Obsidian Throne: Villainess's Husband-Chapter 4 - 1 Part I: The Annoyance of Kings

What was a king’s command worth?

To a general — everything.

To a politician — leverage.

To a merchant — an opportunity that’d end up in a memoir someday, right next to the part where they claimed they’d always known it would work out.

To a priest — probably divine instruction, depending on how convenient the theology happened to be this particular week.

To Alistair Eldenberg, third prince of the Eldenberg Kingdom, currently face-down on a velvet couch at two in the afternoon with a pillow over his head?

Absolutely nothing.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

"Your Highness." He heard the butler’s voice.

However...

He didn’t move.

The pillow was perfect. It had never once let him down. It asked nothing of him, he asked nothing of it, and they had achieved a level of mutual understanding that he had honestly never managed with another living person. He was not going to ruin it.

"His Majesty requests your presence in the throne room."

’The throne room.’

’At two in the afternoon.’

’For what.’

He said nothing. The silence stretched — comfortable on his end, presumably less so on the butler’s. He’d noticed over the years that silence was a useful test. Most people couldn’t stand it for more than a few seconds before they started filling it. The butler was currently at the edge of his threshold. Alistair could tell by the quality of the waiting.

Three seconds.

Four.

"Your Highness, the King has been waiting for—"

"How long," Alistair said into the pillow, "has he been waiting?"

A pause. The calculating pause of a man deciding how honest to be. "...Forty minutes, Your Highness."

"Good." He pulled the pillow tighter. "Let him wait forty more."

The butler made a sound.

That sound. The specific, particular sound of a man who had concluded that pushing further was not survivable and had committed, fully and without reservation, to standing very still until circumstances resolved themselves without him.

Alistair was genuinely proud of that sound. He’d spent years cultivating it. Consistent effort over a long period — ironic, given his general position on consistent effort. But some investments were worth making.

He lay still and let the palace go about its business around him.

Through the window, he could hear the distant sounds of the afternoon court session — footsteps on stone, muffled voices, the general noise of a large building full of people doing things they probably considered important. The autumn light came through the curtains in flat, grey-gold stripes. The pillow smelled faintly of lavender.

He was comfortable. He was genuinely comfortable. There was no compelling reason to move.

’Forty more minutes,’ he thought. ’Maybe sixty.’

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

Then he felt her presence...

He heard her before she reached the door.

Lighter on the right than the left — Eleanor’s step. A habit she’d had since they were both young enough to be running down corridors instead of walking them, developed from some long-forgotten childhood incident she’d never explained and he’d never asked about. He could pick it out anywhere. In any crowd. In any room. He wasn’t sure he’d ever told her that.

The pillow came off his head in one clean motion.

Afternoon light hit his face.

"Al."

"No."

"You haven’t heard what I’m going to say."

"You’re going to tell me to go to the throne room."

Eleanor looked down at him with that expression. The one she’d been refining for years, specifically for him. The I have completely, thoroughly, permanently run out of new ways to be exasperated by this exact person look. It was, objectively, impressive work. He respected the craft of it.

He still wasn’t moving.

"His Majesty sent three butlers," she said.

"I know. I heard the first two."

"And you sent them all away."

"I’m consistent." He sat up slowly, which took more effort than it should have and annoyed him. "Consistency is a virtue. Genuinely undervalued."

Eleanor sat down across from him and folded her hands in her lap.

And then she went still.

That stillness. Her particular stillness — the kind that said she had already decided to wait him out and had thought through every move he was likely to make. He had never once won a standoff that started this way. Not once. He was fully aware of this. He found it deeply, personally, specifically irritating every single time.

’She was going to win.’

’She always won.’

’He hated that she always won.’

He looked at her. She looked back at him with complete patience. The clock on the mantle made its small sound. A bird outside said something brief and flew away. The silence between them had a particular weight to it — the comfortable, slightly exasperating weight of two people who had been having this exact standoff for years and both knew how it ended. The only variable was how long he was willing to keep pretending he didn’t know.

Not long today, apparently.

"Whatever this is," he said, "I’m going to find it annoying."

"Probably," she agreed. The corner of her mouth moved — the early sign of a smile she wasn’t hiding because she’d decided not to bother. "But you’ll be a lot less annoyed hearing it from me here. Rather than from your father. In front of his entire court."

’...That was a genuinely good point. He hated that it was a good point.’

He stood up and grabbed his coat.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

She told him in the garden.

No courtiers. No audience. Just the two of them and the autumn air — cold enough that standing in it required actual effort, which Alistair had always found useful. Cold had a way of cutting through whatever clouded his thinking. He stood with his eyes closed, hands in his pockets, and let Eleanor talk.

She had a good way of delivering difficult information. Calm, clear, no excess emotion — just the facts in the order they needed to be heard. He’d always appreciated that about her. Some people told you bad news like they needed you to comfort them about it. Eleanor told you bad news like she was handing you a tool and expected you to figure out what to do with it.

She finished.

The wind moved through the hedges.

"Marriage," he said.

"Marriage," she confirmed. Her professional voice — the careful, even one. The face that went with it was the one she wore when her real expression would make things worse. He’d always known the difference. She knew he knew. They’d never discussed it directly, which worked fine for both of them.

"To the Eiswald Duke’s daughter."

"Lady Vivienne Eiswald. Yes."

’Eiswald.’

He turned the word over.

’North. Far north. Far enough north that the distance was the whole point.’

His father wasn’t stupid. That was the core of it. That was always the core of it.

Alexandre Eldenberg was one of the sharpest kings this kingdom had seen in three generations. He had looked at his third son — the most capable one, though he would never say it out loud to anyone including himself — and seen exactly what Alistair saw in mirrors.

A problem.

Not because Alistair wanted the throne. He didn’t want the throne. He had never wanted the throne. The throne meant responsibility, and responsibility meant sustained effort, and sustained effort was — in his well-considered and extensively tested opinion — the second biggest waste of a human life. Just behind ambition, which at least destroyed whoever caught it eventually rather than just making them quietly miserable for decades.

But wanting something and being capable of taking it were completely different things.

His brothers understood this. They’d all tried at different points to deal with the problem before it became worse.

They’d all regretted it.

So: Eiswald. Marriage. A dukedom in the frozen north where the snow came early and stayed late and political irrelevance wasn’t a situation — it was geography. Built-in. Inescapable.

His father was sending him somewhere that distance itself would keep him harmless.

"He’s sending me away," Alistair said, "because he knows I’d win."

"He’s sending you away," Eleanor said quietly, "because he can’t afford to lose you. Or the kingdom. In that order."

’She’s right. She knows she’s right. I find this personally offensive.’

"It’s still annoying," he said.

"I know." She never gloated. That made it worse somehow.

He opened his eyes and looked at the sky — flat grey, autumn-flat, the kind of sky that had made up its mind about not being interesting.

"The Eiswald girl," he said. "What do people say about her?"

Eleanor’s expression shifted. Small, almost invisible, but he’d been reading her face for years and knew what to look for. She’d been sitting on something. Something she hadn’t quite figured out how to say.

"They call her the Cold Villainess of Eiswald," she said. Careful and measured. "Ruthless. Harsh. Had a stable boy flogged for looking at her horse wrong — or so the story goes." A pause. She looked at him directly. "People are genuinely afraid of her, Al. Not court-afraid. Actually afraid."

The gold in his eyes caught the flat autumn light the way it did when something had finally, actually managed to get his attention.

"Good," he said.

Eleanor waited.

"Boring women are the worst kind."

Continued in Chapter 1 Part II →