12. Thin Walls and Fat Cats
Thin Walls and Fat Cats
Emperor Ren
I cannot sleep.
This is not unusual. Twenty-two years on a throne built from the bones of my family has made sleep a negotiation rather than a surrender. But tonight is different. Tonight, her words keep returning, circling like carrion birds that refuse to land.
I held his hand while he died.
I have heard confessions before. Ministers confessing treason. Generals confessing failure. Prisoners confessing crimes they did not commit because the alternative was worse. None of them sounded like that. None of them cost the speaker anything.
She gave me something last night. Something she had not given anyone in three hundred years.
I do not know what to do with it.
The comb is in my hands again—mother’s jade, cool and smooth against my palms. I do not remember taking it from the bedside table. My fingers find it the way a man dying of thirst finds water: without thought, without choice.
Remember who you were, she said. Before the fire. Before the crown.
I set the comb down. Close my eyes. Will myself toward sleep.
Through the wall, I hear her voice.
The walls in the eastern wing are old. Wooden panels and silk screens, built for beauty rather than privacy. I learned this the first night I placed her in the adjacent chamber—a security decision, keeping the emperor’s shadow close. A practical arrangement.
This is what I tell myself.
I should not know that she paces when she cannot sleep. I should not know that she hums sometimes, tunelessly, or that she talks to herself when she thinks no one can hear.
I should not be lying here, listening.
“Dumpling, I swear to every ancestor who has ever ignored me, if you knock that inkpot over one more time, I will end you.”
Silence.
“Don’t give me that look. You know what you did. There is a paw print on the Minister of Revenue’s taxation proposal. A paw print, Dumpling. On official documentation.”
More silence. She is talking to a cat. A cat named Dumpling.
I should roll over. Pull the pillow over my head. Pretend the panel between our chambers does not carry every word.
“Fine. You’re right. It was boring anyway.” A pause. “Ren would’ve—” She stops. When she continues, her voice is different. Harder. “The emperor would have found it tedious. That’s what I meant.”
Oh. Tianlong’s voice curls through my mind like smoke. Oh, this is magnificent. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe too loudly. I haven’t been this entertained since the Crown Prince of Liu sneezed during his own coronation and launched the sacred hat into the brazier.
I should stop listening.
You should. You absolutely should.
I do not stop listening.
“He’s ridiculous, you know.” Her voice again, and I recognize this—the deflection, the sharpness that means she is circling something she does not want to name. “Sits there with that face. All carved cheekbones and noble suffering. It’s insufferable.”
The cat offers no opinion.
“And he listens. That’s the worst part. Doesn’t interrupt.
Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t do that thing people do where they’re already calculating how broken you are before you finish talking.
” A sound—frustration, maybe, or something rawer.
“Who does that? Who just… sits there like what you’re saying actually matters? ”
She’s describing basic human decency, Tianlong observes, as if it were a miracle. That’s either a commentary on her past or a confession. Possibly both.
“Stop looking at me like that, Dumpling. I’m not—this isn’t—” She makes another sound, half-laugh, half-something else. “He’s going to get himself killed, being that earnest. Sincerity is a security flaw. I should be concerned. For professional reasons.”
She’s rationalizing. The dragon sounds delighted. Badly. This is fun.
I am not eavesdropping. The walls are thin. I cannot help what carries through them.
You could cover your ears. You could hum. You could do literally anything except lie there listening to every word she says.
I do not respond. Through the wall, Lián is still talking. Her voice has gone quieter now, the sharp edges worn down to something almost soft.
“He carries it all like it’s his fault. The throne, the empire, every death that’s ever happened within a hundred miles of this palace.” A pause. “The fire didn’t ask him, did it? It just… chose. And he’s been apologizing for surviving ever since.”
Something in my chest cracks.
When she speaks again, the deflection is back, brittle as glass. “I’m talking to a cat. About the emperor. At three in the morning.” A bitter laugh. “This is a new low, Dumpling. Even for me.”
I stare at the ceiling. The stone is cold above me, carved with dragons that have watched a dozen emperors sleep and fail to sleep in this bed. Through the wall, I can hear her moving—pacing again, footsteps soft on the floor.
She is ten feet away. A single wall between us. I could knock. I could—
I am not going to knock.
You could. You could knock. You could stop being a coward and—
Then—a sound.
