Obsidian Throne: Villainess's Husband-Chapter 6 - 2 Part I: The Road North

Eleanor organised everything.

That was just how it worked. She decided the carriage left at dawn — so it left at dawn. His conscious participation was neither required nor sought. She had him dressed, fed, and inside the carriage before he’d formed a complete thought about any of it, and by the time his brain had caught up with his body the palace gates were already closing behind them and the driver already had a route memorised and a schedule to keep.

He had genuinely never decided if this counted as kindness or a military operation.

Probably both. Eleanor had always found those compatible.

He was asleep before the gates finished closing.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

He woke somewhere past the third hour to Eleanor’s thinking silence.

He’d spent enough time around her to know all her silences by feel. There was the comfortable one — the kind she had when she didn’t need to say anything and was fine with that. There was the tired one. There was the three-moves-ahead one where she was just waiting for him to catch up to a conclusion she’d already reached twenty minutes ago. There was the slightly annoyed-at-something-she-read one.

This was the pressurised one.

Grey-sky silence. Not a storm, but building. The kind that had weight in it.

"What," he said, without opening his eyes.

A pause. The carriage rolled over a stone bridge — hooves going briefly hollow, then solid again as they cleared it.

"Nothing," Eleanor said.

"You’re quiet."

"I’m often quiet."

"Not like this." He opened his eyes.

She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap, looking out the window. The hills outside were greying steadily as they moved north — the trees thinning, the sky dropping, the whole landscape doing its slow work of becoming less interesting. Her profile was composed. The kind of composed that was costing her something to hold.

He watched her for a moment.

She had a way of carrying things quietly that he’d always found impressive and occasionally maddening. Most people leaked. They let you see the edges of whatever they were carrying even when they were trying not to. Eleanor kept everything inside clean lines. You only saw what she decided you’d see, and she decided carefully.

Except around him. Around him, occasionally, a thing slipped through.

"El."

She turned. Her face ran through a quick internal sorting process — several expressions considered showing up, all of them declined, leaving just the neutral surface she used when she didn’t want to give anything away.

"I’m fine," she said.

"I know you’re fine." He held her gaze. "That’s not what I asked."

She looked at him for a moment, the real looking, the kind where she was deciding something. Then back at the window.

"They say Vivienne Eiswald had her last suitor removed from the kingdom," she said. Careful and even, like she’d been working out how to say it for a while. "Some minor lord who pushed too hard before your father’s arrangement was finalised. He left in the middle of the night." A pause. "Nobody’s seen him since."

"Removed," Alistair repeated.

"That’s the word people use."

He turned it over.

’Removed.’ Clean word. Efficient. The kind of word that implied the messy part had already been handled by the time anyone was talking about it.

’Hm.’

"I like her already," he said.

Eleanor’s mouth curved despite itself. "You would."

"A woman who solves her problems cleanly. Nothing wrong with that."

"There is, slightly, when the solution involves a person ceasing to exist."

"Details." He shifted position, getting more comfortable. "What else?"

"She’s twenty. Three years younger than you." Eleanor smoothed her skirt — the tell, the small precise gesture she made when she was being careful about details. "The Duke is more interested in his hunting than his governance. She’s been handling Eiswald’s political affairs herself for two years." A pause. "They say she’s very good at it."

Alistair considered this.

’Inherited a neglected dukedom at seventeen.’

’Decided to run it herself instead of waiting for someone to do it for her.’

’Made suitors disappear quietly when they became problems.’

’Built the kind of reputation that made people lower their voices when they said her name.’

’...Alright. He was paying attention now.’

"You’ve been researching her," he said.

"Someone had to." She met his eyes — dry and fond in equal measure, which was somehow the combination he found hardest to argue with. "You certainly weren’t going to."

"I was going to form an opinion when I met her."

"That’s not research. That’s hoping things work out."

"I’m not hoping. I’m conserving effort. There’s a meaningful difference between those two things."

She gave him the look.

The one that said she found his self-assessment creative in a way that was not, and had never been, a compliment.

He looked back at the road.

The landscape had fully committed to being northern now. Flat grey sky, bare dark trees, hills that had given up any pretence of being scenic. The road cut through all of it with the grim, straight-line focus of something that had somewhere to be and had stopped caring about the journey somewhere around the second county back. Stone walls along the roadside — low, old, built to mark things off rather than keep them in. The occasional farm, the smoke from chimneys getting pulled apart by the wind before it got anywhere.

He liked the north better than he’d expected to.

Not because it was pleasant. It wasn’t particularly. It was cold and flat and far from everything he was used to. But it was honest. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was. He appreciated that in a landscape.

"El," he said.

"Yes."

"You know nothing changes."

Silence.

The carriage kept moving. Outside, a crow launched off a dead fence post and flew straight north without looking back. He watched it until it was gone.

"I know." Her voice was quiet — the underneath voice, the one that lived below the composed surface. "I know that, Al."

"Good."

A pause.

"...But I’m still going to find it strange."

"That’s allowed."

"Is it."

"Yes." He looked at her directly, the way he rarely did because she always saw too much when he did it. "You’re allowed to find things strange. I’m not sending you away. I’m sending myself away. That’s different."

She held his gaze for a long moment. Something moved across her face that he didn’t have a clean name for — something new, or newly visible, the kind of thing that had been there for a while and had just now stopped being quite so careful about staying hidden. He filed it away without commenting on it. Some things were better left as quiet acknowledgements rather than spoken things, where they became harder to put back where they’d been.

"Go back to sleep," she said, turning back to the window. "We have two more days."

He did.

But he lay still for a while first, looking at the ceiling of the carriage, listening to the wheels on the road.

Two more days.

Continued in Chapter 2 Part II →