The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The Hunt

The horses were waiting when the sky was still gray, and the prince was already mounted, and he looked at her coming down the tower stair with her borrowed girl's face and her borrowed girl's clothes and he smiled in a way that made her want to turn around and go back to bed.

"You look like the palace dressed a ghost for a picnic," he said. "Can you ride?"

"A little, your highness."

"Good. Today you learn properly."

They rode out of Wolf-Fang City through the west gate while the city was still waking, past the last wine shops and the first fields, and the world opened around her like a hand unclenching. Nine had crossed countries in her three hundred years. She had crossed them at night, in the margins, in the space between one kill and the next, and she had never once looked at the land she was crossing. It was something Hell had taken from her without her noticing, the way it had taken her name: the ordinary looking at things. The river ran gray and gold in the early light. The terraced fields climbed the hills like stairs built for giants. The air smelled of water and turned earth and something green she had no name for, and she kept her eyes down and her hands soft and her heart in a place where the silence could not reach it, and she looked anyway. She could not help it. It was like being thirsty for three hundred years and suddenly standing in a river.

The prince rode ahead of her, loose and easy, and he did not look back, and she understood that this was the test: he was giving her rope to see what she did with it. A bride who rode like a courier, who watched the tree line like a soldier, who checked the river crossing before she took it — that bride was not a salt orphan. So she rode badly on purpose, clinging, letting the horse have its head, gasping at the pace, and underneath the performance she watched him the way she had watched the Looking Hall: everything, all at once, filed away.

He pushed the pace along the river road until her cover's breath was genuinely short, and then he reined in at a broken bridge and looked at her, and his eyes were half-lidded and pleased.

"You ride like a sack of rice," he said. "But you haven't fallen off, and you haven't complained, and you haven't asked where we're going. The last three women I took past this bridge asked within the first mile."

"Did they get answers, your highness?"

"They got the bridge." He turned his horse down into the ford, and the water came up dark and cold to the horses' chests. "Come on, little salt. The country bites, but it only eats the slow."

She followed him into the water, and the cold took her breath, and she let it, because it was real, and because the silence under her ribs had nothing to say about cold water and gray light and a prince who rode ahead of her with his back open like an invitation she was no longer sure she knew how to accept.

The grain wagons were burning when they came over the rise.

Nine saw them before he did — the smoke, the movement, the dark shapes — and she had her hand inside her sleeve, on the thin blade, before her cover remembered to be afraid. She made herself gasp instead, made her eyes go wide, made her hands fumble at the reins, and the prince reined in and looked at the road ahead, and the easy pleasure went out of his face like a lamp blown out.

"Stay," he said, and it was not the prince who said it. It was the wolf. "Get off the road. Behind the rock. Do not move, do not scream, do not watch if you can help it."

He rode forward alone.

Nine took the horse behind the rock. And then she watched, because she could not help it, because she had been made to watch, and because the man riding toward the burning wagons was the man she had been sent to kill, and she needed to know what he was.

There were eight of them. Raiders, wolf-blood, lean the way starvation is lean, with pale gold eyes, wolf eyes gone feral. They had pulled the first wagon over and were cutting the traces, and the guards lay in the road, and the grain was spilling out of the split sacks into the mud, and the raiders were scooping it up with their bare hands, eating it raw, desperate, with the prince of Dalang riding down on them and not one of them looking up until he was among them.

He did not draw a sword. That was the first thing Nine noticed, and it was the most frightening thing she had ever seen. He rode into the middle of them and slid from the saddle like water, and his hands were empty, and then they were not.

The leader was a big man, scarred, with the look of a pack wolf gone bad, and he came at the prince with a stolen blade and the rage of a man who has lost everything twice. The prince moved. That was all. He moved the way weather moves, and the big man's blade was suddenly in the prince's hand, and the prince's other hand was on the big man's throat, and the fight was over before Nine understood it had begun.

The rest of the raiders broke. Two of them ran. One of them, a boy, no older than the girl who had brought the lavender water, stood frozen with grain in his hands, and the prince looked at him, and the wolf-gold eyes were terrible and patient, and the prince said: "Go home. Tell your elders the grain is on the road. It was always on the road. You attacked your own dinner."

The boy ran. The prince let him.

The leader was dying in the mud, and the prince knelt beside him, and the dying man looked up at him with the pale gold eyes and spat: "You let us starve. Last winter. You sat in your tower and you let us starve, and our children—"

"I know," said the prince.

