The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(102)

“What . . . what would that look like?”

“It is best if this does not happen.” She refocused upon him shrewdly. “When we leave this place, someone will need to lead the beast gods to a purpose. A home. Someone will need to be their steward. Someone with your particular gift, Nokhai. How convenient you should stumble across our threshold.”

He ignored the pointed look she gave him. “When you say you’re leaving . . . what does that mean?” he asked. “Why don’t you just take the beast gods with you?”

“Where we go, they cannot follow.”

“What’s stopping them?”

“If a cloud asked you to follow it up into the sky, could you do it?”

Nok looked to see if she were joking. She was smiling again, but he’d already learned that meant little. “You could not, am I correct?”

“Where is it exactly that you’re going?”

She was silent for a long while, then said, “What do you suppose is beyond the sky, Pactmaker? This mantle of white and gray you see above us?”

He shrugged. The question made him think about things he’d rather not. “My people said the heavens.”

“And you? What do you say?”

“More of the same, I guess,” he said. “A lot of nothing.”

“Oh, but you can’t mean that. A boy with your gifts, your depth. Do try again.”

“What does it matter what I think?” he demanded.

“You asked where we are going. I believe it is customary to supply a question with an answer, no?”

“Where I come from, answers generally don’t come in the form of new questions.”

“You grow impatient. Very well. Where we go, we cannot fathom until we are there. Does a fish comprehend the land before it has been plucked from the sea? Or, better yet, does a tree comprehend a house before it is cut and hewn to form the walls? Who we are, here, now . . . we are like the tree. Unknowing, unformed, unused.”

Nok’s head swam. “I think you’re better off the way you are now. Who wants to be cut up and turned into something else?”

“Sometimes uncertainty is better than languishing in the familiar—my brother Jin was not wrong about that.”

Nok shrugged. “Better safe and bored than dead, I’d say.”

“Do not mistake cynicism for wisdom, child; it’s very tedious,” Vrea tutted. “Where we go is unknown. It is endless. The emptiness. That is what lies beyond the sky.”

“Like I said: nothing.”

“Emptiness is not nothing. It is a space waiting to be filled. It is all possibility. It could be anything, so it is everything.”

Nok did not know what to make of that. He leaned heavily against the balcony.

“I’ve exhausted you,” Vrea said.

“No,” he replied. “My wound exhausted me. You just . . . confused me.”

She laughed—a strange, almost perverse sound. “You’re funny. That’s interesting.”

“Is it?” he said, gazing past the edge of the balcony for the first time. To his surprise, they were overlooking water. For a moment he thought it must be the lake where they had encountered the imperials, but, no, he realized. Small frothy waves curled up along the edge of the shore, ceaselessly dashing themselves apart against the sand. It was no lake at all, but a sea. Farther out, the mirrored surface reflected the gray, cloud-dense sky above.

There was no smell, he realized. No brackish fishy tinge to the air the way there was along the harbor back home.

Was Yulan City home, now? Home. Where was that?

“I can’t stay,” he said. “I owe a debt to someone.”

“Omair is welcome to join you.”

He looked at her, surprised.

“Princess Lu,” she explained. “She told my brother Jin of your quest. Your obligations to him. But after Omair has been freed by your princess and her new army, return here. Claim your rightful place.”

“My rightful place?” He stifled the urge to scoff. “I wouldn’t know what that is. I-I’m no one. I’ve been no one—”

“For far too long,” Vrea said firmly. “You are the only one of your kind, Nokhai. The only one who can restore the Pacts, bring order back to your gods. Bring life—real life—back to what remains of your people.”

Something cold touched his hand; he looked down and saw the wolf nosing at him. He ran a tentative hand through the blue-silver hairs behind its ears, sunk his fingers into the plush ruff of its neck.

“See how it longs for you?” Vrea murmured. “The bond you have with it is insistent—a force of nature.”

“So why can’t I control the caul?”

As though understanding his words, the wolf pulled back. Vrea held out her hand and maddeningly, the wolf slid toward her, slunk behind the sweep of her robes, peering out at Nok reproachfully.

“Your people had ceremonies for binding people to their cauls, did they not?”

“Yes,” Nok said. “People did them when they came of age. But I don’t know what they entailed, since I didn’t have the Gifting Dream back when I was supposed to. Nasan had the Dream early, but she was too young for the ceremony. And now everyone who knew what to do is dead.”