The Departure #3
I stop at the threshold. The palace sprawls behind me—all that jade and gold, all those corridors I’ve memorized without meaning to, all the rooms where I’ve bled and laughed and slowly, stupidly, started to belong.
The Moon Garden where Ren tried to propose the first time.
The training yard where I accidentally nearly killed Wei and told everyone it was part of the training.
The archive steps where Jing likes to sit when she thinks no one’s watching.
The palace where Dumpling appeared in my quarters one morning like a gift I didn’t ask for. Where Jing brought me tea and questions and a friendship I didn’t know how to hold. Where Ren looked at me across a throne room and saw something no one else had seen in centuries.
When did I start belonging to a place?
Ren waits beside me. He doesn’t fill the silence. Doesn’t offer comfort. Doesn’t try to fix whatever’s cracking open in my chest.
He just... stays.
He’s learning when not to speak. That might be the most intimate thing anyone’s ever done for me.
“I’ll miss it.”
The words come out quiet. Barely a whisper. They surprise me as much as him.
“The palace that tried to kill me on my wedding day. I’ll miss it. Isn’t that ridiculous? It nearly killed me three times, in fact.”
“They were assassination attempts,” Ren says. “Not the palace.”
“Technicality.”
“Perhaps.”
“I’m good at leaving,” I tell him. “I’ve had eight hundred years of practice. I know how to walk away without looking back.”
“And now?”
“Now I want to look back.”
The admission hangs in the air between us. Small. Fragile. The kind of truth I’ve spent centuries learning not to speak.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Ren says. “The palace.”
“Neither am I.” I breathe. Let the words sharpen into something that feels almost real. “Apparently.”
I lean into his shoulder. Just slightly. Not dramatic. Not a declaration.
Just... choosing to be close.
His hand finds mine. The bump shifts—our daughter making her presence known—and I let myself have this. This moment. This warmth. This terrifying, wonderful thing I’m not ready to name.
“If anyone asks,” I tell him, “we were forced to leave for security reasons. I have a reputation to maintain.”
“Your reputation is intact.”
“My reputation is a disaster. I’ve gone soft.”
“You stabbed a man at our wedding.”
“Softly.”
He almost laughs. The sound is rare enough that I choose to remember it—to file it away with all the other rare things.
“Come on,” he says. “We have mountains to climb.”
“Romantic.”
“I thought so.”
The gates close behind us.
Dumpling has finally surrendered—not to the basket, never to the basket, but to my lap, because apparently my thighs are acceptable transport when woven bamboo padded with fine cotton is beneath him. He weighs approximately one thousand pounds. My legs are going numb.
I don’t move him.
Tianlong has claimed a spot on Ren’s shoulder, muttering about indignities and inadequate travel accommodations and the general decline of civilization since the Third Dynasty. He keeps making pointed comments about cats.
Dumpling ignores him with the magnificent disdain of a creature who knows he’s already won.
North. Into the mountains. Because apparently the safest place to hide from northern assassins is more north. I’m sure that makes sense to someone.
The palace shrinks behind us. First the gates disappear, then the walls, then the towers themselves, swallowed by a curve in the road and a hill we’ve been climbing without my noticing.
A merchant passes us going the other direction. He looks at Ren—at the bearing that screams not a merchant even in rough-spun clothes, at the posture that suggests he’s never hauled anything heavier than a decree in his life—and his eyebrows climb toward his hairline.
“Good morning,” Ren says. Imperial tone. Perfect diction. The kind of greeting you’d give a foreign ambassador, not a man with mud on his boots.
The merchant blinks. Mumbles something. Hurries past.
“Husband,” I say.
“Wife.”
“You need to work on that.”
“Work on what?”
“Being normal.”
He considers this. I can practically see him filing it away—another skill to master, another challenge to meet.
It’s infuriating. It’s adorable. I’m not sure which one bothers me more.
“What do you think we’ll be by the end of it?”
Ren doesn’t answer immediately. He’s thinking—that careful, measured consideration he brings to everything, the pause before action that I used to find maddening and now find... something else.
“Different,” he says finally. “I think we’ll be different.”
“Good different or bad different?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
The question catches me off guard.
Does it matter?
It never used to. Different was just what happened. Change was inevitable, impermanent, not worth worrying about. I changed and changed and changed, and eventually I stopped caring which direction the changes went.
But now—
“Yeah,” I say. “I think it might.”
He reaches over. Takes my hand. The contact is small—just fingers lacing together, just warmth against warmth—but it settles something in my chest that’s been restless since dawn.
Chapter 645. In which our heroine admits, just to herself, that she might want to come back.
The thought sits warm in my chest. Terrifying. Wonderful. Completely unlike anything I’ve felt in eight hundred years.
There. I’ve admitted it. I’m never admitting it again.
But maybe—just this once—I don’t have to.