Resurrection #2
“The cipher,” I repeat.
“The names will connect to someone.” She is watching my face, cataloging my reaction. Even now. Even minutes after returning from death. Even with blood still drying in her hair. “The funding trail. The symbols. It all leads somewhere.”
I should be taking notes. I should be summoning scribes, advisors, someone to record this properly. Instead I am sitting beside her bed, close enough to touch her if I reached out, watching her chest rise and fall with each breath.
She shifts on the bed—testing her body, I realize. Confirming that everything works. She pushes herself up against the pillows—my pillows—and something in the movement catches my attention. The way she winces, slight but present.
“The resurrection takes it out of me. Before you ask.”
I had not planned to ask. I had planned to not notice that she was in discomfort, because noticing would require acknowledging that I care about her discomfort.
I noticed anyway.
You are sitting very close, Tianlong observes, for two people discussing treason.
The humor is back. That means he believes the crisis has passed. I should find comfort in this. Instead I find irritation.
She nearly died.
She did die, he corrects, not unkindly. And now she is alive again, and you are sitting close enough to count her eyelashes, and I am simply making an observation.
I do not respond to him. I am watching her hands—restless, already wanting to work. I am noting the way her chest rises and falls. I am counting her breaths without meaning to.
“I should cross-reference the financial manifests,” she continues. “Trace the intermediaries back to—”
“Tomorrow.”
She stops. Looks at me.
“The investigation can wait until tomorrow,” I say. “You need to rest.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“I know.” I meet her eyes. Hold them. “Rest anyway.”
For a moment I think she will argue. She is built for argument, for deflection, for filling silence with noise and motion. But something in my face must communicate what I cannot say, because she subsides against the pillows with only a small sound of irritation.
“Emperors,” she mutters. “Always giving orders.”
“You could ignore me.”
“I could.” She closes her eyes. “I find I do not want to.”
The admission hangs between us. Neither of us examines it.
“Good,” I say. “You should rest.”
“You should leave.”
Neither statement is a request. Neither of us moves.
The hour is improper. I have been here through three hours of waiting and however long since she woke. Dawn light creeps through the window screens, pale gold against dark silk. The court will be stirring. The whispers that started in the streets will have reached every corner of the palace by now.
I do not leave.
“The servants will talk,” she says.
“They already talk.”
“The court will have opinions.”
“The court always has opinions.” I settle deeper into the chair. I have not moved from her side since I sat down. I do not plan to move now. “I find I care about them less than I once did.”
She turns her head on the pillow to look at me. Her hair is matted with dried blood, her face still pale from resurrection, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion. She should look terrible.
She does not.
“Perhaps,” she says. “That is why so many people want you dead.”
“Perhaps.”
The silence stretches. It is comfortable now, in a way I did not know silence could be with another person. I have spent twenty-two years filling silences with strategy, with careful words, with the endless performance of emperor. This silence requires nothing.
“I didn’t have to move.” Her voice is quiet. “When the bolt—I could have let it hit you.”
“I know.”
“You would have survived. The dragon bond. You healed from the poison.”
“Yes.”
“It might have hurt. A lot. But you would have lived.”
“Probably.”
She looks at the ceiling. Her throat moves as she swallows. “I don’t know why I did it.”
“I know.”
Same answer. Same truth. Neither of us knows why we are doing what we are doing. We are doing it anyway.
“You stayed,” she says.
“Yes.”
“The whole time. Three hours.”
“Three and a half.”
“Watching me be dead.”
“Yes.”
She processes this. I watch her try to fit it into the categories she uses to understand the world—threat, asset, ally, enemy. I watch it fail to fit.
“Why?”
I do not have an answer. Or I have too many answers, and none of them are things I can say.
How do I explain that watching her die felt like watching a part of myself die?
How do I explain that the three hours of waiting were the longest of my life, longer than the civil war, longer than the night I bonded with Tianlong, longer than any of the endless moments of duty I have survived?
How do I explain that I would have waited three hundred hours if that was what it took?
Tell her, Tianlong suggests, and for once there is no mockery in his voice. Tell her why.
I cannot. The words do not exist. Or they exist but I do not know how to make my mouth form them, how to take the thing in my chest and translate it into sound.
“I do not know,” I say instead. “But I could not leave.”
She nods. Something in her expression shifts—a softening I have never seen, a crack she usually guards with violence and humor. She lies back against the pillows. My pillows. In my bed. The impropriety of it does not occur to me, or occurs and is dismissed as irrelevant.
“Stay,” she says. “Until I sleep. Just—stay.”
I should not.
“Yes.”
She sleeps eventually.
I watch it happen—the tension releasing from her shoulders, her breathing evening into something slow and steady, her face losing the sharp edges she wears like armor.
In sleep, she looks almost peaceful. Almost young.
The blood in her hair catches the dawn light, turning rust to something closer to copper, and I think about how I should have someone bring water and cloth and clean her properly.
I do not summon anyone.
Eight hundred years. Six hundred and forty-four deaths. And she chose to add one more for me.
I should leave.
The hour is beyond improper now. True dawn has arrived, spilling gold through the window screens, illuminating the room in stripes of light and shadow.
There will be audiences to attend, petitions to hear, the endless machinery of empire that does not pause for emperors who spend the night beside assassins.
I do not leave.
I stay. I will examine this decision tomorrow. I will analyze the implications. I will restore the observation-analysis-control pattern that has governed my life for twenty-two years and determine what this means for the investigation, the conspiracy, the future of the alliance.
Tomorrow.
Today—this morning—I stay.
Tianlong is silent. He knows when to give us privacy. The fact that he considers this moment worthy of privacy says more than I am ready to hear.
She stirs in her sleep. Shifts. Her hand moves across the silk until it rests near mine on the edge of the bed—not touching, but close. Close enough that I could reach out and close the distance.
I do not reach.
But I do not move away either.
I watch her breathe.
That is enough.