Page 83 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 14

Coward

Emperor Ren

The cloth is wrong.

Common weave, rougher than anything I have worn since childhood. It sits against my skin like a borrowed identity—which, I suppose, is precisely what it is. A merchant. I am meant to be a merchant. I have ruled the Jade Empire for twenty-two years, commanded dragon fire, watched two brothers die in a war fought over my existence. And now I am meant to worry about the price of rice.

I have no idea what rice costs.

Lián adjusts my collar. Her hands are brisk, professional. She does not meet my eyes. I note this. I note that I am noting it. I note that I have been noting small things about her for weeks now—the way she moves, the way she deflects, the way she fills silence with humor rather than sitting inside it.

“Stop holding yourself like you’re about to give a decree,” she mutters.

“How should I hold myself?”

“Like someone who’s worried about the price of rice.”

I do not tell her the problem with that. Instead, I focus on the sensation of her fingers against fabric, the efficiency of her movements, the deliberate way she keeps her gaze on her work rather than my face. She is not avoiding me. She is being careful. There is a difference.

I am not certain I understand the difference.

She steps back, assessing. Her head tilts—a gesture I have come to recognize as calculation. “Better. But you’re still looming. Emperors loom. Merchants… slouch. A little. Not much—you’re not a beggar. But you’re not inspecting troops either.”

I attempt to adjust. The result, judging by her expression, is not improvement.

“We’ll work on it,” she says, and something in her voice suggests this is the first of many such adjustments. Three weeks. We have three weeks of playing merchant and wife, of sharing rooms and maintaining a fiction that grows more complicated with every day. Three weeks of proximity that the palace walls would never have permitted.

This is humiliating.

Tianlong’s voice curls through my mind, warm and aggrieved. The dragon has manifested small—eight inches of iridescent scales, golden eyes in a lizard-shaped body, small enough to ride on a shoulder and too dignified to admit he looks adorable. He coils around my neck, beneath the collar Lián has just smoothed, radiating disapproval and warmth in equal measure.

You look like a very expensive necklace, I observe.

I have ended dynasties.

And now you are a travel accessory. Life is full of surprises.

I will remember this, he warns, three thousand years of wounded dignity resonating through the bond. When this journey is over, when we return to the palace, when you next require my assistance in some matter of imperial importance—I will remember that you compared me to jewelry.

Iridescent jewelry. There is a distinction.

I hate you.

He does not. This is the texture of our bond—complaint wrapped around affection, exasperation threaded through loyalty. Twenty-two years of this, and I have learned to read the warmth beneath the words.

From somewhere behind us, a sound rises. High. Continuous. Aggrieved.

Yowling.

Dumpling is in a basket on Lián’s horse, and he has not stopped voicing his displeasure since we secured him inside. The sound is impressive in its persistence, a single note of feline outrage sustained beyond what seems anatomically possible.

Tianlong presses closer to my throat, trying to become invisible.

The creature knows, he hisses. It knows.

He is a cat.