Page 184 of The Immortal’s Mark

“I know what he says.” She shifts slightly, and I feel her shoulders relax against me. “He is not wrong. But neither am I.”

I do not ask what she means. The silence between us is not uncomfortable. It is simply silence—the kind that does not require filling, the kind that exists between two people who have stopped performing for each other.

The palace comes into view on the horizon. I find that I am not eager to arrive.

The return is exactly as expected.

Guards at the gate, straightening when they recognize the imperial standard. Servants rushing to take the horses. Whispers already spreading through the courtyard like fire through dry grass—the emperor is back, and he is carrying her, and she looks pale, and what happened out there, and why is she in his arms, and look at the way he is holding her, look at his face—

I am aware of the whispers. I do not care about the whispers.

Wei meets us at the inner gate. His face is stone—the same expression he has worn through every one of his campaigns, through victories and defeats and the particular horror of watching his own son die. But his eyes are not stone. His eyes are something else entirely.

“You are back,” he says. Then he looks at her. “Both of you.”

“She found me.” I adjust my grip on her as I dismount, lifting her down with care I do not attempt to disguise. “She brought me back.”

Wei looks at me. Then back at her. Something passes across his features—recognition, perhaps. Understanding. The expression of a man who has commanded soldiers long enough to know what it looks like when someone has given more than they should.

He does not ask what happened. He does not ask what it cost. Wei has buried enough soldiers to know that some questions are not asked in courtyards, surrounded by servants and whispers.

Instead, he clears his throat. Looks away.

“The cat has been impossible,” he says.

Emotions pushed aside, something practical offered instead—I nearly smile.

Lián, still half asleep against my shoulder, snorts. “Dumpling is always impossible.”

“This was worse. Three days. He would not eat. He just sat by the door and screamed.” A pause. “We have all found it… difficult.”

I note the admission. Wei does not make admissions. Wei is granite and discipline and the weight of command. Wei does not say we have all found it difficult unless the difficulty has been extreme.

“She is home now,” I say. “The cat will be fine.”

“Yes.” His hand lands on my shoulder—brief, firm, weighted with everything he will not say aloud. “She is… home.”

He steps back. Nods once. Turns to begin barking orders at the assembled servants—prepare the chambers, summon the physician, clear the corridors, the usual efficiency of a general managing a campaign.

I carry her inside.

Jing finds us in the corridor. She is crying. Actually crying—tears streaming down her face, hands shaking, the careful composure she usually maintains entirely abandoned.

“I thought—” She cannot finish the sentence. “When you did not come back, I thought—”

“I came back,” Lián says. Her voice is gentle. I have rarely heard her voice gentle. “I always come back.”

“You always say that.”

“Because it is always true.”

Jing moves forward—hesitant, uncertain—and then she is hugging Lián, arms wrapped around her with the desperate grip of someone who has spent three days imagining the worst. I expect Lián to stiffen. To deflect. To make a joke about personal space or dramatic displays.

She does not. She leans into the embrace. Her hand comes up to rest on Jing’s back.

“It is all right,” she says. “We are here.”

Something shifts in my chest. I observe it. I do not name it.