Page 18 of The Immortal’s Mark

He says none of these things. He bows again, deeper this time.

“I am sure Your Majesty has considered all implications.”

“I have.”

I turn and walk away. The assassin falls into step behind me without instruction.

He sees weakness. Tianlong says.

Let him.

And what do you see, little flame? When you look at her?

I do not answer. Tianlong’s silence, when it comes, is worse than his commentary.

The jade comb has shifted on my desk.

A servant, dusting. Harmless. But I notice. I always notice when something has touched what little belongs to me.

I replace it. The weight of it—cool, smooth, lighter than it should be for all it carries. My mother’s hands held this. Her hair wound through these teeth. She gave it to me the morning before the dragon fire chose me, before everything burned, before the world learned that the third son—the quiet one, the one who wanted to write poetry—would wear a crown built on his brothers’ graves.

I touch it when the weight becomes too much.

It does not help.

I touch it anyway.

My chambers are deliberately sparse. An emperor’s quarters should be opulent—silk hangings, gilded furniture, evidence of power in every corner. Mine are not. A bed. A desk. A chest for robes I am required to wear. The water clock marks time in soft, measured drips. Everything else belongs to the empire.

I own three things.

The jade comb.

A soldier’s waterskin—dented, leather cracked. A man thrust it into my hands during the civil war, moments before an arrow took him through the throat. “Drink, Majesty,” he said. Jin-something. I should remember his full name. I do not. This failure lives in me like a splinter I cannot reach.

And a journal. Leather-bound. Pages filled with my own hand. Meditations. Self-corrections. The only place I speak without weighing every word.

Everything else belongs to the empire. Every robe, every sword, every room I sleep in.

The emperor owns nothing.

The emperor is nothing, except what duty requires him to be.

I wonder, sometimes, what it would be to have something else. Someone who sees the man beneath the crown, not the symbol. Someone who does not bow. Someone who—

I stop the thought.

These are dangerous currents. I know where they lead.

I eat what my soldiers eat. I sleep when they sleep. I have done this for twenty-two years. I do not know another way. The throne is not privilege. It is penance. For my brothers’ deaths. For my father’s shame. For the mother who gave me a jade comb and then watched her sons tear the empire apart over who would wear the crown the dragon chose.

What would I want, if wanting were permitted?

I do not answer the question.

I do not know how.

The water clock drips. Duty calls. I replace the jade comb in its place—precisely where it belongs, precisely where it has been for twenty-two years—and straighten my robes. My face settles into imperial stillness.