Peaches and Osmanthus
The silk is the color of twilight.
I hold it in my hands like it might bite. Which is ridiculous. I’ve been bitten by worse things than fabric. Poisonous snakes. Feral dogs. A very angry goose once, in Dynasty Three. Still have complicated feelings about geese.
But this—this is different.
“You need to blend in,” Ren says from across the room, where he’s doing something competent with his own transformation. Merchant robes. Simple. Dark gray. The kind of thing that costs more than it looks but knows better than to brag about it. “The contact won’t meet with us if we look like—”
“Like an assassin and an emperor on the run?”
“I was going to say ‘travelers.’“
“Your version is less accurate.”
The contact is a merchant’s wife named Yuen who’s been feeding information to Mei for three years.
Her husband laundered money for the cult before they killed him for asking questions.
According to Mei, she knows where the temple records went—the ones that might explain what the Hungering King actually wants with my bloodline.
She’ll only meet in public. Crowded places. Festival night, wine stall by the canal, look like newlyweds or don’t bother coming.
Hence the silk.
Dumpling, curled on the bed, yawns with the exhaustive judgment that only cats can achieve. He’s been watching this entire preparation like we’re putting on theater for his amusement. Which, honestly, we might be.
The silk slides through my fingers. I haven’t worn anything this fine in fifty years.
Last time was for a job—some minister’s wife needed to die at a garden party, and the dress code was specific.
That silk was green. Jade green. I remember the weight of it, how it caught the light, how the blood barely showed.
This one is blue.
Blue like twilight. Blue like bruises. Blue like the sky just before darkness takes it. Blue like the exact wrong color to be wearing when you’re trying not to feel things.
“The hairpins are on the table,” Ren adds. “Silver. They should complement—”
“I know how to dress myself.”
“I wasn’t suggesting otherwise.”
“You were hovering.”
“I was being helpful.”
“Same thing.”
I gather the silk, the pins, the small pot of rouge someone has thoughtfully provided. The rouge smells like roses. Of course it does. Because tonight isn’t complicated enough without smelling like a garden.
I step behind the screen.
The transformation takes less time than it should. I’m out of practice with powder and rouge—haven’t bothered looking decorative since Dynasty Six—but muscle memory is muscle memory. Even eight hundred years later, I remember how to paint a face that gets let into places.
The rouge goes on. Light. Just enough color to suggest I haven’t spent the past week in inns that smell like regret, sharing a bed with an emperor I have kissed exactly twice while Dumpling sprawls between us like a furry chaperone and a tiny dragon offers unsolicited opinions from a ceramic pot.
Three inches of space. Every night. Neither of us crosses it.
I’m fine. This is fine.
The powder follows—smoothing, concealing, creating the illusion of someone who hasn’t seen centuries of violence.
The pins are borrowed. Not stolen. I’m trying to be good now.
They slide into my hair with the weight of unfamiliarity—two silver birds, wings spread, the kind of thing a successful merchant might buy his wife for their tenth anniversary.
I don’t know whose anniversary they commemorated. Probably better not to ask.
The silk settles against my legs like a warning.
Too light. Too soft. The fabric moves when I breathe, shifting against my skin with every motion.
There’s nowhere to hide knives in this. No reinforced seams, no concealed pockets, no place for the small sharp things that have kept me alive for eight centuries.
I hate this.
I hate how exposed I feel. Hate how the silk clings and flows and makes me look like someone who has never needed to run, to fight, to kill.
I hate how it makes me look like someone worth looking at.
I don’t look in the mirror long. Just long enough to confirm I look like someone’s wife. Someone who belongs at a lantern festival. Someone who has never killed anyone, never died, never woken up in her own blood wondering why she keeps coming back.
“Are you planning to emerge?”
“Give me a moment.”
“You’ve had several.”
“Give me more.”
From somewhere, probably near Ren’s collar, Tianlong decides it’s time to commentate on my life once again. “She is stalling. It is painfully obvious.”
“I am preparing.”
“You are afraid he will look at you and feel things. He will. This is the point.”
I’m going to drown that dragon in his teapot.
I take a breath. Count to three. Smooth the silk one more time, though it doesn’t need smoothing. Touch the pins, though they’re not going anywhere.
And, finally—
Step out from behind the screen.
He stops breathing.
