4. Crumbling
Crumbling
The craving wakes me like a knife to the throat.
Not hungry. Starving. The kind of urgent, clawing need that bypasses my brain entirely and speaks directly to whatever animal instincts I’ve spent eight centuries ignoring.
I need cold rice. I need pickled radish.
I need sour plum, and I need all of it now, and I am not going to examine why my body has decided this specific combination is essential for survival at—I check the angle of moonlight through the window—the third hour past midnight.
Wonderful.
I extract myself from Ren’s arm without waking him, a skill I perfected around Death #200 when I spent a decade running with a bandit company who’d slit your throat for snoring.
Dumpling lifts his head from his spot at the foot of the bed, golden eyes tracking me with that particular feline judgment that says I see you. I see your pain. I will not help.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I whisper.
He looks at me exactly like that.
I pad through the imperial chambers like I’m infiltrating an enemy compound—because I am, in a sense.
The palace kitchens at this hour will be staffed by whoever drew the short straw for overnight duty, and I am eight hundred years old, veteran of more sieges and skirmishes than I can count, and I will not be caught scurrying to the kitchens for cold rice like some kind of desperate, undignified, pregnant woman. Which I am. Which is the problem.
The corridor stretches quiet ahead of me.
Too quiet. My shoulders twitch, checking blind spots out of habit—three exits visible, two guards at the far intersection drowsy at their posts.
No immediate threats unless you count my dignity, which has been under sustained assault for eleven days and shows no signs of recovering.
The kitchens are warm and dim when I slip through the service entrance, banked fires glowing low in the massive hearths.
A single servant dozes near the bread ovens.
The only threat here is to my self-respect, and that particular battle was lost somewhere around the fourth time I vomited on Ren’s ceremonial boots.
I find the cold rice in an earthenware pot near the cooling rack. The pickled radish in a jar toward the back of the preservation shelf. The sour plums take longer—they’ve been moved since last week, because of course they have, because the universe delights in my suffering.
I could carry this back to the chambers like a civilized person.
The table is too far away.
I lower myself to the floor instead, back against the cool stone wall, jar of pickled radish balanced on one knee and a fistful of cold rice in my other hand.
The first bite is transcendent. The second is better.
By the third, I’ve stopped caring that I’m an eight-hundred-year-old assassin sitting on a kitchen floor at three in the morning with rice on my face, because my body has demands and I’ve learned the hard way that arguing is pointless.
The tiny occupant has seized control of the negotiations.
The tiny occupant’s terms are non-negotiable.
“Lián?”
Of course.
Ren stands in the doorway, hair loose from sleep, wearing a robe he clearly grabbed without looking because it’s inside out.
He has the expression of a man who woke to an empty bed, tracked his missing bedmate through a dark palace, and found her sitting on a floor eating cold rice with her hands like a feral creature who’s forgotten how tables and crockery work.
I should be embarrassed. I am embarrassed. The embarrassment doesn’t stop me from taking another bite.
“There’s a table,” he observes.
“The table was far.”
“It’s three feet away.”
“Three feet is far when you’re being held hostage by your own digestive system.” I gesture with the radish jar. “Want some?”
He doesn’t answer. Just crosses to where I’m sitting, lowers himself to the floor beside me with the careful grace of someone who spends his days negotiating with ministers and his nights negotiating with me, and takes a piece of pickled radish when I offer it.
His shoulder presses warm against mine. The servant in the corner snores on, oblivious to the fact that the Emperor of the Dragon Throne is sitting on her kitchen floor eating stolen vegetables at an hour when sensible people are asleep.
“The plums are exceptional,” I tell him.
“I can see that.”
“I’m not sharing them.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Good.” I eat another one, sour and sweet and perfect, and something in my chest does a complicated thing I’m not going to examine because examining things leads to feeling things, and feeling things leads to crying about sunrises, which happened yesterday and will not be repeated.
We sit in silence. Me eating. Him watching me eat. The fire crackling low in the hearth, the sound of it soft and steady like a heartbeat. Somewhere deeper in the palace, a night bird calls and receives no answer.
“You didn’t have to come find me,” I say eventually, when the plum jar is half-empty and my stomach has finally stopped screaming demands.
