NEKROS: Husband To Ruin

Morreth's Bargain

The room on the second landing was not what I expected.

I had expected bare stone, a cot. The minimum a woman who anticipated her guests dying within hours would bother providing. What I found instead was a room that had been prepared. A proper bed, a writing desk with ink and paper already set out. A shelf of books, not decorative ones but working ones, the kind with broken spines and loose pages, the kind that had been read.

On the desk, a single black rose in a small stone cup.

I stood in the doorway for a moment and thought about a woman who had been alone for four hundred years, preparing a room for a man she had already decided was different, not knowing yet how different, putting a rose in a cup because that was what you did when you wanted someone to feel welcome.

I set my coat on the chair and sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the tower breathe around me.

It had a sound, this place. Low and constant, like the building itself was exhaling. 

I lay back on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and began building a plan.

The ceremony was in three days. After the ceremony, under Eidyn marriage law, came the cohabitation period, thirty days during which the marriage had to be maintained under the same roof for the contract to be legally binding. 

Varek had built this in as his secondary kill mechanism, if the touch didn't finish me at the ceremony, thirty days in proximity to the Plague Weaver would.

Varek had not accounted for the blessing, Varek had not accounted for a great many things.

Thirty days, I needed to use them correctly.

What I knew about Moira from the texts was extensive, what I knew about Moira from twenty minutes in the same room was more useful. She was precise, she valued accuracy over performance — she had tested my reading of the prophecy fragments not with ceremony but with a direct question, and she had checked my answer against her own knowledge before she decided I wasn't lying. 

She had spent four hundred years being feared and managed and treated as a problem to be solved. She was tired of it.

She had put a flower in a cup.

That was the detail I kept returning to, not the library, the mercury eyes, because you didn't do that for someone you expected to be dead in three days.

She was curious about me, which was good. I was going to give her something worth being curious about.

I found the library on the first morning, I spent an hour walking the tower's accessible floors, mapping the space, and there was a door on the third landing that wasn't locked but had a particular quality of stillness around it that said private. I didn't open it. I stood outside it for a moment, noted its location, and went back downstairs.

Moira was in the main room on the ground floor when I came down. She was at a workbench along the far wall, doing something precise and unhurried with a collection of glass containers and dried plant material. She didn't look up.

"You found the library," she said.

"I found the door to what I assumed was the library."

"You didn't open it."

"It wasn't mine to open."

Now she looked up, just briefly. The mercury eyes measured something in my face and then returned to the workbench.

"Most men who have come here," she said, "open every door within the first hour, they want to know the dimensions of what they're dealing with. Map the territory, establish where the threat is."

"I already know where the threat is," I said. "It's standing at the workbench."

She paused and then her hands continued their work, unhurried.

"And you're not mapping it."

"Mapping a threat that isn't going to move tells me nothing useful. What I want to know is what's in the library."

She was quiet for a moment. "What specifically," she said.

"Pre-Pantheon botanical texts, specifically anything referencing Phthoros's original parameters for the transformation process. I have fragments suggesting the initial blessing was intended as bidirectional — she gives the plague, the blessed receives it and converts it. But my sources cut off before the conversion mechanism is described."

This time she stopped working and turned fully, facing me. Then she set down what was in her hands and said, "Follow me."

The library was not just a room. It was three rooms, connected by narrow doorways, floor to ceiling with shelves on every wall and a reading table in the center of the middle room that was buried under organized stacks of open texts. The organization was precise and personal. The system of someone who had been living inside this material for centuries and knew where everything was without needing labels.

She walked to the far wall of the third room without hesitation and pulled a volume that was so old the cover had gone past brown into something almost black.

"Sit down," she said, and handed it to me.

I sat at the reading table and opened it carefully. The pages were thick, handmade, covered in a script that was older than the standard Vaelthic alphabet by at least two centuries. I could read it. It had taken me eight months in a monastery library to learn it, which was eight months I had never considered wasted.

Moira watched me read the first page.

"You can actually read that," she said.

"Slowly."

"The last scholar Varek sent to study me couldn't read Archaic Vaelthic." She moved to the shelf and began pulling other volumes, setting them beside me in a careful stacks. "He pretended he could for four days before admitting it, I sent him home."

"That was generous."

"It was practical, a man who lies about small things to impress me is useless to me in every other respect." She set down the last volume and stood at the end of the table, looking at the stack. "These five together will give you the conversion mechanism you're missing. The Phthoros parameters are split across the second and fourth volumes. The original blessing description is in the third." She paused. "It's not what the Church texts say it is."

"I didn't think it was."

"No," she said quietly. "I don't imagine you did."

She left me there with the five volumes and I read for six hours straight, and somewhere in the fourth hour I became aware that she had come back and was sitting at the far end of the table doing her own work, and it was the most comfortable six hours I had spent in a room with another person in six years.

The ceremony happened on the third morning as scheduled. It was smaller than I had expected. Elpida was there as Kaleth's official witness, her court-blue robes impeccable, her expression professionally neutral. 

An Eidyn priest — not the Church man from Kalephis, a different one, older, read the binding phrases in the formal register.

Moira stood across from me in the tower's entrance room, she had changed nothing about her appearance for the ceremony. No ornamentation, no formal dress. The same dark robe, she looked at me with those silver eyes and waited.

The priest reached the relevant line.

"The binding requires the joining of hands," he said. "As witnessed under Eidyn law, in the sight of the divine…"

"Yes," Moira said. "We know what it requires."

She held out her hand.

I took it. The cold came again, stronger this time — the full weight of her plague-touch, unguarded now, not the careful test from two days ago. It moved through my hand, my wrist, my arm, searching. The blessing opened around it exactly as it had before, receiving it, redistributing it, converting it into something my body could carry.

Moira's grip tightened, her hand closing more firmly around mine, and I understood that this was not ceremony for her anymore, this was something she was feeling for the first time in four centuries, a touch that didn't end in death, a hand in hers that held on.

The priest finished the binding phrase.

Elpida signed the contract, the priest signed it.

I signed it and Moira signed it last, her handwriting precise and unornamented. Then she set down the pen and looked at the contract for a moment with a rather confused expression.

"Thirty days," she said. 

"Thirty days," I agreed.

She looked at me. "I have conditions," she said.

"I expected you would."

"You will not pretend to be something you aren't in this tower, I have spent four hundred years watching men perform bravery they don't feel. I find it exhausting."

"Agreed."

"You will not touch the specimens in the workroom without asking, some of them are lethal to contact."

"Understood."

"And you will not," she said, and something shifted in her voice, going quieter and more precise at once, "treat this as a transaction, whatever you came here for — and I know what you came here for, I have known about the Sevenfold Prophecy longer than you have been alive, you will not treat me as a step in a sequence."

The room was very quiet. I looked at her, the four hundred years behind the mercury eyes. 

"I came here," I said, "because the prophecy pointed here. That's true, but I stayed in the library for six hours yesterday because the texts were extraordinary and the company was better than I expected. That's also true." I paused. "I don't know yet what the thirty days will be but I know what it won't be. It won't be a transaction."

She stared at me for a long time. "Good," she said finally, and she released my hand.

She walked back to her workbench, and in the corner of the entrance room, Elpida — who had been standing so still and professionally neutral for the entire ceremony that I had almost forgotten she was there — looked down at the signed contract in her hands.

And I saw, just for a second, before she put the expression back, that she was afraid.

Not of Moira, but of what the signed contract meant. Of what it meant that I was still standing.

Of what came next.