Coward
Emperor Ren
The cloth is wrong.
Common weave, rougher than anything I have worn since childhood.
It sits against my skin like a borrowed identity—which, I suppose, is precisely what it is.
A merchant. I am meant to be a merchant.
I have ruled the Jade Empire for twenty-two years, commanded dragon fire, watched two brothers die in a war fought over my existence.
And now I am meant to worry about the price of rice.
I have no idea what rice costs.
Lián adjusts my collar. Her hands are brisk, professional.
She does not meet my eyes. I note this. I note that I am noting it.
I note that I have been noting small things about her for weeks now—the way she moves, the way she deflects, the way she fills silence with humor rather than sitting inside it.
“Stop holding yourself like you’re about to give a decree,” she mutters.
“How should I hold myself?”
“Like someone who’s worried about the price of rice.”
I do not tell her the problem with that. Instead, I focus on the sensation of her fingers against fabric, the efficiency of her movements, the deliberate way she keeps her gaze on her work rather than my face. She is not avoiding me. She is being careful. There is a difference.
I am not certain I understand the difference.
She steps back, assessing. Her head tilts—a gesture I have come to recognize as calculation. “Better. But you’re still looming. Emperors loom. Merchants… slouch. A little. Not much—you’re not a beggar. But you’re not inspecting troops either.”
I attempt to adjust. The result, judging by her expression, is not improvement.
“We’ll work on it,” she says, and something in her voice suggests this is the first of many such adjustments.
Three weeks. We have three weeks of playing merchant and wife, of sharing rooms and maintaining a fiction that grows more complicated with every day.
Three weeks of proximity that the palace walls would never have permitted.
This is humiliating.
Tianlong’s voice curls through my mind, warm and aggrieved.
The dragon has manifested small—eight inches of iridescent scales, golden eyes in a lizard-shaped body, small enough to ride on a shoulder and too dignified to admit he looks adorable.
He coils around my neck, beneath the collar Lián has just smoothed, radiating disapproval and warmth in equal measure.
You look like a very expensive necklace, I observe.
I have ended dynasties.
And now you are a travel accessory. Life is full of surprises.
I will remember this, he warns, three thousand years of wounded dignity resonating through the bond. When this journey is over, when we return to the palace, when you next require my assistance in some matter of imperial importance—I will remember that you compared me to jewelry.
Iridescent jewelry. There is a distinction.
I hate you.
He does not. This is the texture of our bond—complaint wrapped around affection, exasperation threaded through loyalty. Twenty-two years of this, and I have learned to read the warmth beneath the words.
From somewhere behind us, a sound rises. High. Continuous. Aggrieved.
Yowling.
Dumpling is in a basket on Lián’s horse, and he has not stopped voicing his displeasure since we secured him inside. The sound is impressive in its persistence, a single note of feline outrage sustained beyond what seems anatomically possible.
Tianlong presses closer to my throat, trying to become invisible.
The creature knows, he hisses. It knows.
He is a cat.
He is looking at me. He has been looking at me since I manifested. He is calculating.
Calculating what?
Whether I will fit in his mouth.
I consider the relative sizes. Tianlong, eight inches. Dumpling, considerable. The mathematics are not in the dragon’s favor.
You could always return to full size.
And announce the Emperor’s presence to every village between here and Jiangzhou? I think not. Another glance toward the basket, from which the yowling continues unabated. I will simply remain vigilant. The creature will not catch me unaware.
The yowling rises in pitch. Tianlong presses even closer.
I require a defensible position. A pot. Something with a lid.
We are not at the inn yet.
Then I suggest we ride faster.
We do not ride faster. We ride at the pace of merchants—unhurried, unremarkable, invisible in the way that common people are invisible to common people.
Lián sets the speed. She knows things I do not: which roads draw attention, which inns ask fewer questions, which way to sit a horse so that guards glance past rather than toward.
She also knows what rice costs.
I watch her throughout the day. I tell myself this is strategic—she is the expert here, and I am learning.
