CHAPTER 17 - THE MORNING I REMEMBERED HER
I wake the way I usually do meaner than I went to sleep.
Pain has a way of doing that to a man.
It drags you out of sleep by the bones instead of the mind, hooks itself into the places that never healed correctly, and reminds you before you even open your eyes that survival is not the same thing as recovery.
Recovery is a luxury for men who were never carved open badly enough to hear their own lungs choke.
Survival is what comes after. Survival is scar tissue and stiffness and mornings like this.
For several long seconds I lie still, staring into darkness, waiting for my body to decide which wound it wants to hate me with first.
My ribs.
No—my shoulder.
No.
The old slash along my side, the one that healed too tight and too ugly because the fool stitching it cared more about stopping the bleeding than preserving movement.
It pulls when I breathe too deeply, burns when I turn too fast, and on mornings like this feels as though someone has slipped a hot blade beneath the skin just to twist it.
Then the rest join in.
The shoulder where bone was cracked and set badly enough that rain still finds it before the clouds arrive.
The long scar across my back, the one I can't see without a mirror but feel every time the weather turns cold.
The right side of my face, where flesh healed rough and uneven, not truly painful anymore just tight, always tight, like the skin remembers the fire even if I don't let myself.
I exhale slowly through my nose.
Bad morning.
That much is obvious.
Then I remember something else.
The couch.
Why am I on the couch?
My eyes narrow.
Ah.
Right.
The wedding.
The girl.
The newest queen.
The thought irritates me on contact.
I push myself upright too quickly, and pain tears through my side so sharply that black spots jump briefly across my vision. My jaw locks. A curse dies in my throat because speaking through it would only make the pain feel more real, and I am in no mood to give it that satisfaction.
I sit there for a moment, elbows braced on my knees, breathing through my nose like a man trying not to kill the nearest living thing for being alive too loudly.
Then I stand.
The room is quiet, the fire reduced to a low bed of coals. Dawn hasn't fully arrived yet; the windows are gray with the beginning of morning, everything washed in that ugly light that makes stone look colder than it is. The bed sits across the room in a dark, silent shape. I do not look at it long.
Medicine.
That is the only thought I care about.
I move to the cabinet near the wall where I usually keep the first vial for mornings like this. My hand finds the drawer, jerks it open, and
Empty.
I stop.
Look again.
Still empty.
My mood, already poor, curdles instantly.
I shove the drawer shut harder than necessary and pull open the next one. Nothing there either. Then another. Then the shelf above. Then the box behind the stack of papers. Nothing.
The pain worsens with movement. Of course it does. Every irritated breath saws against the scar along my ribs; every twist sends heat along the old wounds like someone lighting them one by one. The more I search, the worse it gets. The worse it gets, the angrier I become.
By the fourth drawer I am no longer searching. I am tearing through the room.
Books are shoved aside.
A ledger hits the floor.
The small metal case near the writing desk is opened with enough force to dent the hinge.
Empty.
I laugh once, humorless.
Perfect.
Just perfect.
A king in his own chambers, half-lame with old pain, rifling through drawers like a desperate addict while a brand-new wife sleeps in his bed.
That thought hits me a second before something else does.
A hand.
On my shoulder.
The world narrows.
My body moves before thought can catch up. I turn hard, pain and instinct colliding into one violent motion, and the dagger is in my hand by the time I face her.
One second there is touch.
The next there is steel.
The blade stops a breath from her throat.
Silence drops into the room so fast it feels physical.
She is standing there in her nightgown, pale in the gray dawn, eyes enormous and immediately wet with terror, one hand still half-lifted where she touched me.
She looks so startled she almost seems unreal like something soft and foolish that wandered into a wolf's den believing gentleness might protect it.
I lower the dagger, but not quickly enough to spare her the fear.
"Jesus, woman," I bite out. "Make noise."
Her lips part. Nothing comes out.
I rub a hand over my face in irritation, the dagger still loose at my side.
"What are you?" I mutter. "A ghost?"
She takes half a step back.
I try for something lighter not kindness, exactly, but the nearest thing I allow myself before sunrise.
"I ought to tie a bell around your throat."
The words should sound dry.
Almost amused.
Instead they come out through clenched teeth because the pain decides that exact moment to stab through my side again, sharp enough to steal half the breath from my lungs. The result is wrong. Darker. Colder. More threat than jest.
Her face drains of what little color it had left.
Excellent.
Now she looks as though she might faint where she stands.
I close my eyes briefly and curse inwardly.
Right.
I married her.
That is apparently a fact now.
Which means the terrified thing in my room belongs here.
Or at least cannot be removed without more paperwork than I care to sign.
When I open my eyes again, she still hasn't moved. She is staring at the dagger now, not me. Her breathing has gone thin and shallow. Another second and she will either pass out or apologize, and I have no patience for either.
"Don't do that," I say.
She blinks at me.
"Do what?" she whispers.
"Look like you're about to die. It's irritating."
That doesn't help. If anything, it makes her look worse.
I could explain. Tell her I wouldn't actually put the blade in her over a startled touch. Tell her reflex isn't intent. Tell her fear makes people stupid and stillness would serve her better than panic.
I do none of that.
