Saving the Immortal

Chapter Three: The Dance

The wedding breakfast was held in the great hall, and I confess I do not recall a great deal of the ceremony's conclusion — only that vows were spoken, a ring was placed upon my finger by hands that were, I noted with some private astonishment, entirely ordinary in their warmth, and that I was, by the time the bells rang out once more, a wife.

A demon's wife.

Though I could not, in all honesty, say I any longer knew precisely what that meant.

The great hall had been prepared with considerable extravagance — garlands of white roses along every column, long tables laden with more food than half the kingdom would see in a season, musicians already tuning their instruments in the gallery above. My father had spared no expense in impressing our new allies, and the Northern Reach's retinue moved through the crowd with a courtly ease that betrayed nothing of the fear their prince's name inspired everywhere else.

I was seated beside Ruselon at the high table, close enough that the sleeve of his black coat brushed my own gown whenever he moved, and found myself entirely unprepared for how ordinary the moment felt.

He did not eat much.

I noticed this the way one notices small, unimportant things when one is desperate to avoid noticing larger ones — that he took wine but little food, that he watched the hall with the particular stillness of a man accustomed to being observed and equally accustomed to giving nothing away in return.

"You are not hungry," I observed, more to fill the silence than from any genuine curiosity.

"I rarely am," he said. "It is one of the smaller inconveniences of what I am."

I did not know how to respond to that, and so I said nothing at all, and turned my attention instead to the dancing that had begun at the center of the hall.

I have always been an excellent dancer.

It was one of the few accomplishments my mother had permitted me to take genuine pride in, having spent countless hours as a girl learning the precise geometry of every court dance until my feet moved without requiring thought at all. When Lord Aldric — an elderly baron of considerable charm and no small amount of wit — asked me to partner him for the first reel, I accepted with something close to relief.

For those few minutes, turning through the familiar patterns with the music swelling around me, I forgot entirely what awaited me once the celebrations concluded.

I forgot the treaty. I forgot my father's careful desperation. I forgot, for the length of a single dance, that I had been given rather than chosen.

I danced with Lord Aldric, and then with a young viscount whose name I did not fully catch, and then with my own father, whose eyes were wet in a manner he took considerable pains to disguise, and I allowed myself, entirely, to be nothing more than a woman enjoying music and movement and the particular freedom of a body that knew precisely what it was doing.

Only once, between partners, did I glance toward the high table.

Ruselon watched the dancing without joining it, wine untouched now before him, his expression composed into something I might have called pleasant had I not already learned, in the space of a single morning, precisely how much his expressions concealed.

He smiled when our eyes met.

It was, I noted immediately, not a real smile.

I had grown up in courts long enough to recognize the difference — the specific practiced curve of the mouth that accompanied performance rather than genuine feeling, the smile a man wears because an audience requires it of him rather than because anything within him has actually stirred to warmth. It was elegant. It was correct. It gave away nothing whatsoever.

I looked away before he could see me notice it.

"Your husband does not dance," Lord Aldric observed, when the music paused and he claimed my hand once more for the next set.

"It would seem not," I said carefully.

"A pity," the baron said. "Though I confess I have heard stranger things said of the Northern Reach's prince than that he prefers to sit quietly at feasts."

I did not ask what stranger things he meant.

I did not need to. I had heard every one of them myself, long before I ever set foot in that cathedral, and had spent eight months building a monster from precisely such stories.

"He caught me," I said instead, surprising myself with the confession, "on the cathedral steps this morning. Before the ceremony. I nearly fell, and he was there."

Lord Aldric's eyebrows rose slightly.

"Did he," he said. "How fortunate."

"I did not know it was him," I continued. "Not until I saw him standing at the altar."

"And what did you make of that," the baron asked, his tone carefully neutral now, the specific caution of an old courtier who understood precisely how dangerous certain conversations could become in the wrong company.

I considered the question longer than I perhaps ought to have, my feet moving through the dance's familiar patterns without requiring any conscious direction from me at all.

"I do not yet know what to make of any of it," I admitted finally.

The music carried us onward, and I said nothing further on the matter, though my eyes found the high table once more before the dance concluded.

Ruselon was still watching.

Still smiling that same practiced, hollow smile — the smile of a demon performing the role his court required of him, giving nothing whatsoever of the man beneath it away.

I wondered, turning through the final steps of the reel, what it might take to see a real one.