NEKROS: Husband To Ruin

The Branded Prince

The knife came for my throat before the door finished swinging open, angled low to account for my height. 

I dropped.

The knife buried itself in the doorframe exactly where my neck had been. 

I was already moving — rolling sideways off the stool, knocking the oil lamp across the table so the room filled with lurching shadows. My penknife was in my hand, I always carry it for cutting rope and sharpening quills.

Tonight it would have to be enough.

The man came through the door fast, a second blade already drawn. He was broad and professionally dressed like a dockworker to blend into Vethara's harbor district. But dockworkers don't move like that. He'd been trained, trained well.

"Kyros Nekros," he said. 

I smiled at him from the floor.

"You're using the old name, nobody has called me that in six years."

"The man who hired me didn't care what you call yourself now."

"No." I was already measuring the room behind him. One door, one window. Two strides to either. "Men like yours never do. Who sent you?"

He didn't answer, he lunged.

I rolled left, right was where the window was and where any sane man would run. Left was the wall, the small table with the ceramic water jug on it. I grabbed the jug as his blade scraped stone, and I hit him with it.

The jug shattered against the side of his head and he staggered, swerving, one knee dropping. I was on him before he straightened, my penknife pressing under his jaw.

"Let's try this again," I said. "Who sent you?"

He was shaking, blood from his temple ran down into his collar in a thin line. His eyes darted sideways — toward the door, toward rescue that wasn't coming.

"Varek," he said finally. "Emperor Varek of Kaleth, he wants you in the capital. Alive."

"Alive. You threw a knife at my throat."

"That was…. that was to test if the rumors were true. About you being hard to kill."

I studied his face, the profuse shaking was genuine, he believed what he was saying.

"And the rumors?" I asked.

He glanced at my penknife, at the blade he'd thrown, still buried in the doorframe six feet away.

"...Seem to be accurate," he admitted.

His name was Phaedros. He told me everything within twenty minutes — not because I hurt him further, but because I offered him the one thing Emperor Varek's coin couldn't buy. I offered him a way out of a contract he'd realized too late he couldn't complete.

Varek wanted me in Kalephis, the Kaleth capital. The summons had a seal, Phaedros pulled a letter from inside his vest with the hand I wasn't restraining and set it on the table between us.

I read it without touching it first. Old habit, some letters are poisoned at the edges.

It wasn't poisoned, it was worse. The seal of Emperor Varek IV, pressed in black wax. Beneath it, three lines in the Imperial script:

"Kyros Nekros, third prince of the fallen Valeborn line, is summoned to Kalephis to perform a duty befitting his station and his blood. The matter concerns the Calamity known as Moira the Plague Weaver. He will come, will serve the Empire. He will not refuse."

I stared at the letter for a long time.

Phaedros shifted uncomfortably. "You know what it means."

"I know exactly what it means." I finally picked it up. "Varek wants a proxy bridegroom, someone to stand in for the Empire at a political marriage with the Plague Weaver. Someone who will shake her hand, contract the marriage, and then die from her touch before the ink on the contract dries." I set it back down. "He chose me because if I die — which he fully expects, no one in this continent cares and if I somehow don't die, which he doesn't believe is possible, he's gained a weapon he can point at the Calamities."

"That's…" Phaedros stopped.

"Accurate?" I looked at him. "You can say it, I don't embarrass easily."

"That's exactly what he said, when he thought I wasn't still in the room."

I almost respected Phaedros for that. I stood, folding the letter into my coat. My reflection caught in the dark window glass across the room — pale face, silver-streaked black hair that people in this district called cursed and crossed the street to avoid, eyes like cracked amethyst that had unnerved every healer who'd ever looked into them. I looked exactly like what the continent believed I was, a cursed exile. A dead man walking, the last rotting branch of a fallen royal line.

Good, I had worked very hard to look exactly like that.

"What will you do?" Phaedros asked from the floor.

"What every man in my position does."

"Which is?"

