The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

Chapter three

She had not meant to stay awake. Blades slept when the work allowed and woke when it did not, and there was no work now. There was only the silence under her ribs, where the recitation had lived for three hundred years, and every time she closed her eyes she found herself listening for it the way you listen for a tooth you have lost. The emptiness was too loud to sleep in.

She had spent the night on the window seat with her back against the cold wall, watching the moon-phase door. The carving ran its whole length: new moon at the bottom, full moon at the top, the phases climbing toward the lock. Someone had designed it as a promise. Locked, it was a joke.

The collar lay on the pillow where she had left it. Seven's collar. She had not been able to put it away. Beside it lay the note, in a careful hand, the hand of a man who had practiced mercy. Rest well, little nothing. I will come for you when the moon is full.

She did not know who had written it. She had decided, sometime in the third hour, that not knowing was worse than knowing, and she had not decided anything since.

The palace women came with the light. Three of them, soft-footed and afraid. They were afraid of her already, and by evening the whole tower would be: she was the fourth one. They washed her in water that smelled of nothing, dressed her in dove-gray silk, and the youngest, hardly more than a child, picked up the lavender water and held it like a question.

"The last one liked it too," she whispered. "The one who—"

"Hold your tongue," said the oldest, and the girl went red to the ears.

Nine stood still while they worked and let the silence in her chest do her thinking. Lavender. Seven had worn lavender. She had worn lavender herself across a hundred covers and more, because Hell stocked its dead girls with lavender and sea salt, the smell of a body that had stopped making its own. It had never once occurred to her to ask why no one questioned it. Now she knew. The palace drenched its brides in lavender as a matter of course. Hell had not chosen the scent by accident. Hell had chosen the one smell nobody would ever think twice about, and the woman at her back was pouring it onto her skin from a bottle that had probably been bought for the last bride, who had probably worn it into her grave.

The summons came before the sun was properly up. A eunuch with a voice like silk: his highness would break his fast, and the young lady would join him. Nine followed him through galleries she had never seen, past windows full of courtyards where servants stopped to stare, and she kept her eyes down and her hands folded and the silence under her ribs hummed like a bell that had been struck and had forgotten to ring.

His rooms took up the whole top of the tower. The morning light came in low and gold, and he was standing at the window when she was announced, and he turned, and for a moment the wolf-gold eyes were the only warm thing in the room.

He was not wearing the mask of the Looking. This was the man underneath: black hair loose, robe half-fastened, a cup of something steaming in one hand. He looked like he had not slept either. He looked like he slept badly as a habit.

"Sit," he said. "Eat. I don't like eating alone and I like it less with people who are afraid of me, so do me the courtesy of pretending."

There was food enough for four. Nine sat, and took a piece of bread, and ate it slowly, because that was what a girl from a dead house would do with palace bread: hoard every bite.

He watched her over his cup. "Did you sleep?"

"Like the dead, your highness." It was the truest thing she had said all morning.

That got a small, real sound out of him, halfway between a laugh and a breath. Her chest did something dangerous. The silence under her ribs ached where the recitation used to sit, the way a scar aches before rain.

"You know why I stopped at you," he said. "In the Looking. Forty girls, and they all smelled like their mothers' hopes. You smelled like a closed door. I wanted to know what was behind it."

She said nothing. The glamour had given her lavender and salt, and he had smelled through it anyway, the way he had smelled through Seven. Wolf blood. Of course.

"And then you told me the truth." He set the cup down. "Do you know how rare that is in this palace? Everyone lies to me. It's the national sport. You told me what you hate, in a room full of people who would have killed you for it. I collect true things, little salt. I have very few."

"I collect them too, your highness," she heard herself say, before the cover could stop her. "I find I am running low."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he laughed, properly, that rough bright sound, and Nine felt it go through her like a blade going in clean, and she understood, with the part of her that was still a blade, that she was in terrible danger, and it had nothing to do with collars.

"Why are you being kind to me?" she asked, because the question came out of the silence whether she wanted it or not. "Everyone thinks you kill brides. You put me in a tower with a locked door and a dead woman's collar on my pillow, and now you feed me and laugh at my jokes. What do you want from me?"

The smile stayed, but something behind it went still. "The collar was Seven's. She was my bride, and she died before her rite, and no one will tell me what happened in that room except that she sang for three days and then the collar came back empty. I keep her things. I left them for you so you would know what waits for you here, because no one told her, and I have regretted it every day since."

He leaned forward, and the wolf-gold eyes went flat and old. "I don't know what you are, little salt. But you don't smell like a bride, and you don't walk like one, and you answer questions like someone who has been questioned before. So here is my offer, and it is the only one you will get. From today until the Emperor sets the rite, you walk where I walk, sit where I sit, eat what I eat. The court will see you at my shoulder every hour of every day. That keeps you alive, because the people who killed my other brides will not move against you in front of me. And it keeps you where I can watch you, because I am very tired of being surprised."

She had thought she was prepared for him to know. She had not been prepared for him to say it out loud, gently, like a man describing the weather.

"And if I refuse?" she said.

"Then you go back to your tower and your locked door, and you wait for the rite alone, and the people who killed my other brides will have a clear road to you. Your choice. But I'd rather you stayed." He picked up his cup. "I hadn't laughed in a year before yesterday. You made me laugh in front of the whole court. I find I want to keep doing it, and I don't like owing that to anyone."

She stayed.