The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The Collar

The temple women came at the half-moon and took her over with soft hands and hard eyes: the bathing, the oils, the gray shift that would become the rite robes, the hours of instruction in the bridal chamber's customs. The rite had a shape, and the shape had words, and the words had to be learned until they lived in her mouth like her own. The oldest of the women, a priestess with a face like a closed door, made her practice the vow until her voice went raw.

"I, Shen Xi, of the salt house of the coast, take Xiao Jin, crown prince of Dalang, before the Moon, with this body and this soul—"

"Again," said the priestess. "The Moon hears the heart behind the words. Your heart is not in it."

Nine bowed her head and said it again, and the words tasted like ash in her borrowed mouth, because they were a lie built on a lie: a dead girl's name taking a living prince, a blade practicing the vow that would either save her or burn her, and she did not know which one the Moon would hear when the time came.

She had not told him anything.

The door between their rooms stayed closed. She saw him at meals, at the court functions the temple allowed, always at a distance, always with the public face on, and the wolf-gold eyes found her across every room she entered, and neither of them crossed the space the door had made between them. He had said the door stayed unlocked until the full moon. She had not tested it. She told herself it was prudence, blade habit, the discipline of three hundred years. She lay awake at night and listened to the silence on the other side of the wood, and she knew it was not prudence, and she did not know what it was, only that it had her name on it and the name was not Shen Xi.

The moon filled like a cup being poured.

On the eve of the rite, when the sky beyond the window was already silver at the edge, the Confessor came to her room.

He came alone, through the door the temple women used, and the women melted away from him like mist from a blade, and he stood in her lamplight in his moon-bleached robes, and she saw, under the collar of his robe, the chain of collars he wore against his skin like a rosary of dead birds. She had seen him at the feast, at the Looking, always at the edge of things, always watching. She had never been alone with him. She understood, with a blade's cold certainty, that this was the conversation she had been walking toward since the night she read the register.

"Blade Nine," he said.

Not a question. He said it the way you'd say a name you had known for a long time, and he sat down across from her without being asked, and his face in the lamplight was old and still and utterly without cruelty.

"I heard you the night you came over the river bridge into Wolf-Fang City," he said. "Three hundred years of counted sins, reciting themselves under a drowned girl's skin. I have heard every blade the Nine Abysses has sent against this line. I heard Su Mingyue's, counting a decade of sins she had never committed, wearing them like a borrowed coat. I heard Gu Caiwei's. I heard Seven's, and Seven's was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard a dead voice do, and I collared her for it, and I have been sorry ever since." He looked at her, and his eyes were the color of old moonlight. "Yours was the loudest. Three hundred years, blade. A whole library of the dead, reciting itself in my skull. And then, at the Looking, in the middle of a laugh, it stopped."

The silence under her ribs was so vast she could hear the lamp burning.

"I have been a priest of the Moon for fifty years," the Confessor said. "I have heard a thousand recitations. I have never heard one die. I did not think they could die. I thought they only died with their blades, in the fire or the collar or the long fall into Hell's accounting. And yours stopped in the middle of a prince's laugh, like a bell struck once and finding it had nothing left to say." He folded his hands. "So I came to tell you what you are walking into tomorrow, because the Moon does not want your ashes, and I am the only one who can tell you the truth of the rite and stay alive afterward."

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Nothing." He said it simply. "That is the whole trouble of it, blade. For the first time in fifty years, I want nothing from a blade but the truth. So listen."

He told her the rite.

The rite was the Moon's judgment, and the judgment was simple: a bride stood before the Moon and spoke, and the Moon heard the heart behind the tongue, and a true heart spoke true words and lived, and a borrowed tongue spoke borrowed words and burned. The three brides had burned because they came to the altar speaking words that were not theirs, sentences forged in the Nine Abysses and installed under their ribs, and the Moon, which hated a borrowed tongue above all things, had taken them for the lie of it. The kingdom read the ashes as murder. The prince let it. The Confessor gathered the ashes at dawn and wrote the pages, and the pages were true, and no one read them.

