The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

Defending herself

It was a real laugh, bright and rough, and it rang off the rafters, and the whole hall flinched, and beside him Nine felt the dead silence under her ribs turn over like a sleeping thing. He stood, and walked around the table, and picked up the pin, and held it up to the light.

"I remember this pin," he said, pleasantly. "It was in the grave goods the temple sealed. Which means whoever put it in my bride's hair opened a sealed grave, or bribed someone who did. That is a desecration of the Moon's own seal." He looked at the woman with the red sleeve, and smiled with all his teeth. "The Moon will want to know who. Find them."

The woman collapsed. It took her a moment to remember she was supposed to protest her innocence, and by then the guards had her, and the war faction was staring at its shoes, and the Emperor was looking at his son with something between exasperation and pride.

The feast did not recover. Nine did not care. She sat at his left hand and ate the last course without tasting it, and she did not look at Meng Shuying, and Meng Shuying did not look at her, and that, somehow, was the most honest exchange of the evening.

He caught her wrist in the corridor outside her door.

It was not rough. It was fast, and precise, and before she could decide whether the drowned girl would flinch, he had turned her hand over and pressed two fingers to the inside of her wrist, and was standing there in the lamplight, reading her pulse like a man reading a letter.

"Your heart never changed," he said. "Not when they called you a thief of graves. Not when the whole hall was waiting for you to break. Not now." His thumb moved, once, across the vein. "I have held the wrists of soldiers who were calmer than you, and I have held the wrists of assassins who were not this calm. Which are you, little salt?"

His sleeve had ridden up when he caught her. The brands lay bare between them, old and dark, running up her forearm toward the elbow, prison-sigils that looked like scars if you did not know what you were seeing.

She did not pull away. A blade does not pull away. She let him look, and she watched his face, and she saw the questions move through it one by one and settle, unasked.

"The sea is rough where I come from, your highness," she said. "The ships take what they want. The sea left its marks on everyone who survived it."

"These aren't the sea's marks." His thumb traced the lowest brand, once, feather-light, and her whole arm lit up with the wanting to pull back. "I know what scars look like when they're earned. These were made. By someone who wanted to leave a receipt."

She said nothing. In the silence under her ribs, something that was not the recitation whispered: he knows. He doesn't know, but he knows.

He let her go.

"Get some sleep," he said, and his voice was ordinary again, warm and careless, as if he had not just peeled her open to the bone. "Tomorrow I'm taking you out of this city. The walls are making you reckless."

He was gone before she could answer. She stood in the corridor with her wrist burning where he had held it, and she did not know if the burning was his fingers or the brands waking up, and she did not know which was worse.

The Confessor was waiting in the colonnade between her corridor and the tower stair.

She had not heard him. She had heard nothing. He stood in the moonlight in his moon-bleached robes, and under them, she knew, hung his chain of collars, and he was smiling the smile he had smiled at her in the Looking Hall: the smile for a dish you are not sure is poisoned.

"You did well tonight," he said. "The true thing in the middle of the lie. It is the oldest trick in the book, and you performed it beautifully." He tilted his head. "I heard it stop, you know. The recitation. At the Looking, when he laughed at you in front of the whole hall. I have stood at the rites of every blade Hell has sent to this palace, and I have heard every one of their recitations, and I have never heard one stop."

Nine stood very still. The glamour was a wall of lavender and sea salt and drowned-girl softness, and she could feel it holding, and she could feel him reading through it anyway, the way the prince read her pulse.

"I know what sleeps under your sleeve," said the Confessor, softly. "I have always known. I collared Seven myself on the eve of her rite, and she sang for three days, and her song was beautiful, and at the end of it I knew everything the Moon needed me to know about the Nine Abysses and the blades it forges."

He stepped closer. The moonlight fell through the colonnade and turned his face to bone.

"You are the first blade who has ever gone quiet. I do not know yet whether you are the Moon's answer or Hell's joke. Neither, I think, does the Moon. So I will not collar you tonight, and I will not tell the prince what you are, and I will not help you." He smiled. "But I will be watching. We are all watching, little Nine. The palace has been waiting for you since the first bride burned."

He went down the stair, and his robes whispered away into the dark, and Nine stood in the colonnade with her hands at her sides and did not breathe until the cold began to hurt.

Little Nine. He had called her by her number. Not the cover. Not a name. Her number, in the mouth of a priest who had collared Seven and heard every blade's recitation and burned them one by one at the Moon's own altar.

She went up to her tower. She barred the corridor door. She sat on the bed with her back to the wall, facing the moon-phase door, and she was still sitting there an hour later when the knock came.

Not three knocks, slow and courteous. One knock, firm, the knock of a man who expects the door to open.

She opened it.

The prince stood in the lamplight of the corridor, still in his feast robes, and he was holding something wrapped in dark cloth, and his face was the public face, pleasant and sharp, and his eyes were not.

"May I come in, little salt? I have something to show you, and I would rather not do it where the walls have ears."

She stepped back. He crossed the threshold, and the room changed. It had been hers, cold and strange; now it was smaller, warmer, full of him. He looked around once, at the window seat, at the shutters, at the bed, and she watched him read the room the way he had read her pulse.

He unwrapped the cloth on the table. Inside lay a collar.

Fresh iron. New. It had never touched a throat. On the inside, where it would rest against the skin, a character had been cut into the metal, deep and careful.

The number nine. Her number. The only name she owned.

"I borrowed this from the Moon Temple's workroom while the Confessor was busy at the feast," said the prince, pleasantly. "He keeps them like a man keeps fishhooks. Ready for the next bite."

She made herself look at it, and then up at him, and she let the drowned girl's eyes go wide and frightened, which cost her nothing, because underneath, Nine was very still, the way a blade is still before it is drawn.

"What is it for, your highness?" Shen Xi asked.

"For brides who lie." He picked the collar up and turned it, so the lamplight ran along the cut character. "Seven's collar had a mark on the inside too, where it rested against the skin. I did not know what it meant until after she died. I thought it was the collar-maker's seal." He looked at her. "It was a number. Seven was the seventh blade Hell sent to kill me. They number their weapons, little salt. This one is nine. Somewhere in this palace, right now, the ninth blade is wearing a face I probably know."

The silence under her ribs was a drum. She was certain he could hear it, the way wolf blood heard everything, the way he had heard her pulse not hurry.

"Are you afraid?" he asked.

"Should I be, your highness?"

"I don't know." He set the collar down between them. "I am going to find her before she finds me. I found Seven too late, and I have carried her collar ever since, because someone should remember her. I will not be too late for the ninth." He smiled, and it did not reach his eyes. "Whatever you are, little salt, I find I am hoping you are not her. I have started to enjoy your company."

He left the collar on her table, the way he had left Seven's on her pillow, and he was gone before she could answer.

She stood in her room with her own number shining in the lamplight, and she understood, with a clarity that felt like a blade going in, the shape of what she had walked into. He was not the man the recitation had described, and he was not the monster the court feared. He was a man who kept the collars of the women sent to kill him because someone should remember them, and he had just told her, kindly, to her face, that he hoped she was not the weapon she was.

She picked the collar up. It was warm from his hands. Somewhere in the last three days she had begun to keep the things he gave her, and she did not know if that was a blade keeping trophies or a woman keeping gifts, and the silence under her ribs, which had never once in three hundred years let her wonder anything, let her wonder that.