The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The Resident

It did it without haste, the way a tide goes out. One motion, and it stood on the far side of the threshold, in the corridor, at the top of the stair, and it was still there, she saw, it had not left, it had only moved to where the seal held and stopped, the way a blade rests in its sheath: present, patient, waiting to be drawn.

She had watched it all night. Her body was stiff with the watching, the old watch, the one that never ended, and her new heart was beating too fast under her hand, and she could not stop looking at the collar.

It wore Seven's collar. The pale leather was dull in the gray light, the throat of it empty, and it wore it the way a man wears a key on a ring, and the table beside the lamp was still bare, and she had seen it take nothing, and it had it anyway.

Behind her, the bed rustled.

"What are you looking at," said the prince, and then he saw, and the sleep went out of his voice in the same breath it came in. "That is mine," he said. Not loud. He said it the way he said everything that mattered, like a man stating a boundary the world had forgotten. "That collar is mine. I gave it once. It is not yours to wear."

He was already moving. She heard him come up behind her, felt the heat of him at her shoulder, and his hand went past her to the doorframe, and she put her hand on his wrist, and he stopped.

"Don't," she said.

Her voice came out wrong. She heard it wrong, thin and strange, the voice of someone asking, and she had not asked for anything in three hundred years, and he heard it too, because he turned and looked at her, and the anger in his face went out like a lamp turned down, and what was left was worse.

"You're afraid," he said.

It was not a question. He said it the way he had said her name at the rite, like a man reading a thing he could not believe and could not look away from.

"I don't... " she started, and stopped, because she did not have the words, she had never needed the words, a blade does not explain fear, a blade does not have it. She looked past him at the thing on the stair, and she made herself say it, because he had stepped into fire for her and she owed him the truth the way she owed him nothing else.

"It's not here for you," she said. "It was never here for you. It's here for me."

He went very still. She had seen him still before, in the court, in the hunt, the stillness of a thing deciding whether to kill, but this was different. This was a man holding his breath.

"What is it," he said.

"The three knocks," she said. "The first nights, on my door. You told me they were not you. They were this. It knocked to know if I would answer."

"And if you had?"

"It would have known I was a blade." She looked at the thing, and it looked back, if it looked, she could never tell if it looked, it had no face she could name and it watched her anyway. "It comes for blades when blades fail. I was sent here to kill you. I failed. It is the shape of what comes for me. It has always been the shape."

He was quiet a long moment. Then he said, in the voice he used for weather: "Then it will wait a long time. I have been waiting for you longer than it has."

She did not know what to do with that. She had no shelf for it. She looked at his hand, still in hers, and she let him go, and he did not move toward the door, and that was the first gift of the day, and she did not know it was a gift yet.

The sun came over the roofs of Wolf-Fang City, and the world switched on.

It was not a metaphor. It was a flood. She had stood in daylight for three hundred years and it had been weather, information, the condition under which targets moved. Now it was warmth. The light fell across the floor in a long gold blade, and she put her hand in it, and the warmth went into her skin and up her arm and she made a sound, a small one, she did not know she had it in her, and he looked at her and his whole face changed.

"You've never felt the sun," he said.

"I've seen it," she said. "I've walked in it. I didn't... " She turned her hand in the light, watching it like a strange animal. "It was never warm before. Nothing was warm. I didn't know the world was like this. I thought it was all gray, and I was only too dull to notice."

"It's not gray," he said. "It was never gray. You were dead, love. You're not anymore."

Love. He said it like a word he had been saving. She filed it on the shelf that had no shelf, next to the other thing, and she put both hands in the sun, and she stood there until the light moved and left her, and he stood behind her and did not touch her, and that was the second gift, and she did not know she was counting.

The hunger came at midday.

It came on like weather, a hollow ache below her ribs, and she did not know what it was, she had never had it, and she put her hand on her stomach and looked at it with suspicion, and he laughed, his real laugh, the one that made him a boy.

"That's hunger," he said. "The word is hunger. You're learning to be a person."

"There is nothing to eat," she said. "The table is bare." She said it flat, but she felt the ache again, and it occurred to her, with a small cold wonder, that the ache would come again tomorrow, and the day after, that her body was hers now and it would ask and ask and ask, for food, for warmth, for sleep, for him, and she would have to answer it, every day, for the rest of her life.

"That's the Confessor's hour," he said. "Dusk. He feeds the beast in the tower. It's the only religion he has left, I think."

"Dusk," she repeated. She looked at the window, at the sun, which had never seemed slow before, and he laughed again, and she decided she would learn to make him do that, the laugh, she would learn it the way she had learned every other trade, by watching and doing it wrong until it came right.

They sparred in the afternoon, because he could not sit still and she could not watch the door, and the chamber was the only room in the world that was theirs.

