The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(14)

He set down the bladder. Adé was staring off toward the harbor, where docked boats were bobbing lazily on the murky salt river. It was one of the rare things Nok had seen that made her sad: sailors and ships.

Her father, Tesfa Mak, had been a foreign mapmaker and navigator from the Western Empire, where the people dressed in silks of blazing white and deepest indigo, taking refuge from the heat in blanched palaces of marble, drinking iced nectar.

But now Tesfa was dead, along with Nok’s parents, gone wherever it was dead parents went.

Adé seemed to sense his gaze and turned back with dark, nervous eyes. They held his for a moment, then dropped. It wasn’t just melancholy for her father, Nok realized. Something else was on her mind. “Listen, Nok,” she said, reaching out a tentative hand. “I was trying to tell you earlier . . . ,” she trailed off.

“Yes?”

“Carmine’s father is throwing us an engagement party next moon,” she blurted. “It would be nice if you could come.”

“A party . . . ?” He paused, shook his head. “Wait, did you say ‘engagement’?”

She nodded.

“Con-congratulations,” he said. His voice was still weak and hoarse, and it made him sound less than enthusiastic. He cleared his throat. “Congratulations.”

“So, will you come, then?” she asked with a hopeful smile. “To the party?”

Nok wrinkled his nose. “In the Ellandaise sector? They’ll kick me out before I got two steps in.”

Adé laughed. “No, they won’t. Just tell them you’re looking for the Anglimn residence—they’ll know where it is.”

“Why do you want me to come?”

“It’s going to be full of strangers, and rich pink people, and—”

“Perfect for me,” he quipped. She poked him in the side.

“And,” she pressed on, “it would be nice if I had a friend there.”

“You have other friends.”

“Not,” she said, “like you.”

A trio of Ring girls traipsed into the alley, a flurry of arms joined at the elbows and excited chatter. Nok and Adé stood to give them room to pass. As they did, one of them flitted a glance toward Nok, then whispered something to her friends. The three of them dissolved into giggles before hurrying away toward the harbor.

“What are they looking at?” Nok frowned. People his age were always laughing. It made him nervous.

“They’re looking at you, dummy,” Adé told him, crossing to the opposite wall of the alley, facing him.

“Why would they look at me?” he asked stupidly.

“They . . . well, you know . . .”

Nok looked at her, uncomprehending.

“They like what they see,” she said, exasperated.

The color rose in his cheeks, uninvited and most unwelcome. Reflexively, he made to rub his scarred palms together, but he forced them back down. “They wouldn’t look if they knew what I was really like,” he muttered, looking at the ground.

“True,” Adé retorted. She produced an apple from the folds of her robe and flung it at his chest, giggling as he scrabbled to catch it. “I can barely stand you myself.”

He rolled his eyes, lobbing the apple back to her. “It’s so charitable of you to leave your job in the middle of the day to spend time with me, then.”

“I,” she said loftily, “am the picture of charity.” Then she threw the apple to him in an underhanded arc high in the air. Her aim was poor; Nok was forced to lunge forward to catch it, nearly colliding with her. Instinctively, he reached a hand forward to brace her around the middle with one hand as the apple fell neatly into the other. He caught the scent of vanilla and cedar in her hair as he pulled away.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, releasing her waist and making to hand the apple back over. As he placed it in her palm, though, she closed her other hand over his, pulling him even closer.

“I’m not,” she said. And when he looked up she kissed him.

It was soft and dry. Chaste, as far as kisses went. At least, Nok assumed it was. He didn’t know much about kisses; this was his first. He wondered for a fleeting moment if he should kiss her back. What trouble it would mean if he did. A part of him wanted to, regardless.

He pulled away. As he did so, the apple slipped from their hands and rolled down the street, coming to a rest in a wagon rut. Nok watched it go, guilt over the wasted food rising in him. Adé was still looking at him.

Someone else with Adé’s past, someone who had once been so intimate with starvation that it was like a sister, a lover, might never be so careless with food. But that was how Adé had always been, he knew. Even in the throes of her family’s troubles, even staring death in its gaunt, hungry face, she’d been distracted, looking expectantly for some brighter future that was inevitably around the next corner with those eager brown eyes. Not like him.

“You’re angry,” she said. It sounded like she was chewing her lip; he couldn’t look at her to say for certain.

His hand was still in hers, a holdfast. For a dumb, animal moment, he felt a jolt of pleasure at the warm contact. When had he last been touched without violent intent? With gentleness and love? It had only been Omair, tending his wounds four years ago, and Adé—always Adé. She’d been holding his hand when he awoke that first morning in Omair’s home, so far from the desert, and all he’d known.