Borrowed Night
One day.
One day until the capital, and everything that waits there. The palace. The politics. The weight of empire settling back onto shoulders that have, for a few stolen weeks, remembered what it feels like to be light.
We’ve made camp somewhere beautiful. A clearing by the river, sheltered by old pines that creak when the wind moves through them.
The water runs over stones—a low ripple and rush, breaking white where the rocks push through.
Stars overhead, thick as spilled salt against the dark.
The kind of night that feels borrowed. Like the universe is being generous and will want it back with interest.
No watchers tonight. Ailun and Tairui split off yesterday, racing back to the capital by separate routes.
Drawing attention away from us. Their absence sits strange on my skin—no eyes from the treeline, no muffled bickering carried on the wind.
Just us. The fire. The river. And the knowledge that tomorrow, this ends.
My back aches. The baby has been performing acrobatics on my bladder since I woke this morning, and I’m fairly certain she’s training for some kind of internal martial arts competition.
Every time I find a position that works, she shifts, and suddenly there’s an elbow—or a knee, or whatever that sharp protrusion is—pressing against something that makes me want to scream.
Romance is the absolute last thing on my mind.
I’m settling onto my bedroll, trying to find a configuration that doesn’t make my spine feel like it’s been replaced with hot iron, when Ren announces he’s going to wash off the road dust.
Fine.
Good.
I don’t care.
I absolutely do not watch him walk toward the river. I do not notice the way the firelight catches the line of his shoulders, or how the towel slung low on his hips is fighting a losing battle with gravity.
I have no opinions about any of this.
Dumpling is watching me.
That flat, golden stare. He’s draped across my travel pack like he owns it—which, to be fair, he believes he does. Everything is his. The pack. The bedroll. The small human growing inside me. I’m just the crazy lady that feeds him and provides convenient sleeping surfaces.
“What?” I ask him.
The cat slow-blinks. Judgment.
“I’m tired. I’m allowed to be tired.”
His ear twitches. He does not believe me. He has never believed me about anything. He is a creature of pure skepticism wrapped in orange fur.
“I don’t know what you think is going to happen.” I shift, trying to get comfortable—an exercise in futility at this point. “I’m the size of a rice barrel. I haven’t seen my feet in a week. The last time I felt attractive, the Jade Throne had a different family on it.”
The cat yawns. Elaborately. He is clearly very unimpressed.
“You’re a terrible companion.”
He begins grooming himself. The conversation, apparently, is over.
I shift again. My hip protests. The baby rolls, pressing against something that makes my breath catch. I’ve survived poison and drowning and fire and that one time with the kraken—and this, this slow, relentless occupation of my own body, is somehow worse than most of them.
At least dying is quick.
Pregnancy is an endurance test I never signed up for. Nine months of losing control of my own body, inch by inch, organ by organ. My body doesn’t belong to me anymore. It belongs to her—this tiny creature who kicks my kidneys and sits on my bladder and has opinions about everything I eat.
I love her already. Fiercely. Terrifyingly.
I would die for her a thousand times.
I just wish she’d stop using my spine as a punching bag.
Dumpling pauses his grooming to stare at me again. That look. Like he knows something I don’t. Like he can see straight through all my carefully constructed defenses to the soft, stupid, wanting thing underneath.
“Stop it,” I tell him.
He resumes grooming. But his whiskers twitch. Smugly.
Then Ren comes back from the river.
Wet.
Barely dressed.
Unselfconscious in the way of someone who has never had to work for a body like that, who has spent decades training with soldiers and fighting in campaigns and apparently never noticed that the result is—
Water running down his chest, catching the soft light in ways that seem personally offensive.
The burn scars on his palms are pale against his skin when he pushes his hair back—the marks the dragon fire left when it chose him, when he walked into flame at twelve years old and came out the other side as something more than human.
His arms do things when he moves. Things involving muscles shifting under skin. Things I wish they would stop doing.
He’s not even trying. That’s the worst part.
He’s just... existing. Standing there by the fire, wringing water from his hair, completely unaware that he’s dismantling my composure with every casual movement.
I forget what I was thinking.
I forget my own name for a second.
Fuck.
Dumpling, without looking up from his grooming, emits a small mrp. It sounds smug.
“Shut up,” I mutter.
