Trying to Relax
I wake up in to Ren’s warmth at my back, steady as a banked fire and my bladder, announcing that the small human I’m growing considers my internal organs recreational equipment.
Perfect.
I extract myself from the bed with all the grace of a woman five months pregnant and eight centuries tired.
The floorboards are cold beneath my feet—properly cold, the kind that makes you reconsider every life choice that led to this moment.
The chamber pot is across the room, because of course it is.
These are the glamorous realities of honeymoon travel that the poets conveniently forget to mention. All those verses about moonlit journeys and tender nights, not a single word about how pregnancy turns your bladder into a hostage situation.
The window shows a town waking up below. Market stalls being assembled, smoke rising from cooking fires, the particular bustle of a place that exists at a crossroads and knows how to profit from it. Mountains in the distance, still capped with snow even this late in the season.
When I return, Ren is standing by the window.
He’s been up for a while. I can tell by the way he’s holding himself—that particular stillness that means he’s finished cataloguing every vulnerability in the room and moved on to the street outside. His shoulders are relaxed. His eyes are not.
Twenty-two years of ruling an empire full of people who’d like to see him dead. You don’t unlearn that kind of vigilance by changing locations.
Trust me. I’ve tried.
“Relaxing?” I ask.
“Thoroughly.”
“You’ve mapped the rooftop access points.”
“I noticed them incidentally.”
“Incidentally.”
“While relaxing.”
He turns, and there’s something in his expression—not quite a smile, but the shadow of one. The morning light catches the planes of his face, the careful neutrality he wears like armor. His hair is slightly dishevelled from sleep, and there’s something almost human about that. Almost approachable.
I should be irritated. We’re supposed to be taking a break. Enjoying the journey. Acting like normal newlyweds instead of what we actually are: an emperor who can’t stop ruling and an assassin who can’t stop assessing threats.
Chapter 645, and I still haven’t learned to take a day off. Some narratives are harder to escape than curses.
Instead of irritation, something warm settles in my chest. I’ve married a man who’s exactly as broken as I am.
The knock comes twenty minutes later. Efficient. Military.
Tairui. He looks like he’s been awake since before dawn and resenting every minute of it.
There’s a twitch beneath his left eye that wasn’t there yesterday.
His uniform is immaculate—the man probably irons his underwear—but there’s something haggard around the edges.
Something that speaks to a long night of professional suffering.
“All clear,” he says. “No incidents overnight.”
“Aside from the innkeeper’s daughter,” I observe.
The twitch intensifies. “She was being HOSPITABLE.”
“To Ailun.”
“To Ailun. At two in the morning. With warm towels. And questions about whether he was comfortable. And an offer to personally adjust his pillows.”
“Personally.”
“She was very specific about the personal nature of the adjustment.”
“And Ailun thought...?”
“He thought she was dedicated to her profession.” Tairui’s voice has achieved a flatness that suggests profound internal screaming. “He thanked her for the excellent service. He asked if the inn had a comment box where he could note her attention to guest comfort.”
I decide not to pursue this. Some suffering is too fresh to poke.
“We’ll be exploring the town,” Ren says. “Fifty-foot distance. Standard protocol.”
“Understood.” Tairui pauses at the door. “And if anyone approaches Ailun—”
“Let me guess. Assume hostile intent?”
“Assume any intent. The man cannot tell the difference.”
Through the open door, I catch a glimpse of Ailun in the hallway, holding a small bundle of what appears to be breakfast pastries. Someone has given him pastries. At dawn. In a town where we’ve been for less than twelve hours.
“The innkeeper’s daughter,” Tairui says flatly, without turning around. “She was ‘worried he might be hungry.’”
“It was very thoughtful of her,” Ailun says.
Tairui walks out without responding.
Muffled argument follows. Something about professional boundaries and the definition of “helpful.”
“This is going to be a theme,” I tell Ren.
“I am beginning to suspect that, yes.”
“Should we intervene?”
“I believe intervention would only prolong the inevitable.”
“Which is?”
“Tairui’s complete psychological collapse.”
“That seems extreme.”
“You have not seen the serving girl’s face. She has plans.”
“Ailun has no idea, does he?”
“Ailun,” Ren says, with the measured tone of someone observing a natural disaster, “has never had an idea about this particular subject in his entire life.”
The market smells like fried dough and garlic.