"But the blessing," he said, "is cracking."

"The blessing?"

"The Moon's protection on the wolf line. It is one seamless thing, laid over the blood of the imperial house at the first rite a thousand years ago. No enemy blade can take a wolf prince while it holds." He looked at her. "Only a bride can. That is the seam Hell found, and it has been driving its blades into that seam for three years, and every blade the Moon burns at the altar cracks the blessing a little more. Su Mingyue cracked it. Gu Caiwei cracked it. Seven, who never reached her rite, cracked it another way, because the collar and the singing and the taking all fed the same wound." His voice dropped. "Hell does not need one blade to kill your prince, blade. It needs the door to break. And it has been sending brides through the Looking one at a time, patient as water, to break it."

She stared at him.

"You're telling me the brides were never meant to succeed."

"They were meant to burn. Every one of them. A blade who burns at the altar is worth more to the Nine Abysses than a blade who kills, because the burning is the work. The killing was never the point. The breaking was the point." He looked at her, and for the first time something moved behind the old moonlight of his eyes. "And then you came. The fourth blade. The loudest one. Three hundred years of sins, walking into the Looking with a dead girl's face and a mission that had already died, though you did not know it yet. And I heard your recitation stop in a laugh, and I understood that Hell had finally made a mistake."

"What mistake?"

"It sent a blade that could fall." He said it softly, like a prayer. "The first blade in a thousand years whose orders died before the altar. Do you understand what you are, blade Nine? You are the only woman in the history of the wolf line who can walk through that door tomorrow and not burn. Not because you are innocent. You are not. You are a collector of souls, three hundred years deep, and the Moon knows it, and it does not care. The Moon does not judge what you were. It judges what you say, and whether you mean it." He leaned forward, and his voice was barely a whisper. "If you love him, the rite will know. If you speak the vow with a true heart, under whatever name you can bear to say, the Moon will hear it, and you will live, and the blessing will seal itself whole again, because a true bride's vow at a cracked altar is the only thing in the world that can mend it. You are not just the fourth blade, Nine. You are the repair."

The room was very quiet.

"And if I don't love him?" she asked.

"Then you will burn like the others, and I will gather your ashes at dawn, and I will write your page, and the wolf line will be one crack closer to breaking, and Hell will send the fifth blade, and the sixth, and the seventh, until the door opens." He said it without menace, as a man states the weather. "I will not help you, blade. I cannot. I cannot speak for you at the altar, and I cannot make your heart true, and I will not lie to the Moon to save you, because I have spent fifty years being the Moon's truth and I will not spend my last night being its liar. But I will not stop you, either. I have not collared you. I have not told the prince what sleeps under your sleeve, though he has guessed the shape of it, because he is not a fool, and because he has been choosing blades for three years and calling it marriage, waiting for one to choose him back." He looked at her, and something in the old face softened. "He chose you, blade. Out of forty girls in that hall, he chose the only one who told him the truth. I have watched him bury three women he did not love and one he almost did. I am the only one in this city who hopes you love him. Not for the blessing. For him. And, if you will forgive an old priest who has burned more women than he has saved, for you."

Nine sat in the lamplight with the words settling into her like stones into a riverbed.

She had known she would burn. She had made her peace with it, the way a blade makes peace with the fire that waits at the end of every mission: it was the price of the borrowed face, the borrowed name, the borrowed life. She had not known there was a door in the fire. She had not known that the fire was a judgment, and the judgment was only this: whether what she felt for him was real.

"You wrote my name in the register," she said. "Before the Looking. Before he chose me. How did you know?"

"I heard you coming," the Confessor said. "The night you crossed the bridge, I heard the loudest recitation of my life counting its way toward my city, and I knew the ninth blade had finally come, and I wrote the line, and I sealed it, because the Moon showed me you would be chosen, and I did not know whether you would be the blade that broke the line or the blade that mended it." He looked at her. "The date at the end of your line is still blank, blade. Tomorrow you will fill it. With ashes, or with a name."

