Sent as the Alliance Leader's Hostage Husband novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Red Palanquin
Ye-han arrives at the Alliance's lake fort as the Demon Cult's hostage husband, and the Leader stops a blade with his bare hand and tells him he knows about the needle in his braid.
They carried him into the Alliance's lake fort in a red palanquin.
Seol Ye-han had been sitting in it for nine hours, and he looked wonderful.
That was the plan.
If he was going to be handed to his enemies, he would go in crimson silk and gold chain, with kohl on his eyes.
He was twenty-five, the Young Lord of the Crimson Night Cult.
The Martial Alliance called his people the Demon Cult, and they were not entirely wrong.
The curtain lifted, and Dawn Hall rose over a black lake in grey stone and grey banners.
Four hundred sect masters stood on the steps to watch him arrive.
Nobody clapped.
That was fine.
Ye-han stepped down onto the flagstones and snapped his fan open, and the iron ribs caught the light.
Three hundred sword hands tightened at once.
He enjoyed it very much.
"The hostage will be searched," said a thin old man in elder's blue.
The old man had the pinched mouth of someone who had been sour his whole life and was proud of it.
Ye-han would come to call him the Hall Elder, and later some other things.
"I am the husband," Ye-han said pleasantly.
"The hostage," the Hall Elder said. "Give me the fan."
"Come and take it."
The Hall Elder smiled and nodded to the guard beside him.
The guard's sword left its sheath without a sound, and it was aimed at Ye-han's face.
Ye-han had half a second to decide whether to kill a man on his first day of peace.
He had the fan up and his weight already shifted when a hand came in from the side and closed around the blade.
A bare hand.
It caught the steel by the flat, between the guard's grip and the point, and it held.
Blood ran down the wrist and dripped on the stone.
The guard stared.
The man who had caught the sword didn't look at him.
He was tall, and broad enough that the grey linen of his robe pulled tight across his shoulders.
His skin was tanned, and his close-cropped hair had gone grey at the temples.
A scar cut through his upper lip, and his eyes were the grey of rain.
A string of plain wooden beads hung at his wrist.
"He is my guest," said Do Gyeong-wook, the Leader of the Martial Alliance.
His voice was low and unhurried, and it carried over the whole courtyard.
"He is also my husband, since this morning's seals."
He turned his hand, and the blade snapped.
"Touch him again and you answer to me."
The guard dropped the stump of his sword.
The Hall Elder's smile went thin.
"Leader. The elders agreed the terms."
"The elders agreed to a marriage," Gyeong-wook said.
"This is one."
He turned to Ye-han then, finally, and Ye-han looked up at him.
Ye-han had practiced his expression in the palanquin, bored and poisonous and amused.
He forgot it.
Up close Gyeong-wook smelled of pine ash and iron, and a single drop of his blood had landed on the back of Ye-han's hand.
"Young Lord," Gyeong-wook said.
"Leader."
"Your hand is shaking."
"It is anticipation," Ye-han said.
"For what?"
Ye-han had no answer ready, so he took the bleeding palm in both of his ringed hands and turned it to the light.
The cut ran deep across the heel of it.
"You're a fool," he said. "That will scar."
"I have others."
Gyeong-wook's thumb moved across his knuckles, once, and Ye-han's whole arm went warm to the shoulder.
He took his hand back, which cost him something.
The vow ceremony took an hour.
They knelt on a cushion before an ancestral tablet and drank from two wooden bowls.
The Sealing Elder read nine articles of peace aloud.
Ye-han gave every response perfectly.
All the while he thought about the needle.
It was as thin as a horsehair, and it was hidden in the red cord of his left braid.
His regent, Elder Ma, had pressed it into his palm three weeks ago in the dark of Blood Moon Citadel, smiling his gentle smile.
"One scratch, Young Lord," Ma had said.
"Do it by the hundredth night.
"The Leader dies in his own bed, and the Alliance is blamed for breaking the peace."
Ye-han had smiled back.
It was an excellent plan, and he'd had every intention of carrying it out.
Then he looked at the man kneeling beside him, bleeding quietly into a bandage and not complaining.
For the first time in his life, Ye-han lost his nerve.
At the last bow, the elders rose, and the noise in the hall swelled.
Ye-han leaned forward to lift the cup, and Gyeong-wook leaned forward too.
His shoulder touched Ye-han's.
His mouth was a hand's breadth from Ye-han's ear.
"Young Lord," Gyeong-wook said, so softly that no one else could have heard.
"You have a needle in your braid."
Ye-han's blood stopped moving.
"Use it tonight," said the Leader of the Martial Alliance.
"I would rather know."
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