I know because I’m watching for it—the expansion of his chest, the rhythm of someone who’s just been handed something unexpected. He was expecting the merchant wife. He got… whatever this is.
His hands, which had been adjusting his sleeve, go very still. His eyes, which had been focused on something practical and emperor-like, snap to me and don’t move.
The silence stretches.
It’s the wrong kind of silence. The kind that makes me want to fill it with noise—a joke, a threat, something to break whatever is happening in the space between us.
“Say something.” My voice comes out sharper than intended. “You’re staring.”
“I—” He clears his throat. Tries again. “You look—”
“If you say ‘nice,’ I will stab you. I’m not currently armed, but I will improvise.”
“I was going to say like the reason empires fall.”
The words land in my chest like something thrown.
My face does something I can’t control. Something that has no business happening to an eight-hundred-year-old assassin in borrowed silk and someone else’s hairpins. Something that probably looks like vulnerability, or worse, like hope.
“That’s…” I search for the appropriate response. Deflection. Mockery. Something armor-shaped. Find nothing. “Acceptable.”
His mouth twitches. That almost-smile that’s more devastating than anyone’s full grin. The one that says he knows exactly what he did and is quietly pleased about it.
Tianlong’s voice emerges from his pot, small and dripping with amusement. I note that he was not near Ren’s collar. “Smooth. I didn’t know you had it in you, little flame.”
“Be quiet,” Ren says.
“Make me.”
“When we return to the palace, I am going to have your dragon’s hoard audited.”
“You’ve been threatening that for twelve years.
I remain unaudited.” Tianlong’s voice carries the particular smugness of someone who has been watching this situation develop and finds it endlessly entertaining.
“Though I must say, she does clean up remarkably well. For someone who spends most of her time covered in other people’s blood. ”
“Tianlong.”
“What? It’s a compliment. I’m being supportive.”
“You’re being insufferable.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
I check my reflection one more time. Fix a pin that doesn’t need fixing. The silk whispers against my legs, shifting with every breath, reminding me that I am wearing something beautiful and I hate how much I don’t hate it.
“Can we go?” I ask. “Before the dragon provides more commentary?”
“I have many observations yet to share,” Tianlong says. “The night is young.”
“The night is about to get significantly shorter if you don’t shut up.”
“Threats. How delightful. Truly, you two deserve each other.”
Ren and I exchange a look. The kind that says we’re going to be dealing with this all night, aren’t we? And yes, we are and is it too late to find a different dragon?
He offers his arm.
I take it.
Fine. Let’s go pretend to be normal people at a festival.
How hard can it be?
The Lantern Festival is chaos in the best possible way.
I clock the exits first. Always. Three streets branching off the main square, two alleyways, one bridge over the canal where they’re releasing floating candles.
The crowd density is high but not crushing—bodies packed tight enough that pickpockets would thrive, loose enough that I could cut through if I needed to.
Weapons potential: low. These are families, couples, merchants showing off their wares. The only danger here is emotional.
Which, honestly, might be worse.
Paper dragons bob overhead on sticks, carried by performers in silk costumes. Their scales catch the lantern light—gold and red and green—and for a moment they look almost real. Almost like Tianlong in his true form, if Tianlong were made of paper and optimism instead of scales and sarcasm.
Someone is playing a pipa badly but with tremendous enthusiasm. The notes float through the warm night air, mixing with the smell of smoke and sugar and something frying. Children dart between legs, clutching candied fruit and shrieking with the particular joy of being up past bedtime.
“I have not attended a festival since I was eleven,” Ren says quietly.
“Busy ruling an empire?”
“Something like that.”
His hand finds the small of my back—light, guiding, exactly the right amount of pressure—and I tell myself it’s for the cover. We’re merchants. Married. His hand belongs there.
The shiver running up my back disagrees. It thinks his hand belongs everywhere.
“The contact is near the wine stall,” he says. “We have time.”
“Time for what?”
“The festival.”
I glance at him. His face is doing that thing it does when he’s trying not to want something—jaw tight, eyes careful, the mask of duty slipping just enough to show the person underneath.
“You want to… enjoy the festival?”
“Is that not what married merchants do?”
“How would you know? You’ve never been a married merchant.”
“I am improvising.”
My chest does something inconvenient. I ignore it. “Fine. Improvise away.”
We drift into the crowd.
He buys me candied hawthorn without asking.