Page 84 of The Immortal’s Mark

He is looking at me. He has been looking at me since I manifested. He is calculating.

Calculating what?

Whether I will fit in his mouth.

I consider the relative sizes. Tianlong, eight inches. Dumpling, considerable. The mathematics are not in the dragon’s favor.

You could always return to full size.

And announce the Emperor’s presence to every village between here and Jiangzhou? I think not. Another glance toward the basket, from which the yowling continues unabated. I will simply remain vigilant. The creature will not catch me unaware.

The yowling rises in pitch. Tianlong presses even closer.

I require a defensible position. A pot. Something with a lid.

We are not at the inn yet.

Then I suggest we ride faster.

We do not ride faster. We ride at the pace of merchants—unhurried, unremarkable, invisible in the way that common people are invisible to common people. Lián sets the speed. She knows things I do not: which roads draw attention, which inns ask fewer questions, which way to sit a horse so that guards glance past rather than toward.

She also knows what rice costs.

I watch her throughout the day. I tell myself this is strategic—she is the expert here, and I am learning. But I note the ease that enters her shoulders outside the palace walls, the humor that surfaces more readily when there is no court to perform for. The way she speaks to strangers without calculation, without weighing every word for political consequence.

She is freer here. Strange, given that we are riding toward danger rather than away from it. But she moves through the world like someone returning home rather than leaving it. Eight hundred years of wandering, and she has learned to carry herself like someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere. I have spent twenty-two years belonging to a throne, and I cannot remember how to belong to myself.

I do not know what home feels like. I am beginning to suspect this is a larger absence than I have acknowledged.

The miles pass. The yowling eventually subsides—Dumpling has fallen asleep, or has accepted his fate, or is simply conserving energy for later protest. Tianlong remains coiled beneath my collar, a thin warmth against my throat, occasionally muttering observations about the landscape, the roads, the profound indignity of being reduced to this.

That village has exceptionally ugly chickens, he notes at one point.

I did not know you had opinions about poultry.

I have opinions about everything. I am three thousand years old. I have earned the right to judge chickens.

The sun arcs overhead, and I realize I do not know what time it is.

Not because I cannot read the sky—I can. But because there is no schedule to measure against. No morning audience at the hour of the dragon. No petitions at the hour of the snake. No war council, no ministerial reports, no evening documents requiring the imperial seal.

There is only the road. The horse beneath me. The woman riding ahead. The warmth of a small dragon against my throat and the distant promise of a cat who will yowl again when he wakes.

It should feel like freedom. I do not know why it feels like falling.

The inn is small.

The room is smaller.

The mattress is… I do not have words for what the mattress is. It contains something that might once have been stuffing, compressed by generations of travelers into a surface that suggests sleep without promising it. The room smells of other people’s journeys—old smoke, older sweat, the ghosts of travelers who sought nothing more than a horizontal surface and a roof.

“The bed or the floor,” Lián says. It is not a question.

“The floor.”

She nods, as if this is expected. Perhaps it is. I am the emperor—was the emperor, am pretending not to be the emperor—and she is the woman I am pretending to be married to. There are lines that should not be crossed even in pretense. Especially in pretense.

She takes the bed. I take a blanket and a space near the door where I can see both entrance and window. Dumpling takes the pillow, claiming it with the absolute certainty of a creature who has never been denied anything in his substantial life.