Not from her room. From the corridor outside. A footstep where there should not be a footstep. The guards do not patrol this section; they station at the wing’s entrance only. No one should be in this corridor at this hour.
No one except—
I am on my feet before the thought completes. The knife is in my hand, strapped to the bedpost where it has lived since the war. I move to the door, press my ear to the wood.
Another footstep. Soft. Deliberate. Moving not toward my door.
Toward hers.
I have two choices. Slip back into bed, pretend I heard nothing, report the intruder through proper channels in the morning and let the guards handle it.
Or.
I open my door.
“Show yourself.”
I do not raise my voice. I have never needed to. The shadow freezes—then bolts.
Toward her door.
I am moving before the thought completes. The knife is in my hand, balanced for throwing, but the angle is wrong and the shadow is fast and if I miss—
The door bursts open from the inside.
Lián. Blade already drawn, sleep-clothes and violence, eyes sharp and calculating even before they find me in the corridor with an intruder between us. Not wide. Not frightened. Annoyed.
“Oh, for the love of—”
The assassin lunges. Not for me. For her.
She sidesteps, blade singing, but this one is trained—professional, not some amateur fumbling with borrowed steel. The assassin matches her pivot, redirects, strikes low. She blocks. The impact rings through the corridor.
I circle left, looking for an opening. The assassin is good. Lián is better—but in close quarters, with bad footing, against someone who clearly came prepared—
She’s magnificent, Tianlong observes, utterly unhelpful. You should tell her.
The assassin feints high, goes low. Lián catches the blade on her forearm guard and I see my opening. I step in, knife angled for the assassin’s exposed side—
Dumpling.
The cat has wandered into the doorway, and chooses this exact moment to stretch… luxuriously. Front paws extending. Back arching. And then he flops directly into the assassin’s path with the boneless grace of a creature who has never once considered that the world might not revolve around him.
The assassin trips.
It is not dignified. It is not dramatic. One moment they are a lethal threat; the next they are sprawling across the floor, thrown off balance by a ball of furry orange indifference, and Lián’s blade is at their throat before they finish sliding.
“How does it feel? To be thwarted by a cat?”
The assassin doesn’t move.
I straighten. My knife is still in my hand, angled for a killing stroke that is no longer necessary. I make myself set it down. The assassin is contained. The threat is neutralized. By a cat.
Dumpling, utterly unbothered, begins grooming his other paw. His work here is apparently done.
I adore him, Tianlong says. We should keep him.
The cat is not ours to keep.
Everything in this palace is ours. You’re the emperor and I am your dragon. Have you forgotten?
I do not respond. Because Lián is looking at me now. Then at the doorway I came through. At the position that makes it very clear where I was—before the shadow appeared.
“How long,” she says, “were you listening?”
I could lie. I have been trained in diplomacy since childhood; I know seventeen different ways to sidestep a direct question, at least four of which would technically be true.
I could tell her I heard a noise and came to investigate.
I could tell her I saw the assassin and followed.
I could give her an exit from this moment that lets us both pretend.
I do not want to pretend.
“Long enough.”
Her jaw tightens. The blade does not waver from the assassin’s throat—her arm is perfectly steady, her breathing controlled, every inch the professional—but something in her eyes flickers. Vulnerability into anger into something harder. Something that looks like a door closing.
I have made a mistake.
Yes, Tianlong agrees. You should have lied.
“We’ll discuss this later.” Her voice is flat. Emptied of everything I heard through the door. “Guards.”
The word carries down the corridor. Footsteps respond. And whatever was cracking open between us seals shut again, buried beneath protocol and professionalism and the assassin sprawled on her floor.
Dumpling yawns, stretches again, and begins washing his face.
The interrogation takes place in a lower chamber, far from prying ears. Stone walls. No windows save narrow slits near the ceiling, where the first grey light of dawn is beginning to seep through. A room designed for conversations the empire would prefer to forget.
The assassin is bound to a chair at the center. Seated. Silent. Professional to the end.
Lián circles them.
She has changed—practical clothes now, hair pulled back, blades visible at hip and thigh. All trace of the woman talking to her cat erased beneath the assassin who has killed more people than most armies. She moves like water finding the edges of a bowl. Patient. Inevitable.
She has not looked at me since we entered this room.