He said it quietly, without defense, and the dying man's eyes went still, and the prince closed them with his own hand, and then he stood in the road among the wreckage of the wagons and the spilled grain, and he looked at the dead guards, and he looked at the dead raiders, and he said nothing at all for a long moment.

Nine watched him from behind the rock, and the silence under her ribs was so vast she could hear the river.

She had been sent to kill this man for letting the border packs starve. It had been the second coin in the counting, the one she had carried for three hundred years, and she had just watched him kill a starving man who had spoken the accusation aloud, and take it, and kneel in the mud and close the man's eyes, and she did not know what to do with the man who had done all of it, and the recitation's ghost had nothing to say, and she hated the silence for the first time since it had fallen, because it left her alone with what she had seen.

He came back to her, and his hands were red, and he looked at her with the public face gone and something raw underneath it.

"You watched," he said. "I told you not to watch."

"I couldn't help it, your highness." It was true. It was the truest thing she had said to him.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he took her hand, and she let him, and he wiped the blood off her fingers with the tail of his sleeve, carefully, as if she were the one who had killed.

"Can you ride?" he asked.

"Yes, your highness."

"Then ride." He mounted, and looked back at the burning wagons, and his voice was flat. "There will be men here in an hour to bury them. Tell the warden at the pass I said to bury the wolves on the hill, facing their own country. They were wolves. They should lie like wolves."

He rode on, and she rode after him, and they did not speak again until the sun was high.

They stopped at a stream to let the horses drink, and the prince knelt at the water and washed the blood off his hands, and Nine stood on the bank with her heart in her throat, and she understood, with a blade's cold clarity, that his back was to her, and they were alone, and there was no one within a mile who would see.

One clean moment.

Her hand moved toward her sleeve, where the thin blade slept, and stopped. She pushed it. She commanded it, the way Hell had taught her to command it, the way she had commanded it through a hundred kills in a hundred countries, and her hand would not move. Not because it was afraid. It was not afraid. Her hand was perfectly still, and the moment was perfectly open, and the blade stayed where it was, and somewhere under the silence in her chest, something that was not a blade and not a number and not the deep voice's property, something that had been asleep for three hundred years, whispered: no.

The prince finished washing his hands. He stood, and turned, and looked at her, and she did not know if he had known she was there with the moment open behind him, and she would never know, because his face gave nothing.

"Every other bride would have run by now," he said. "The first one begged to go back before we reached the river, and I turned the horses around, and she thanked me, and three nights later she stood before the Moon and tried to kill me. The second one rode beside me for a whole day without saying a word and never once looked at the country, and I thought she was shy, and she was only waiting for the rite to finish it. Seven laughed at everything and sang at the ford, and I almost believed her, and they collared her for it, and she sang for three days, and she never told them a thing that mattered." He walked toward her, and stopped a hand's breadth away, and the wolf-gold eyes were close enough that she could see the ring of darker gold around the pupil, like a year's worth of sunsets. "But you. You watched me kill a man, and you didn't scream. You didn't faint. You didn't run. You sat on that rock and you watched, the way you watched the feast, the way you watch everything, like a woman taking notes for a test she already knows the answers to."

The silence under her ribs was a held breath.

"What are you, little salt?" he asked.

And Nine opened her mouth to give him the drowned girl, the soft answer, the lie that had kept her alive through a hundred doors, and what came out instead was the truth, small and raw and terrified:

"I don't know anymore."

He looked at her. The sun was behind him, and his face was in shadow, and she could not read him, and for three hundred years she had never needed to read anyone, because the deep voice had read them all for her and told her what to feel, and the voice was gone, and she was standing in the light with a man who had just asked her what she was, and she had answered him with the only true thing she had left.

"Good," he said softly. "Neither do I."

He turned and mounted, and rode on, and she stood by the stream for a long moment with her hand over the blade that had refused her, and she understood that the disarm was not in the voice anymore. The voice had died in his laugh, but the body had its own memory, and the body had chosen, and the body had chosen him, and she was standing on a riverbank in a country she had never once looked at, holding a blade she could no longer lift against the only man who had ever made her want to stay in a room.

The moon was fatter tonight. She counted the days until it would be full, and she counted them the way a woman counts the days until a door opens, and she did not know if she was counting toward his promise or her death, and she rode on after him, and the wanting rode with her, and it was the only thing in her that was still alive.