The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(24)

“I’m sorry,” Min whispered. Set looked up at her. “I didn’t know.”

“Few did,” he said lightly. “My mother runs a tight household and kept the story quiet. They’d been giving me poppy tears for the teeth your sister broke. After that day, they gave me more for a broken jaw and cracked ribs. The deep bruises, two blackened eyes. My mother could not bear to see me in pain, and she insisted they increase my doses. And so, even after I was healed, I needed it. My body craved it—and my mind. Behind its veil, I did not have to look into this new world in which my father had renounced me.”

“No one could blame you,” Min said softly.

Set turned to her and lifted one eyebrow. “Couldn’t they? It was a weakness in me. The poppy tears—and later, when I began to smoke it, the tar—protected me, made the edges of things soft. I was tested, and I chose weakness. Comfort. This is the person your sister and her ilk think I still am—but I’ve changed. I chose a different way. Do you know why?”

She shook her head.

“My father—perhaps he was ashamed of me, perhaps of himself—he left a year after my beating for our family’s summer retreat farther south. I’ve only been once in my life. It’s a pretty bit of property, right on a small lake. A bit warmer than where we lived. A good place for relaxing and thinking on one’s own. Which is what he did. He relaxed and thought . . . and drank. And drank. For four years now he’s been doing this, never returning home once. Never sending a single letter.”

“He—he was wrong to do it,” Min murmured. Children weren’t to criticize their elders, Min knew, but Set looked so proud and yet so devastated—what else could she say? “It was cruel.”

Set sighed. “Do you know, Min, what it is like to hate your father? Your own parent?”

Yes, whispered a small voice within her. No! she corrected herself. She pictured her mother’s face. Then, more vaguely, as though it were hard to recall, her father’s.

Yes.

How could she think such a thing? I don’t hate anyone, she told herself quickly. I don’t. But it was too late. There were some thoughts so ugly and so true that once released they could not be unthought. Like a drop of blood spilled on white silk.

Set wasn’t paying her any mind. Perhaps he hadn’t expected her to answer.

“The Analecta, the monks, they tell us we shouldn’t hate our parents,” he went on. “That we can’t. We came into this world to serve them, that it is our duty by the laws of man and heaven. But the day my father left, I swore I would never serve an unworthy master again. Not him, not his memory, not the pain he caused me, and not the poppy tar I had been smoking. So I sought out the best healers and priests the North had to offer. Physicians to backwoods shamans, it made no difference to me what their pedigree was, so long as they could show me a way to stop. And Brother—the loyal monk who serves me—fresh from the labor camps along the front lines, he did.”

“How?” Min asked without meaning to.

“How?” Set paused, then seemed to gather himself. He didn’t move away, but she had the sense he’d stepped back several paces. “Perhaps one day I’ll tell you,” he said. “It is a complicated story, and not very interesting for a girl your age, I think. But the important thing was I made a choice. I chose to find what was true in this world—what was constant, and real, and unbreakable beneath the filth and noise of everyday life. I figured out what I wanted, and I chose to pursue only that goal. And one day, very soon, I’ll make them all see that—my father, your sister, all those backbiters and naysayers in court. They’ll all see who I truly am, what I am capable of, when I’m their emperor. I advise you to do the same as me, cousin. Find what is true, and live only for that.”

But what could that possibly be? Min could never hope for the power to which he aspired. All she knew was an endless monotony of embroidery lessons, disrespectful servants, her mother’s disapproval, her sister’s ostentatious rebellions that she never saw fit to share with Min, and a thousand lovely silk robes leading up to the one they would bury her in. How could she ever expect to find truth when her existence amounted to little more than a politely stifled yawn?

Aloud she said, “I’ll try my best. To do what you said.”

“You’re a good listener, Min,” he told her absently. “A good girl.”

“Oh, I’m not a girl,” she blurted. “I’m a woman.”

Set blinked in surprise, fixing his cool gray eyes upon her.

“Oh?” he said.

She lowered her own gaze. “I know you don’t think it, no one does,” she said, her voice struggling to rise above its accustomed whisper. “But it’s true.”

When she dared look up again, his eyes reflected bemusement, and something else—curiosity?

He was seeing her. Truly seeing her. Before she had been like the mottled brown moth that blends in against the bark of a tree to hide from predators, but she had moved, and he had glimpsed the colorful undersides of her wings. He saw her.

Around them, the rain picked back up. Min shivered. She felt an odd kind of fear—not the jumpy sort that had sent her hurrying past the shamaness temple, but something new. Like taking two stairs down by mistake, but righting yourself before you fall. A small exhilaration.