“I didn’t say anything,” Ren says.
“Not you.”
He pauses, water still dripping from his hair, and follows my gaze to the cat. Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. That almost-smile he does, the one that makes him look younger and more dangerous at the same time. The one that does something inconvenient to my chest every time I see it.
“Ah,” he says. “Him.”
“He’s judging me.”
“He’s always judging you.”
“He’s judging me specifically right now.”
Ren’s almost-smile deepens by approximately one degree. He reaches for a cloth to dry his hair, and the motion involves his shoulders in ways I’m choosing not to think about.
I’m not thinking about it.
I’m absolutely not thinking about it.
I am eight hundred years old.
I have killed men in fourteen different countries.
I have seduced my way into and out of situations that would make courtesans blush and assassins take notes.
I have survived poison and fire and drowning and that truly unfortunate incident with the ceremonial elephants.
I have walked into courts and bedchambers with absolute control over every muscle in my face, every beat of my pulse, every breath.
I should not be undone by wet collarbones.
And yet. Here I am, competely undone.
I try to look away. My eyes refuse to cooperate. Traitors, both of them.
He’s toweling his hair now, which involves his arms lifting over his head, which involves his abdomen…
glistening. Why is it glistening? His back is to me, and there’s a scar running along his shoulder blade—old, thin, probably from a training accident years ago.
I want to trace it with my fingers. I want to trace all of them.
This is ridiculous, I tell myself firmly. I’m pregnant. I’m uncomfortable. I haven’t felt desirable in weeks. My body has been colonized by a tiny dictator who controls my bladder and my center of gravity and apparently also my judgment.
This is not the time.
My body disagrees.
My body, in fact, has a number of opinions about the current situation, none of which align with my carefully constructed defenses. My body has apparently forgotten that I’m supposed to be too tired for this. Too swollen. Too graceless.
My body is also a traitor.
The baby kicks, as if in agreement. Great. Even she’s on his side.
“Are you going to stare all night?” Ren asks without turning around. “Or would you like me to provide commentary?”
Damn him. Damn him and his observation skills and his almost-smile and his—
“I’m not staring.”
“You’ve been staring for three minutes.”
“I’m assessing.”
“Assessing what?”
“Threat levels.”
He turns. The almost-smile has become an actual smile, small but devastating. “And what have you concluded?”
“That you’re extremely threatening to my peace of mind.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t one.”
“I’ll take it anyway.”
I say something.
I don’t even know what comes out of my mouth.
Something that’s either too blunt or not blunt enough—I can’t tell anymore.
My voice sounds strange. Rough at the edges.
Like it belongs to someone else—someone who wants things, who reaches for things, who hasn’t spent eight centuries learning that wanting is just loss with a longer prologue.
He looks at me. Really looks, the way he does when he’s reading something on my face that I haven’t agreed to show him. The almost-smile flickers.
“Are you—”
“Don’t.”
“I was only going to ask—”
“I know what you were going to ask. The answer is yes. Stop looking pleased about it.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re smirking.”
“I don’t smirk.”
“You’re smirking internally. I can tell. After eight hundred years, I can read a face. Yours is saying smug things.”
He sets the cloth down. Crosses to where I’m sitting—not quite gracefully, because he’s still half-dressed and his hair is dripping, but with that deliberate quality he has. Like every movement is a decision. Like even walking toward me is something he’s thought about, weighed, chosen.
He kneels beside my bedroll. Close enough that I can smell the river on him, clean and cold. Close enough that the warmth of his skin reaches me through the cool night air.
“I’m not smirking,” he says. “Internally or otherwise.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
“My face,” he says, “is merely expressing a reasonable degree of... satisfaction.”
“Satisfaction.”
“That you find me tolerable enough to—”
“Tolerable is not the word I would use.”
“What word would you use?”
His voice has dropped. Lower. Closer. His hand finds my jaw, tilting my face toward his, and his eyes are very dark in the firelight.
This close, I can see the places where exhaustion has left its mark—the faint shadows beneath his eyes, the tension he carries in his jaw.
The emperor who never rests, who carries an empire on his shoulders, who is somehow still here with me in this borrowed clearing, looking at me like I’m the only thing that matters.
My mouth goes dry.
“Inconvenient,” I manage. “I would use the word inconvenient.”