Explaining myself before breakfast is a habit I do not intend to acquire.
Instead I turn away from her entirely and storm out of the room.
If I stay, I will either say something crueler than necessary or be forced to look at the expression on her face for longer than I want to. Neither appeals to me.
My office is three corridors down and around the eastern corner.
The walk feels longer with each step because the pain is no longer merely present it is spreading.
The scar under my ribs has gone from sharp to grinding, the kind of ache that makes the muscles around it seize.
My shoulder throbs in uneven pulses. The old healed wounds across my back feel as though they have tightened overnight into wire.
I hate mornings like this.
Hate them because they make me feel mortal in a way battle never does.
A battlefield gives you something to strike back at.
This is just flesh remembering.
I reach the office and go straight for the locked cabinet behind the desk where the reserve vials are kept. The key turns. The doors open.
Empty.
For one perfect instant I think the pain has finally driven me mad.
Then I remember ordering the last of the reserve moved after the southern campaign and never replacing it.
I stare at the empty shelf long enough that my vision blurs around the edges.
Then I slam the cabinet shut so hard the wood rattles.
The sound cracks through the room like a threat.
I brace both hands on the desk and breathe through my nose, each inhale measured, each exhale sharpened by irritation.
From somewhere behind me, very far away in memory, comes the image of her face when I turned on her with the dagger.
Too pale.
Too frightened.
As though she genuinely believed I would cut her open where she stood.
That thought should amuse me.
Instead it irritates me too.
The stories have made me into something theatrical. Something simpler than I am. A butcher. A monster. A king who murders wives for sport and cleans the blood from his hands before dinner.
The truth is less flattering and more inconvenient.
I am a tyrant. I know that. I make no effort to deny it. Tyrants are efficient. Tyrants choose fear because it works faster than love. Tyrants understand that mercy is most useful when rare.
But the stories
The stories stretch.
Yes, one of my wives died by my hand.
She was a traitor.
Not suspected. Not perhaps. Not misunderstood. A traitor.
She smiled while trying to poison men in my court.
She passed messages to enemies. She arranged one failed assassination, then a second, then a third, each time convinced that beauty would excuse intent if she denied it sweetly enough.
I warned her. I warned her twice. The third time I had her dragged into the middle of court and cut her throat open in front of everyone she'd been conspiring with.
Messy.
Necessary.
Effective.
A message only matters if the room is large enough to hear it.
Yes, another one died because she tried to poison my wine.
People always leave out the detail that she reached for my cup first. That she expected me not to notice. That all I did was switch the goblets back to where they originally belonged and let consequence finish the work.
That is not murder.
That is mathematics.
One died in my bed with her own blade in her throat because madness found her faster than I did.
One ran.
I was angry when I went after her. That much is true.
Angry because she chose dawn my worst hour to flee, and I was already in pain before the search even began.
By the time we found her, she was bleeding out in the mud, white-faced and gasping, too far gone for saving and too stubborn to die cleanly.
I remember crouching beside her while she gritted her teeth and looked at me as if I had put the wound there myself.
Perhaps I sounded guilty when I told the guards to take her body and plan the funeral.
Perhaps because I wanted my medicine and nothing else.
Perhaps because pain strips tenderness from a man's voice until even concern sounds like contempt.
No one believed me.
Of course they didn't.
One dead wife is misfortune.
Several begin to look like design.
Especially when the last person seen alone with them is always me.
I straighten slowly and open the lower drawer of the desk, the one no one touches but me.
There.
At the very back, tucked beneath sealed correspondence and a map of the northern pass, is a single small wooden case.
I had forgotten I moved one here.
For emergencies.
I almost laugh again.
This qualifies.
I open it and find three vials lying in velvet grooves like relics.
I take one immediately.
The medicine tastes as vile as always bitter and metallic, thick enough to cling to the tongue. I swallow it anyway and brace my hands on the desk, waiting.
The relief does not come instantly.
It never does.
First the pain sharpens once more, furious at being challenged. Then it begins to dull by degrees. The heat beneath the scars cools to ache. The vice around my ribs loosens enough that breathing no longer feels like a punishment. My shoulder stops pulsing. My back becomes background noise again.
I stand there longer than necessary, letting my body remember how to belong to me.
When I can think clearly again, the first thought that returns is not the kingdom.
Not the court.
Not the stack of unsigned documents.
It is her.
Standing in my room in a nightgown, too quiet, too pale, too frightened to do anything except touch my shoulder and nearly lose her mind for it.
I still don't know her name.
That realization arrives with a faint, unpleasant sense of neglect.
I never read the report.
Never asked where she was from beyond the broadest political terms. Never cared enough to remember which daughter had been sent this time, only that a kingdom had offered me one and I had accepted because refusing would have cost more than agreeing.
Now she's in my rooms believing I might slit her open before breakfast.
My mouth twists.
Cruel, perhaps, but not incorrect.
She should be afraid.
Fear keeps people alive longer than comfort does.
Still
I push away from the desk and cap the empty vial.
The medicine has settled enough now that the anger has gone from white-hot to manageable. The world sharpens back into edges I can use.
I will have to speak to her.
At some point.
Preferably before she faints or starts praying at me like I'm death in boots.
Perhaps I'll ask her name.