Page 128 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 21

The Journey Home

Chapter 644: In which our heroine spends the last night pretending tomorrow won’t come.

The palace is half a day’s ride away.

I know because I’ve been counting. The stone bridge at noon. The merchant’s waystation where we bought rice wine and didn’t drink it. The temple on the hill where Tianlong made a comment about architecture that was definitely an insult to someone’s ancestors.

Half a day. Twelve hours. Maybe less if we push.

We’re not pushing.

We’ve made camp by a river whose name I won’t remember tomorrow. The fire’s dying down to embers, painting everything in shades of amber and shadow. Dumpling has wedged himself into Ren’s saddlebag and is purring like a broken bellows, which means he’s either very content or plotting something. With Dumpling, it’s usually both.

Six weeks on the road. Six weeks of shared beds and stolen touches and pretending we’re just a merchant and his wife traveling south. Six weeks of watching an emperor learn to haggle badly and discover he hates persimmons but loves salted plums and writes poetry by firelight when he thinks I’m not watching.

I’m always watching.

Tomorrow, it ends.

“You’re brooding,” Ren says from across the fire.

“I don’t brood. I contemplate. There’s a difference.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Contemplating is dignified. Brooding is what heroes do in bad novels before they make terrible decisions.” I poke at the fire with a stick. “I’m far too practical for terrible decisions.”

His mouth does the thing. The almost-smile. I’ve learned all of his almost-smiles by now—the sardonic one, the surprised one, the one that surfaces when Tianlong says something outrageous. This is the soft one. The dangerous one. The one that makes my chest do something inconvenient.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“Don’t.”

“We should—”

“We really shouldn’t.”

He watches me for a long moment. Patient. He’s always patient. Twenty-two years on a throne teaches you to wait, I suppose. Twenty-two years of everyone wanting something from you teaches you to read the wanting in others.

I wonder what he reads in me.

Probably too much. That’s the problem with him. He sees things. The real things, underneath all the jokes and the deflection and the eight centuries of armor I’ve built up like scar tissue. He looks at me like he’s solving a puzzle he actually wants to understand, not just finish.

It’s terrifying.

It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

From somewhere inside the saddlebag, Dumpling makes a noise like a small demon being exorcised.

“The creature,” Tianlong announces from his traveling pot, “has consumed an inadvisable quantity of rice wine sediment. I have been attempting to ignore this. I have failed.”

“How did he even—” I start.

“Do not ask. The answer will only distress us both.”

Ren laughs. Actually laughs. Out loud, without checking first to make sure it’s appropriate, without smoothing it into something more dignified. The sound hits me somewhere below the ribs.