Married to the Emperor's Fiercest General, Who Is Terrified of Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Veil
On the wedding night the scholar lifts his own veil to fight, and the most feared general in the empire backs into the door frame and knocks his head; the scholar finds a box of seven years of his own essay poems under the bed in the general's clumsy hand.
Jing Wenxuan lifted his own veil, because nobody else was going to.
He had sat on the wedding bed for a full hour, and he was done waiting.
He threw the red silk on the floor and stood up with both fists ready.
The most feared man in the empire stood in the doorway, and he took one step backward.
His head hit the door frame with a crack that rattled every lantern in the room.
For a moment neither of them moved.
General Ge Zhenyuan was a head and a half taller than anyone at court, with a scar across his jaw and another through his left hand.
The whole capital said he had cut down three hundred men at Hanlu Pass and not blinked.
He was blinking now, fast, with one hand pressed to the top of his skull.
"Door," he said.
It was the only word he said.
"You hit your head on the door," said Wenxuan.
The general's ears went red.
Then his neck went red, and then the red climbed his face until it reached the scar.
Wenxuan had come to this room ready to be broken.
The emperor had announced the match in front of the whole court that morning, laughing, as a joke.
"Two men who bow to nobody," His Majesty had said. "Let them bow to each other."
Wenxuan had been top scholar for exactly eleven days.
He had written a memorial that made the Minister of Rites cry in public, and the general had refused every bride the throne offered him.
So the emperor, annoyed with both of them, had married them to each other.
Every guest at the banquet had looked at Wenxuan with pity.
Wenxuan was twenty-three, slim, and a head shorter than the general's shoulder.
Everybody expected the Marshal of the North to snap him in two.
"Well?" Wenxuan said. "I'm ready. Let's get it over with."
The general took a very careful step into the room.
He stopped by the table and picked up the wine cup.
His hand shook so hard that the wine slopped over his sleeve.
"I'm not going to," he said, in a low scratchy voice, to the floor.
"Not going to what?"
"Hurt you."
Wenxuan folded his arms.
"Then what are you going to do?"
The general looked at the bed, and looked away so fast his neck cracked.
"I'll sleep elsewhere."
"Where?"
A long pause.
"The stable."
Wenxuan stared at him.
"The stable."
"The horses are quiet," said the general.
"It's our wedding night."
"I know," said the general, miserably.
He put the cup down, picked it up again, and drank it, and then he choked on it.
Wenxuan lifted his chin.
Twenty guests in the courtyard were waiting for sounds from this room, and the servants would be listening at the screen.
If the general left now, the whole manor would say the scholar had been thrown out of his own bridal chamber.
"If you walk out that door," Wenxuan said, "I'll tell them you ran."
The general stood very still.
"I'll tell them the Marshal of the North ran from a man who weighs half what he does, on the night of his own wedding."
"That's true," said the general.
"Then stay."
"I can't," said the general.
"Why not?"
The general opened his mouth, and shut it, and looked at the door frame.
"Because," he said, and nothing came after it.
Wenxuan waited.
He was very good at waiting for people to lie to him.
This man did not lie.
He simply could not talk.
"Fine," Wenxuan said at last. "Go to your horses."
The general's shoulders dropped with relief, and it was almost insulting.
"But tomorrow you'll eat breakfast with me at the table," said Wenxuan. "And you'll look at me while you do it."
The general swallowed.
"Yes," he said.
"Say it in a full sentence."
"I will eat breakfast with you, and I will look at you."
He said it.
Then he bowed, hit the door frame with his elbow on the way out, and was gone.
Wenxuan sat down on the bed.
His hands were shaking, and he could not have said whether it was fear or the strongest urge to laugh he had ever had.
"Three hundred men," he said to the empty room.
He got up and began to search.
A man who meant to kill him would not have walked into a door.
A man who was hiding something would have run, and this one had run too, to the stable.
The room had almost nothing in it.
A sword stand, a plain wardrobe, a bare table, no scrolls, no flowers, not a single picture on the wall.
Under the bed, pushed far back against the wall, was a long wooden box with a cracked lid.
Wenxuan pulled it out and opened it.
It was full of paper, folded small and tied in bundles with army cord.
He took out the top sheet.
The hand on it was huge, blunt and crooked, the writing of someone who held a brush.
The words were not.
They were the closing poem of an essay on grain taxes, the one Wenxuan had written at sixteen for a provincial exam, and he knew it as well as his own name.
It had been copied out so many times that the paper had gone soft as cloth.
Beneath it was the next sheet, and the next, each one dated in the same clumsy hand, one every few months.
The earliest was seven years old.
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