The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(44)

He seemed as stunned as she, but the sound of her voice returned his bearings to him with a start. He jerked away from her as though he’d been burned where they touched, scrabbling away on elbows and heels.

Lu frowned. She’d been trying to protect him.

She made to push herself up, then let out a cry as she put her left hand to the earth. The crossbow wound. Her arm gushed hot blood at the sudden pressure. Shock and momentum had kept the pain at bay, but now it seared through her. Her arm felt on the verge of splitting in half.

“You’re hurt.”

The stranger lowered down to his knees with some effort. Then, with contradictory grace, he parted the silken tatters that had once been her sleeve to better view the wound.

“This will need to be sewn closed; it is very deep. For now I must staunch the bleeding.” He pulled a scarf from around his neck and wound it around her arm. Lu stifled a scream of agony as he pulled the cloth tight.

Desperate for something else to focus on, she cast her gaze toward where the Ashina boy was cautiously standing, testing his limbs and joints.

“Are you hurt?” she called to him, her voice strained.

“I’m fine,” he said coldly, as though he thought she might be disappointed by this news. He turned to look at the old man tending her arm. “Omair, what was that?”

Omair! The name gave her a start.

The old man shook his head and waved them up. “Inside! We cannot linger out here where someone might spot us.”

“Omair,” Lu repeated aloud, grabbing ahold of one gnarled brown hand. “Omair of Ansana? Shin Yuri sent me to you!” she stammered.

“Let’s go inside,” the old man repeated, casting a wary glance about them.

“Inside? Inside where?” She looked around properly for the first time. They were no longer in the depths of the inner forest, but on a grassy hilltop. Farmland sprawled about them. A large silvery tree stretched high overhead, casting dappled shade across her upturned face. There was a door in the trunk of the tree.

“Inside,” the man said as Lu took a step toward it. “Then we can talk.”



But talking was deferred in favor of the more immediate tasks of stitching up Lu’s arm, and—seemingly far less urgent in her mind—heating a large iron pot of porridge. At his prompting, the Ashina boy brought a bowl of it over to her with an air of hostile reluctance. Lu accepted it, but her stomach felt like a knot of twisted iron, heavy and sullen. Politesse required she take a bite, but looking at the pale mash, she wondered if she would ever want food again. She set the bowl down.

The man regarded her with keen, curious eyes. “Yuri was right,” he said. “There’s something about you that feels just the same as your mother.”

There was a weight in his voice she didn’t understand. How could this stranger know her mother? The empress did not make a habit of befriending rural peasant apothecarists, surely.

Lu stood, fighting off a wave of dizziness. Her arm ached at the sudden rush of blood. “I must go back. My cousin—I don’t know what he has planned.”

“Yuri told me to keep you hidden until he arrived.”

Her hand twitched toward the sword at her waist. This old man couldn’t keep her imprisoned against her will—he could hardly stand up straight. But then she remembered whatever it was he had done in the forest. And there was the slipskin wolf to consider. She glanced sidelong to where the Ashina boy sat moodily on a stool by the cook fire. She doubted he would put up a fight; he wanted her gone.

It was hard to believe it was him, but there he was: the same hard-angled ochre face, the coarse black hair forever falling across his black eyes. Those eyes, though . . . they had changed. Once they’d sparkled like midnight starscapes.

Now they were black like an absence.

She could imagine what he’d been through since. The only true mystery was how he’d survived to end up here. She knew well enough what had happened to his Kith—to all the Gifted who had fought back.

They shouldn’t have fought at all, she thought with a sudden flare of anger. The slipskins had no business going up against the imperial army; what had they expected? And her father had offered them a way out. But they had been too proud for that, too in love with their land and their traditions and their magic.

She understood, in a way. It was the decision she herself would’ve chosen had she been in their position. Still, had they bent just a bit—

Someone gasped. Lu looked up in time to see the apothecarist pitch forward in a swoon.

“Omair!” The Ashina boy had been skulking around the edges of the room, passing uncertain looks at both Lu and the apothecarist before, but now he leaped forward. He caught the old man by the shoulders and guided him upright again.

There was an odd gentleness in his movements. Survivors of the northern expansion had been relocated to labor camps—and yet, this boy was here, just outside Yulan City. This Omair must have had something to do with that, she mused.

“I’m all right,” Omair murmured. “I’m fine.” He blinked, shaking his head, as though to clear his eyes of some obscuration. “I’m fine,” he repeated. “Only a bit depleted. The spell—back there in the forest. I haven’t worked magic like that in many years.”

Lu stared. This man knew her mother. And he knew magic. Not a few sleights of hand, or the recipe of some swindler’s herbal elixir. Real magic. The sort that was supposed to have disappeared years ago, along with Yunis.