The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(30)

A skinny girl screaming soundlessly, belly big, legs spread, pushing out a baby. Her life’s blood—running red against sun-kissed skin blanched white, and when her eyes opened, they, too, were red.

A warm hand against his cheek, fingers petting idly at the gray fur there; his fur . . .

His own face—no, not quite, sharper, cannier and the hair longer, tossed carelessly over one eye.

A man of twenty, twenty-five, walking down a dark corridor, back stiff, step mouse-like and nervous. He turned back and looked at Nok with Omair’s face, only impossibly, unimaginably young. The man pushed open a pocket door and Nok felt the dread that shook his hands, filled his throat . . .

The wide, implacable horizon of the desert. Setting sun spilling searing pinks and purples and violent orange across the sky, the sand still hot with daylight under his paws.

Abrupt as silence, a tableau of gray and white: a fog, a patch of cloudy sky, placid lake, a stony shore . . .

A voice, drifting down steady and deliberate from above him, a voice with weight and authority (it is time), her (was it a woman?) words equal parts question and statement . . .

A pair of eyes stared at him. Flecked with copper and familiar. A girl. Black hair. Shrouded from behind with a lush canopy of green, and beyond that, the sky so wide and blue.

He opened his eyes and found himself running, loping through the whipping underbrush swatting back at him—too slow, too slow. The wet ground tore beneath his paws, soft as moss.

Paws? Nok looked down, saw massive shaggy blue fur.

His body was gone.

He was inside the wolf. He was the wolf.

A spear of panic stabbed through him, and the creature came to a standstill, as though confused by it.

A high-pitched hysterical laugh caught in his throat, unreleased when he discovered that his mouth—no, the wolf’s mouth—could not move to form it.

Bored by Nok’s thoughts, the wolf focused on something small and legless sliding across the forest floor thirty paces behind him. Rainwater flew through the air in its wake, clinging to a stop amid the bracken. From far off came the senseless trilling of frogs.

The sky was still dark with night above him—and yet, impossibly, he could see as clear as though it were midday. The great barrel of his chest heaved as he panted—no, not his chest. The wolf’s. His chest and the wolf’s.

It occurred to him then that this was not a dream. Not in the ordinary sense.

The Gift.

They always said it would come, only it never had. Until now.

But that was impossible—the Ashina Pact had been severed, the gift lost forever to time and war and trampled beneath the feet of the invading Hu, buried under the imperial mining colonies. Only one chosen by the beast gods could carry a caul without a pact in place. Only a Pactmaker. And he was no . . . he couldn’t be. Couldn’t even bear the thought. It was too sick and cruel and absurd, after all these years. After he had lost anyone who would understand or care . . .

Those were Nok’s thoughts. The boy’s thoughts.

The wolf stamped its front feet impatiently. The wolf did not know irony. Did not care for the names assigned to things by men. It knew the dark of the forest—how to find clean-running creeks, how to cut the quickest path through the high grass. And it knew blood, not a hundred paces off, hot and alive and bound up in the bristling flesh of some small, soft creature. It knew hunger.

It occurred to Nok then that he was feeling all this, too. Through the creature’s body, yes, but perhaps . . . he thought to lift the wolf’s snout into the air, but it did not obey. This body wasn’t his yet, he thought. Back home, the elders would’ve taught him how to integrate his mind with the wolf mind, but they were all gone now . . .

At the realization, he sunk deeper into the wolf, and his own concerns—those of a lost, scared little human boy—felt less real. As though before he had been hovering around the blood and tissue and muscle, and now he was a part of it all, diffuse and indelible.

Somewhere in the distance, a man yelled a name. Nokhai. Meaningless.

The smell of the forest flooded him then, overwhelmed him to the point where, were he still in his boy’s body, he might’ve found tears stinging his eyes. Instead he huffed in the smells of damp bark and soil, of animal urine, and of rot. The musk of a thousand predators stalking just as many small, trembling deaths.

The wolf snarled in distaste, low and mild. Fear. It had an acrid, yellow smell. The wolf had no fear, but he recognized it. Knew it well, even: how to arouse it and just as well how to end it. They could do that. Both of them.

The wolf ran, taking Nok with it.





CHAPTER 9


Dawn

Lu woke to darkness in the earliest hours of the morning. She had her nunas draw her bath, comb and brush her hair, then comb it again before pulling it into a series of intricate plaits. Her face was scrubbed and buffed and painted. Silly. She would sweat it off in a few hours, but ceremony was ceremony.

She exited her apartments to find Hyacinth waiting in the garden. The nuna leaned against a trellis, her face lit pale by the ghost of a heavy-bellied moon. Lu followed her tense gaze, but there was nothing there, just gardenias and tumbles of petunias. Last night’s rain had left its damp fingerprints on everything.

“Why so glum?” Lu asked, making the nuna start. “Don’t tell me you’re worried I’m going to lose.”

Hyacinth pushed a grin onto her face. “You? Lose? Never.”