My Orders Changed on the Wedding Night novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ring
The righteous sect leader slides a betrothal ring onto his bodyguard's palm in front of the whole Alliance, and that night a red plum pit in the roof tells the bodyguard to kill him.
Mun Ja-heon had spent three years waiting to kill him, and then the man told the whole Alliance he was going to marry him.
Ja-heon stood behind the leader's chair in the Hall of the Crane, where he always stood, with his hands folded and his face showing nothing.
It was a good face for the job.
Two hundred sect masters sat in rows below the dais for the Spring Assembly, drinking tea and waiting to be bored.
At the high table, Dam Cheol-ho, Chief of the Righteous Alliance, smiled over his prayer beads.
"Pavilion Master Yun," the Chief said warmly, "a leader of your age needs a wife.
"My niece is gentle, and her dowry is three granaries.
"Say the word, young friend, and the Alliance will call it settled."
Every head in the hall turned toward the man in the white chair.
Yun Seon-woo did not turn his head.
His hair was white, naturally white, from a fever he had caught at nine years old.
He wore it tied high, and it fell down his back.
He was thirty-one and the quietest man Ja-heon had ever met.
In three years Ja-heon had heard him raise his voice exactly once, and that was at a horse.
"I am honored by the Chief's generosity," Seon-woo said.
His voice was low, and it carried through the hall without any effort.
"But the Crane code allows its leader to take a sword-brother, a husband bound to him by vow, and I have already chosen."
A low murmur swept through the hall.
The Chief stopped smiling.
"Chosen whom?" he asked.
Seon-woo stood and turned around.
He looked at the wall past Ja-heon's shoulder for a moment, and then he looked straight at Ja-heon.
"Mun Ja-heon," he said.
Ja-heon felt the name go through the room.
"Step forward."
His feet moved before his mind caught up, because three years of taking orders had worn a path in him.
He came around the chair and stopped one pace from Seon-woo.
Seon-woo was a head and a half shorter, and he had never once seemed it.
"Hold out your hand," Seon-woo said.
Ja-heon held out his left hand, palm up.
From inside his sleeve Seon-woo took a plain silver ring set with a single chip of white jade.
He slid it onto Ja-heon's third finger.
Then he turned the hand palm up again and pressed his thumb into the center of it.
He pressed hard enough that Ja-heon felt it in his knees.
He slid the thumb down slowly, over the base of the palm, and stopped on the pulse in Ja-heon's wrist.
The pulse had been hammering for half a minute.
Nobody else in the hall could see what Seon-woo was doing.
Ja-heon knew exactly what he was doing.
"Three arrows," Seon-woo said, so low that only Ja-heon could hear.
"The Crane code says a man who has taken three arrows for his master has earned the master's name.
"You have taken four."
"That was the job, Pavilion Master," Ja-heon said.
It came out rough.
"Then take this too," Seon-woo said, "and say yes in front of them."
An elder in the third row jumped up and shouted about the code, about Ja-heon's low birth, about the Crane's dignity.
Seon-woo ignored him.
He kept Ja-heon's hand in his and his eyes on Ja-heon's face, and Ja-heon understood that he was asking.
He was not ordering.
Seon-woo was giving him a way out.
If Ja-heon said no in front of two hundred people, Seon-woo would take the shame and never speak of it again.
Ja-heon knew that about him the way he knew the sound of his footsteps.
He also knew what was sewn into the hem of his own left sleeve.
It was a red needle, no longer than a finger joint, with one drop of Blood Cult poison on its tip.
It had sat there for three years, waiting for an order that never came.
"I accept," Ja-heon said.
He said it loudly enough for the back row to hear.
Something moved behind Seon-woo's black eyes, quick and bright, and then it was gone.
"Then it is done," said Yun Seon-woo.
Chief Dam rose and raised his cup, beaming, and said the Alliance would bless the vow with all its heart.
His smile was a little too quick.
Ja-heon noticed it, and then the elders began shouting again and he forgot it.
Hours later, in the dark guard hut behind the stables, Ja-heon took off his coat.
Something rattled in the roof.
A plum pit dropped out of the thatch and rolled across the floor.
He knew what it was before he picked it up.
The kitchen girl had left it there while he stood in the hall being engaged.
Inside the hollow shell was a paper slip no wider than a barley leaf.
The handwriting was his lord's, shaky and so familiar that Ja-heon's throat closed.
"Accept the marriage," it said.
"Use the needle on the wedding night.
"Bring home the key to the Crane's Seal."
Ja-heon sat on the cot with the ring on his finger and the slip in his other hand.
He did not move until the candle burned out.
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