Page 134 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 22

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Emperor Ren

The gates open, and I feel myself closing.

It happens before I am ready—but then, I am never ready. The iron groans on hinges that have announced emperors for three centuries, and somewhere between the sound and the silence that follows, I become someone else.

Guards snap to attention. One of them moves so fast he nearly hits himself with his own spear, and I might have smiled at that a few days ago. The man who swam in rivers and danced at festivals and ate jianbings and made love outdoors would have smiled. I do not smile now. My face has already composed itself, muscles settling into the expression that belongs on coins, in court paintings, in the nightmares of ministers who have failed their duties.

And I hate it.

A minister approaches. He carries scrolls—enough scrolls that I wonder if the empire has been invaded or merely audited. Both seem equally plausible at this point.

“Majesty.” He bows so low his topknot grazes his knees. “The treasury reports require your seal. The northern garrison has sent seventeen dispatches. Chancellor Feng requests an immediate audience regarding the… situation. And the Jade Province tax assessors have—”

“One moment.”

He freezes mid-word.

I take a breath. Then another. The palace smells wrong after six weeks on the road—too much sandalwood, not enough wind. Too many bodies pressed into formal clothes. Too much fear layered under propriety like sediment at the bottom of a pond.

“The arrests,” I say. My voice is level. Measured. The voice of a man who has not spent three weeks eating street food and writing poetry and learning that he does not, in fact, like peaches. “What is their status?”

“The evidence you sent ahead has been verified, Majesty. Thoroughly.” The minister’s voice carries the particular satisfaction of a bureaucrat who has done his job well. “Minister Huang is in custody. Prince Liu is… resisting custody.”

Of course he is. Liu has never accepted anything quietly in his life. When we were children, he screamed for three hours because I beat him at archery. When his mother died, he wept so loudly the palace dogs joined in sympathy.

And now I have sent guards to arrest him for treason.

He used to follow me everywhere. The thought rises unbidden, and I push it down. There will be time for grief later. There is always time for grief. It is the one commodity emperors never lack.

The simple man who swam in a river and smiled at the sky is gone. I feel him retreat somewhere behind my ribs, curling into a space that is growing smaller by the moment. The Emperor has returned.

I glance at her. Just once.

Lián stands at the edge of my vision—not in the shadows, not anymore, but not in the light either. The space between. She has positioned herself where she can see every entrance and three of the four guards without moving her head. Old habit. The kind of calculation that happens below conscious thought when you have survived eight centuries of violence.

She does not bow. She has never bowed. I find I am counting on this in ways I cannot afford to examine.

Her expression gives nothing away to anyone watching. But I have spent six weeks learning the architecture of her face, the way her jaw tightens when she is pretending not to feel something, the almost-imperceptible shift in her stance when she moves from observation to readiness. Right now, she is both. Observing. Ready. Her thumb brushes her wrist in the grounding gesture I have come to recognize—I am here. I am whole. This is real.

She sees what I am doing. She sees what it costs.

Something in her eyes says: I know.

Something in mine says: I am sorry.

I turn to the minister and become what I have to be.

I require my lair immediately. Tianlong’s voice curls through my mind, ragged with indignity. He has been an eight-inch lizard for six weeks, stuffed in saddlebags and terrorized by a cat. His patience has reached its limit approximately seventeen cat attacks ago.

I am aware.

I have been hunted. By a creature with no appreciation for ancient majesty and a deeply concerning enthusiasm for small dragons. I have dignity to recover.

The minister is still talking. Something about grain stores. I should care about grain stores. Grain stores determine whether people eat. Whether they starve. Whether they riot in the streets and add another chapter to the endless saga of emperors who failed their duty.