The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(69)

The air soon filled with a warm, nutty smell and he announced that the tubers were done. He handed her one, swaddled in a rag. She pulled the cloth apart and yelped when the skin burned her fingertips.

“They’re hot,” the boy said.

“That’s very helpful!” she snapped.

She watched and did as he did, licking her fingers and using them to pull apart the crackling wine-purple skins to reveal the yellow flesh beneath. A swipe of her knife cleaved a chunk into her waiting hand. As she dropped the hot meat into her mouth her eyes widened in surprise.

“It’s sweet.”

“Hence the name.”

She looked up. Nokhai was—not quite smiling, but it was close. It gave her a start; jerked something hard in her gut to see him like that. With his face lit, he looked a good deal more like the bashful child she had met in the desert.

When he caught her gaze in his own, though, his smile slipped.

“What?” he asked.

She shrugged, taking another chunk of sweet purple in her fingertips. It was cooler now. “I thought you’d forgotten how to smile. It’s nice. You smiling, I mean.”

His ears reddened. “Haven’t had much reason to smile.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but it seemed he did not expect her to. He turned back toward the fire.

“Needs more kindling,” he said. “The bigger logs aren’t staying lit.”

As he bent by the fire, red light danced across his face, accenting the hollows under his cheekbones and the edge of his jaw where it drew up sharply to meet his ear. Lu stared at that juncture, watched it clench as he worked.

He’d been the first friend she’d ever made on her own. It was different from Hyacinth and the other nunas—she loved them as well as anyone in the world, but they hadn’t chosen one another so much as they were chosen for one another. She’d seen Nokhai in the crowd when their retinue arrived, and right then and there she’d known . . . what, exactly? Only that there was a familiarity in him, like finding some precious thing that she hadn’t even known she’d lost.

They spent that single afternoon wending their way through a chain of caves in the hillside while their Elders and her father convened in the Ashina encampment below. When they came across a nest of scorpions, Lu had wanted to crush them with rocks. But Nokhai had convinced her to let them be.

Aren’t you afraid? she’d asked.

He hadn’t understood. Yes, of course I am.

And she’d thought, Here is a boy that is soft as flowers.

They hadn’t known then that the evening would end in curses and vows of war; they’d only been children.



“You know,” she said. Nokhai looked up from the fire. “Even if the rumors about Yunis aren’t entirely true, there might be some of your kind left. Not your Kith, maybe, but others . . .”

Nok’s face closed off to her so swiftly as to be brutal. “Just because your kind thinks we’re all the same doesn’t mean we see ourselves that way.”

“I only thought, since we are going to the outer territories, maybe we could ask after your Kith. See if anyone . . . you know, if they—”

“Survived both the slaughter and the labor camps?”

She hesitated at the choice of words, but his tone was no more hostile than usual. “Yes.”

“No.”

She frowned. “No, you don’t think they did, or no you don’t want to ask?”

“No, I don’t want to know. No, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But if there’s any chance . . . you could have a home again.”

A spasm of anger seized his face. “There is no home without . . . ,” he broke off. “You killed my home when you killed everyone I knew.”

Lu shook her head. “I don’t understand. You were a princeling; if you had the chance, wouldn’t you want to rebuild your people?”

“We don’t—we didn’t have princes. We weren’t like you.”

“But your father was a prince—”

“He was a Kith father. It’s not the same thing. We didn’t have princes.”

“Still, he was important.”

Nok stood abruptly and seized their pail. “My family is dead. My home is gone. I’m going to get water; sweet purples are dry eating.”

She watched him stalk off down the slope toward the river.

She scrambled to her feet. “Nokhai!” Her voice seemed to tear out of her at its own volition.

He stopped, but did not turn.

“I’m sorry.” The words wrenched from her, guttural and haggard and absurd in how useless she knew them to be. “I’m sorry about your family.” I’m sorry about everything.

His back stiffened, almost imperceptibly. Finally, at length, he said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

It took her by surprise. In truth, she’d been doing her best not to think about her father. But she thought of him now, like a wound reopening at the soft brush of Nokhai’s words.

“No . . . I mean, it’s not the same thing,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry. Truly. I wish . . . I’m sorry.” She wished she could will him into believing her.

“I understand,” he said. Then he slipped off into the night.