The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(28)

“Do we?” the stranger scoffed. “All except you, I suppose. Always cold as stone.”

“You’d be surprised,” Omair said, sadness softening his voice.

Nok shifted uncomfortably, his knees popping slightly as he did so. It seemed wrong to eavesdrop on this strange, private turn the conversation had taken.

“Do you still think of her?” There was an edge of reproach to the question.

“Of course I do,” Omair snapped. “I should ask the same of you. You know what happened to her, what we did to her, and you still dare to ask me for this—”

Something hot and wet and soft brushed down the back of Nok’s neck. He toppled over with a yell.

“What was that?” The stranger’s voice came closer, as though he were already on his feet and moving.

Nok scrabbled back on his elbows and looked up. Bo gazed back expectantly.

“Nokhai?”

Omair was standing in the doorway, framed in the warm yellow light of the kitchen lamps.

Nok scrambled to his feet, brushing off his legs. “I . . . fell,” he muttered, as though that explained anything.

“Are you all right?” Omair asked, a smile on his warm brown face. “My, the time got away from me. You’re very late—good thing you made it home before the rain.”

The stranger sidled up beside Omair, allowing Nok to place a figure to the voice at long last. He was a tall, well-built man. A plain rough-spun cloak draped loosely over his head and shoulders. Nok squinted, but lit from behind, the man’s face was just a shadow under his cowl. One hand slipped under his cloak to rest on something at his waist. Nok went cold. The man had a sword.

“This is the boy?” The stranger sounded skeptical. “I thought he’d be taller. His father was a big man.”

The blood drained from Nok’s face. This man knew—had known his father. What else did he know?

The stranger’s arm snapped forward. He gripped Nok by the chin, tilting his face up. Nok caught sight of cool, intelligent eyes, a sharp brow, hard jaw, black hair laid tight around his forehead as though bound back severely. The stranger was close enough now that Nok’s nose filled with his smell—dusty and horsey from his ride to Ansana, but beneath that, clove and well-oiled, costly leather.

The man squinted, then carefully, as though the wound were still fresh and not years old, thumbed over the silvery lick of scar marking Nok’s right cheekbone, just below the eye. “That healed up ugly, didn’t it?” he remarked.

And then Nok knew him.

The princess’s voice hurtled out of the darkness cloaking the past: “I’ll kill you!”

Nok shrunk within himself, as though trying to escape it, this fragment of time that ricocheted around inside his head like a wayward bat. He closed his eyes, but he could still see the blade swinging in a wild, crooked hack. The edge was so straight, so clean; it scarcely whispered across the length of his palms. The unsteady backswing planted the ghost of a kiss on his right cheek. His hands were wet. Something glinted blue-white upon the sand—

“For heaven’s sake, Yuri!” Omair’s voice erupted through the memory. “Let the boy go. You’re frightening him.”

The stranger’s hand disappeared. Nok stumbled, as though his body had been lifted from the past, then dropped unceremoniously back into Omair’s warm kitchen.

The stranger . . . no, Nok realized. Not a stranger after all. But not a friend. Not to him at any rate. But he was to Omair. There was no mistaking the affection between them. So what did that make—

“He’s one of them,” Nok blurted. “Did you know that?” His voice was shaking, louder than he’d meant it to be. “He’s a soldier. An imperial. A guard for the prin—he’s inner court. He’s a servant of the royal family.”

A glimmer of surprise crossed Omair’s face. “Ah. You remember him?”

Nok’s heart skipped. Wildly, he thought about the knife in his boot. Omair seemed to see it happen, interpret Nok’s fear. His face fixed into one of concern. Familiar and yet—

“Nok,” he said softly, reaching for him. Nok flinched as the old man’s hand touched his shoulder, reassuring, gentle—

A new voice arose in Nok’s mind. One he had worked so hard to wall up, lock away brick by brick. Taut and thin as tendons, it broke through. I won’t let them take us—I won’t . . .

Nok knew what was to come next. The jumbled mess of blood and flesh and dark, browning fluids that his mind had mashed his family into: here, his father’s sightless eyes gazed up at the stars, the red pulp of his unnamed baby brother seeped through his mother’s cold, disembodied hands, and everywhere, under every flap of skin and jutting bit of bone, appeared his sister’s mouth, screaming promises a child couldn’t ever keep.

“I won’t let them take us! I won’t!”

“No!” Nok screamed, throwing the apothecarist’s hands off. Desperately, he shoved past the stranger—the soldier—and ran outside.

He scarcely registered the thunder booming overhead, but he felt the rain. It came down in sheets, streaking his vision, running sopping tendrils of hair down his forehead. He ran regardless, ran from the stranger, from Omair, the memories. He ran until his legs and his lungs burned. He did not stop, he never stopped—he fell. His foot caught a furrow and he went down hard, knees planting in the saturated earth.