He rose, and his robes whispered against the floor, and he moved toward the door, and then he paused.

"He gave you her collar," he said, to the dark of the threshold. "The night you came. I have watched you carry it for weeks, blade. Under your pillow. In your hands when you think no one sees. I wondered if you would ever put it on."

Nine's hand went to her bare throat, and she said nothing.

"I collared her," the Confessor said. "He kept her. He carried her collar for a year, the way other men carry letters, and then he gave it to a woman he did not know, on the first night she slept in this palace, because no one had warned Seven, and he has regretted it every day since. It has always sat strangely with me, blade, that the man who buried her was the one who remembered her best."

"He remembers everyone," Nine said. "He keeps the collars of the women Hell sent to kill him, because someone should remember them."

"Kept," said the Confessor. "He kept them. He has only ever given one away."

The silence under her ribs was a held breath.

He turned, and his old moonlit face was very tired.

"Wear it tomorrow," he said.

"Why?"

"Because Seven never got her choice. She spent her last three days singing true things to a palace that could not understand them, and she never once said what she was, and the Moon loved her for it. If she had stood where you stand tomorrow, with a choice in her hand and a true heart in her chest, she would have lived." His voice was very gentle. "She was always on the side of the ones who chose, blade. If her luck can sit on anyone's throat tomorrow, she would choose yours."

He turned away, and went to the door, and stood there a moment with his back to her.

"Tomorrow the moon is full," he said. "If you love him, the rite will know. If you don't, you'll burn like the others."

The door closed behind him.

"Lucky," he said through the wood, and his footsteps went away down the corridor, and the silence came back like water filling a footprint.

Nine sat alone in the lamplight, and after a long time she went to the bed and took Seven's collar from under the pillow, where she had kept it every night since the prince left it there.

It was cool from the linen, and light, and it had no one in it. She had kept it for weeks without knowing why. She had slept with it under her pillow and carried it through the palace like a stone she could not put down, and she had never once put it on, because a collar was a thing that was put on you, and she had worn one once, a lifetime and three hundred years ago, when Hell first clamped the number into her skin, and it had been heavy, and she had never taken it off, not really, not where anyone could see. She had collected the collars of other blades in her mind like a ledger: the collared, the burned, the forgotten. She had never once seen a woman choose to wear one.

She lifted Seven's collar, and she put it on.

It settled around her throat like a breath she had been holding for three hundred years, and it was light, and it had no one in it, and she sat in the lamplight with the empty collar warm against her skin and the moon rising silver beyond the window, and she tried to be a blade about it, and she could not.

She did not know if she loved him.

That was the terrible thing, the thing that made the fire real: she did not know. She had been made to count sins, not to feel them. She had watched him kill and bury and laugh and wait, and something in her had gone soft and strange, and her hand had refused him at the stream, and her body had chosen at the riverbank, and her mouth had almost told him everything at the open door, and none of it was arithmetic. None of it counted. It was the first thing in three hundred years that would not fit in the ledger, and she did not know if it was love, and she was walking into the fire tomorrow to find out.

She touched the collar at her throat.

"Lucky," she said to the empty room, and she did not know whose luck she meant.

The moon rose over Wolf-Fang City, one night from full, and the silence under her ribs had nothing to say, and for the first time in three hundred years she wished it did. She wished it would tell her what she was, and what she wanted, and whether the wanting was enough to stand in front of the Moon and say true words with a borrowed mouth.

She did not sleep.

She sat at the window with Seven's empty collar at her throat and watched the moon fatten toward morning, and beneath the window, in the dark of the palace gardens, something moved that was not a servant and not a guard, and it paused at the edge of the light, and it looked up at her window, and then it was gone.

She did not see it.

She was counting the hours until the fire.