I picked up my coat from the hook by the door with Phaedros' first knife still buried in the wood beside it. I worked it loose and set it on the table — a gift he could take or leave.

"Accept the invitation," I said.

Vethara at midnight smelled like salt water, fish guts, the particular desperation of a port city that had changed hands four times in twenty years. I walked the harbor district with my collar up and my head down — not hiding, just unremarkable. A thin man in a worn coat, nothing worth robbing. Nothing worth noticing.

I had lived in Vethara for eight months. Before that, Selinon, the free city on the Ashen Reach's eastern edge. Before that, a string of fishing villages, merchant caravans, and one particularly miserable winter in a monastery whose monks asked no questions and fed everyone who showed up. Six years of moving, six years of being no one.

Kyros Nekros, who had once been Kyros of the Valeborn line, the third prince of a kingdom that no longer existed, was very good at being no one.

What I was not good at was ignoring a door when someone was holding it open.

And Varek's letter was a door. A trap disguised as a door — the man wasn't subtle — but a door nonetheless, because Moira the Plague Weaver was the first name on a list I had been building for six years. 

A list drawn from fragments of heretical texts, burned church records, and conversations with old scholars who remembered things the Pantheon of Eidyn wanted forgotten.

The Prophecy of the Sevenfold Husband.

The man who marries all Seven Calamities and survives their touch.

Every serious scholar called it myth. Every serious scholar was also very careful to say so loudly and in public, which told me they were afraid of something.

I turned off the harbor road onto a narrower street, where the buildings leaned together overhead and blocked out the stars. My rooms were three streets over — rented under a merchant's name, paid three months ahead, with nothing inside worth stealing. I had learned to own nothing that I couldn't walk away from in under two minutes.

A shadow peeled itself off the wall twenty steps ahead of me. I stopped.

The shadow became a woman, or the shape of one. She was dressed entirely in gray, face wrapped except for her eyes, and she stood in the center of the narrow street with the posture of someone who had been waiting patiently and found the waiting no hardship at all.

"Kyros Nekros," she said. 

"That's twice tonight," I said. "I'm beginning to find it repetitive."

"I'm not here to kill you."

"Phaedros wasn't either, officially." I kept my distance, far enough to react to a thrown blade, close enough to read her posture. "Who are you with?"

"Sarreth," she said. "The Empire of Sarreth sends its regards and a warning. If you go to Kalephis — if you go anywhere near Moira the Plague Weaver — you will not survive it."

"I appreciate the concern."

"It isn't concern." Something in her voice shifted. "It's intelligence, we've been watching you for three years, Nekros. We know what you've been collecting the texts, the fragments. We know what you believe about the Sevenfold Prophecy." She paused. "We need you to stop believing it."

The street was very quiet. Somewhere distant, a harbor bell rang twice.

"And if I don't?" I asked.

She looked at me for a long moment. "Then Sarreth will handle the Plague Weaver problem themselves, and you will not be a problem for anyone."

She stepped back into the shadow, and she was gone, as if the dark had absorbed her.

I stood in the empty street for a moment, the harbor bell still echoing.

So Sarreth was watching, Kaleth was summoning. The Pantheon's priests had been burning prophecy texts for thirty years. Three separate powers, all converging on the same point, all of them afraid of the same thing.

I looked down at Varek's letter in my hand.

I had nowhere left to run to, I had known that for years, if I was being honest with myself. The running had always been preparation, not escape. Every city, every manuscript, every cold winter in a monastery had been building toward a moment when someone finally opened the door.

Varek thought he was sending me to die, he had no idea he was sending me home.

I put the letter away and started walking toward the docks. Toward the ship routes that would carry me north, toward the capital of the Kaleth Empire, toward a political marriage designed to kill me.

Behind me, from the rooftop, one I'd clocked twenty minutes ago when I first turned onto this street, the one with the figure on it who hadn't moved since I'd entered the alley, I heard a single sound.

Footsteps retreating, which sounded more than one pair.

I hadn't been followed by two tonight.

I'd been followed by five.