The Jealous Husband
Emperor Ren
I wake before dawn, the way I always do, and in the grey half-light I find her still beside me.
I become aware of my hand. It rests against her ribs, where it must have drifted in the night. I do not remember placing it there. I do not move it now.
I close my eyes. Count my breathing. Open them again.
She is facing away, as she does every night.
Her shoulder rises and falls in rhythms I should not have memorized.
Her hair has escaped its tie and spreads across the pillow like dark water.
In sleep, her face loses the sharpness it carries during the day—the constant vigilance, the readiness to run.
She looks younger. She looks like someone who might stay.
I do not examine why this thought produces a sensation behind my ribs that I cannot name.
Her eyes open.
For a moment, neither of us moves. The dawn light catches in her gaze, turning it amber, and I find I have forgotten how to breathe in a way that feels casual.
“You are staring,” Tianlong announces. Aloud. Because of course he wants Lián to know.
“He’s always staring,” Lián says without opening her eyes. “I’ve learned to sleep through it.”
“I am not—”
“You are. I have been watching you stare.”
“Creepy,” she murmurs into the pillow. “Both of you.”
“I am three thousand years old. I am entitled to my entertainments.”
Her eyes open. She looks at me, then at the faint glow of Tianlong’s brazier. “Is he always like this in the morning?”
“He is always like this.”
“Lies. I am a delight.”
Neither of us mentions the kiss. Neither of us mentions my hand. The morning light shifts across her face, and I watch her decide not to pull away.
“I will make breakfast,” I say, because I need to move. Because if I stay in this bed one more moment, I will do something foolish. Pull her closer. Bury my face in her hair. Ask her to say wife again.
I have never made breakfast. Ever. This is still the safer option.
I stand. My feet are bare on cold floor. The merchant’s clothes hang loose on a frame built for armor and ceremony, and I am acutely aware that I do not know how to be this person—this man without title or throne or purpose beyond the next mile of road.
She watches me cross to the small brazier. I can feel her gaze on my back like a hand I cannot shake.
The rice. The water. The flame. Simple things. Things people have done for centuries without education or training or thought.
I burn it anyway.
“Impressive,” Tianlong says. “Truly. You command dragon fire but cannot manage a cooking flame.”
I stare at the blackened pot. The smell is acrid, wrong, a failure so mundane it almost makes me laugh. In the palace, servants prepare my meals. In the palace, I have never held a cooking implement in my life.
“Here.” She is beside me suddenly, reaching past me for the pot. Her arm brushes mine. I do not flinch. I do not lean into the contact. I stand very still and pretend I am not memorizing the exact temperature of her skin.
She scrapes the burned rice into a bowl. Pours water over it. Takes a bite.
“You are not actually going to eat that?” I ask.
“I’ve eaten worse.” She takes another bite, chewing with deliberate theatricality. “Death number two hundred and seven, I survived three weeks on shoe leather and spite. This is practically a feast.”
“She is being kind to you,” Tianlong observes. “I would mark this day.”
“I’m always kind,” Lián says without looking up.
“You attempted to assassinate him.”
“Yes, but in my defence, there was a lot of money involved.”
I feel the corner of my mouth threatening to curve. I do not stop it.
She sees. Her eyes warm.
I look away before I do something irreversible.
Every night is exquisite torture.
We share the bed because there is only one, and purchasing separate rooms would raise questions about a merchant traveling with his wife.
Wife. The word sits strangely in my mind.
I have never considered marriage—the throne requires political alliance, not personal choice, and I had accepted that my eventual bride would be a treaty in silk.
Someone appropriate. Someone who would understand that the emperor does not belong to anyone.
Lián does not understand this. Lián does not understand any of the rules I have lived by for twenty-two years. She sprawls across her half of the bed like she has never heard of propriety, and when she sleeps, she makes small sounds that should not be endearing and absolutely are.
She sleeps facing away. I lie awake, aware of every inch between us.
Dumpling has no such concerns. He sprawls across both of us without hesitation, a ball of warm orange impediment who has decided that the space between our bodies is the ideal location for his nightly bread loaf impression.
The cat has more sense than you do, Tianlong says directly in my head.
I do not dignify this with a response.
Just touch her.
No.
