Return #3
“Would you prefer I enumerate the many ways you were smiling wrong over the last six weeks? I have notes. Extensive notes. The way your face attempted joy on day three of the road trip was particularly tragic—”
“I was not aware I smile.”
“Exactly.” Tianlong settles his head on his forelimbs, smoke curling from his nostrils in what might be a sigh. “That is the problem. You have forgotten how. She is reminding you.” His eyes drift to the entrance of the lair, in the direction of the palace above. “Do not forget again.”
Night. Jasmine blooming. Our bench.
She finds me before I find her—or perhaps we find each other, drawn by the same gravity that has been pulling us together since she tried to kill me and I refused to die. The garden is silver with moonlight, and she moves through it like she belongs to the shadows. Like the shadows belong to her.
She does not bow. She does not announce herself. She simply sits beside me, close enough that I can smell the road still on her clothes—dust and wind and something that might be freedom, or might just be her.
The bench is the same one we have shared before—the one by the jasmine trellis, the one that has become ours through repetition and unspoken agreement. The stone is cool through the silk of my robes. The night air carries the sweetness of flowers that bloom only after dark.
“It’s different now,” she says.
“Everything is.”
“You had to become him again. The Emperor.” She does not make it a question, but I hear the question underneath. Are you still in there? Under the crown? Under the duty?
I consider the answer. The weight of the throne room. The way my face composed itself without permission. The boy who ate jianbing with his eyes closed, buried somewhere behind duty and discipline and the endless demands of empire.
“Yes,” I say. “But I am still here. Underneath.”
She looks at me. Her armor is cracked too—I have learned to read the signs. The way her shoulders carry less tension when we are alone. The slight softening around her eyes that she thinks she hides. The way her hands rest in her lap instead of hovering near weapons.
“I know,” she says. “I can tell the difference now.”
Something in my chest loosens. Not gone—I am not certain it will ever be entirely gone—but easier. She sees me. Not the Emperor, not the Dragon-Bonded, not the symbol on coins and in prayers. Me.
“Is this the part where we acknowledge that we’re terrible at this?” she asks.
I almost laugh. It comes out closer to an exhale, but she catches it. Her eyes glint with something that might be victory.
“I believe so.”
“Good. At least we’re consistent.” She stretches her legs out, crossing her ankles in a display of casual comfort that she would not have allowed a month ago. “Feng is going to be a problem.”
“Yes.”
“He was watching me like I’m a siege engine he needs to dismantle.”
“You are a siege engine.” I pause. “One that is also somehow on my side. I believe that is what upsets him most.”
She snorts. It is an undignified sound. I find it entirely too charming.
In the distance, Dumpling is yowling at something. The sound cuts through the garden’s peace with all the subtlety of a drunken opera singer.
“Your cat,” I observe.
“Your palace.”
“He was not yowling at ghosts before I met you.”
“He wasn’t hunting ancient dragons before you either. I’d call it personal growth.”
Silence, but not the heavy kind. The comfortable kind. The kind that belongs to two people who have stopped trying to fill every space with words and started trusting the quiet.
Somewhere in the palace, someone is walking a patrol—I hear the distant rhythm of footsteps. The empire continues to turn, even now. Ministers are scheming. Guards are watching. The Hungering King is waiting, somewhere in the dark, for the moment when he can take what he believes is his.
“Tomorrow will be harder,” I say.
“Probably.”
“Feng will not stop.”
“Definitely not.”
“The Hungering King is still out there.”
“Yes.” She turns to face me, and there is something in her expression that makes my breath catch. Not soft, exactly—she is never entirely soft—but open. Unguarded. The door that is usually bolted left slightly ajar. “But tonight is tonight.”
Tonight is tonight.
I reach for her hand. She lets me take it. Her fingers are calloused from centuries of weapons, scarred in ways that have healed and scarred again. They fit against mine like they belong there.
We sit in the jasmine-scented dark, two people who should not fit together, who should not work, who should not have found each other in a palace built on duty and ghosts.
We fit anyway.
Tomorrow will be harder. Tomorrow I will be the Emperor again, and she will be the shadow, and Feng will scheme and the Hungering King will wait and the empire will demand everything I have.
But tonight, in this garden, I am just a man who wrote poetry on the road and admitted he does not like peaches and fell in love with a woman who cannot die.
Tonight is enough.
She squeezes my hand once. I squeeze back.
Tonight is tonight.