Home #3
She is sitting in our usual place. Her knees are drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. She is staring at nothing—the wall, the climbing vines, the darkness beyond. She does not turn when I approach, but she shifts slightly. Making room.
I sit beside her. The familiar distance between us—close enough to reach out, far enough to retreat. Neither of us retreats.
“I should be dead,” she says.
I wait. She will continue when she is ready.
“I made a choice. In that moment. When the Hungering King had you, when the ritual was activating, when everything was falling apart—I chose to die. I meant it. I chose to give myself to his ritual because it was the only way to save you.”
Her voice is steady. Clinical, almost. The voice of someone who has had too long to think about something and has worn the edges smooth.
“I should have stayed dead. That was the deal. Willing sacrifice. Love-fueled. Permanent. The ritual should have worked. The Hungering King should have gotten his wife back and I should have been—” She pauses. “Not dead. Ended. My essence used as a vessel. No resurrection. No coming back.”
“But you did come back.”
“Yes.” She finally turns to look at me. Her eyes are dark, confused, searching.
“He saw something. In that void between death and resurrection. He looked at me and saw something that stopped the ritual—something that made it reject me as a sacrifice. And he could not say what it was. He looked at me like I had broken something he forgot he owned, and he could not make himself speak.”
I consider this. The Hungering King, who has pursued his obsession for eleven centuries. The Hungering King, who has read every word of the blessing that hides Lián from his sight. The Hungering King, who saw something that stopped his ritual and could not name it.
“Do you know what he saw?”
“No.” Her laugh is short, frustrated. “Everyone keeps looking at me like they know something I do not. Tianlong. Lady Mei. Even the cat. They look at me, and then they look at—”
She stops. Her hand has drifted to her stomach. She stares at it, surprised by its position, and does not move it.
“You keep doing that,” I say.
“I know.” She shakes her head. “I do not know why.”
The silence stretches. The jasmine blooms around us, pale flowers glowing in the moonlight. I think about Lady Mei’s lingering gaze. Tianlong’s cryptic observations. The cat’s protective positioning. The puzzle pieces arrange themselves in my mind, form a shape I am not certain I am ready to see.
I do not push. If the shape is what I suspect, she will understand soon enough.
“Perhaps your body knows something you do not,” I say quietly.
She looks at me. Studies my face in the darkness.
“That is very philosophical.”
“I am a very philosophical person.”
“You are a very annoying person.”
“Also true.”
Something eases in her expression. The tension bleeds out of her shoulders. She leans against me—a slow motion, deliberate—and I shift to accommodate her, my arm settling around her waist.
“The Hungering King will come again,” she says.
“Yes.”
“He will figure out what stopped the ritual.”
“Probably.”
“He will try again.”
“Then we will be ready.” I pause. “We.”
She catches the word. I feel her attention snag on it, turn it over.
“We,” she repeats.
“Is that objectionable?”
“No.” A pause. “It is… unfamiliar. I have not been part of a ‘we’ in a very long time.”
“Neither have I.”
The admission hangs between us. Two people who have spent their lives alone—she by necessity, I by duty—finding themselves suddenly, unexpectedly, part of something larger.
“Your poetry is still terrible,” Lián says.
The non sequitur startles me. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your poetry. The journal entries. They are objectively terrible.”
“You have not read today’s entry.”
“Does it rhyme?”
“It does not rhyme.”
“Progress.” She yawns. Settles more heavily against me. “Read it to me tomorrow. The terrible poetry. I want to hear how bad it is.”
“That seems counterproductive.”
“That seems necessary. For my entertainment. And my critical assessment.”
“Your critical assessment is—”
“Invaluable. Yes. I know.”
I find that I am smiling. Not the almost-smile. Not the careful curve of lip that suggests amusement without committing to it. An actual smile, in the darkness, where no one can see.
She cannot see it either. But I think she knows.
“Rest,” I say. “You are exhausted.”
“I am resting. Against you. In a garden. This is very restful.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Also true.” Her breathing slows. “Ren?”
“Yes?”
“I am glad I came back.”
The words are simple. She says them without drama, without weight, without the layers of deflection she usually wraps around anything true.
My arm tightens around her. My chin rests against her hair. The jasmine blooms around us, and the night stretches on, and somewhere in the palace the empire continues its endless motion, demanding attention I do not intend to give.
“I am glad too,” I say.
She does not respond. Her breathing has evened out—the slow rhythm of sleep, here, against me, in the garden where everything began.
I do not move. I do not need to.
She is here. She is safe. She is home.