The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(125)

“Maybe not. But they’re angry, and they hate imperials. They might not win a war alone, but by sheer numbers, they could certainly cause damage. They could burn a city. Start enough trouble to let a smaller party—say, us, and no more than a dozen of your best people—infiltrate the palace.”

“Of course, because the palace isn’t defended by highly trained armed guards and enormous walls.”

Lu forced herself to smile. “The thing about being a princess is, you grow up in the palace. It’s your home. And you know all its secrets, all its weaknesses.”

Nasan pursed her lips, but Lu could see the idea taking root in her mind. “You’re crazy,” she said, but that was fine. A person like Nasan, with the vision to break into an imperial labor camp—a prison of death from which there should be no feasible escape—that was a person to whom crazy wasn’t such a bad thing. Nasan wasn’t through arguing, though. “Who’s to say the prisoners won’t just kill you straight off, considering they hate imperials so much?”

“What would they stand to gain from that? Kill me and there’s no overthrow, no change in the empire at all. Fight with me, and I will alter the whole face of the North.”

“They may not hear that argument so well while they’re busy tearing you to pieces.”

“I’ll have Prince Jin by my side, and you—the great liberator. They’ve surely heard rumors about you and your people by now. You can help them see reason.”

“And how do you expect to keep a thousand sickly people alive all the way down to the capital? People have to eat, you know.”

Lu hid a smile. They were arguing on her terms now. “The soldiers running the camps have food and medicine. Weapons, armor, horses.”

Thoughts were racing behind Nasan’s clever eyes. Lu had her. “We’d have to strike fast, and hard,” Nasan murmured, almost to herself. “If even one imperial slips out, we’ll have the whole army coming for us before you could blink.”

“So, we won’t let even one slip out.”

“What you’d be asking of these prisoners—you’d be sending most of them to their deaths. Maybe all of them.”

“Once we’ve taken the prison, they’ll be free to choose. They could follow me or go on their way.”

“Some choice,” the other girl scoffed. “Die of freezing or starvation in the empty desert or become your foot soldier. Out of one prison, into another.”

Your title, your station—your very existence—is built on the subjugation, on the suffering of others.

Lu hesitated. I’d be giving them the opportunity to fight for themselves—for their freedom. But somehow the words would not leave her tongue.

Nasan didn’t comment on her silence. Just licked her lips, then cast a look down the darkening shore. “It’ll be bloody,” she warned. “Bloody and ugly.”

Nearby, two small children were splashing and giggling in the shallows of the lake, seemingly oblivious to the clouds of blood pinking the waters. Someone—a parent, maybe—shrieked at them to get out. Lu watched them run up the rocky shore, chagrined.

“I’m up to my ears in bloody and ugly,” Lu said.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“So.” Lu gathered herself. “Does our deal stand?”

Nasan scowled. “It’s getting dark. Let’s get these people back inside.”

“Do we have a deal?” Lu repeated, louder.

Nasan sighed. “Tomorrow,” she said at length, turning toward the temple. “Tomorrow we march back to fetch my army.”

“And then?” Lu persisted at her retreating figure.

Nasan didn’t stop. “Then we head to the camps.”



They were ready to go before dawn, a few hundred hunched survivors with little more than the clothes on their backs, and what life still fluttered in their tired hearts. They had put the weakest—the elderly and small children, of which there were more than Lu would have liked—on horseback. The rest of them would walk.

Lu stretched as she gazed out onto the lake for the last time, trying to ease the stiffness that persisted in her shoulder. She touched the hilt of her sword, secure once more at her waist.

Goodbye. She sent the thought skipping across the water like a stone. She would not miss this place in all its bleak, morose beauty, but she felt the need to honor it all the same. And again, this time for the many souls—and one soul in particular—that now lingered lost beneath that mirrored surface:

Goodbye, Nokhai.

Prince Jin walked up and stood at her side.

“Do you think,” she asked hesitantly, “they’ll wash up, eventually?” She did not have to say of whom she spoke.

Prince Jin grimaced. “The lake behaved . . . differently in the Inbetween. I do not know about this lake. They may be lost to us for good.”

He didn’t say what they were both thinking: that even those that had landed in the lake were likely not intact. That there would be no bodies to wash up at all.

Lu felt the sensation of Nokhai’s mouth against her own. The way he had moved beneath her hands. How easy it was to take the living flesh, the blood, the bone for granted. How callously ungrateful it was to be alive and not recall at every moment that so many were not.