The Wealthy King Pretended To Be Dying To Test His Wife and Children..What The Did Left Him Heartb….

Chapter 6

The king’s condition worsened at a pace that satisfied even the most pessimistic of the court physicians. He no longer spoke. His eyes remained closed from morning until night, his breathing so shallow and slow that servants crept past his door with their hands clasped in prayer, certain each time that they would find the chamber in mourning. Dr. Hart’s reports grew grimmer by the day, delivered in a voice of professional sorrow that Alys, who knew the truth, found almost unbearable to listen to. To the household, the king seemed already halfway gone.

In truth, King Theron had never been more awake. He lay within his own silence, absorbing everything that happened around him with a clarity that had been sharpened by weeks of enforced stillness. He knew which of his stewards had begun to pack their belongings. He knew which of his nobles had quietly changed their allegiances. He knew, because Alys told him each night in whispers, exactly how much of his treasury had been moved, which estates had changed hands, and which of his wife’s ladies had grown suddenly, suspiciously wealthy.

And he knew that Queen Cressida’s ambition had outgrown the treasury.

It began, as these things always did, with a name spoken in the wrong place. Alys overheard it in the kitchens — a whispered reference to a foreign merchant, a man of immense wealth who had arrived in the city under the guise of trading in silks, and who had been seen, more than once, in the company of the queen’s personal steward. The name was Voss. The description, filtered through the gossip of scullery maids and footmen, was of a man who smiled like a courtier and counted money like a king.

Alys carried the news to the sickroom that night, and the king’s hand, beneath the blanket, tightened around hers. “A merchant,” he murmured, his voice barely audible. “And for what purpose does my wife need a merchant? The treasury is already hers for the taking. What does she intend to buy — or sell — that requires a man of foreign wealth?”

He did not have to wait long to find out.

Three days later, Alys was tending the candles in the king’s chamber — part of her carefully maintained disguise, for even in the king’s illness, someone had to keep the flames burning — when she heard the soft click of the side entrance opening. The side entrance was a small, unremarkable door that led to a private corridor used by the royal family, and no servant was permitted to use it without express leave. Alys, stationed behind the heavy curtains of the bed, watched as the door swung inward and three figures stepped into the sickroom.

Queen Cressida came first, magnificent in a gown of deep emerald, her face composed and satisfied. Behind her came a man Alys did not recognize — tall, foreign, with the careful grooming of a man who spent his life in the company of money — and behind him, a smaller, furtive figure in the dark robes of an appraiser, carrying a leather case of instruments.

The king lay motionless beneath his blankets, his breathing carefully measured, his face arranged in the practiced stillness of a man who could hear nothing at all. Alys, hidden in the shadows of the bed-curtains, held her own breath and watched.

The foreign merchant circled the chamber slowly, his eyes moving with professional appreciation over the tapestries, the gilded sconces, the ancient stone of the walls. “Your Majesty’s apartments are as fine as the stories say,” he murmured, and there was a hunger in his voice that made Alys’s skin prickle. “One would hardly believe the king lies dying in such splendor.”

“The king,” Queen Cressida said, with the faintest emphasis on the title, “lies dying in exactly the splendor he deserves. Now — you have seen the ledgers. You know what I am offering. But there is one piece of this arrangement that I have kept private, even from my own stewards. A piece that I believe will interest you far more than any estate or chest of gold.”

She crossed to the ancient stone wall behind the king’s headboard — the wall where, Alys knew, generations of the royal family had hung their most sacred tapestries. And then Queen Cressida did something that made Alys’s blood run cold. She pressed her palm against a section of the stone that looked, to any eye, identical to the rest of the wall, and she pushed. There was a soft, grinding sound, and a section of the wall swung inward, revealing a compartment hidden in the depth of the stone, a compartment that had been sealed for generations.

Inside the compartment stood a statue.

It was carved from solid gold, life-sized and gleaming even in the dim candlelight, a figure of a king in full regalia — the first king of Aldermere, the founder of the line, preserved by his descendants for centuries behind that wall of stone. It was not meant to be sold. It was not meant to leave the family’s protection. It was, Alys understood with a sickening clarity, the single most sacred object in all the kingdom — older than the throne itself, worth more than every estate and chest of gold the queen had already stolen combined.

The merchant stepped forward, his breath catching in his throat. He circled the statue slowly, running appraising eyes over every detail of its craftsmanship, murmuring his admiration in a language Alys did not recognize. The appraiser followed, his instruments already in his hands, tapping and measuring with the practiced detachment of a man who had valued a thousand treasures and would value a thousand more.

It was the appraiser who spoke the number first, in a low, reverent voice. And when the merchant nodded, and named a sum of his own — a sum vast enough to secure a fortune spanning generations — Queen Cressida smiled.

It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a woman who had just watched her last hesitation die.

“Once the king breathes his last,” she said softly, “this belongs to me. Prepare the payment. Return the moment his funeral rites are concluded, and the statue will be waiting for you.”

The merchant nodded, his eyes never leaving the golden figure. “It will be an honor to give such a treasure a proper home,” he said. “A king of Aldermere, ruling from a palace across the sea. There is something fitting in that, is there not?”

“Fitting,” Queen Cressida agreed. “And final.”

The two men left the compartment exactly as they had found it, sealing the golden king back behind the stone. The queen lingered a moment longer, her hand resting on the wall, and Alys saw her lips move in a silent prayer — or perhaps a promise — before she too turned and left the chamber, the door closing softly behind her.

The room fell silent. The candles guttered in the draft. And Alys, still hidden in the shadows of the bed-curtains, looked at the king.

A single tear had slipped from the corner of his closed eye and was tracing a slow path down his temple, catching the candlelight like a jewel. He did not move. He did not speak. He lay as still as the golden king sealed behind the stone, and Alys understood, with a grief that surprised her, that the tear was not for the treasure. It was not even for the betrayal, though that was vast enough to drown a kingdom in. It was for the quiet, unbearable proof of exactly how little his life had come to mean to the woman who had shared his bed for eighteen years.

She lowered her eyes and continued her quiet work, trimming the candles with hands that trembled, carrying his grief alongside her own. She said nothing. She understood, without being told, that the king’s silence was deliberate, that his plan required her own restraint a while longer.

But she also understood something else. She understood that the queen had just made a mistake — the kind of mistake that kings and queens made only once, the kind that cost them everything. She had shown her hand. She had revealed the depth of her greed, the reach of her ambition, the final, terrible measure of what she was willing to take from a man who was not yet dead.

And the man who was not yet dead had been listening to every word.