The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(81)

Nok struggled to his knees, fumbling for his fallen knife. If he could reach Lu, cut the bonds from her feet . . .

Something hard cracked across his skull with the force of a charging ox.

The world around him went quiet like numbness. A heavy blanket falling over him. White stars burst, spectacular and searing before his eyes.

As they dissolved, he found himself on the ground, staring up at his attacker.

And that was when he knew he must be dead.

His own face stared back at him. Same black eyes fringed with dark lashes, same sharp jawline. Its expression, though, was an inversion of his own fear and pain: fierce and gleeful, like a cat playing with a mouse.

When their eyes locked, the look vanished, replaced with naked shock.

“Nok?”

He would know that voice anywhere. The voice that cried out in his dreams for the past four years.

I won’t let them take me! I won’t!

“Ay!” she hollered over her shoulder, waving at the others, whistling sharply. “Stop! Stop! Someone come help me over here!”

She bent over him now, shaking at his shoulders. He saw her clearly now. Not his face, not exactly. She had their father’s nose; he had their mother’s. That was what they’d been told growing up.

“Nok!” she repeated, urgently.

“Nasan,” he murmured.

Then he slipped into darkness, never knowing if his sister had heard.





CHAPTER 26


Baby

“Concentrate,” Brother instructed. “Close your eyes if you think it will help.”

Min didn’t think it would—he made the same suggestion every day.

What’s the point? Nothing ever changed. She never changed.

But she did as he suggested, shutting out the monk, her bedroom, the table between them, arrayed with crystals and browned ledgers, a hand mirror, several odd metal contraptions she did not recognize, and disconcertingly, a small knife with a blade that looked hewn from glass. Brother’s “tools.”

“Perhaps one of these will work, since the tea did not,” he had said when he’d arrived. That had been hours ago.

She’d had to bite her tongue to stop herself from telling him that the tea had worked. But if that were the case, she would have to explain why she’d lied, all the things she had seen, what Set had done to that old man, what her mother had said about her sister—

“Think of what it felt like when you broke the cup at the Betrothal Feast,” the monk pressed. “Try to conjure what was going through your mind. What you felt in your body, and where.”

Min furrowed her brow. She’d been annoyed. At Snowdrop, at her sister. She searched for something deeper, something more meaningful, but all that surfaced was anger, harsh and red.

“I need her with me!” Set bellowed. The sound was close; he was in her apartments. He, and her mother with him. Min winced. They’re fighting again. She flicked her eyes toward the red-lacquered pocket doors that stood between her and their chaos.

Brother smiled encouragingly, as though he hadn’t heard anything at all. “Pay them no mind,” he told her. “Concentrate on—”

“In a war zone? On the front lines of battle?” her mother countered. “Have you lost your mind?”

“On the contrary, I see more clearly than ever.”

“Then you’re going to have to explain it because all I see is madness.”

There was a heavy thud, as her cousin—no, her husband—struck something. A wall, perhaps. Min flinched. Brother sighed.

“Let us see what they want.” The monk leaned back in his chair.

“Stop lashing out,” her mother scolded the emperor. “You’re acting half a child! How am I to trust your word if you can’t behave like an adult?”

Min resisted the urge to clap her hands over her ears. Instead she rose and walked toward her windows, gazing down onto the garden where her nunas milled like pigeons. Brother had sent them away for her “lesson.”

He made them leave so they wouldn’t gossip. Well, all this shouting certainly would give them something to gossip about.

Below, Butterfly stroked the seven-stringed zither, laid across her lap like a cat. The others sang along, their voices coming through the window muted and somehow sad, though the lyrics were happy.

Min felt so far away. As though they were in a world apart from her. She lingered there like a mournful phantom, half waiting for one of them to look up and see her. They wouldn’t, though.

They never really liked me, she thought, not for the first time, but still, it stung. No one does. Not truly. I could die and they would all weep dutifully, but not one of them would miss me.

Min might have accepted this as the way of the world—the natural order between servants and those they served—had Lu’s nunas not hung on her every word, fought for her sister’s attention and praise. Loved her as a friend. A sister. Even having to sort her laundry and wash her hair had not dampened their enthusiasm.

For all the good it did them, murmured a voice in the back of her mind. Now they’re locked up. They’ll be tortured, kicked and beaten—

No! She shook her head as though to knock loose the thought. That was a dream.

But she found herself imagining Hyacinth, her knuckles bloody, her skinny ankles draped in chains—