The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(39)

Below, she could see the little stream she’d heard, and lying prone, half in the water, was the wolf.

Dead, she thought, oddly bereft.

But then, it stirred. At first she thought she’d imagined it, the tremor was so slight. Then it lifted its head, rose on its front paws, and stood. Only—she gasped at the sudden realization—only now it was transparent as a thinning fog. She could see the stream and ferns and trees through the blue-gray haze of its body.

A ghost, she thought wildly, feeling dizzy. Feeling unreal, like she had taken leave of her own flesh. Like in all the folk stories. Strange beasts and ghosts in the wood.

The wolf shook its massive head, gazed up at her. Seemingly unimpressed, it turned and loped off into the trees beyond the stream, its form growing fainter and fainter as it went before dissolving completely.

She heard a low moan, and only then did she notice the body the wolf had left behind in the stream, like a cicada leaves its spent skin. Or a spirit leaves a corpse. Except what lay below lived, trembling and heaving. Flesh and bone. And it resembled nothing of the ghostly wolf that had abandoned it.

It was a boy.





CHAPTER 12


The Forest

The world was spinning and Nok’s mouth was full of metal. He rolled to one side and spat a gob of blood. He must have bitten his tongue in the fall.

The fall. The Gifting Dream. The wolf.

Wild, impossible memories surged over him like water . . .

Water?

Nok lifted an arm. It was wet. He was lying in a creek bed.

He rolled out of the stream, trying not to shudder. The forest swam drunkenly before him. He closed his eyes against it.

This isn’t happening, he told himself. In a moment, I will wake up in Omair’s house. I’ll see wooden walls and a dirt floor. The stink of fresh salve will fill the room.

But no, that wasn’t right. Omair wasn’t safe anymore, and Nok had nowhere to go. He opened his eyes.

A massive bull elk stood over him, blinking inquisitively, blocking out the sun.

Nok opened his mouth to shout, but the sound shriveled in his throat. When he tried to sit up, the beast let out a blustery snort and stepped back. It turned as it did so, revealing the rider atop its back.

She was tall and athletic, wearing a plush cloak of scarlet and a look of guarded amazement on her tawny face. One gloved hand grasped the elk’s reins, the other hesitating in mid-reach toward the jeweled pommel of the sword on her back.

Nok knew her the moment their eyes met.

Hers were contoured with an exaggerated line of black paint, emphasizing dark brown irises flecked through with copper and gold. Lively like fire. Twin mirrors reflecting his own shocked recognition.

She blinked.

Nok scrambled to a stand but slipped in the muddy bank. His body cried out in protest from half a hundred places. Ignoring it, he leaped back, instinctively putting a boulder between them. His wrist was already swelling from where he had wrenched it against the ground. When he flexed it, pain blossomed through his arm, but it moved well enough. Not broken.

“I know you,” the girl said, her words hushed in wonder.

He licked his lips.

“I know you. I know your face.” She had the lofty, imperious voice of someone accustomed to people listening to her. It was lower than it had been all those years before, but familiar nonetheless.

“I—” Nok shot a look to his right, spotting the telltale rutted dirt and tunneled bracken of a deer trail cutting through the underbrush. All at once his senses flared, as though part of the wolf were still in him. He was assaulted by the musky residue of the creatures. His eyes dilated, drawing his focus to a tuft of white-brown fur clinging to a branch at its entrance. A flash of images: hurtling through the wood, snapping at hooves, the clench of his jaws around a haunch of flesh, blood on his tongue that was not his own. Absurdly, his mouth began to water.

He shook his head hard and the world retracted. He wondered if the fall had not done some permanent damage.

“Will you say something?” the girl demanded, guiding her elk a step closer.

“I’m not—I’m not anyone you would know,” Nok said, looking back up at her. Focus. Stay alert.

His answer seemed to displease her. She frowned and asked rather more impatiently, “Don’t you know who I am?”

“The Hu princess.” That much was obvious. Even if they hadn’t met before, he’d know. Even if he hadn’t tried and failed to forget her these past five years.

Could he run? He wasn’t certain. Should he try? He flicked his eyes toward the deer trail again, then back to the princess’s war elk. The beast’s shaggy legs were thick as the trunks of young trees. If the princess gave chase she would overtake him, though he might be able to lose her in the dense brush.

“You don’t remember my name?” She sounded almost disappointed.

Of course I remember your name—how not? he thought. Your people were the most exciting thing to happen in all my young life. And the worst . . .

The elk took another step toward him. “I remember your name, Nokhai.”

He started. And when he looked her in the eyes he was drawn back to that day in the desert, under the high noon sky, when the emperor and his retinue had arrived at the Ashina’s summer encampment. It had seemed to him in the years to follow that that was the moment his life had bent, as though over a knife’s edge, and clove itself in two.