The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(100)

“I will be your husband, your consort, live my days in your southern city. I will be the eyes and ears and wisdom and trust of Yunis, at your side. Surely my brother cannot ask for a more tangible bond than his own flesh and blood. Marry me, Princess, and you will have our army. Your army.”

There was a ringing silence, as though Prince Jin had sucked all the air from the room with his words. Then came pandemonium. Shouts of outrage mingled with shouts of shocked glee and hushed, rapid whispers. Lu had the distinct impression this was the most excitement the people of Yunis had seen in a very long time.

There must have been a thousand eyes on her, but she turned and found Nokhai’s at once.

His were black and still and faraway. The smile was gone from his lips. She thought frantically: I would do anything to bring it back.

A lie. She already knew what she was going to do.

Prince Shen seized the heavy poleax from a guardsman’s hands, banging the butt of it against the dais. “Quiet! Quiet!”

As the crowd went still, Lu turned away from Nokhai and took care not to look at him again.

Prince Shen was glowering at his brother. “Jin, what you propose is unprecedented.”

“Yes,” the younger man agreed earnestly. “And why not? We live in unprecedented times.”

Prince Shen’s brow furrowed as he stared at Jin, searching his face, looking for some hint of—what, exactly? Weakness? Doubt? But Prince Jin looked back boldly, chin held high.

“Do you really wish this, little brother?” Shen’s voice was softened with disbelief.

“I wish for hope,” Prince Jin responded, his voice quavering now, not with fear, but with fervor. “Hope for a better future for our city. Hope that our people might someday flourish, rather than just cower and merely survive.”

“Prince Shen!” Lu cried out. She walked to the top step of the dais. The room was so quiet she could hear the rustle of her crimson robes—wrong, the wrong red.

Prince Shen turned to watch her ascent. How did she look? Proud, defiant, tall? A woman grown? She could only hope.

“Will you honor your brother’s proposal?” she demanded. “If Prince Jin and I marry, will I have my army?”

There was a long silence. Then, “You will,” the prince said at last. “If you would have my brother, and the terms of our future peace, you will have our army.”

Lu lowered her head. “Prince Jin,” she began, and found it was not as difficult as she might have thought to keep her voice steady. “I accept your offer.”





CHAPTER 31


Emptiness

Princess Lu was the sole still thing in the room, the eye of a storm, the axis upon which the winds turned. She was staring at Prince Jin as though seeing him for the first time.

The gathered crowd kicked back into an uproar. Five hundred different opinions seeking to be told at once. Nok flinched at the cacophony, the voices clashing and breaking over one another like soldiers in battle.

“Clever,” Nasan mused beside him. “A marriage binds Yunis’s fate with Lu’s. Yunis is desperate for a chance to become a real city again, and the princess is desperate for an army. This way, win or lose, they’re in it together. She’s smart to take the offer.”

Too late, Nok realized he should say something in response. He nodded.

He never heard Prince Shen dismiss the court, but suddenly everyone was migrating toward the doorways at the rear of the hall. Nok stayed where he was, far away from all of it. Perhaps it was some quality of the Inbetween that spun his head so, made him feel as though he were drifting on the edge of a precipice, dizzy and strange. The hole in his side throbbed tender and overly warm.

“Come on.” Nasan nudged his leg with the toe of her boot. “It’s over. Get up. Let’s go.”

“What?” he said.

“I’ll take you to the apartments they gave us,” his sister said. Then she peered down at him. “Are you all right? You look even paler than before.”

Prince Jin emerged from the crowd before them and Nok blinked, looking at him much as Lu had: as though for the first time. He tried not to recoil.

“Nokhai?” the prince said. He was polite as ever, but his eyes were lively and distracted, scanning the faces of the audience—perhaps to gauge their reaction to his proposal? “My sister, Vrea, would like a word with you.”

Jin gestured to where the priestess stood, long and solemn and gray upon the dais beside Prince Shen. Lu crossed in front of the two of them just then, directed off the dais by a group of ladies-in-waiting. She didn’t see Nok at all. He forced his eyes not to follow her. What was the point? He felt a lance of self-hatred in his gut.

Everyone always leaves me, he’d told her. And why should she be any different?

“Nokhai?” Prince Jin peered anxiously at him.

Nok looked from him to the priestess to Nasan. His sister just shrugged, as if to say, it’s up to you.

“All right,” he said uncertainly.

Nok looked back at the woman called Vrea. She nodded almost imperceptibly when Nok met her gaze. She walked off the dais, toward a door leading out the back. He followed after her.

The door led out onto a wide stone balcony, large enough to accommodate a garden with a pair of bubbling fountains on either end.

Nok felt a presence at his back and turned. Vrea was standing by the edge of the balcony, just outside the door. He’d walked right past her. At her side stood a wolf.