The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(67)

She nodded, trying not to appear overeager.

He took her arm in his own, leading her to the door. She suppressed the urge to glance back into his mirror; she already knew what she’d see there. A girl who could be anyone. A girl who could be nothing at all.





CHAPTER 20


Exile

Crying was a weakness, and Lu was not weak. She would choose fury over fear, and her fury would sear away any tears that might well inside her. This was what she decided on the trail north.

She rode with the reins of the horse in hand, the Ashina boy seated behind her. He sat stiffly, as though trying to avoid touching her, but otherwise was so still, so silent she might have thought him asleep. The soft, lethargic sway of the wind-swept pines and the high trill of breeding cicadas had more to say than he did.

She let him keep his quiet. He’d been through enough. They both had.

Her father was dead. Her father was dead, and everyone believed she’d been the one to kill him.

Not Min, she thought. Surely her sister couldn’t believe she could do such a thing, could she? Their mother, though . . . she wasn’t so certain. But Min . . .

Poor Min. Sweet, innocent, simple Min. Sold off to Set by their mother like some prized mare. The thought slid through her, oily and repugnant.

Pushing away the thought, she looped the reins around a wrist and held up Omair’s map, studying the browned paper rotely for the hundredth time.

As she folded it back up, Nokhai shifted behind her. Lu felt she ought to speak, but she could all but feel the mistrust radiating off him. How could this be the traveling companion the heavens had chosen for the most important journey of her life?

Omair trusted the boy to guide her, she reminded herself. And Yuri trusted Omair.

Did she trust Yuri, though? Even if his heart were loyal, he hadn’t left her with much to work with. Was there anyone she could rely on?

Not anymore. Out here, I’m alone.

Fear sluiced through her gut as the horse stumbled beneath her. Horses, Lu thought in annoyance, were a decidedly inferior mount to elk. She yearned for Yaksun’s broadness, his sure-footed strength. This creature, for all its meticulous breeding, seemed to spook at every pit and root it stumbled on.

And there were plenty of pits and roots on this jagged, narrow forest lane. She’d wanted to take the well-maintained, slate-paved Imperial Road, but the boy had insisted—rightly, she had to admit—that they try a route less frequented by hordes of imperial soldiers.

The horse stumbled beneath her again. She frowned.

“You have a mule,” she mused aloud. “Mules aren’t so different from horses, are they? How frequently do you need to reshoe a mule?”

The boy at her back was silent for a long moment. Then he whispered, “Bo.”

“What?”

“The mule’s name is Bo. We left Bo behind,” he said, sitting up straighter. There was now a panic in his voice that alarmed her.

“I know . . . ,” she said. “We had to.”

“Oh gods,” he croaked. “Omair. We have to go back.”

“Wait!” she cried, but too late. The boy slipped from the saddle and was running down the trail, back in the direction they had come.

It occurred to her for a frozen moment that she could leave him. Let him run back into the waiting arms of the soldiers probably still swarming the old apothecarist’s house, searching the nearby fields for them . . .

Cursing, Lu turned the horse after him.

She overtook him in no time at all; perhaps horses weren’t entirely useless. When she was close enough, she reined up and slipped from the saddle.

The boy was still running, but when she caught him by the shoulders he stopped, breathless. At first she thought he was winded, but then she realized he was having some sort of fit. He could scarcely breathe.

“Omair,” he hissed. “We need to go back for Omair.”

“It was Omair’s command for us to continue to Yunis alone. He saved us so that we could—”

The boy whirled on her at those words. “He saved us, and we left him. Oh gods, I left him . . .” He hunched on the ground, head clutched in his hands. Lu watched him quiver, tufts of coarse black hair peeking out between his clenched fingers. “Gods.” His voice was so quiet Lu could barely make out the words. “I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward.”

Lu hesitated. She had never been very good at comfort. From an early age she had learned that to lose one’s composure was unbecoming, so she had taught herself to keep hers wrapped tight around her like a cloak, to drape it over her unsightly pain. In turn, though, she had never learned how to soothe pain in others. When little Minyi had cried over some harsh words from Amma Ruxin or their mother, it had been Butterfly or Hyacinth who held her sister’s hand, stroked her hair as she wept.

And when she’d made Set cry all those years ago in the desert, Lu had laughed.

Because he deserved it, she’d told herself. And because he was a boy, and boys were supposed to be warriors, and warriors didn’t cry. She had learned that before she’d learned to swing a sword. She didn’t get to cry, so why should he?

But here in the woods there was no Butterfly, no Hyacinth. And the boy hunched before her was not her cousin. He was no warrior, either. But perhaps that was all right.

“Nokhai,” she whispered. The name felt at once forbidden and familiar in her mouth. She crouched down beside him. Her hand found his shoulder, clumsy and experimental. He flinched beneath her touch, but did not pull away. Her hand moved in progressively broader circles, until her fingers were tracing over his shoulder blades, the prominent notches of his spine.