The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(26)

Min’s mouth was dry and thick, and the rice wine had left her throat scratchy, but her voice came out clear and strong. “It sounded like magic,” she said.





CHAPTER 8


The Stranger

A dash of wet brushed Nok’s cheek. Rain. He looked up. The sky had grown dark and marbled as a new bruise. He cursed under his breath. With luck, it would just be a passing summer shower rather than the first thundering downpour of monsoon season.

“Come on, hurry,” Nok muttered, pushing Bo’s stubborn bulk in the direction of Omair’s house. It had been a long day of delivering medicines around Ansana, but Nok was grateful. Work meant doing rather than thinking, and after his encounter with the shamaness, Nok could do with less thinking.

A vision of the beggar woman flashed in his mind.

Slipskin?

His throat tightened, and unconsciously he scrubbed his eyes, as though to wipe the old woman away.

Around him, the village was still under the threatening sky. Only Mother Wang was out, shooing a stray chicken into its coop. At the sound of Nok’s approach she looked up, her face souring. Nok did not know the woman well. The closest they’d come to talking was last spring, when he had made the mistake of cutting through one of their fallow fields on his way back from the city. She had set their dogs on him.

Dogs usually liked Nok, but these were mean creatures. He had barely gotten away with the clothes on his back.

When he reached the path leading up to Omair’s house, Nok noted light glowing from the small windows at the base of the trunk. A pleasant tendril of smoke, purpled in the gloaming, curled from the chimney. Omair would have porridge simmering over the waning fire. Nok’s stomach growled in anticipation.

He pulled a reluctant Bo toward the stable. “Why we even keep you around, I don’t know,” he muttered. Then he gave the old mule a gentle scratch behind the ears, where the hair was surprisingly downy and soft. “Ready for dinner?”

Nok opened the stable door and froze. There was a horse inside. A big one, with a lean, proud build. The dirty saddle blankets draped over its back didn’t quite manage to hide the lustrous black-brown coat beneath.

A Hana warhorse. Unmistakable. Nok had seen enough to recognize one ten lifetimes from now. A cold finger of fear scraped down his spine.

For their part, Bo and the strange horse snorted at one another with a look of mutual disdain.

“Well, Bo,” Nok said, slowly backing out. “Looks like we have a guest.”

Had Omair ever had a guest before? He occasionally received patients from neighboring villages and settlements. Farmers, mostly. Certainly no one who would be in possession of a horse like this.

Nok left Bo in the yard and made his way cautiously toward the rear of the house. The late summer night air had only the barest hint of autumn chill, but the sweat drying on his skin left him cold.

He lifted a hand to open the door. Muffled voices came through from the other side. Nok dropped his hand and crouched by the window instead.

The stranger was speaking. His voice was gruff, as though from years of tobacco smoking, but his accent refined, lofty. Definitely Inner Ring. At least. It matched the mystery horse in the stable. “I’m telling you, Ohn—”

“Omair.”

A snort. “Omair? Is that what you’re going by these days? What is that, southern?”

“It doesn’t hurt to be cautious. They were looking for me a long time.”

“To that end, you would do well to think less about your name and more about your reputation. How do you think I found you? A country apothecarist with your talents—word spreads.”

The whispers of the villagers wormed their way into Nok’s thoughts: Unnatural. Magic, its manipulations of energy, its sacred rites, had been banned within the empire since the Yunian War. But that didn’t mean it went away. There were still places in the Second Ring where you could find fortune-tellers, vendors touting love spells, fast wealth with the swig of a potion.

But that wasn’t Omair. Nok had always known the old man was special—a true healer among the usual crop of charlatans. Now, though, he wondered just who Omair—Ohn?—was. What he was. What he had been.

Nok wrung his hands together, felt his scars catch. It wasn’t that these questions hadn’t occurred to him; more that he didn’t wish to know. Let dead things stay buried. That was the way it had always been with Omair—they didn’t need to know their pasts to trust one another. Did they?

Absently, Nok palmed at the knife in his boot.

“Something tells me,” Omair said pointedly, “I don’t think you came all this way under the cover of dusk to talk about my name.”

The stranger conceded with a grunt. “You’ve heard the emperor named that Hana boy his successor?”

“Indeed. And that Princess Lu has challenged him for the title,” Omair replied. “We do hear things out here.”

Princess Lu. Nok’s stomach clenched at the sudden memory of her narrow face, hair dark and iridescent as the wings of a raven. He pushed the vision away. He’d hoped those memories were behind him, in the dust of the North, with the bones of his family.

“The princess has challenged him, it’s true, but the boy behaves as though the throne is already his. I’ve been watching him—who he meets with, what he promises them. He’s building support, mostly among the military. And there are well enough many in court who would sooner follow a Hana man—any man, any Hana—than her. Set knows it. Lu, she’s too young to see it. Too sheltered. She thinks that her wits and pedigree and the love of her father will be enough to carry her. But Set’s planning something. I just don’t know exactly what.”