Coward #2
I do not move. I barely breathe. This is the most absurd moment of my reign. I am the Emperor, Dragon-Bonded, Voice of Heaven, and I am lying on the floor of a terrible inn being used as a sleeping surface by a cat I did not invite.
I am afraid to move in case he leaves.
There were no animals in my life that did not serve a purpose—the dragon is bonded, the horses are transport, the dogs that appear in the palace are guards. Everything in the palace serves the empire. Everything in my life serves the throne.
This is simply a cat. He has no purpose here except the one he chooses.
He has chosen me.
The weight of him is warm against my chest. His purring vibrates through my ribs. In the darkness, I can hear Lián’s breathing above me, slow and steady, and the faint rustle of Tianlong shifting in his ceramic pot, and the distant sounds of an inn settling into the night.
I lie in the darkness, the weight of the cat on my chest, and I think: I have never been happier.
The thought arrives without permission. I examine it.
I should dismiss it—happiness is not a word I use, not a state I seek, not a thing that belongs in the vocabulary of empire.
But it persists. Stubbornly. A warmth beneath my ribs that has nothing to do with duty and everything to do with this moment: a terrible room, a hard floor, a cat who will not stay where he is wanted.
This is absurd. This is undignified. This is everything an emperor should not feel, everything a ruler cannot afford to acknowledge.
I do not move the cat. I close my eyes.
I sleep.
Grey pre-dawn light.
I wake before consciousness fully forms—a skill learned from years of emergency war councils, assassination attempts, advisors who believed the emperor’s time belonged to them rather than to himself.
My eyes open to a ceiling I do not recognize, walls I have never seen, the disorienting blankness of an unfamiliar space.
For a moment, I do not know where I am.
Then memory returns: the inn, the road, the disguise. Lián breathing softly from the bed. Dumpling returned to the pillow, curled into a substantial orange circle. Tianlong presumably still in his pot, dreaming of being enormous.
I lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling.
There is no schedule.
The understanding arrives slowly, like water seeping through cloth.
No minister waiting outside the door. No petitions requiring review.
No war council convening at dawn. No documents, no audiences, no ceremonies, no endless procession of duties that have structured every day of my life since I was twelve years old.
There is nothing.
I do not know what to do.
Not what to do next—I understand the plan. The road south. The temple in Jiangzhou. The investigation that has brought us here. That is clear. That has purpose.
But right now, in this grey light between night and day, I do not know what to do with myself. How to occupy the minutes. Where to put my hands, my attention, my existence.
The structure is gone, and I am falling.
Lián stirs. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring at the ceiling like it owes you money.”
I consider the ceiling. It does not owe me money. It does not owe me anything. It is simply there, wooden and water-stained and indifferent.
“I do not know what to do.”
“We ride south. We discussed this.”
“No, I mean—” I stop. The words are harder than they should be. “I do not know what to do right now. There is no schedule. No one needs me to be anywhere.”
Silence. Then the creak of the bed as she props herself up on one elbow. The grey light catches her hair, loose and tangled, falling across the terrible pillow in a way that should not hold my attention but does.
She is studying me. I can feel the weight of her assessment, the eight centuries of observation she brings to every moment.
“Ren. When was the last time you had a day with nothing scheduled?”
I search my memory. The answer is not difficult—it is simply uncomfortable. A fact I have known but not examined, like a wound I have learned to move around rather than treat.
“I was eleven.”
Silence again. Longer this time. I do not look at her face because I do not want to see pity there. I have spent twenty-two years avoiding pity, the performance of sympathy from people who cannot comprehend and do not try.
But when I finally glance toward her, pity is not what I find.
Something shifts in her expression. Not softness—she does not do softness. Something closer to recognition. The look of someone who has seen a door and realizes she has a key, not because she made it but because she has passed through similar doors herself.
How many of her years were scheduled by someone else’s expectations? How many spent running from the structure that would confine her?
“Then figure it out,” she says. Her voice is gentler than her words. “You have three weeks.”
“Figure it out,” I repeat.
“That’s what I said.”
“And if I cannot?”
She sits up, the blanket falling from her shoulders, her expression caught between exasperation and something warmer.
“You survived ascending the throne at twelve. You survived immolation in dragon fire. You survived a civil war you didn’t start. You’ll survive having a morning off.” A pause. “Probably.”
“Your confidence is overwhelming.”
“I’m told it’s one of my best qualities.”
Despite everything—the disorientation, the strangeness, the profound uncertainty of existing without structure—I feel the corner of my mouth threaten to move. It does not quite become a smile. But it is close.
She sees it. Her own expression shifts, a flicker of something that might be satisfaction.
“Now,” she says, throwing back the blanket with a decisiveness that startles Dumpling from his sleep, “we have distance to cover. Figure out your existential crisis while we ride.”
The second dawn comes differently.
Another inn. Another room. Another night survived. The grey light filters through thin curtains, and I am awake before the light has fully formed, watching shadows become shapes become furniture become the ordinary details of a life I do not recognize as mine.
Lián is still asleep, her breathing slow and even, her hair spread across the pillow in dark tangles.
I am watching her.
I should not be watching her. There are many things I should be doing—preparing for the day’s travel, reviewing what we know about the temple, planning contingencies for the investigation ahead.
Productive things. Imperial things. Things that do not involve cataloguing the way the early light catches the scar through her eyebrow or the curve of her mouth in sleep.
Her mouth. I am looking at her mouth.
You’re staring.
Tianlong’s voice, from the windowsill. He has emerged from his pot at some point during the night, reclaiming a position where he can observe both the door and the room. Eight inches of iridescent dragon, golden eyes catching the grey light, watching me watch her.
I am keeping watch.
You are keeping watch of her face.
The room has two entry points. I am monitoring both.
The room has two entry points, and you have been looking at neither. You have been looking at her mouth.
I cannot argue. The observation is accurate, and Tianlong knows it, and I know that he knows it, and the pretense of denial has grown too thin to sustain.
Her mouth. She is sleeping, and I am watching her mouth, and somewhere in the accumulated silence of twenty-two years of careful control, something has cracked beyond repair.
I look away. The window. The door. Anything but her.
We should wake her. We have distance to cover.
Coward.
I do not argue.
The grey light strengthens, bleeding into something warmer. Dumpling stretches on the pillow, yawns, and begins to purr. The sound fills the room—rumbling, content, oblivious to the weight of what hangs in the silence between a man and a dragon.
She stirs. And the moment ends, as all moments do, with the weight of what I did not say pressing against my ribs.
But the light is turning gold. The cat is purring. And I am learning that cowardice and patience are not always the same thing.
You are still a coward, Tianlong observes.
I am aware.
But perhaps, he allows, grudgingly, a coward who is learning.
It is not absolution. It is not encouragement. But from a three-thousand-year-old dragon who has watched me avoid my own life for twenty-two years, it is something close to hope.
Three weeks. I have three weeks to figure out the difference between caution and cowardice.
The light reaches the bed. She opens her eyes. And somewhere beneath the weight of empire and duty and carefully constructed walls, something new is growing.
I do not name it. Not yet.
But I do not look away.