The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

Chapter four

The morning court was held in the Hall of Hanging Lamps, and Nine stood at his shoulder and learned the shape of the man the kingdom feared. He heard petitions like a man pulling teeth: fast, merciless, and over. A merchant who had watered his silk got his license burned. A captain who had abandoned his crew to slavers got the same courtesy the slavers would have given him. The hall loved him and hated him in equal measure, and he seemed to feed on it.

Then a warden of the western passes came forward, gray and hollow-cheeked, and knelt, and asked for grain for the border packs, who were starving again after the winter kill failed. Nine felt the recitation's ghost stir in the dead silence under her ribs. He has let the border packs starve while his cellars rot with meat. She had counted that sin like a coin for years. She watched him now, the man who had done it, waiting for the cruelty.

He granted it. Coldly, publicly, with conditions that made the warden swallow his pride, but he granted it, and then he signed the order himself, in his own hand, which the ministers did not do. Nine watched his fingers move across the paper and did not know what to do with what she was seeing. The voice that had told her what to think about him was gone. She was standing in the wreckage of her purpose, watching the man she had been sent to kill sign away grain to the people he had been accused of starving, and the silence offered no verdict.

"Disappointed?" he murmured, without looking at her, as the warden withdrew.

"Trying to decide if it was real, your highness."

"Good. So am I."

Between petitions, in the gallery behind the throne, the whispers found her. Court ladies, young ones, who had not learned to keep their faces. "That's her. The fourth one." "Lavender, like the last." "She'll be ash by the next moon. They always are." "They say he does it himself, in the bridal chamber, so the Moon can't refuse the line." "No, the Moon refuses him. It's the blood. The line is cursed, and he burns them to spite it." "The poor thing. She doesn't know."

She stood at his shoulder and heard her death discussed like the weather, and she held the drowned girl's soft face perfectly still, and underneath it, Nine counted each whisperer, and filed them, and felt nothing at all, and was grateful for the one thing the silence had not taken from her.

The day went like that. She ate when he ate. She stood where he stood. Twice he touched her, once to steer her out of the way of a servant's tray, once to hand her his cup when his hands were full, and both times her skin remembered it for hours. By evening the palace had a new story: the prince's shadow, the salt girl who did not flinch.

They set her back in the tower as the lamps were lit. The women came, and went. The door to the corridor was barred from the outside. The moon-phase door waited, locked, patient, its carving climbing toward a moon that was visibly fatter than it had been last night.

Nine stood at the window and watched the real moon rise over Wolf-Fang City, and she counted the days until it would be full, and she did not know if she was counting toward the rite, or toward the promise in the note, or toward the moment when Hell noticed its blade had gone quiet and came to collect.

She did not eat. She lay down in the dark with Seven's collar beside her and the note under her hand, and she listened to the tower settle, and she thought about his laugh, and she hated herself for it, and she was still hating herself for it when the knocks came.

Three of them. Slow. Courteous. On the moon-phase door.

Nine was on her feet without deciding to move, the thin blade Hell had forged into her sleeve already in her hand, her breath stopped, her whole body a question. The knocks had come from the prince's side. Three. A man knocking on a door he did not intend to enter. No voice followed. No footsteps. No second round.

She stood at the door with the blade in her hand and did not open it. A blade would have opened it. A blade would have wanted to know what was on the other side, because knowledge was the only armor blades wore. She stood there in the dark, the lock cold under her knuckles, and she did not open it, and she did not know if that was survival or cowardice or something else entirely, and the silence under her ribs, which had been her prison for three hundred years, was now the only thing in the world that would not tell her what to do.

After a long time she heard, on the other side of the wood, the soft sound of someone breathing out. A sigh. Almost gentle.

Then nothing.

She did not sleep. She sat on the floor with her back to the moon-phase door until the gray came, holding Seven's collar in both hands, and she thought about three knocks, and three brides, and a man who wrote notes to women he was afraid of losing, and she understood that whoever had knocked had not wanted in.

They had wanted to know if she would answer.

She had not.

And she did not know, yet, whether that meant she was still a blade, or no longer anything at all