13. The Only Way Out
The Only Way Out
The tea has gone cold.
I’ve been staring at the same map for three hours. The ink blurs, reforms, blurs again—rivers that might be roads, mountains that might be metaphors, and somewhere between the Western Pass and Jiangzhou, a temple that might actually contain answers instead of more questions.
My ribs ache from sitting too long. I shift, and the chair creaks. Palace furniture wasn’t designed for assassins who can’t hold still; it was designed for ministers who’ve perfected the art of ornamental presence. Everything in this room is mahogany and jade inlay and uncomfortable.
I’ve died six hundred and forty-four times and this is what stops me. Paperwork.
Jing found it—the lead, not the answer. Buried in a requisition manifest from thirty years ago, cross-referenced with a trade route census that no one had touched since the last dynasty.
The girl’s good. Terrifyingly good. She’d presented her findings two days ago with the kind of quiet triumph that means she hasn’t slept in weeks.
“A temple,” Ren had said, studying the documents with those careful emperor’s eyes that miss nothing. “Three weeks south.”
“The Jade Serpent Temple,” Jing had confirmed.
“Abandoned now. But the records suggest it was the origin point. Names of founding members. Ritual texts. A complete accounting of the original brotherhood.” Her hands had trembled slightly, the only sign of what this discovery had cost her.
“Everything the cult has been trying to bury for three centuries.”
Everything we need.
The problem isn’t finding it. The problem is getting there before whoever’s watching us burns it to the ground.
I push back from the table, boots scraping against stone. The war room smells like cold tea and frustration—mine, mostly. The braziers have burned low, casting everything in bronze and shadow.
“Every lead we’ve followed has turned to ash,” I say, though Ren already knows this.
I need to hear it out loud. Need to remind myself why I’m about to suggest something monumentally stupid.
“The warehouse—emptied before our soldiers arrived. The merchant contact—vanished the day after we identified him. Someone inside is watching. Someone with access to our dispatch orders, our route plans, our—”
My knife stops mid-flip. The realization lands fresh, though it shouldn’t.
“Everything,” I finish. “They have access to everything. The moment we send soldiers to Jiangzhou, that temple will be ash and empty rooms before they’re halfway there.”
Ren stands by the window, silhouette sharp against the paper screens. He hasn’t moved in twenty minutes. That particular stillness means he’s thinking—the dangerous kind of thinking, the kind that preceded every successful campaign of the civil war.
I’ve started recognizing his silences. This one is frustrated.
“Lady Mei has narrowed the possibilities,” he says. “Four names.”
“Four names in a court of thousands.” I count the scroll cases stacked on the table. Twelve. None of them useful. “And the moment we investigate any of them directly—”
“They’ll know we’re close.”
“And the evidence will vanish. Again.” I resume the knife flip, needing the motion, needing something to do with my hands that isn’t throwing something. “We’re chasing smoke, Ren. Every time we get close to the flame, someone snuffs it before we can see what’s burning.”
Silence. The braziers crackle. Outside, rain has started—soft and persistent, drumming against roof tiles with the patience of something that knows it will eventually wear through stone.
Somewhere in the palace, a pipa player is practicing scales—mournful notes drifting through rice-paper walls like the ghosts of songs that used to mean something.
I say it before my brain catches up to my mouth:
“We go ourselves.”
The stillness changes. Not frozen anymore—listening. The way a predator listens to movement in the brush.
“Quietly,” I continue, because I’ve already jumped off this cliff and I might as well enjoy the fall. “No retinue. No announcement. Two people traveling to a temple. By the time anyone realizes the emperor has left, we’ll already have the evidence.”
Ren turns. The lamplight catches his face—sharp jaw, tired eyes, that particular expression he gets when someone has said something either brilliant or catastrophically idiotic. He hasn’t decided which yet.
“You want the Emperor of the Jade Throne to sneak out of his own palace.”
“I want to catch whoever’s trying to kill you.” I meet his gaze. Hold it. “If you have a better idea, I’m listening.”
He doesn’t.
The silence stretches. I can hear my own heartbeat, steady and unhurried. Eight hundred years of practice at waiting for dangerous men to make dangerous decisions.
“It takes three weeks,” he says finally.
“Give or take.”
“Disguises.”
“Obviously.”
“A cover story.”
“Merchant and wife.” The words come out smooth, professional. I’ve used this cover before, different centuries, different partners, different—
Wife.
The word hangs between us like incense smoke.
