Page 135 of The Immortal’s Mark

Soon.

You are stalling because you do not want to face the council.

I do not dignify this with a response. Mostly because it is accurate.

Also, Tianlong adds, the cat is following us. He is in the courtyard. He is watching me with intent.

Dumpling is of course following us. The cat has decided that Tianlong is either prey or family, and he does not seem to distinguish between these categories.

I almost smile.

Almost.

The throne room has not changed. The same jade pillars rise toward a ceiling painted with dragons and clouds—my ancestors watching from their eternal positions, judging, always judging. The same silk banners hang motionless in air that smells of sandalwood and politics. The same faces watch from the same positions, calculating the same calculations.

But I have changed.

I sit on the Jade Throne and feel the weight of it differently now. Six weeks ago, this seat was penance. The stone beneath the silk cushions, the carved armrests that have held a hundred emperors’ hands, the elevation that sets me apart from everyone below—it was a cage I had learned to call home.

Today it is something else. Not lighter. But no longer the only thing I am.

Lián stands behind me and to the left. I asked her to stand where I could see her, and she agreed without asking why. Close enough that I can hear her breathing if the room goes quiet. Close enough that I know exactly where she is without looking.

The guards bring Huang first.

He goes quietly. Too quietly. There is something knowing in his eyes, a patience that belongs to a man who has already won even as he loses. My supply minister. Wei’s trusted subordinate. The man who hid payments to a death cult in the margins of legitimate requisition orders for twenty years.

His robes are still immaculate. Even now, even arrested, even facing execution, Minister Huang has found time to arrange his clothing properly. This is what unnerves me most. Not the treason—treason I understand. But the tidiness of it. The calm.

“Minister Huang,” I say. “You are charged with conspiracy against the throne, treason, and collusion with enemies of the state.”

He smiles. It is not a pleasant expression.

“The throne is not what he wants, Majesty.” His voice is conversational, as if we are discussing weather. “She is. And he has waited centuries. He can wait a little longer.”

I do not react. The Emperor does not react to threats. The Emperor is stone and fire and the weight of unbroken rule. But I feel Lián’s weight shift almost imperceptibly behind me—not fear, never fear, but calculation. She is counting his tells, storing information, preparing for whatever comes next.

“Take him.”

The guards move. Huang goes without struggle, still smiling, and something about the angle of his departure makes me think he has said exactly what he came to say. A warning. A promise. He is coming.

Then they bring Liu.

My cousin does not go quietly.

He screams. He fights. He lunges toward the throne with a desperation that takes three guards to contain, and he says things I cannot let myself hear—about family, about betrayal, about the summers we spent chasing fireflies in gardens that no longer exist.

“You were supposed to protect me!” His voice cracks. “You were supposed to—I trusted you, I trusted you—”

I remember him as a child, laughing, grabbing my hair with sticky fingers. I remember teaching him to hold a sword when he was seven—too young, really, but he begged, and I have never been good at denying people who beg properly.

And now he is screaming at me about betrayal, and I cannot tell him that he was the one who betrayed first.

“When He comes—when the Hungering King comes for what’s his—you’ll wish you’d listened!” Liu’s voice breaks on the words. “You’ll wish—”

“Take him.”

Two words. My voice does not waver. My hands do not shake. The boy who taught his cousin to parry is somewhere very far away, in a memory I will examine later, alone, when no one is watching.