The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

There were forty scents in the hall. Hers was not among them.

She kept her chin down and her shoulders soft, the way the drowned girl would have stood, if she had lived. Shen Xi, the palace called her: the last orphan of the Shen salt-house of the coast, the family that went down with its ships and left nothing behind but a ward, a lavender-water scent, and a debt Hell had been glad to collect. That was the skin the Nine Abysses had sewn for her. Under it, Nine stood with her hands folded inside her sleeves and counted the ways she could kill every person in this room before the lanterns burned down. It was habit. Three hundred years of habit, and underneath it, patient as a heartbeat, the order recited his sins.

Xiao Jin. Crown prince of the wolf-blooded dynasty of Dalang. Weighed and found owing.

He has taken three brides and buried none of them with honor. He has let the border packs starve while his cellars rot with meat. He respects no one: not the Moon, not his father the Emperor, not the vows he swore at his crowning.

Jin. Ashes. She had heard the deep voice name him a hundred times and never decided whether the name was irony or a warning from the place that had named her Nine.

Nine did not listen anymore. The order never stopped. It had not stopped since the pit door shut behind her, since the deep voice had set her true name aside and given her a number instead, since it had told her the one thing she needed to know: the crown prince of the wolf kingdom had been weighed and found owing, and she was the debt collector.

Get chosen. Share his bed. Speak the condemnation in the bridal rite, and his soul would be hers to carry down.

Two blades had come before her. Seven had been sent a year ago and had not come back, and Hell had said failure, burned, forget her. Nine had not forgotten. Blades were not supposed to remember numbers, but she remembered Seven the way you remember a hand you lost. She touched the brands on her own forearms, the prison-sigils that made her a weapon instead of a woman, and she promised nothing, because promises were for people with names.

The hall was the Looking Hall of the Wolf-Fang Palace, and it was beautiful in the way a mouth full of teeth is beautiful. Black lacquer beams. A fire that did not reach the corners. Forty girls from forty houses, border holds and coast clans and generals' daughters, all of them washed and scented and trembling, because the Moon's blessing on the wolf line meant the prince could not be taken by an enemy blade, only by a bride. So the kingdom sent its daughters to be looked at, and the prince, it was said, looked at them the way a man looks at horses he does not intend to buy.

The Emperor sat on the dais, old and gray and watching his son with something Nine recognized, because she had seen it on the faces of men who knew they had raised a storm they could not call back. Beside the Emperor stood a priest in moon-bleached robes, and Nine's skin went cold when his eyes found her. The Confessor of the Moon Temple, the high priest Xuan Ji. He smiled at her the way you smile at a dish you are not sure is poisoned.

Then the prince came in, and the hall forgot to breathe.

He was beautiful in the way of things that kill you politely. Tall, black hair bound with a plain jade pin, wolf-gold eyes half-lidded with boredom, and a mouth that looked like it had been smiling at something cruel and was keeping the secret. He wore no crown. He wore dark riding robes with the collar open and the sleeves tied back for the hunt, as if the rite of choosing his future bride was an inconvenience he had dressed for badly on purpose. His knuckles were scarred. Nine filed that away, along with the way he moved, loose and dangerous, the way of something that had never once in its life been afraid.

He walked down the line of candidates without looking at any of them.

"Moth-eaten," he said to the first. "Sour," to the second. "Your mother was prettier, and I would know." Laughter, nervous and quick, from the court. The candidates blushed and curtsied and died a little, and Nine understood the game. The wolf kingdom sent its daughters. The prince sent them home with their pride in a bag. He respected no one, and here was the proof, walking the line and yawning behind his sleeve.

When he reached her, he stopped.

Nine did not look up. She had practiced this. Soft shoulders. Chin down. The drowned salt-house girl had been shy and small and would not have met the eyes of a prince. Her glamour held: pale skin, dark hair, and nothing underneath but the brands on her arms, which looked like old scars if you did not know what you were seeing.

He was quiet for a long moment.

The hall went quiet with him.

Then he leaned in, close enough that she felt the heat of him through the air, and he breathed in. Once. Twice. A man smelling a flower, or a wound. Nine felt the order pause in her chest, the way a hound pauses at a scent it cannot place. Her glamour gave her a scent, lavender water and sea salt, the cover's cheap perfume. It had fooled every door in the Wolf-Fang Palace.

The prince's eyes narrowed. Then they cleared, and he smiled, and it was not kind.

"What do you hate most, little salt orphan?"

The question was a trap. Every girl before him had been asked nothing. He had smelled the nothing on her, and he was curious, and curiosity in a thing like him was a knife. She should have said the sea. She should have said drowning, to match the cover, soft and sad and safe.

She raised her chin, because the glamour could not hide everything, and the truth came out of her bent sideways, the way blades do.

"Being laughed at, your highness."

The court gasped. Forty girls looked at her like she had bitten the Emperor. The guards shifted. Nine felt the weight of the Confessor's smile on the back of her neck and knew she had just made a mistake the size of a funeral.