The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(45)

“Who are you?” she blurted.

He smiled wryly. “That would depend on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you!” Lu snapped, more sharply than she’d intended. She’d had enough mystery to last a lifetime. “Why did Yuri send me here? How do you know him?”

If the apothecarist was offended by her tone, he didn’t show it. “That’s as good a place as any to start, I suppose,” he sighed. “Yuri and I grew up together.”

She frowned. “Yuri grew up in the court.”

“So did I, after a fashion.” He caught the skepticism on her face and smiled faintly. “I fit the part of the rural peasant well, don’t I? Well, that is how I was born. Poor and coarse, in a town not unlike this one. But I passed the civil service exam and attended the Imperial Academy, where I met Yuri. After the core years, we were divided into specialized colleges based on our aptitudes. Yuri went the martial route to become an officer—no surprise there—while I reluctantly found myself in the monastic order.”

“What you did back there,” Lu interrupted. “Hana monks don’t learn . . . that.”

“What? Magic?” he supplied. “They did. And they still do—of a sort. In the Imperial Academy we were initiated into lower-level, domesticated forms of magic—reading runes, energy healing, herbology; that sort of thing.”

Was he being willfully obtuse? “What you did back there was somewhat beyond herbology.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But all magics are related at their core. All come down to the manipulation of energies. What I did today would be considered the use of ‘free magic’—a bit of a misnomer, really. Lay folk call it that, but in the academy our instructors felt ‘free’ lent the misconception that it was free of cost, which no magic ever is. They preferred the label ‘feral magic,’ to impress upon us that it had the strength and the unpredictability of any wild thing. Because it is used by an individual and not an order, it must be paid for by individual sacrifice.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” the Ashina boy demanded warily. Lu had nearly forgotten about him, but he had retaken his seat on the periphery of the room.

“Blood, say, for quick, coarse bursts of magic,” Omair told them. “Or for more skilled wielders, life energy. Each person has it—some more, some less. And it can fluctuate during certain events in one’s life—childbirth, death, moments of strong grief or anger. Even menstruating can heighten a person’s powers.”

“That’s what you used to save us earlier,” Lu deduced. “Life energy. Your own.”

Omair nodded. “In part. I wasn’t sure if I had the strength left in me, but wild places—forests, mountains—are quite dense with their own loose magic, and I was able to draw from that as well.” He sighed. “Cities have their own sort of magic, but it’s more difficult to wield. People bring noise and disharmony. Makes it tricky, inconsistent.”

“But,” Lu pressed. “If you didn’t learn to use free magic at the academy—”

Omair nodded. “Yes, well. I had—extracurricular interests. I learned from a friend. I suppose you know the history of the Gray Shamanesses?”

Lu started at the change of topic. “Certainly. Everyone knows that.”

“Nok?”

The boy gave the barest affirmative nod of head. “Of course. Everyone knows.”

Lu narrowed her eyes, but the boy ignored her and continued: “The Gray Order were the elite shamanesses of Yunis. They served the Yunian mountain gods for five thousand years. Then the empire invaded and murdered everyone.”

“That is not what happened,” Lu retorted hotly. This boy had suffered at the hands of the empire, she knew, but someone had fed him outright lies. “My grandfather tried to broker a deal with the Yunians for the shared use of northern lands, but they refused. In the ensuing Gray War the shamanesses were a savage force, using unnatural magics to violently slaughter Hana and Hu troops.”

“Oh, right, while you noble imperials civilly slaughtered women and children using natural swords and crossbows.”

Her body bristled like a too-taut wire he had plucked. “War is brutal. Casualties are inevitable.” But even as the words fell from her mouth, she felt they came from someone else.

“It wasn’t a war; it was a massacre!” The boy stood so fast his stool knocked back up against the wall.

“Oh?” she retorted. “It happened long before either of us was born—were you there, somehow?”

“I didn’t need to be!” he snapped. “I saw what your forces did to my people.”

“We’re talking about the Gray War, not the Slipskin Rebellion,” she reminded him. “Yunis had an army.”

He ignored the last part. “Don’t play stupid. Yunis was a peaceful city, and their army was less than half the size of yours. And it doesn’t matter which war we’re talking of; you imperials won’t hesitate to attack defenseless people if they have something you want. You came after the Gifted Kith with your full strength, and we had no armies at all. You know that—you saw what we were with your own eyes!”

It was true. She remembered it still: the field of painted leather yurts dotting the northern desert, amid hunched scrub trees and stalwart yellow flowers scrabbling up through dry splits in the earth. Pretty brown goats led by herders; children chasing elders who taught songs and histories and crafts. A community, not an army.