Someone’s working a brazier of scallion pancakes, the oil snapping and hissing, smoke carrying that particular fragrance of wheat and green onion that hits somewhere between hunger and nostalgia.
A grandmother is selling eggs from a basket balanced on her head, calling out prices in a dialect that clips the consonants short.
Children weave between the stalls like small, determined missiles. A dog investigates something unspeakable near the well. Two merchants are having an argument about radish quality that seems to have been going on for approximately thirty years.
Normal. Pleasant. The kind of morning that normal people enjoy without looking for escape routes.
I have already counted the exits. Three—the main street, a gap between the cloth merchant and the herbalist wide enough to squeeze through, and an alley that curves toward what’s probably the river district.
The fabric seller on the left is watching us too closely, his attention sliding back to us every few seconds even when customers approach.
The woman selling eggs hasn’t looked up once, which is its own kind of tell—someone trying too hard to appear uninterested.
The spice merchant’s stall would provide good cover. The fish seller’s would provide good weapons, in a pinch. The alley between the metalworker and the fortune-teller is too narrow for two people to fight abreast—defensible but a trap if someone blocks the far end.
Ren’s doing it too.
Different pattern. He’s tracking the rooflines, the sight angles from the upper windows, the structural integrity of the awning over the dumpling stand. His gaze moves in sweeps—methodical, thorough, the assessment of a man who’s spent two decades expecting arrows from unexpected directions.
“We’re supposed to be relaxing,” I observe.
“I am relaxed.”
“You just evaluated that awning’s weight-bearing capacity.”
“It appeared unstable.”
“You were calculating whether it could support an assassin.”
Pause. His mouth does something that isn’t quite guilty.
“It could not. The support beams are decorative rather than structural. Anyone above one hundred and thirty pounds would collapse it within seconds.”
“There. See? Relaxing.”
We buy the scallion pancakes. They’re good—crispy on the outside, soft in the middle, the kind of street food that tastes better when you’re eating it standing up, grease on your fingers, watching a town pretend not to watch you back.
We reach the temple district.
Old incense, old stone. The kind of smell that gets into your clothes and stays there—sandalwood and smoke from bronze censers that have been burning since before my grandmother’s grandmother was born. Steps worn into shallow bowls by centuries of feet.
“Excellent defensive position,” Ren observes.
“Terrible sightlines, though. Too many blind corners, and that alcove by the offering bowls could hide two people comfortably.” I’m already doing it—counting exits, marking cover, noting where someone could wait.
Can’t help it. “The bell tower would give you vantage, but the stairs are too narrow for rapid ascent.”
“The monks would probably object.”
“Monks have objected to worse.”
“You are in a temple,” Tianlong says, with the weariness of someone who has had this conversation before. “A place of worship. Spiritual reflection. Inner peace.”
“The columns break up any clear line of fire,” I add.
“I am going to begin screaming and never stop.”
We look at each other—Ren and I, not Tianlong, who is glaring from atop Ren’s shoulder. Two people standing in a sacred space, mapping kill zones instead of lighting incense.
“We could light incense,” he offers.
“We could.”
Neither of us moves. The incense seller, an old woman with a face like crumpled linen, watches us with the patience of someone who’s seen our type before.
“Next location,” I decide.
“Agreed.”
The restaurant has good dumplings. Thin skins, pork filling with ginger and scallion, a chili oil that builds without overwhelming. The kind of food that suggests the cook learned from someone worth learning from.
They’re getting cold, because we’ve spent the last twenty minutes extracting the town’s entire political history from a waiter who turned out to have opinions.
Lots of opinions. Detailed opinions with names, dates, and the particular relish of someone who’s been waiting years for strangers interested enough to listen.
“The Wu family diverted the water source seventeen months ago,” Ren summarizes, after the man finally retreats to terrorize another table. “Bribing the magistrate’s brother-in-law, who married into the family specifically for access to the irrigation records.”
“Classic pattern. And the previous inspector?”
“Promoted to a position three provinces away.”
“Convenient.” I poke at a dumpling. Still warm enough to eat. “The local petition system?”
“Backlogged for ten months. The waiter mentioned a date late next year.”
We contemplate our cooling food. Somewhere near Ren’s collar, Tianlong sighs with the weight of three millennia.
“You are both fundamentally broken people.”
“We’re aware.”