The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(38)

Lu urged Yaksun on. The elk picked its way over the forest floor; he was equipped to deal with this terrain. The Hana in their arrogance had never given up their attachment to horses, Lu thought with grim satisfaction. She yanked her reins to the left, urging the elk up an embankment, kicking up further distance between them and her pursuers. She cut a jagged path through the trees, pressing toward where they were densest. It was a risk; one misstep and they would be on the ground.

Yaksun ran until he was frothing at his bit. He stumbled, and a lance of fear drove itself through Lu’s belly, but the elk hadn’t tripped, he was merely exhausted. How long had they been running? Lu looked back again, but there was only the stillness of the trees now. She reined up and the elk stopped. Had she lost them?

Something large moved in the undergrowth.

Lu froze, wondering if she had imagined it.

Keep going, stupid, she scolded herself, digging her heels into Yaksun’s sides. If there was something there, better to present a moving target than to freeze like some witless deer.

It’s only a boar, she told herself. Or a badger, or—

A silent blur of blue-gray advanced, then receded in the corner of her right eye. In spite of herself, she reined up and stopped. She was being followed. Stalked.

Around her, the wood was once more maddeningly, mockingly still. She could hear the diffuse, nebulous screech of cicadas in the treetops, the lazy fall of dead leaves and twigs. Nothing else.

Stupid, she repeated. You’re like a scared little child, turning shadows into ghosts.

“Come on,” she whispered to Yaksun, guiding him on, a bit faster now.

The elk stopped, let out a guttural low.

“Yaksun,” she hissed, kicking at his sides. But the elk snorted in agitation, stamped backward, and threw his head, limpid brown eyes wide, ringed white and lolling.

The dam inside her broke, and all at once fear rushed down her spine in an icy rivulet. The thing was close. She felt its eyes on her from the shadows.

This time the streak of blue-gray came threading through the trees on her left, fast and close. She could see it now: thick fur, and flashing black eyes.

A wolf?

She whipped the bow from her back and scanned the trees, arrow nocked, heart thrashing against her ribs. Could it truly be a wolf? There hadn’t been wolves in the Northwood since long before the Hu had conquered the Hana. Farmers had complained of losing livestock, and the king—she could not remember which, nor the dynasty—had initiated a campaign to have the creatures slaughtered. If it was a wolf . . .

They’re pack animals, she thought with rising panic. Perhaps it wasn’t just one wolf but several she was seeing.

A branch snapped to her right and she whipped her bow in the direction of the sound.

Not now, she thought, furious. She hadn’t made it away from her cousin’s grasp only to be felled by some animal, no matter how big.

The rage pulsing under her skin gave her an odd comfort. She might be at the precipice of losing all she knew, but she still had herself.

Another flash of gray. Lu instinctively shot, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of the arrow bedding itself amid the bracken.

And the animal was before her, claws digging into the rotted log upon which it stood.

She opened her mouth as though to yell, but the sound caught in her throat.

It was massive. Half the size of Yaksun.

But instead of crouching and leaping at her, the thing gave her a curiously intelligent look, then loped off into the trees.

She lowered the bow, cold sweat prickling her forehead, the back of her neck. What game was this? Was it toying with her? Where had it gone?

Lu hesitated, staring at where it had been. If she let it go now, it would likely return.

She patted Yaksun on the neck and directed him in the direction the wolf had disappeared. She would kill it before it killed her. That was the rule of the wood.

As she followed, she caught fleeting glimpses of it between the trees, emerging amid a clump of ferns, disappearing behind rocks, fleet as water. She flung an arrow at it, then another, but each fell useless to the wayside, as she somehow knew it would. It felt, she thought, as much like a dance as it did a chase.

Turn back, a voice inside her hissed. But something in her heart, something giddy and certain as the blood thundering there, propelled her forth. Even Yaksun seemed to have lost his fear, surging on as though he understood that she was now the hunter, and not the hunted.

The trees fell away, leaving them at the edge of a precipice. The wolf stopped at its edge, still and large and implacable as truth. Lu reined up quickly, scarcely more than a stone’s throw away. Below them, she could hear the narrow trickle of a stream.

“Well met,” she heard herself say, breath heaving in her chest. She pulled the bow once more from her back and nocked an arrow, drew. For a moment, they stared at one another, the wolf and the girl. Its eyes were black, and somehow uncannily human. It seemed to be waiting for something.

What it was never came. She let her arrow fly.

Its course was true. She could almost see it sinking deep into the plush fur of the creature’s chest, lacing delicately between its ribs, and finding the meat of its heart.

The wolf leaped over the edge of the cliff. Her arrow thunked safe and disappointed into the soft earth where the creature had only just stood.

Stunned, Lu leaped from Yaksun and ran to the precipice, slamming down beside her spent arrow to peer over the edge.