He came at her the way he did everything, grinning, loose, and she met him the way she had met everything for three hundred years, and he was fast, wolf-fast, faster than any man she had ever killed, and it did not matter. Her body knew. Her body had known for three hundred years and it did not forget its trade because her heart had learned a new one. She had him on the floor with his wrist bent behind him before she understood she had moved, and she looked down at him, and the old machinery in her went quiet, and she did not know how to stop.

"Let go," he said.

She could not. She looked at her own hand, at the hold, the perfect hold, the one that ended things, and her hand would not open, because it had never once in three hundred years opened on a live throat, and the thing in the corridor was watching, she could feel it watching, and she was a blade, she was a blade, she was—

"Nine," he said. Not loud. The old name, her old name, the number, and she looked at him, and he was smiling, patient, his wrist in her hand like it was nothing, like he had all the time in the world. "You can put it down. Watch. Hand open. That's all. The world does not end when you let go. I promise. I'm the authority on it. I let you go three times a day and I'm still here."

She opened her hand.

His wrist fell free, and he did not move, did not roll away, did not take the opening, and she stared at her own empty hand like it had done a miracle, and then she sat back on the floor beside him, and they were both breathing hard, and the thing in the corridor had not moved, and the sun was going down.

"You let me," she said.

"Of course I let you," he said. "I've been trying to get you to put your hands on me for a month."

She did not laugh. She was not sure she knew how, yet, outside of him. But something in her chest did the thing the laugh did, the warm thing, and she filed it, and she looked at the window, and the light was the color of the wine he had given her, and below the window the city was going to its evening, cookfires going up, voices, the smell of oil and smoke and horses, and it was all real, all of it, and none of it knew her, and she could not touch any of it, and she understood the shape of the month for the first time: the tower was not a cage. The city was the cage. The tower was the only free place in it.

The Confessor came at dusk.

She heard him before she saw him, the soft weight of his step on the stair, and she watched the thing on the landing, and it did not turn, and she thought: it will not let him pass, it has never let anyone pass, it is older than the hand, it is older than the palace, and then the Confessor came around the turn of the stair, and he walked past the thing the way a man walks past a familiar piece of furniture, and the thing did not move, and the Confessor did not look at it, and she understood that they knew each other, the priest and the resident, the way border officers know each other, and that the Confessor had been passing that thing on that stair for longer than she had been a blade.

He carried a tray. He set it on the table, the bare table, and he lit the lamp, and then he looked at her, and he stopped.

She had forgotten. She had been forgetting all day, in the sun, in the warmth, in the new ache of hunger, she had forgotten that the face he knew was the drowned girl's face, and the face he was looking at now was the one the Moon had written in his register in no known hand, and he looked at it a long time, and his eyes went strange and old, and he said, very quietly: "I carried that name for a night and a day before I ever saw the face. The name was easier."

She did not know what to say. She had never known what to say to priests. He saved her the trouble. He set the tray between them, and she looked at it, at the steam, at the white rice and the soup and the dark pickles and the small gold cake, and her body made the sound again, the hollow sound, and she sat, and she ate.

It was the first meal of her life.

She ate slowly, the way she did everything now, like a person learning the shape of a new tool, and every taste was a door opening in a house she had not known she owned. The salt. The salt was the first thing, and it nearly undid her, it came up out of the bowl and into her and something in her chest remembered a thing her mind did not, a wind, a gray water, a hand, and it was gone before she could catch it, and she ate the rice, and the soup, and the cake, and she did not know she was crying until the prince's thumb came across her cheek, gentle, and he did not say anything, and the Confessor watched the lamp, and the thing in the corridor did not move, and the moon was rising behind the moon-door, and the first day of the seal went down into the second night, and she was still hungry, she realized, she was still hungry for all of it, the salt, the warmth, the world, him.

The Confessor gathered the tray. At the door he paused, and he looked past her, down the stair, at the thing, and he said, without turning: "It has not left the landing since first light. When I came up, it was not watching me."

She waited.

"It was watching your door," he said. "All day. It watched to see if you would open it."

"I didn't," she said.

"No," said the Confessor. "Not today."

He went down the stair, past the thing, and his steps faded, and she stood in the door of the chamber, and the thing stood at the top of the stair, and the moon was up, and somewhere below the window the city went on eating and sleeping and dying, and none of it knew what stood above it, and she stood looking at the thing for a long moment, and the thing looked back, patient as ink, and she understood the month then, all of it, in one cold bright piece: it was not a cage, and it was not a sentence. It was a question, asked every night at moonrise, and the thing at the top of the stair was the ink, waiting to see what she would write.

She turned her back on it. Three hundred years, and she had never once turned her back on a door, and she did it now, and she walked into the chamber, to the man who was watching her with his whole unarmored face, and she did not close the door, because closing it would have been an answer, and she was not answering yet, she was choosing, and the difference was the whole of her new life.

Behind her, the thing watched her turn her back, and it did not move.

It had all month.