Page 45 of The Immortal’s Mark

I do not answer. I keep walking.

The streets blur. People step back. I am aware of whispers starting before I pass and continuing after, the first sparks of a fire that will burn through the palace by morning. The emperor carrying a body through the merchant district. The emperor’s face, whatever is on it right now. The blood on his robes, his hands, his silk that cost more than most families earn in a year.

The whispers will be spectacular.

I find I do not care.

The infirmary is east. I walk west. Toward my chambers. I do not examine this decision. My body is making choices my mind has not approved, and I find—

I find I do not wish to override them.

The servants have cleared by the time I arrive. Someone gave orders. Possibly me. I do not remember.

I lay her on the bed. My bed. The silk is dark—good for hiding blood, though that is not why I chose it. I chose it because emperors are expected to have dark silk, and I am very tired of choosing things.

She looks smaller here. The room is too large for her, too empty. She is supposed to take up space. She is supposed to fill silences with noise I pretend to find insufferable.

She is still.

I should clean the blood from my hands. There is a basin. The water is warm—someone prepared it, someone anticipated. I do not move toward it.

Instead I sit. There is a chair beside the bed—there is always a chair—and I pull it closer than necessary and I sit and I wait.

She returns. Tianlong’s voice is gentler than I have heard it in years. I can feel it. The fire knows.

I try to take comfort in this. I cannot.

Little flame. Breathe.

I am not breathing properly. I note this. I cannot correct it. The observation-analysis-control pattern that has governed my life for twenty-two years is failing, and I cannot make it work, and I cannot make my hands stop shaking, and I cannot look away from her face.

The water clock marks the hour. One drip at a time. Each drop impossibly loud in the silence, a rhythm that does not match the rhythm of her absent breath.

Her chest does not rise. Her face does not change. Her eyes stay closed.

One hour.

I should summon the physicians. They cannot help—she is beyond any physician’s art, beyond any healing except the one her curse will provide—but the act would be appropriate. Expected. What an emperor does when someone under his protection is injured.

I do not summon anyone.

I sit. I watch. I count the drops from the water clock because counting gives my mind something to do that is not imagining futures where she does not return.

I memorize her features because I cannot do nothing. The arch of her brows. The curve of her jaw. The small scar at her temple that I never noticed before—perhaps it vanishes with each death, perhaps it returns, perhaps I simply never looked closely enough.

I am looking now.

Two hours.

What if this is the time?

She said six hundred and forty-three deaths. Six hundred and forty-four now. She said she always returns. But what if—

The fear is irrational. I recognize this. She explained the curse. She has died in every way a human body can fail and she has returned from all of them. There is no reason to believe this time will be different.

But she died for me.

I did not ask her to. I did not want her to. I did not know she would until it was already done—her body between me and the bolt, her chest opening where my back should have taken the wound.