The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The summon

Nine heard it from the corridor while the prince was still shrugging into his court robes: the Emperor had called the morning court, and the Emperor did not call morning court for weather. The attendant's voice was carefully empty, the way palace voices got when they carried news that would change somebody's life, and Nine stood very still in the outer room with her borrowed face and her lavender water and her hands folded like a ward's hands, and she understood before the words came that this was the day the countdown became real.

The prince came out of his chamber already buttoned into formality, and he looked at her, and he said: "You're coming."

"It isn't my court, your highness."

"It isn't my court either. It's my father's. But they're going to talk about my wedding, and I am not sitting through that alone again." He held out his hand, and when she did not take it, he let it fall and smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes. "Come, little salt. Walk where I walk. That was the deal until the rite is set."

She followed him.

The court was packed, and it went quiet when they entered, the way a room goes quiet around a wound. Nine walked at his shoulder, eyes down, and she felt the whisper run the length of the hall before she could hear it: the bride. The fourth one. Look at her, she doesn't know, somebody should tell her, somebody should warn her, the prince buries them, the prince—

She had stopped listening to the court's version of her story weeks ago. She had the files. She had the receipts. She had watched him close a dying man's eyes in the mud, and the court could whisper whatever it liked; she was the only woman in Dalang who knew what the ashes at the moon gate really were, and the knowledge sat in her chest like a stone she could not put down.

The Emperor came in wearing gold that made his son's ash-gray look like a deliberate insult, and he looked at the room, and he looked at his son, and he looked at Nine, and his face gave away nothing at all.

"The Looking is done," the Emperor said. "The Moon has been patient. The line needs heirs. The temple has confirmed the omens." He paused, and the hall held its breath. "The rite will be held at the next full moon. Nine nights from today. The bride will enter the temple's keeping at the half-moon, and on the night of the full moon she will walk through the prince's door, and the Moon will judge the match."

The hall exhaled. Nine counted the words the way she had once counted sins: nine nights. Three hundred years of Hell's arithmetic, and the only sum that mattered now was nine.

The prince's hand, at his side, was perfectly still.

The war faction moved before the Emperor had finished sitting.

It was a minister who rose, a thin man with a general's scar and a merchant's eyes, and his voice carried to the rafters: "Your Majesty. The wolf line has waited three rites for an heir, and three rites have given the Moon nothing but ashes. The prince's bride is a salt orphan with no house behind her. If the line fails again, Dalang fails with it. The Meng house has offered its daughter. Let the general's daughter enter the same rite as side-consort, and let the Moon give us two chances at a son instead of one."

And there she was. Meng Shuying, seated among the women of her house like a knife on silk, beautiful in the way of a drawn bow, and she did not look at Nine. She looked at the prince, and her face was perfectly composed, and Nine understood in that instant that the girl would do it, too: she would walk through that door and lie down beside the man who had buried three wives, because her father had told her the wolf line needed her, and she would do it with her spine straight and her heart locked away, and the Moon would burn her for the lie of it, because the Moon hated a borrowed tongue and there was nothing more borrowed than a bride who came for a dynasty instead of a man.

The Emperor was considering it. Nine could see the calculation moving behind his face like fish under ice: the war faction's armies, the border, the empty nursery, the son who kept marrying ghosts.

The prince spoke before his father could.

"No."

One word, pleasant, final, spoken to the minister with the ghost of a smile. The minister's mouth opened. The prince looked at him, and the wolf-gold eyes went flat and old, and the smile stayed, and the whole hall understood that the smile was the dangerous part.

"I have stood at that altar three times," the prince said, softly, conversationally. "I have watched the Moon take three women I married. Do you remember them, Minister? Su Mingyue, who begged me to take her home, and thanked me when I did, and died at moonrise three nights later with my name in her mouth. Gu Caiwei, who never said one true word to me in a whole day of riding, and burned for the words she said instead. Xie Qingluan, who sang for three days until the Moon took her singing." He let the names sit in the silence like coins on a table. "Now you want me to take the general's daughter into that same room. Tell me, Minister. Do you know something about the Moon that I don't? Or is the Meng house simply cheaper to you than the last three were?"

The minister's scar went white. "Your Majesty, I meant only—"

"I know what you meant." The prince turned to his father, and the public face dropped for a second, and underneath it was something tired that he let the whole court see, because the whole court already knew. "Father. One bride. One rite. If the Moon wants to give me a side-consort, it can burn me one of its own. I am not marrying a fourth woman I don't love to please a faction that will outlive me anyway."

