Page 33 of The Immortal’s Mark

“What—” Her voice catches. She stops. Tries again. “What do you mean?”

But Tianlong does not answer her. His attention has already turned inward, or elsewhere, the way it does when he is thinking thoughts too vast for me to follow.

I wait.

“Leave us,” Tianlong says to her—aloud still, and I do not know what to do with this impossibility. “I would speak with my bonded.”

She looks at me. A question in her eyes.

“Wait by the passage,” I say. “I will not be long.”

She nods. Walks toward the cavern’s edge, her steps measured, her shoulders tight. I watch her go.

I do not know why I watch her go.

She is significant.

Tianlong’s voice is in my skull again, private, the familiar warmth of the bond. But his tone is different. Serious in a way I rarely hear.

What did you see?

Old magic. Celestial blood, perhaps. Something hidden for a very long time. A pause. The fire knows her, little flame. Even if she does not know herself.

Why did you speak to her? Aloud. You have never—

I do not know. This, from Tianlong, is rare. An admission of uncertainty. The words came. I did not plan them.

I process this. File it alongside the other impossibilities that have accumulated since the night she failed to kill me.

What do you want me to do?

Do not let her leave.

I am quiet. He has said this once before—the night she arrived, when she lay dead in the dungeon and then was not dead. I thought then that he meant: do not let her escape. Do not let the assassin flee justice.

Now I am not certain.

Why?

Because if she leaves, you will follow.

The words settle into me like stones into water.

And the empire cannot spare you both yet.

I search for the argument against this.

I have been emperor for twenty-two years. I have ruled through famine and war. I have watched brothers die and not abandoned my post. I am duty. I am control. I am the empire’s servant before I am a man.

I search for the argument that says I would not follow an assassin I have known four days.

I cannot find it.

The silence stretches. Tianlong waits. He knows, as I know, that the inability to argue is itself an argument.

Significant, he says again, and there is something in his voice that might be sadness, or might be hope. I cannot tell you more yet. But keep her close, little flame. The fire knows.

The fire knows what?