The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 777

There is a story they tell in the villages of the south, about the most romantic couple anybody ever knew.

They had been married fifty-five years.

Everybody in the district knew them. They walked to anywhere arm in arm, they sat on the same bench outside the bakery every morning, and when the regional paper wanted a feature on lasting love, it was always their door the reporter knocked on.

And every time, the wife said the same thing.

"We're a happy couple. My husband is so kind to me. Fifty-five years, and he has never once raised his voice. He helps me with everything. Always romantic." She would put her hand over his on the table.

"And if there's an afterlife, I'll marry him again. I want to be his wife there too."

The husband never said anything.

He only sat beside her, and smiled, and nodded.

The reporter came back the next day, and the wife had gone into town for the market, and the old man was sitting on the bench by himself.

The reporter sat down next to him with his notebook.

"Your wife always says she'd marry you again in the next life," he said. "I've never heard your side of it. Would you? Would you marry her again?"

The old man did not answer straight away.

He looked left down the road. He looked right toward the bakery.

He looked over his shoulder at his own front door, and he waited until he was quite sure there was nobody anywhere near enough to hear.

Then he shook his head.

"Please," he said. "In the next life, could I please have somebody else?"

...

The Emperor of the Leonhart Empire had married his first two wives for a great many reasons.

Very few of them were love.

The First Queen had come with the northern provinces.

Her father controlled the rail and the grain and the two largest regiments on the border, and a young prince who wanted to be Emperor could not afford to have that man as an enemy.

The Second Queen had come with the banks. Her family held the debt of half the noble houses in the capital, and the Treasury itself had borrowed from them twice in a bad decade.

So he had married them. Both of them. Before he was thirty.

And they had put him on the throne.

That was thirty-five years ago.

He had been Emperor for all of it, and for all of it their families had sat in his council. Their ministers had drafted his laws.

Their votes had decided his budgets, and their sons were the two names every man in the capital had quietly already chosen between.

He wore the crown. He signed the decrees. He sat on the seat at the end of the Hall of Council.

And there were nights, more of them every year, when Maximillian Leonhart lay awake and asked himself whether he was actually the Emperor at all.

"Alexander."

The Emperor's voice came down the length of the hall, and it was quite gentle.

"I understand what the voice is telling you, and I hear the anger in it. But you should understand something too." He folded his hands.

"I love my wives. The First Queen and the Second Queen are good women. They helped me build this Empire, stone by stone, for thirty-five years. I cannot simply remove them."

On the left side of the floor, the Minister of the Interior closed his eyes in relief.

On the right, the First Queen's ministers let out a breath together.

Alexander opened his mouth to answer.

And the Emperor vomited blood.

It came out of him all at once, bright and dark together, over his hand and down the front of the plain dark coat and onto the step below the throne. He folded forward in the chair with his fist against his mouth and his shoulders jerking.

Somebody in the gallery screamed.

"Your Majesty!"

The Prime Minister was the first one up the steps. He was seventy years old and he took them two at a time, and he got an arm round the Emperor's shoulders as another mouthful came up and spattered the black stone.

"A doctor! Get a doctor in here, now—"

"No."

The Emperor lifted his head.

There was blood on his chin and in his grey beard and all over his right hand, and his eyes, when they came up, went straight across forty metres of floor to his tenth son.

"No doctor," he said. "It's the curse."

The whole hall went still.

"The curse?" The Prime Minister was still holding him. "Your Majesty, what curse?"

"Who would dare?" somebody said from the middle benches. "Who would dare lay a curse on the Emperor?"

The Emperor did not look at any of them. He was looking at Alexander.

"Alexander." His voice had gone rough, but it carried. "Tell me the truth. Is this what the voice in your head told you? That the ancestor of our house has said — if I do not clear the First Queen and the Second Queen and their power out of this hall, then I will die?"

Alexander had absolutely no idea what to say.

There was no voice.

There had never been a voice.

There was no ancestor, no great-great-grandfather, no ghost in the walls of the summer castle.

And he had not touched the Emperor.

He had not been within forty metres of him. Not a needle, not a thread of energy, not a single point on the man's body. Whatever had just come out of his father's mouth, it had not come from him.

So how was his father cursed?

He did not answer.

He did not need to, as it turned out, because the Emperor did not wait for him.

Maximillian Leonhart wiped his mouth slowly with the back of his hand, and then he took the Prime Minister's arm and used it to stand up.

He stood in front of his throne with blood down the front of his coat, and he looked out over two hundred of the most powerful men in the Empire.

"Everyone, listen to me."

Nobody made a sound.

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