filled it immediately.

You’re tired, they said, shifting. Softer now. A different angle. You’ve been tired for years. The council, the border disputes, the marriage that solved nothing. When does it stop?

He looked at his hands on the desk. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com

It could stop, the voices said. That’s the thing nobody tells you. It could simply stop. You could let it.

He closed his eyes.

He was thirty-one years old and he had been king since he was twenty-four and some mornings the crown felt less like authority and more like something slowly tightening.

Just, the voices suggested, very quietly. Just let go.

He opened his eyes.

Picked up a different document. Tax assessments from the southern provinces.

No, he told the voices, the way he always told them. Not loudly. Not with drama. Just flatly. The way you close a door.

The voices didn’t leave.

They never left.

But they quieted, for now, back to their usual low murmur, like a river heard from a distance.

He read the tax assessments.

He initialed three pages.

He did not change Lord Fennick’s sentence.

Outside his window, Valdris went about its afternoon, loud and alive and entirely unaware of what it cost him to keep it that way.

Back in his room, Arjun was making a list.

Mental, not physical. Written lists were evidence.

One: figure out divorce laws.

Two: identify who placed the curse and why.

Three: figure out what I’m supposed to be doing as a royal consort and do the minimum required amount of it.

Four: find a way home. Probably.

He paused on four.

Probably, he confirmed.

He added a fifth item.

Five: do not let thirty-two spirits know I can see them. That never ends well.

He looked at the ceiling.

Somewhere in this palace, his husband was sitting with a snake around his neck and voices Arjun was increasingly certain weren’t natural, and the worst part — the genuinely annoying part — was that Arjun knew exactly what was happening to him.

He’d seen it before. Slower versions. Weaker curses.

He knew what they did, if left alone.

Not my problem, he told himself.

I don’t even know this man. I didn’t choose this. I was shot. This is not my responsibility.

He pressed his fingers against his eyes.

...The curse has been there a while. Years, maybe. And he’s still standing. Still functioning. Still running a kingdom with thirty-two spirits and a death curse and whatever those voices are.

Arjun thought about the hand pressed to the temple. The flat, tired way Caelian had said fine.

Not the voice of a man who was cruel.

The voice of a man who was exhausted.

Not my problem, Arjun said again, firmly, to the ceiling.

The ceiling offered no opinion.

He closed his eyes.

Grandmother, he thought, I really wish you were here.