Your self-control is admirable and stupid.
Go to sleep, I think to him.
I don’t sleep. I watch. It’s what I do.
Then watch quietly.
Where would be the fun in that?
I close my eyes. Count my breathing. The cat purrs against my hip. She shifts in her sleep, and her foot brushes mine, and I lie very still and do not move for the next three hours.
The road is dusty and the day is hot and we have been riding since dawn.
Something in me snaps.
I do not know what triggers it—the heat, perhaps, or the way the river glitters through the trees ahead, or the simple fact that for the first time in twenty-two years, no one is watching.
No court. No ministers. No guards watching my every movement for signs of weakness or strength.
Just the road, and her, and this unbearable heaviness I have been carrying since I was twelve years old.
I dismount. Hand the reins to her. Walk toward the water.
“What are you doing?” she calls.
“Swimming.”
I strip off the merchant’s tunic. The undershirt. My boots, my trousers, until I am standing in only my underclothes on the riverbank, and the sun is hot on skin that has not felt unarmored air in—
I cannot remember.
The water is cold. Shockingly, blessedly cold. I wade in until it reaches my chest, and then I stop thinking entirely and simply let myself float.
As I float on my back, I notice how blue the sky is.
Has it always been this blue? The river carries me, gentle current pulling at my limbs, and I am weightless.
I am nothing. I am not the emperor, not the dragon-bonded, not the third son who should never have worn a crown.
I am just a body in water, and the cold seeps into me, and the fire that always burns beneath my skin—the dragon fire that chose me, that marked me, that made me—goes quiet.
I did not know it could go quiet.
I float. I breathe. The sky wheels overhead, and for the first time in longer than I can name, I am not performing.
She is watching from the bank.
I can feel her gaze like warmth, tracking my movement through the water. She has dismounted. The horses drink downstream, and she sits on a flat rock with her arms wrapped around her knees, and she is looking at me like she is trying to memorize something.
I should be concerned about this. I should analyze it, control my response, consider the implications.
I float on my back and watch the clouds instead.
After a long moment, she stands. Moves to the water’s edge. I watch her from my position in the current, and there is something uncertain in her posture—something almost afraid.
“You have survived six hundred and forty deaths but you do not swim?”
She does not answer. Her jaw tightens, and for a moment I think I have pushed too far, crossed some boundary I did not know existed.
Then she sits back down on the rock. Pulls off her boots. And slowly, carefully, she puts her feet in the water.
It is not swimming. But it is something.
“Six hundred and forty-four deaths,” she corrects.
I drift closer, until I am near enough to see the way her toes curl against the cold, the way her breath catches and then steadies. She does not look at me. She looks at the water like it is an enemy she is choosing not to fight.
“You do not have to explain,” I say.
“I know.”
We stay like that for a long time. Me floating, her with her feet in the water, the horses patient in the shallows. The sun moves across the sky. Nothing changes, and everything does.
When I finally wade out, her eyes follow me. Trace the water dripping from my shoulders, the scars on my chest from battles I wish I could forget. I should feel exposed. I should reach for my clothes, cover myself, restore the distance that has always kept me safe.
I stand in the sunlight and let her look.
Her smile, when it comes, is small and wondering and worth every century she has spent alone.
Well, Tianlong says, and for once there is no joke in his voice. There you are.
The tea house is crowded. We sit in a corner, gathering what intelligence we can about the road ahead, and I am trying very hard to focus on the conversation at the next table—something about a lantern festival, something about trade routes, useful information I should be cataloguing.
The owner’s son is refilling her cup.
This would not be notable, except that he has refilled it four times in the last half hour. And each time, he lingers. His hand brushes hers as he pours. He leans close to murmur something about the festival, about the lights, about how a woman like her should not miss it.
I take a sip of my own tea. It tastes like ash.
Little flame. Your jaw is doing something concerning.
I am fine.
Your hands have formed fists beneath the table.
I am perfectly fine.
You are projecting so loudly that I am experiencing your emotions, and I must tell you, this is extremely tedious.
Then stop listening.
I cannot stop listening. We are bonded. This is the bargain you made when you were twelve. I feel what you feel. A pause. Your jealousy tastes like copper, since you were wondering.
He is touching her wrist.