Saving the Immortal

I never got to choose who I was destined for. That was the first truth of my life, the one I understood before I understood almost anything else — that a princess's heart belonged to her kingdom before it ever belonged to her. I had watched it happen to my own mother, married to a man she'd met only twice before the vows were spoken, and I had told myself, foolishly, that perhaps my own fate would be gentler. It was not gentler. It was worse than anything I could have imagined. His name was Ruselon. Everyone knew him as the demon — not a title whispered in fear behind closed doors, but spoken openly, plainly, the way one might speak of a mountain or a storm. A force of nature rather than a man. The son of the devil himself, born of darkness and old power, ruler of the Northern Reach through means no one dared question too closely. My father had pushed me toward him the moment the envoys arrived with their promises of soldiers and grain, the specific desperate calculation of a king who needed an ally more powerful than any other kingdom could offer. Ruselon's influence stretched further than any human lord's. His power was said to bend armies without a single blade drawn. And so I was given to him. Not asked. Given — the way you give away something you no longer have use for, wrapped in silk and pearls to disguise the transaction underneath. I had never seen his face. No portrait had been sent. No letter in his own hand. Only the treaty, and the specific cold silence of a man — a demon — who apparently saw no need to introduce himself to the woman he intended to bind to his side forever. The cathedral bells had been ringing since dawn. I had counted every single one of them from behind my veil, sitting motionless while my ladies pinned pearls into my hair, and had come to hate the sound more completely than I had ever hated anything in my nineteen years of living. Today you become a queen, my mother had told me that morning, hands cupping my face with the brittle tenderness of someone offering comfort she didn't fully believe herself. Today the kingdom is saved. I had said nothing. There was nothing to say to a fate decided before I was old enough to understand what a crown truly cost. The steps of the cathedral stretched down before me — white stone worn smooth by centuries of royal weddings, lined on either side by nobles and commoners who had come to watch a princess walk toward a monster. I stood at the top in ivory and gold, veil trembling with every breath, and felt the specific vertigo of a life about to be permanently altered by a decision I'd had no part in making. Walk, I told myself. One step. Then another. I walked. The train of my gown was heavier than I'd anticipated, the steps narrower than they'd looked from above. I focused on my feet, on the mechanics of not tripping in front of half the kingdom, and didn't see the loose stone until my foot had already caught against it. The world tilted. I felt myself falling — the horrifying slowness of a moment stretching before impact, the crowd's gasp rising around me, my mother's cry somewhere in the distance — And then a hand caught me. Strong. Certain. Closing around my wrist and pulling me upright with an ease that suggested my near-fall had cost him nothing at all. I looked up. A man stood over me — dark hair falling loose past his shoulders, sharp features carved from something that looked less like flesh and more like carefully sculpted stone, eyes so dark they seemed to swallow the morning light rather than reflect it. He wore black, unornamented, standing out starkly against the gold and cream of every noble surrounding him. He hadn't been standing near me a moment ago. I was certain of that. "Careful," he said. His voice was low, quiet, carrying something ancient beneath its calm surface that made the small hairs on my arms rise without my fully understanding why. "The stone there has been loose for years. No one's ever bothered to fix it." "Thank you," I managed, still catching my breath, still held upright by his grip on my wrist. "I don't — I don't believe we've met." Something flickered across his expression. Amusement, I thought. Or something close to it. "No," he said. "We haven't." "Are you with the Northern Reach's party?" I asked, glancing past him toward the assembled retinue that had arrived three days earlier — soldiers in unfamiliar colors, courtiers with faces I didn't recognize, all of them here to witness their prince claim his bride. "I haven't had the chance to greet everyone properly." His dark eyes held mine for a long moment. "Something like that," he said. He released my wrist gently, steadying me fully on my feet, and stepped back half a pace — enough distance to be proper, enough to remind me that whatever this was, it existed only for the length of a fall and its correction. "You should continue," he said quietly. "They're waiting." I looked past him, down the remaining steps, toward the cathedral doors standing open and dark, toward the demon I was about to bind myself to for the rest of my life. "I know," I said. I looked back at the stranger. "I didn't get your name," I said. Something shifted in his expression — the amusement deepening into something I couldn't quite read. "You'll learn it soon enough," he said. He stepped back further, melting into the crowd with a fluidity that seemed almost unnatural, gone before I could ask anything else, before I could even properly thank him for keeping me upright. I stood alone at the top of the steps for one more moment. I did not know it then — could not have known it, standing there with my heart still racing from the fall — but I had just been caught, quite literally, by the very monster I was walking toward. The bells were still ringing. The crowd was still waiting. And so, because my fate had been decided long before I ever had a say in it, I continued down toward the cathedral doors. Toward the wedding. Toward the demon I had still, even now, never truly seen.