The hall was a held breath.

The Emperor looked at his son for a long moment, and something moved behind his eyes that might have been pride and might have been grief, and he said: "The rite is for the bride. After the seal month, we will speak of consorts." He rose, and the court rose with him. "Nine nights."

That was all. The court emptied around them like water from a cracked bowl, and Nine stood at the prince's shoulder, and he did not move until the last minister was gone, and then he let out a breath that seemed to come from somewhere very deep.

"You shouldn't have done that," she said quietly.

"Done what? Saved you from a wedding with a rival wife and a faction that would have eaten you by the half-moon?"

"Made them an enemy. The Meng house will not forget that."

"The Meng house was going to eat you anyway." He looked at her, and the wolf-gold eyes were tired and young at once. "They pushed at me through three dead brides. They pushed at me through Seven's singing. They will push at me through you, and I will say no, and they will keep pushing, because that is what they are for. But I will not let them put another woman in that room to burn for their ambition. Not while I have a tongue to refuse with." He started walking, and she fell in beside him, and his voice went light again, the armor sliding back into place. "Come on. I have something to show you before the temple gets its hands on you."

He took her up.

The Hawk Tower stood at the crown of the palace's oldest wall, older than the Emperor's father, and the wind up there was a different element, clean and cold and full of the city below. The prince kept his hunting birds in the top chamber, hooded shapes on perches, and the birds watched her with their yellow eyes and did not move, and the prince moved among them like a man among old friends, murmuring, checking hoods and jesses with quick practiced hands.

Nine stood at the window and looked at the city she had been sent to burn.

Wolf-Fang City lay below her in the late light, roofs and rivers and the long gray thread of the West Road running out to the mountains, and she had crossed three hundred years and a hundred countries to stand in this one window, and she could not feel the mission anymore. It had died somewhere between his laugh and the stream and the mud, and what was left of her stood in a hawk tower and watched the light go amber over a city that was about to become her death or her life, and she did not know which one she was hoping for.

She felt him come up behind her before she heard him. The wolf moved quietly.

"You're doing it again," he said. His voice was low, near her ear. "Looking at the world like you're memorizing it for a report."

"I'm looking at the city, your highness."

"You're looking at it like a woman saying goodbye." A pause. "Or like a woman checking her exits."

She turned, and he was closer than she had thought, close enough that she could smell the cold wind on him and something underneath it, woodsmoke and iron, and the wolf-gold eyes were very close and very still, and the air between them went thin.

"You've been different since the stream," he said. "Quieter. You were always quiet. But you're a different kind of quiet now. Like something in you stopped fighting." His hand came up, and she felt his breath on her skin, and his thumb stopped a finger's width from her jaw, waiting, asking. "In six days the temple takes you. On the ninth night you walk through my door, and after that, whether you want it or not, you are mine before the Moon. So I am asking you now, while you still have a choice about it. Is there anything you want to tell me before I can't ask anymore?"

The words were right there.

I am Nine. Blade nine of the Nine Abysses. I was sent here to share your bed and speak your condemnation at the rite and carry your soul down to the place that forged me. Three hundred years I counted your sins. Then you laughed at me, and the voice died, and I have been falling ever since, and I don't know how to stop.

The words were right there, and her mouth opened, and nothing came out.

The silence under her ribs was so vast she could hear the hawks breathing. She had been able to say true things to him at the stream because they were small truths, single stones. This one was the whole landslide, and her tongue had been trained for three hundred years to hold it back, and the training was older than the disarm, older than the love, older than the silence, and it held.

She put her hand on his chest instead, lightly, and pushed, and he let her make the space between them.

"You don't know what I am," she said.

It came out smaller than she meant. Almost a plea. Almost a warning.

The prince looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled, and it was not the public smile and not the dangerous smile; it was something quieter, almost gentle, and it undid her more than any of the others.

"I've always known you're not what you say," he said. "I knew it in the Looking Hall, when you told me the only true thing any of them said all day, and I laughed, and I haven't laughed like that since I was a boy. I knew it on the river when you watched a man die and didn't scream. I knew it when you kept the collar I gave you instead of giving it back like a sensible girl." He reached out, and his hand stopped again at the same finger's width from her face, and his voice dropped. "I don't know what you are, little salt. But I know you're not Shen Xi of the drowned sa