But I note the ease that enters her shoulders outside the palace walls, the humor that surfaces more readily when there is no court to perform for.
The way she speaks to strangers without calculation, without weighing every word for political consequence.
She is freer here. Strange, given that we are riding toward danger rather than away from it.
But she moves through the world like someone returning home rather than leaving it.
Eight hundred years of wandering, and she has learned to carry herself like someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere.
I have spent twenty-two years belonging to a throne, and I cannot remember how to belong to myself.
I do not know what home feels like. I am beginning to suspect this is a larger absence than I have acknowledged.
The miles pass. The yowling eventually subsides—Dumpling has fallen asleep, or has accepted his fate, or is simply conserving energy for later protest. Tianlong remains coiled beneath my collar, a thin warmth against my throat, occasionally muttering observations about the landscape, the roads, the profound indignity of being reduced to this.
That village has exceptionally ugly chickens, he notes at one point.
I did not know you had opinions about poultry.
I have opinions about everything. I am three thousand years old. I have earned the right to judge chickens.
The sun arcs overhead, and I realize I do not know what time it is.
Not because I cannot read the sky—I can. But because there is no schedule to measure against. No morning audience at the hour of the dragon. No petitions at the hour of the snake. No war council, no ministerial reports, no evening documents requiring the imperial seal.
There is only the road. The horse beneath me. The woman riding ahead. The warmth of a small dragon against my throat and the distant promise of a cat who will yowl again when he wakes.
It should feel like freedom. I do not know why it feels like falling.
The inn is small.
The room is smaller.
The mattress is… I do not have words for what the mattress is.
It contains something that might once have been stuffing, compressed by generations of travelers into a surface that suggests sleep without promising it.
The room smells of other people’s journeys—old smoke, older sweat, the ghosts of travelers who sought nothing more than a horizontal surface and a roof.
“The bed or the floor,” Lián says. It is not a question.
“The floor.”
She nods, as if this is expected. Perhaps it is. I am the emperor—was the emperor, am pretending not to be the emperor—and she is the woman I am pretending to be married to. There are lines that should not be crossed even in pretense. Especially in pretense.
She takes the bed. I take a blanket and a space near the door where I can see both entrance and window. Dumpling takes the pillow, claiming it with the absolute certainty of a creature who has never been denied anything in his substantial life.
Tianlong takes a ceramic pot.
Defensible positions, he says, curling inside with exaggerated dignity. The lid, if you please.
I place the lid over the pot. He radiates satisfaction.
Now I am invisible. The creature cannot reach me here.
The creature is asleep.
The creature is pretending to sleep. I invented predator behavior. That cat is waiting.
Through the ceramic, I can still feel his warmth, the thread of our bond.
Twenty-two years of this—the voice in my head, the constant commentary, the irritation that is actually comfort.
I have never been alone since the fire chose me.
Even in the most isolating moments of rule, he has been there, sardonic and eternal.
I have never slept in a room with another person.
Not since childhood. The palace does not permit it.
The emperor’s chambers are guarded but not shared, private in the most complete and isolating sense.
A hundred guards outside the door, and no one within it.
Protected and imprisoned in equal measure.
Lián’s breathing slows. She is asleep, or approaching sleep, her form a darker shadow against the darkness of the room. Dumpling purrs from the pillow, a rumbling sound that fills the silence in a way I did not expect to find pleasant.
I lie on the floor. The boards are hard beneath my back. The blanket smells of horses and woodsmoke.
I should be uncomfortable. I am accustomed to silk. To space. To the particular quiet of a room where no one is allowed to enter.
Instead, I feel something I cannot name. Something that has to do with the sound of breathing that is not my own, the warmth of another presence, the simple fact of not being alone.
At some point in the night, I wake.
Dumpling is on my chest.
The cat has abandoned the bed, abandoned the pillow, abandoned Lián entirely to settle his considerable weight across my ribs.
He is purring. His eyes are closed. His paws are tucked beneath him in the position that suggests maximum comfort has been achieved and will not be surrendered for any consideration.
“Traitor,” Lián mumbles from above.