The Prince Want Me But I’m A Demon

The truth

He turned and went back to his birds, and Nine stood at the window with the city burning gold below her and his words burning gold inside her, and she understood that she had just been given the most dangerous thing anyone had ever given her: a way out of the lie, held open, with no price on it.

She should have been afraid. A blade with a way out of her cover was a blade with a hand on her own throat.

She was not afraid. She was standing in a hawk tower with the wind in her face, and for the first time in three hundred years she wanted to be ready, and she did not know if wanting it made her more human or more lost, and she went down the stairs behind him with the wanting loud in her chest and the silence under her ribs saying nothing at all.

That night she did not dream of Seven.

She lay in the dark of the tower room with the two collars under her pillow, her own and Seven's, and she counted the beams in the ceiling and the nights left and the reasons she should run, and she had reached eleven reasons and was working on a twelfth when she heard it.

Not the knocks. She would have known the knocks. This was smaller than a knock, and older, and final: the sound of a key turning in the lock of the door between their rooms.

She went still. The blade under the pillow was in her hand before she understood she had reached for it, and she lay in the dark with the blade cold against her fingers, and she heard the lock turn, and then a pause, and then the door swung open a hand's width, and the light from his room came through the crack like a held breath, and no one crossed it.

The door between their rooms stood open, and his rooms beyond were dark, and the silence stretched, and she understood.

He had said he would come for her when the moon was full.

The moon was nine nights from full.

He had come anyway.

The door stood open when she woke.

Nine lay very still in the gray light and looked at it: the door between their rooms, open a hand's width, the way he had left it. She had not closed it in the night. She had lain awake half the night listening to the silence of his rooms through the crack, and at some point the silence had become a different kind, the kind that meant someone was standing on the other side, and she had not moved, and he had not moved, and they had both held their breath through the dark like two animals deciding whether the water was safe to drink.

Now it was morning, and the door was open, and she could hear him moving in his room, and she understood that he had left it open on purpose, and that the day would be a test of something she did not yet have a name for.

She dressed slowly. She did not put on the lavender water. She did not know why she skipped it, only that her hands would not perform the ritual this morning, and she stood at the door in her gray clothes with her own face under the borrowed one, and she pushed it open the rest of the way.

He was standing at his window, half dressed, his hair loose, looking out at the city. He did not turn when the door opened. He said: "You kept it open all night."

"You opened it."

"I did. But you kept it open." He turned, and the wolf-gold eyes were unreadable in the morning light, and there was no armor on him yet, no public face, and he looked younger and more dangerous than she had ever seen him. "Do you know what that means, in this palace? An open door between a prince's room and his bride's, the night after the Emperor sets the rite. If I were a different kind of man, the servants would be drawing conclusions already."

"What kind of man are you?"

"That," he said, "is the first question you've ever asked me that wasn't a deflection."

He crossed to the threshold, and stopped there, on his side, and leaned against the frame, and looked at her, and the morning light came through the window behind him and put his face in shadow and his eyes in light, and she stood on her side with her hands at her sides and felt the whole conversation she had been running from for weeks gather itself in the space between them.

"Ask me," he said quietly. "Whatever it is. Ask me now, before the temple takes you and the rite makes everything official and it becomes too late to ask anything honestly. I can see it in you. You've been carrying a question since the night you read the files in the Hall of Bamboo Slips."

She went cold.

"I don't know what you mean, your highness."

"I mean the Hall of Bamboo Slips. The bride files. The fourth line in the register that somebody wrote before you were ever chosen." He said it gently, the way you'd tell a child the dog was dead, and the cold went all the way through her. "I've known since the third night you were here. The temple keeps its records badly, and I keep nothing badly. You went in through the west door and came out through the east, and you left the files one finger's width out of their original order, and I checked, because I check everything, because I am very tired of being surprised."

She stared at him.

"You knew," she said. "You knew I—" Her voice failed. She started again. "You knew I went through your records, and you said nothing. You took me hunting. You gave me a collar. You stood in a hawk tower and told me you'd wait for the truth, when you already knew the shape of it."

"I knew you read the files," he said. "I knew you knew about the brides before I told you at the stream. I knew you were lying about being a salt orphan. I have known you were lying since the Looking, and I have been waiting since the Looking to see what you would do with the truth when you found it." He looked at her, and his voice went very soft. "You found it. And you didn't run. You stayed, and you rode beside me, and you watched me kill a starving man, and you told me you didn't know what you were anymore. That was the first true thing anyone had said to me in years. I wasn't going to waste it on an accusation."

The silence under her ribs was so vast she could hear her own heart.

"Ask me," he said again. "Ask me what you came to ask me. The door is open. It's the only time it will be."

She looked at him across the threshold, and she asked.

"Did you kill your brides?"

"No," he said.

He said it without defense, the way he had said I know in the mud, and he looked at her, and the wolf-gold eyes were terrible and patient and utterly open.

"They died trying to kill me."

The words hung in the air between them like smoke. She had known. She had the files, she had the receipts, she had watched him bury them with his own money at the Moon's gate at dawn, and still the words hit her like a blow, because he had said them to her face, and there was nothing in them but the truth, and she had spent three hundred years being told that men like him were made of lies.

"The first one," he said, "I didn't know until the rite. She stood before the Moon, and she opened her mouth, and instead of the vow she spoke a sentence that wasn't hers, a condemnation, a list of my sins in a voice that wasn't her voice, and the Moon judged the tongue false, and she burned. I stood at the altar and watched a woman I had married burn for words that were put in her mouth, and I couldn't stop it, and I couldn't save her, and the only thing I could do was bury her with honor and let the kingdom think I'd killed her, because the truth was worse and nobody would have believed it anyway."

