The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The dream

She dreamed of Seven that night.

It was not the first time. Blades were not supposed to dream of numbers, but Nine had dreamed of Seven since the day the deep voice said failure, burned, forget her, the way you dream of a hand you have lost. In the dreams Seven was always whole, always singing, always somewhere Nine could not reach her.

This dream was different. This time Seven was in the room with her.

She stood by the window of the tower room, in the moonlight, and she wore no collar. Her throat was bare and pale and unmarked, and she was beautiful the way a closed book is beautiful, and she was singing. It was the song she had sung for three days, the one the whole palace still whispered about, and Nine could not make out the words, only the shape of them, rising and falling like water finding its level.

Then Seven stopped, and turned, and looked at her with eyes that were the exact color of the space where the recitation used to live.

"Whatever you do at the rite," said Seven, "don't speak it."

Her voice was careful, low, the voice of someone who had learned kindness late and was still practicing it. It was the kind of voice that wrote notes to the dead.

"The Moon hates a borrowed tongue," Seven said. "I learned that too late to use it. I sang it for three days, and it was true, and I could not stop, and they put the truth in a collar and wore it like a jewel." She smiled, and there was nothing cruel in it. "You still have your silence. Keep it. Whatever you do at the rite, don't speak it."

Nine woke with the words in her teeth and the collar warm under her hand. She had fallen asleep holding it. The new one, her own, the one with her number cut inside.

She lay in the dark for a long time, and the words turned over and over: don't speak it. The Moon hates a borrowed tongue.

She did not know what it meant. Her mission, the only mission she had ever had, was to get chosen, share his bed, and speak the condemnation in the bridal rite. Speak it. Everything she was had been built toward one sentence, spoken once, in front of the Moon. And Seven, who had gotten closer to the truth than any blade who ever lived, had spent her last words telling her not to speak at all.

Nine got up.

She did not light a lamp. She dressed in the dark, in gray, in silence, and she moved through the sleeping tower the way she had moved through a hundred sleeping places before this one, and it felt like coming home to a house that had burned down: every step still knew the way, and nothing was left inside.

The palace kept its records in the Hall of Bamboo Slips, behind the bridal office, where clerks copied the Looking rolls and the ward registrations and the long sad story of everything the court wanted to forget. The door had a lock that would have stopped a merchant. It did not stop her. The lock was old, and her hands were older.

The bride files were where she knew they would be: three bundles of paper, tied with red cord, at the bottom of the last shelf. Nobody had opened them in a year. Dust lay on them like snow.

Nine sat on the cold floor with the first bundle in her lap, and she read the story of the women who had died wearing her shape.

Su Mingyue. Ward of the Su house of the western river ports. The whole house had gone down with its grain fleet in the spring flood, three years past. The ward office had registered her as a candidate the autumn before, noting, in the careful hand of a clerk who had noticed nothing: no kin to sign; the ward could not name her mother's house; arrived with no mourning clothes, no letters, no keepsakes. Chosen at the Looking. Dead within the month. The temple's page said: entered the bridal chamber at moonrise. Judged false before the Moon. Ashes gathered at dawn. Signed with the Confessor's seal.

Gu Caiwei. Ward of the Gu house of the Iron Pass. The hold had burned in the border war, two years past, and the ward had walked out of the ash alone. The file said: the ward speaks of no relations; cannot be made to weep; carries nothing. Chosen at the Looking. Dead within the month. The temple's page said the same words, in the same hand: judged false before the Moon. Ashes gathered at dawn.

Xie Qingluan. Seven's cover. Ward of the Xie house of the south harbors, taken whole by a storm the year before last, ships and house and all. The file said: the ward sings; the ward's belongings: two changes of gray silk and a bottle of lavender water; the ward cannot name the sea her family died on. Chosen at the Looking. And then, where the other files had the temple's page, Seven's file had the Confessor's own hand: found false on the eve of her rite. Collared. Sang for three days. On the third night, the collar was returned empty. The Moon took what sang.

Nine read the three files twice. Then she sat back against the shelf in the dark, and the silence under her ribs was so vast she could hear her own blood moving in her ears.

Three women. Three wards of drowned and failed houses. Three girls with no kin, no keepsakes, no mourning clothes, no names for the places they came from. Too clean. Every one of them too clean by exactly the amount a cover is clean: Hell filed them with the ward office months before their Lookings, dressed in the same borrowed sorrow, smelling of lavender and sea salt, and the palace had poured lavender on them and married them to its prince and buried them at dawn.

They had been blades. All three of them. The first two had walked into the rite and spoken Hell's condemnation, and the Moon had judged their borrowed tongues false, and the fire had taken them. Seven had been collared before she could try. And the kingdom, reading the ashes, had decided the prince killed brides.

He had not killed them.

He had buried them.

She found it in the margin of the first file, in a clerk's small hand: rites ordered by the prince's household, paid in full, at the moon gate. And in the second. And in the third, underlined, as if the clerk had been as puzzled as she was: the prince attends each rite himself, alone, at dawn.

Nine sat in the dark with the papers in her lap, and the recitation's ghost moved through the silence where it used to live, and it had nothing to say. She had counted his sins like coins for three hundred years. He has taken three brides and buried none of them with honor. It had been the second coin in the counting. And here were the receipts that said he had buried all three, with his own money, at the Moon's own gate, at dawn, alone, a man keeping watch over the women the kingdom said he had murdered.

Hell had lied to her. Or the ledger had. Or the man was both things at once: the ash that starved border packs and the hand that paid for his enemies' graves. The silence under her ribs, which had once told her exactly what to think about him, now only waited, and she did not know how to be a blade without being told what to see.

She was reaching for the fourth bundle when she saw the register.

It lay on the shelf above, open, as if the last clerk to use it had been interrupted. The bridal register. The book of the prince's brides, kept by the palace for the temple, one line for each woman who had stood before the Moon at his side.

Three lines were filled.