Page 146 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 24

Taken

Emperor Ren

The morning light falls across the taxation documents I should be reading. I find my attention elsewhere.

This has become a problem.

The word surfaces again—consort—and I examine it as I might examine a curious artifact. Something foreign that has become familiar through handling. Two weeks ago the word ‘wife’ was strategy, a cover, a necessary deception to keep her close while we hunt conspirators. Now it fits differently in my mind. Warmer. Heavier. I think of her sleeping in my chambers, the way she curls toward me in the night without waking. The warmth in my chest does something I choose not to analyze.

I am thinking about tonight. About the council meeting I must endure and the hours after, when the court releases me and I can return to rooms that no longer feel empty. About tomorrow. About mornings that stretch forward without end, and how that no longer seems like duty to be endured but something else entirely.

You are humming.

Tianlong’s voice carries amusement I decline to acknowledge.

I am not humming.

You are. It is a love ballad. From the Third Dynasty. Notably saccharine. The sort of drivel poets compose when they have never actually experienced passion and must therefore imagine it in excessive detail.

I do not know what you are talking about.

The melody concerns a farmer who pines for a river spirit. There are seventeen verses about her hair. Shall I recite them?

I have work to do.

You have been staring at the same taxation report for six minutes. The Qingzhou grain surplus is not so fascinating as to warrant that level of attention, unless you have developed a previously unannounced interest in agricultural yields.

The morning light shifts. I set down the report I have not been reading and rise from my desk, moving toward the window. The palace gardens spread below, winter-bare but peaceful, and somewhere in the eastern wing she is waking. Perhaps already awake. Perhaps thinking of me.

I catch myself and stop the thought before it can settle.

Denial, Tianlong observes, is a river you have swum so long you have forgotten what shore feels like.

Your commentary is not required.

My commentary is always required. You simply lack the wisdom to recognize its value. A pause, and something shifts in his tone. The amusement thins. Something is stirring.

I turn from the window. The bond between us—that thread of fire and consciousness that has connected us for twenty-two years—feels different this morning. Not wrong. Not yet. But there is a faint static where the connection usually runs clear. A distance that should not be there.

What do you sense?

I am uncertain. The admission costs him something; Tianlong is never uncertain. There is… interference. A weight at the edges of my perception. It could be nothing. It could be the wards shifting with the season. A pause. It could be you.

Me?

You are feeling things you have not permitted yourself to feel in twenty-two years. Wanting things. The bond carries emotion as well as fire, little flame. I am three thousand years old and I have never felt you like this. Another pause, longer. It is possible I am sensing your heart learning to beat again and mistaking it for threat.

I consider this. The explanation is plausible. The bond has always been sensitive to emotional extremes—rage sharpens it, grief dulls it, fear makes it sing like a struck bell. It stands to reason that whatever this is—this warmth I cannot name, this wanting I cannot stop—might register as something new. Something strange.

And if it is not that? If it is something else?

Then we deal with it. But I cannot act on what I cannot see. His voice gentles, though the unease beneath it remains. Go to your council, little flame. I will keep watching. If it becomes clearer, you will know.

I should press him. I should demand more. But the light is warm and somewhere in the palace she is waking, and the truth is that I want his explanation to be correct. I want the strangeness in the bond to be nothing more than my own heart betraying me.

I want one more ordinary morning.