Page 9 of The Immortal’s Mark

“Medieval populations had very limited problem-solving skills,” she is saying now. “Anything they could not explain with demons or divine punishment, they simply burned. I was burned forty-seven times in the thirteenth century alone. After a while, I stopped trying to explain and simply let them get on with it. Faster that way. Though the smell of burning hair never quite—”

She stops. Her eyes narrow slightly, focusing on something in my face.

“You almost smiled.”

I did not.

“The corner of your mouth. Just there.” She gestures with her chained hands. “Most people do not notice. You are very good at not showing what you feel. But I have had eight hundred years to learn how to read people, and you, Your Majesty, were almost amused.”

Something shifts in my chest. An unfamiliar pressure. My mouth wants to curve, wants to acknowledge that something about her relentless absurdity has cracked through the wall I maintain between myself and the world.

I do not let it.

She notices anyway.

“Ah,” she says softly. “There you are.”

I am afraid that she is right.

For a moment, neither of us speaks. The silence is not strategic. I do not know what it is.

She has been alive for eight centuries. I have been emperor for twenty-two years. Both of us, I realize, have forgotten what it is to be truly seen by another person. To be looked at without fear, without agenda, without the careful calculations that power demands.

She is the first person in twenty years who has looked at me like I am a puzzle worth solving rather than a throne worth fearing.

The realization is inconvenient.

You like her, Tianlong observes.

I do not dignify this with a response.

Liar.

I step closer to the bars. She does not flinch—if anything, she leans slightly forward, as curious about my approach as I am about her existence.

“You know who paid for my death.”

“I know who paid me,” she corrects. “Not the same thing. The money passed through three intermediaries. Whoever actually wants you dead is clever enough to maintain distance. But the trail exists. Trails always exist, if one knows where to look.”

“And you know where to look.”

“I have eight hundred years of practice following money. It is a remarkably consistent skill. The currencies change, the methods evolve, but greed leaves the same greasy fingerprints across every century I have witnessed.”

She speaks with a confidence that should irritate me. It does not. There is no arrogance in it—just the simple certainty of someone who has had longer than most dynasties to learn her craft.

She watches me. Waiting. Not nervous—curious. As if she has all the time in the world.

She does, I realize. She has had all the time in the world for eight hundred years.

I have considerably less. But perhaps, for once, that is an advantage.

“You tried to kill me,” I say. “You failed. By every law of the empire, you should be executed. Publicly. Painfully. Made an example of, so that others who might consider treason will remember what the throne does to its enemies.”

She nods. “A reasonable approach. Traditional. I have been executed by empires before. It is, as I mentioned, ultimately ineffective, but I appreciate the theatrical commitment.”

“I am not going to execute you.”

The words surprise me as much as they seem to surprise her. I had not planned to say them. I had not made this decision—or if I had, I had made it somewhere beneath the level of conscious thought, in the quiet space where instinct lives.