The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(85)

“Relax. She’s fine. Not a scratch on her. I’ll take you to her when you’re up for it.” She pushed him back down. “Just rest.”

“I don’t need to rest.” Where were they? Nok craned his head to look, but all he could see out the room’s single window was a dense thatch of greenery.

Nasan sighed. “In that case, I have some questions. First off, what are you doing here? How did you get out of the labor camp?”

“An imperial officer,” he said, experimentally propping himself up on one elbow. “He got me out.”

“Why?”

He considered explaining the extent of Yuri’s past, the old man’s connection to Lu—but, no. Later. When he better understood the lay of things.

“I got sick after you . . . after they took you,” he said instead. “Really sick. They tossed me into the medical tent with the other lost causes. But the officer, he seemed to think I could be saved—I don’t know; I guess he felt sorry for everything they’d done. He was on his way back down to the capital, so he sneaked me away with him. Left me with an apothecarist friend of his—I’ve been the apothecarist’s apprentice ever since.”

Nasan laughed. “In the capital? Right in the belly of the beast?”

“Not quite,” Nok corrected. “Little farming town just to the north.”

Thinking of Omair flooded him with restless urgency. It hadn’t been long—less than a moon’s pass—since he’d last seen him. But it felt a lifetime ago. Had the old apothecarist been relegated to some palace dungeon this whole time? Had there been a trial? Was he even still alive?

There was no way of knowing. All Nok could do was press on, move forward with Lu’s plan. But Nasan and her friends had plowed through their path with the grace of a sandstorm.

What was the plan now?

In lieu of family, Nok had had Omair. Once he had had Adé. And now he was stuck with Lu. But—a smaller, uglier voice in the back of his mind thought—now he had Nasan back. Didn’t he?

“Nok?” Nasan was watching him with careful, catlike eyes. “Are you all right? Do you need to rest?”

You owe Omair a debt, he told himself harshly.

“I was just . . . it’s a lot to take in at once,” he said. “I assumed you must be dead—that monk killed all the children he took, didn’t he?”

“Almost all of them,” Nasan said. “The same night they took me, we left the camp. Me and ten or so other specially chosen kids—anyone who retained any hint of the Gift. We were loaded into a wagon and traveled for miles. They kept the windows covered so we couldn’t see where we were going, but I could tell the air was getting drier, colder. We were in the Gray Mountains. The monk had some sort of cottage set up there. Full of cages.”

“The others said he peeled the skin off the kids he took,” Nok murmured. “That he was looking for magic under their skin.”

“Not quite,” Nasan said. “He took three of us the first night we were there—me and two boys. I was the only one who came back. He took us up into the mountains. H-he had this map, marked with a location he thought might be a gateway into Yunis.”

“Yunis?” Nok repeated in surprise.

“Yes,” his sister confirmed. Her face took on a closed, careful look. Anyone else might have missed it, but there were some things siblings never forgot.

It was the same look that she used to get when their mother accused her of making off with the last dessert plum. Nasan had been clever enough to know she could never convincingly mime innocence, so instead turned deceit into a game of endurance, sustaining her lie louder and longer than her opponent was willing or able to deny it. Persuasion by exhaustion, Nok had called it.

The look had grown subtler over their four years of separation, but Nok still saw it for what it was.

What was she hiding?

“The monk had this notion that the city was—what was the word he used?—‘slumbering.’ That the Yunians had magicked it into hiding, and with the right combination of spells and sacrifices of his own, he could worm his way in.”

“And then what?”

Nasan shrugged. “Damned if I know. He didn’t share it with us. Anyway, when they got there it didn’t look like anything special, but he seemed sure that it was that particular spot.”

“So, what happened?”

She sighed. “He killed the other two right there, trying to use their blood to open the gate. When that didn’t work, he tried to make me caul on the site. Right there on the ground, on my knees in the other kids’ blood. Thought he was going to kill me when I couldn’t, but he just took me back to the cottage. The next night, me and four of the others ran.”

“And now you’re here,” Nok said.

“And now we’re here.”

“Who are all your other . . . friends?” Nok gestured around, referring to the other children he’d seen earlier. “And how many of you are there?”

She smiled, a hint of affection lighting her face. “Sixty-eight of us. Mostly Gifted, though there are a few ungifted who were also displaced by the colonies. Some are Gifted orphans we found wandering the woods after their Kith were slaughtered, a few are escapees like me, and about twenty are rescues from when we raided a labor camp a few months back.”