I don’t look at him. Very specifically don’t look at him. My knife keeps flipping—silver-white-silver-white—and I focus on that instead of the heat climbing up the back of my neck.
“It’s the most common cover for mixed-gender travel,” I say, and my voice doesn’t waver. Good. “Two merchants would be questioned. A married couple draws less attention.”
“I see.”
That’s all he says. I see. Two words, perfectly neutral, carrying absolutely no weight whatsoever except for the weight of three weeks of shared rooms and shared meals and shared everything that “merchant and wife” implies.
I should not have said merchant and wife.
The silence stretches. I’m very carefully not thinking about the word wife.
“There’s a complication,” Ren says.
I wait.
“The bond has… requirements.” His voice is careful. Measured. “Distance deteriorates it. If Tianlong and I are separated too far, for too long—” He stops. Starts again. “We both begin to decline. Mentally. Physically.”
Three weeks. Three weeks’ ride south.
“How far is too far?”
“We’ve never tested it.” A pause. “Neither of us wanted to know.”
I file that away. The Emperor of the Jade Throne, afraid to learn the limits of his own power. The ancient dragon, unwilling to risk his bonded. There’s something almost tender in that mutual cowardice.
“I have a plan for the dragon,” I say.
Tianlong’s lair is warm.
Not the warmth of braziers or summer sun—something deeper. Ancient. The kind of heat that seeps up from stone that’s been absorbing dragon fire for thirty centuries. The air tastes of minerals and old magic, copper and ozone and something that might be the residue of stars.
The passage descends for what feels like miles, carved through bedrock that predates the palace, predates the dynasty, predates everything human hands have built above. The walls are smooth—not from tools, but from the passage of something massive moving through them for millennia.
When the cavern opens, I still lose my breath.
I’ve been here once before. Tianlong had addressed me then—voice echoing off stone, ancient and amused, while I tried not to stare. I’d thought I was prepared this time.
I was wrong.
He fills the space.
Golden scales catch the phosphorescent light—crystals that have grown for eons, blue and green and amber dancing across his hide like sunrise through stained glass.
His eyes are ancient gold, each pupil a vertical slit that contains depths I couldn’t fathom in eight hundred years of trying.
Wings folded against flanks that could crush buildings.
Teeth longer than my arm, visible even with his mouth closed, each one holding the faint glow of banked fire.
You don’t get used to this. You just learn to keep breathing through it.
Three thousand years of existence, coiled in crystal-lit darkness, watching us approach like insects that have wandered into his domain.
Which, to be fair, we have.
“So,” Tianlong says, and his voice resonates through rock and bone and the spaces between thoughts, “you wish me to become small.”
The word drips with three millennia of dignity, offended.
Ren doesn’t blink. I’m watching him specifically not blink. The control required to stand before a dragon the size of a palace wing and maintain perfect composure—
“I wish you to be helpful,” Ren replies.
“I have burned armies for you.”
“And now I need you to fit in a saddlebag.”
I make a sound.
It’s not quite a laugh. More like a laugh that got trapped in my throat and is trying to claw its way out. Ren’s face doesn’t change—stone-carved and serene—but there’s something around his eyes that might be satisfaction.
Tianlong’s massive head swings toward me. The movement displaces air, warm and mineral-scented.
“You find this amusing, little dawn?”
“I find it hilarious.”
“Do you.”
“Absolutely.” I’m grinning now. Can’t help it. “Eight-inch dragon. Saddlebag. The mental image alone is worth the entire trip.”
The dragon’s eyes narrow. Golden slits in golden depths, calculating something I probably don’t want calculated.
“When I am small,” he says slowly, “I will remember this. I will provide… commentary.”
“You provide commentary anyway.”
“Yes.” A pause, weighted with ancient patience. “But you will not be able to escape it.”
I stop grinning.
Ren’s mouth twitches. Almost imperceptibly. If I hadn’t spent the last weeks cataloguing every microscopic expression that crosses his face—which I definitely have not been doing, that would be ridiculous—I wouldn’t have noticed.
But I have. And I do.
“Three weeks of you in my ear,” I say flatly.
“In your vicinity.” Tianlong’s tail shifts, scales scraping crystal formations with a sound like wind chimes made of diamonds. “I cannot speak mind-to-mind with you as I do with the flame. But I can speak. Constantly. At length. About everything I observe.”
“Including?”
“Everything.”
The way he says everything makes it very clear what everything includes.