The Saintess and the Demon King novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Citadel
Housed in the king's own chamber, she heals one of his soldiers, learns what his glove hides, and lets him put his mouth to her wrist until a horn announces the Temple's envoy.
At dawn the demon army pulled back from Corvane's walls, exactly as the king had promised.
Isabeau watched it from the Citadel's high window, with a guard at her door and a cup of tea she hadn't touched.
Forty thousand people were alive because she had knelt in a tent.
She held onto that.
The Citadel was the city lord's keep, a grey tower on a cliff above the river.
The Demon King had taken it without breaking a window.
He had also given her the lord's own bedchamber.
"Mine is warded," he'd said, when he walked her up the stairs himself. "No one gets through the door. Not even the Temple's messenger birds."
"And where do you sleep?"
"Here."
He said it as casually as if he were naming a room.
The bed was huge and had black silk sheets, and the only other seat was a high-backed chair by the fire.
"You'll sleep in the chair?" she asked.
"I don't sleep much." His red eyes flicked to the bed and back. "And I told you. Nobody touches you unless you ask."
So that was her first day as a hostage.
She stood at the window until noon, and then she couldn't stand being useless any longer.
Down in the yard, a demon soldier was being carried in on a plank.
He was young, with a short grey horn and a spear wound through his thigh, and the men carrying him were shouting.
Isabeau was down the stairs before the guard could stop her.
"Move," she said. "Put him down."
They stared at her, huge and horned and bristling with blades.
She knelt on the cobbles, put both hands around the wound and let the Flame go.
It came the way it always did, warm and white, running down her arms.
The skin knitted under her palms.
The wound closed, and the boy's whole body arched and sagged and he began to breathe in long, ragged, living breaths.
The yard went silent.
Then somebody laughed, a short disbelieving bark.
She looked up at a broad, one-horned demon with his arms crossed and a look of deep annoyance.
"So the hostage is useful," he said. "I'm Torvin. I'm the general. The king told me to keep you away from the kitchen knives."
"I'm not going to stab anyone."
"Everyone says that." He glanced at the boy, who was crying and trying to hide it. "That's my sister's son. Thank you."
He said it stiffly.
Isabeau nodded, because her throat was too tight to answer.
She had healed eleven thousand people, and none of them had ever sounded like that.
By nightfall she had walked through the whole barracks, and she was shaking with tiredness.
The light still came as easily as breathing.
Her heart began to pound again only when she climbed the stairs.
The king sat by the fire with his gauntlets in his lap.
He had taken off his armor.
Under it he wore a loose black shirt, open at the throat.
The grey of his skin went down into the shadow of his collarbone.
He wasn't wearing his gloves.
His left hand was a hand, large and scarred.
His right hand was marked by a black vein, thick as a cord.
It ran from his palm up under his sleeve and beyond.
It looked like ink poured into a crack.
"Don't look at it," he said.
"I heal wounds."
"This one doesn't heal."
"Let me try."
He didn't answer, and she took that for yes.
She knelt in front of his chair and took his hand between both of hers.
The black vein was cold, and it pulled at her light.
The Flame flared, and then thinned, and for a moment she felt something under his skin that was older than her power and angrier.
He hissed through his teeth and pulled his hand away.
"Enough."
"It drank it," she said, shaken. "It drank all of it."
"It does that."
"Who did this to you?"
He flexed his fingers slowly.
"Your Temple, in the last war. A wheel of sunlight that burns demons. They call it the Sunwheel."
He looked at her for a long moment, and the firelight moved on his horns.
"Come here, Saintess."
Isabeau got up from between his knees and sat on the edge of the bed, because it was the nearest thing.
He stood and crossed the room.
When he knelt in front of her, his eyes were still almost level with hers.
He took her left hand, turned it over, and pressed his mouth to the inside of her wrist.
She stopped breathing.
His lips were warm and slow, right over her pulse, and she felt the tip of his tongue against the thin skin.
"You've gone quiet," he said against her wrist.
"I'm thinking."
"Think louder."
He kissed up the inside of her forearm, one deliberate kiss after another.
Every one of them landed in a place she hadn't known could feel anything.
"Your skin," he murmured, "is so soft that I could ruin it by looking."
Her free hand gripped the black silk.
He reached the crook of her elbow and bit her gently there.
A sound came out of her that she had never made before.
He smiled against her arm, and it was not a cruel smile.
"There. That sound. I'd cross a continent for that sound."
His right hand, the dark one, settled on her knee.
It slid slowly up the outside of her thigh, over her robe, and the heat of it soaked through the cloth.
He stopped at the crease of her hip.
His thumb pressed in, an inch from where she was aching, and she heard herself breathe his name.
"Veyron."
"Say what you want."
Her whole body was leaning toward his hand.
She wanted it to move.
She wanted it so badly that she could have wept, and the word was in her mouth.
But if she asked, she would be fallen.
The Temple's healers would leave Corvane.
The boy in the yard would be the last one she ever saved.
"I can't," she whispered.
He held still for a long moment, and then he took his hand away, very gently, and folded her robe back over her knee.
"Then not tonight," he said.
His voice was rough.
Isabeau saw what it cost him to stand up.
A horn sounded from the gatehouse, long and low.
Torvin's boots hit the stairs outside, and he didn't knock.
"A Sister of the Temple, under a white flag," he said. "She's demanding to see the Saintess's light with her own eyes."
The king turned toward the door with his face gone cold.
"Tomorrow," said Veyron. "Let her wait the night at the gate."
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