The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(113)

Where forgotten things go.

In the silence, he heard another distant rumble—farther away now. A summer storm receding.

They come.

“They? Is it Set?” he asked.

The one you call Set, confirmed the Black. And the one who seeks the knowledge of the beginning of all things, and the one who is their weapon. The Girl. She is the deadliest of all, though they do not know it yet. She does not know it yet.

“The girl?” he repeated. “What girl?”

An inversion, hissed the Violet. With a sweet face and gray eyes. The one born of vengeance. She is a sword wrought in the flames of hatred. Forced. She is disharmony. She is their counterfeit key. It was she who unlocked the gate.

Confusion gave way to frustration. “Please, Nasan and the others—I have to go.”

Go, echoed the Violet. It is too late for us, but it is not too late for you. For your gods. You have languished long here already—nearly too long. Perhaps you were here even before you arrived. But now you must take your patron and return to where you belong.

“My patron?”

The paintbrush strokes of the Black and the Violet parted like curtains, sweeping light as a kiss across his face. Nok flinched against the flaring heat of them, burning so hot and fleet and clean it felt almost like cold, like freezing. He closed his eyes.

And when he opened them again, the flames were gone. In their place stood the wolf. His wolf.

Nokhai, the wolf murmured. Its voice was warm and languid, seeming to emanate from the walls of the sanctum cavern like steam. But he felt it come from within as well, rumbling through the thin, quivering flue of his own throat.

“We have to go,” he said.

We? the wolf repeated, and now its voice quivered apart like music, harmony—each note sung by a different voice. All at once, he heard Nasan’s hoarse lilt, his father’s stern, stolid rumbling. There were others, too—Elder Pamuk’s imperious croak. The jeers of Karakk and the other Kith boys. And lingering after all the rest, his mother’s low, sweet cadence, familiar as a childhood lullaby. Painful as a kick to the chest.

“I need you,” he whispered, and his own voice sounded tinny and small. “I need you to tell me what to do. I need . . .” The words died on his lips. Why won’t you come to me?

I’m here, the wolf said, and again Nok heard the tumbling chorus of his half memories, his ghosts, the many in that one voice.

I’m here. Are you?

He understood then. Suddenly—and also not. He’d known all along, hadn’t he? This was all that remained, all they had left him. For years, he’d ignored it in favor of his disbelief, his resentment, his fury. He’d let all that coil around it like a knot of scar tissue, calcify into a shell. Kept the whole thing like a stone in his gut, named it grief. But he saw the truth at the core of it now, clean and swift. It felt like emerging from a long dream in which he’d been someone else.

This was all there was. And what had wrought it was hateful and cruel and wrong—a wrong that would never be reversed—but it, the thing itself, was blameless. It was simply all that remained. He was all that remained.

He, and the wolf.

He swiped an arm across his face, found it wet with tears. When had he begun crying?

“Come to me,” he said, and though his voice quavered, it held, the words a rope of steel buried in the heart of all that dust and grave dirt. “Come to me, now.”

And the wolf came.

This time when it swept over him, warm as summer wind in the steppe, he felt something catch. Knit in place.

It hurt—a harsh clicking pain, deep in his bones, a sharp itch in the marrow. He closed his eyes and accepted it. The pain passed, and then came something new. It spread through his veins, swift and effervescent, gleeful in its quickness, its rightness. He felt buoyant, as though he’d spent his whole life with a boulder lashed to his back, and someone had just cut the ropes. His face twitched and all at once he barked out a laugh—

Joy.

He’d forgotten joy.

He opened his eyes again and found himself alone in the cavern. All that remained of the Black and Violet flames was an ambient warmth, a hint of sulfur in the dead air.

No wolf, either. But he could sense it all the same, the way when he went still and quiet, he could feel his own heartbeat.

He stretched his arms in wonder. The pain and exhaustion weighing down his muscles had disappeared. He walked forward and discovered a new power left in their absence, a singing in his blood, a new strength. The dark of the cavern had receded, too. He blinked. Finding no source of light, he realized that his vision had altered.

The wolf, he thought. He now saw with the wolf’s eyes as well as his own.

Walking faster, he reached the end of the cavern and, estimating the place where he’d entered, he pressed his hands to the wall. The stone was still warm to the touch, and he ran his palms over the coarse bite of stone.

“Nok?”

“Where did he go?”

“Where is there to go?”

Voices. Human voices, now. He could hear Nasan, and—

“Nokhai!”

Lu.

“Nok?” They were calling louder now.

He pressed again at the wall and this time the stone parted soft as water, and he was stumbling, falling—

“Nokhai!”

Strong arms engulfed him, pulling him upright. He could smell the oil combed through her hair, the perfume they’d dabbed along her collarbone—a combination of sandalwood and something sweet and floral. Citrus blossom, maybe. He opened his eyes.