The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(94)

They jolted to a stop in a settling cloud of dust and gravel. Lu swiped at her face to clear it and felt wetness in its wake. Blood from her mangled palms. She smelled copper, smelled salt. Someone was moaning, low and ragged, and she recognized her own voice. She blinked hard, forced her swollen eyes to open.

They were at the edge of the lakeshore. Another thirty feet and they would be in the water.

A dark violet-gray fog rolled in over the lake, curling and swelling toward them. The ghostly form of Nok’s wolf loped down the shore into it, paws skimming the surface of the open water.

Lu squinted her dust-stung eyes, trying to focus, but they welled with tears. When she managed to open them again the wolf was gone, but the fog remained.

Then she saw the boy’s body lying on the shore. His broken, all-too-human body.

“Nokhai!” She flew down toward him. He was still moving, but his breath was ragged, and she saw that every wound and mark carved into the wolf was now left upon his own skin. The shaft of the crossbow bolt had snapped clean off in the fall, leaving only the ragged point lodged into his ribs.

His eyes were distant, but they focused on her when she touched him.

“Go,” he rasped. “Get out of here.”

“I am not leaving you,” she hissed. His eyes . . . he was having trouble focusing, but they fluttered at the blast of the scout’s horn, much closer now. Another horn responded in kind. Then another. Close. She heard the hard clip of a thousand hooves on stone, rippling toward them like a wave. She looked for them—the soldiers—but the fog had grown too dense around them.

All she could see were her own bloodied hands, clutching at Nokhai’s pallid face, smearing red across his skin.

“You have to go,” he told her.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“They’re coming.” And beneath the pain, the fear, she felt his iron, his mettle. “Go now.”

“Not without you,” she said. She hauled him up onto her back, struggling to stand. She made it to a crouch before her knees buckled and she fell back against the stones.

The soldiers were upon them. She could hear the shouts of men over the slamming hooves against rock, the labored huff of the beasts.

“Over there!”

The call came behind them, unexpected, from the direction of the water. Lu half rose, her hand poised on the hilt of her sword. But then she recognized the voice.

“Nasan?” she cried out, her voice cracking with hope and disbelief. “Nasan!”

Something large cut through the smoke-gray fog over the lake, as if it were pushing its way through a curtain: a scow with a hull carved into the likeness of a dragon, painted ivory-white. Then, no—it was a blushing fuchsia, then the palest blue. Impossible. Lu drew in a sharp breath. The boat was hewn entirely from crystal, scintillating in the low light.

A hooded figure was poling the boat along. Nasan waved frantically from its prow.

The blast of the Hana scout’s trumpet came again, and it should have been close, closer, but it sounded impossibly far away. The air was oddly still. Something had changed.

The horses, Lu realized. The thundering of hooves had disappeared.

“Nokhai,” Lu whispered, bending to pull at his shoulders. His eyelids fluttered but did not open. “Nokhai?” She shook him, frantic now. “We’re here. We’re saved. Please . . .”

The boat bumped against the edge of the shore, and the tall, hooded figure within emerged. They walked strong and upright, but as they advanced, Lu glimpsed beneath their cowl the face of a very old man, his skin spotted with age, eyes and mouth drooping not unpleasantly at the corners.

“Please!” she called out to him. “My friend . . .”

The man bent over Nokhai swiftly, touched his throat, his temple, his chest. “He lives,” he assured her. “We must hurry—bring him to my sister. But he lives.”

He withdrew the cloak from his shoulders and wrapped it around Nokhai’s limp frame. Lu looked up to thank him—but the face she had glimpsed before was gone, replaced by that of a young man no more than two or three years her senior. He stood, lifting Nokhai in his arms as though he weighed no more than a cat.

“Princess Lu?” the young man said politely, his eyes searching her face with a curious, almost boyish wonder.

“Yes, I . . .” She blinked, baffled at the sight of his dark, unhooded eyes, and soft, affable features where the old man had been moments earlier. “And you are . . . ?”

“My name is Prince Jin,” the young man said. “Welcome to Yunis.”





CHAPTER 29


The Gray City

Nok’s eyes fluttered open.

He saw a high-flown arched ceiling carved from stone. All around him, silence. He blinked, and the pain came rushing in.

Even as it knocked the breath from him, he knew it was a good pain, a healing pain. His hand went to his ribs, felt clean bandages wrapped taut around his middle. The air smelled sharp and medicinal.

He sat up as slowly as possible, resting heavily on his left side to do so. It took him what felt like an hour to rise, but at long last he pressed his feet to the cold stone floor. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to stand, but he tried it, anyway, and found he could.

He was thirsty, and desperate to make water. He shuffled about the room until he found a chamber pot and relieved himself.