The field ran green all the way to the low stone wall at its far edge, and the wind came across it in one long push that lifted the straw hat clean off her head.
Asteroth watched it go without hurrying. There was nothing in this world worth hurrying for. She had walked out of her own country of ash and long shadow into the middle of a human summer, and after some days of it she had concluded that the human world was precisely what she had been promised it was not. Small. Warm. Unbearably dull. A demon lord of death had no use for a hat. She had taken this one because it had been sitting on a table in a market and because the sun here was tiresome.
Behind her, in memory, a woman's voice said again what it had said on the day she left. Be careful of the human world. Whatever else you do there, do not love anything in it.
She scoffed at that. She looked at the humans working the far end of the field, bent over, brown-armed, insignificant, each of them a candle already half burned down, and she thought that her sister had wasted a warning.
Then the hat stopped in the air.
A hand had closed on the brim, quick as a bird, and a young man was holding it out to her, and saying something light about the wind knowing what it wanted. He was blonde. He had the look of someone who had been in the sun all his life and had never once thought about it.
"Thank you," she said. "Sincerely."
He stopped. Whatever he had been about to say went out of him at the sound of her voice, and the colour came up under his tan, and he asked her, all in a rush, for her name.
She did not give it.
He asked again. That surprised her. Humans did not usually insist with her; something in them generally understood, without being told, that insisting was a bad idea. He touched the back of his neck, thinking, and then the thought turned into a smile, warm and unhurried, and then into a wider one — charming, confident, entirely certain of its welcome.
She thanked him one last time and walked away.
He followed her. Not close, not saying anything, simply walking in the same direction as though the direction had been his all along. She turned, surprised, and he told her his name then, and she repeated it back to him.
"Enrique."
Every warning she had ever been given, she ignored. She fell in love with the naive shepherd the way a stone falls down a well.
The next time she came to the field he was there again, and when she stepped into his path he stammered, halfway through a sentence he never finished. She smiled at him, delighted, as though their meeting again were the most natural thing in the world.
He was flabbergasted. She leaned in until there was nothing between them but the width of a hand, and his shock melted into a bashful flush, and then into a sly, knowing little smile that she had not expected from him at all.
Perhaps that was too strange an approach, she thought. She had to keep remembering that she was not human, and that humans had rules about distance.
They stood together in the small village at the foot of the hills, facing one another. They walked out through the fields, and he talked the whole way, animated, waving his hands, telling her things about the grass and the weather and the goats as though all of it mattered.
Her love for him grew, and her impatience grew with it. He would hand her something to eat, some small country thing wrapped in a cloth, smiling while she took it, and she would look at his face and think about how short a mortal life was. How little of it there was. How much of it she wanted.
She came up behind him and put her arms around him, and when he turned she kissed him, deeply, and the kiss went on until it stopped being gentle.
"Give me your whole life," she said against his mouth.
"My — what?" He was flustered. He pulled back just far enough to look at her. "Has something happened?"
Nothing had happened. She only intended, silently, to make every part of him hers, down to the last hour.
So she asked him to marry her.
He stood there stunned, and she watched his hesitation, and said, "You don't want to?"
He looked at her then with an expression of such pure and undefended love that she almost pitied him for it. He said yes, happily, and it was done.
They knelt together before a church altar. Though she was a demon, she found herself praying — foolishly, sincerely — to a god who was no friend of hers. Holding his hand in front of that altar, she prayed to be allowed to stay with him until the very end.
On her wedding night she sat dressed and waiting in an empty room, and wondered where Enrique had got to.
She remembered making him promise, early on, never to come to her house. That had been necessary. But he had forbidden her the same thing, always, and had never once explained why she could not visit his home. Now she was his wife. Surely a wife could walk into her husband's house. She let herself imagine him living like a slob in there, boots on the table, and smiled about it.
The house was small and neat when she reached it, and quiet. She stepped inside and called his name.
He was in the far room, and he was not dressed for a wedding night. He was in formal robes, heavy ones, and he had his back to her.
"Why aren't you in our chamber?" she asked.
He turned. His face was twisted with pain, and in his hand was a small ornate dagger.
She screamed. She could not move — something had closed around her like a fist, magic she had not felt gathering — and she watched him drive the dagger into his own chest. A crimson jewel shattered. The blast came out of it white and enormous and tore the room apart.
She was on the floor, dazed, bleeding, wondering what was happening to her. Enrique stood over her holding the bloody dagger, and he was crying.
"Why did you come here?" he said. "Now I have to kill you."
"What are you saying?" She could hardly hear her own voice. She looked at the robes again, and this time she saw the cross worked into them, shining, holy.
A pink-haired woman came running through the wreckage to his side and put her arms around him, and held him while he wept, and comforted him like a mother.
"You've earned it," the woman told him, warm and smug. "Crown prince. You should thank me, you know."
So the love had been a calculation, from the field, from the first day. Asteroth understood it all at once, lying in the ruin of the room, while Enrique wept in silence and would not look at her.
She collapsed onto her side, clutching the wound in her, and it was fatal; she knew the shape of a fatal wound better than any physician alive.
"Dying for him," the pink-haired woman said, smiling down at her. "How sweet."
The woman smirked at the dying demon. Enrique watched her glare up at him, betrayed, and in her rage her true form broke out of the borrowed body — horns, wings, the black armour of a demon lord of death.
With her last breath she cursed him.
And she remembered, as everything went out, her sister's voice telling her not to love a human.
Then she was somewhere else, in a body that was not hers, and someone was saying, "Your Majesty."
A grey-haired man was leaning over her, calling her by that title. Her throat burned as though she had swallowed a coal. She could not think past it. She reached up, caught him, and pulled the yang energy out of him in one greedy draught — and he recoiled from her, appalled, and it was nowhere near enough. She sat up in the bed craving something immense.
The man fled the room, shouting for a physician.
Her eyes opened properly then — red eyes, in a face she had never worn. Where was she? The body she was in was weak past believing, thin-wristed, hollow, and it had no power in it at all. She heard herself calling for help in a stranger's voice.
The door banged open.
Her visitors, she thought. That was quick.
It was not the physician. A man stood in the doorway alone, soaked in blood from his hair to his boots, and his golden eyes burned in the dimness like two lamps.
An assassin, she thought, sitting up in the bed. Then she dismissed it. He was far too young, and far too badly hurt.
He came toward her, stumbling.
"Stop there," she said.
He put out one hand as though to hold her off. "Stay back," he said. "Stay away from me —"
Then he went down, and his hand closed around her ankle, and the maids in the corridor began to scream.
What in the world, she thought, as he fell across the bed and across her, and someone in the doorway was asking, over and over, if Her Majesty was all right.