“No.”
“You could have gone back to sleep.”
“I could have.”
“You’re going to be exhausted tomorrow. You have that meeting with the Minister of Works. The canal situation.”
“The canal situation will survive my exhaustion.”
I want to argue. I don’t. I’m too tired and the rice is too good and his shoulder is warm against mine, and this is the problem, isn’t it?
This is the whole problem, wrapped up in cold rice and kitchen floors and a man who tracks me through a dark palace because I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.
I’m letting him in. Bit by bit, stolen meal by stolen meal, I’m letting someone see me like this—messy and undignified and needing things—and I can’t seem to stop.
I’ve buried everyone I’ve ever let this close. Every single one.
“You’re thinking too loud,” he says.
“I’m always thinking too loud. Character flaw.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
I finish the rice. Set the jars aside. My fingers are sticky with plum juice and vinegar and I should wash them, should get up, should return to bed like a reasonable person instead of sitting on a kitchen floor letting an emperor keep me company at an hour that exists only for insomnia and regret.
I don’t move. Neither does he.
Dawn finds us still there, and if the morning kitchen staff have opinions about discovering their emperor dozing against a wall with his consort asleep on his shoulder, at least they have the good sense not to voice them.
The sunlight through the kitchen windows runs golden and soft across the flagstones. The kind of light that artists try to capture in portraits of happy families. The kind of light that shouldn’t make my eyes sting, shouldn’t make my throat go tight, that absolutely should not—
I’m crying.
Over light.
“No,” I manage, scrubbing at my face with my sleeve. “No, no, no. Not again.”
Ren is awake immediately, alert in the way of someone who’s spent a lifetime expecting assassins. “What’s wrong? What—”
“It’s the sunrise,” I say, and my voice cracks on the word like something fragile dropped from a height. “It’s just the sun doing what the sun does. Every day. I’ve seen thousands of sunrises and none of them have ever—”
The tears keep coming. The tiny dictator inside me has apparently seized control of my emotions along with everything else, and I have no idea how to get them back.
Twenty minutes later, I nearly throw a teapot at Jing’s head.
“I don’t need rest,” I snap, and my voice comes out sharp enough to cut glass. We’ve relocated to the morning room, which was a mistake, because the morning room has breakable things in it and I no longer trust myself around breakable things. “I need everyone to stop looking at me like I’m—”
Like I’m what? Fragile? Broken? Growing something that’s decided to reroute my entire nervous system through a carnival of feelings I never agreed to attend?
The teapot stays on the table. Barely.
Jing takes a step backward. Her arms are full of books—always more books, she must have a supplier that also hates me—and her face wears that particular expression I’m learning to recognize. The one that says I want to help and I don’t know how and you’re scaring me a little.
Good. I’m scaring myself.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Then, more honestly: “No. I’m not. But I should be. Come back later.”
She retreats with the careful haste of someone backing away from a wild animal, which is fair. I don’t feel particularly tame right now.
Ren watches me from across the room with that particular stillness that means he’s calculating something.
Risk assessment. Threat evaluation. Except I’m not a threat—I’m a disaster with yesterday’s clothes and unraveling composure and an emotional landscape that changes terrain every quarter hour without warning.
“Don’t,” I tell him.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking many things. You’ll need to be more specific.”
“Whatever helpful suggestion you’re formulating. Whatever solution you’re designing. Don’t.”
He inclines his head once. Doesn’t argue. Doesn’t try to fix it. Just picks up the stack of reports he’d been reviewing before I started threatening ceramics and returns to reading them, giving me space without leaving. It’s infuriating. It’s exactly what I need.
I escape to the Moon Garden. It looks different in full daylight—less ethereal, more solid, the jasmine perfume lighter without the night to concentrate it.
I find the bench in the shade of the plum trees and sit with my hands braced on my knees, breathing slowly until my chest stops feeling like someone’s wrapped iron bands around it.
This is not me.
I don’t do this. I don’t cry at sunrises and threaten teapots and need people to sit with me on kitchen floors while I eat cold rice at three in the morning.
I am Lián, the Immortal Assassin, centuries of survival compressed into a woman who learned early and often that feelings are weaknesses and weaknesses get you killed.