He was not looking at her anymore. He was looking at the city, and his voice was flat and careful, the voice of a man reading a list of his own wounds.

"The second one, I knew before the rite. I knew the day she rode beside me in silence and never once looked at the country. I knew she was waiting for the rite, and I let her come to it anyway, because I thought, this time, maybe the Moon will judge her true, maybe she'll say the vow, maybe I'll finally have a wife instead of a weapon. She didn't. She burned like the first one, and I buried her, and the kingdom added another grave to my account."

He turned back to her, and there was something raw in his face that he did not try to hide.

"Seven, I knew the night before. The Confessor collared her, and I stood in the corridor and listened to her sing for three days, and she sang true things, the truest things I've ever heard anyone sing, and she never once told them what she was, and on the third night the Moon took her singing, and I buried what was left at the moon gate, and I have never hated myself the way I hated myself standing over that grave. Because I knew what she was, and I let her be collared anyway. Because I thought if I said nothing, if I didn't force the question, maybe the Moon would be merciful, and the Moon is never merciful."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere below, the city was waking; the sounds came up through the open door like the sounds of another world.

"Three brides," he said. "Three blades. I didn't know the word for it until the Confessor let it slip, but I knew the shape of it: the temple keeps sending me women who come to kill me, and the Moon burns them for the lie of it, and the kingdom thinks I'm a monster, and I let them think it, because the alternative was telling the truth, and the truth made me sound like a man who married the same knife three times and blamed the knife." He smiled, and there was nothing funny in it. "I am that man, little salt. I am the prince who keeps choosing the knife. Do you want to know why?"

"Why?"

"Because the first one begged me to take her home. And I took her home, and she thanked me, and three nights later she stood at the altar and tried to kill me anyway, because whatever was driving her was stronger than her gratitude. The second one never gave me anything to hope for. But Seven sang. Seven sang true things, and for three days I almost believed that one of them would choose me back." His voice dropped. "You told me the truth at the stream. Not a small truth. The truth. And I have been standing at this door ever since, trying to decide if I can bear to be the man who chooses the knife a fourth time and watches it choose him back."

The silence under her ribs was a held breath.

She understood, then, with a clarity that felt like a blade going in: she was bride number four. Walking into the same fire. The temple had already written her line in the register, and the line ended in a blank date, and she was standing on one side of an open door with the man who had buried three women who wore her shape, and she was going to burn like they had, because she could not speak the condemnation and she could not speak the vow and she could not run, and the only thing she had ever been was the thing that was about to kill her.

"Why keep me?" she asked. "If you know what I am. If you know what I came here to do. Why didn't you send me away with the first one? Why did you open the door?"

He looked at her for a long time.

"Because you're the first one who ever told me the truth," he said. "Not a pretty truth. Not a truth designed to make me love you. You looked at me over a dead man's blood and said I don't know anymore, and it was the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me, and I wanted to hear what else you'd tell it about."

She opened her mouth.

I am Nine. I was sent here to kill you. I have counted your sins for three hundred years. I came here to share your bed and speak your death at the rite, and the voice that held the words died when you laughed at me, and now I am standing on one side of an open door with nothing inside me but you—

The words were right there. They had never been more right there. They gathered in her throat like water behind a dam that had held for three hundred years, and she opened her mouth to let them out, to tell him everything, to hand him the whole truth she had been forged to keep, and nothing came.

Her throat closed. Her tongue locked. The sentence that would have saved her lived in the voice, and the voice was dead, and what was left of her was a girl who had been taught for three hundred years that saying what she was meant death, and the teaching was in her bones now, deeper than the disarm, deeper than the wanting, deeper than the love she was only beginning to name.

She stood at the threshold with the truth breaking against the inside of her teeth, and she could not speak it, and he watched her struggle, and his face did not change, and he did not step across the door to help her, because he had said he would wait, and he was waiting.

"If I told you," she said finally, "that I came here to kill you. What would you do?"

The words came out small and raw, and they were not the whole truth, but they were true, truer than anything she had said to him since the stream, and she watched him hear it.

He looked at her for a long time.

The wolf-gold eyes moved over her face like a hand reading a page, and she saw him take in the gray clothes, the borrowed name, the collar under the pillow in the room behind her, the whole long lie she had been living, and she saw him understand what she was asking, and she saw him decide.

"I'd ask," he said softly, "if you still wanted to."

The words went through her like the first breath after drowning.

He reached out, and his hand stopped at the same finger's width from her face it had stopped at in the Hawk Tower, and then it crossed the threshold, and his fingers touched her jaw, once, barely, like a brand, and he said: "That's the question, isn't it. Not what you are. Not what you came here to do. Whether you still want to." His hand fell. He stepped back, into his own room, and he looked at her through the open door with something in his eyes that she could not name and could not forget. "When you know the answer, little salt, you know where to find me. The door stays unlocked until the full moon."

He closed the door on his side.

It shut with a sound like a held breath released, and she stood on her side with her hand on the wood, and the silence under her ribs was so vast she could hear the city below like water under ice, and she did not know if she still wanted to kill him, and that was the most terrifying thing she had ever not known, because if she did not want to kill him, she was walking into the fire with nothing to say, and if she did want to kill him, she was standing at the door of the only man who had ever made her want to be true, and either way she was lost, and she could not stop wanting the door to open again.

She stood there a long time.

Then she went back to her side of the room, and she sat on the bed with the two collars in her hands, her own and Seven's, and she looked at the closed door, and she began, very slowly, to understand what Seven had been trying to tell her in the dream.

Don't speak it.

Not because the words were dangerous.

Because once she spoke them, she would have to know what she was choosing.