The Girl King (The Girl King #1)(98)
His sister rolled her eyes. “Well, she certainly got to you. Maybe there’s hope, after all.”
CHAPTER 30
Proposal
The Yunians’ white fox fur stole was beginning to slip from Lu’s shoulders. She tugged it back up, then smoothed the thick, wooly skirts of her robes. They were dark red—as scarce a color as any in these parts. It seemed Yunis was called the Gray City not merely for the steely peaks of its mountains; its citizens appeared to wear no other color. Lu wondered fleetingly which had come first, the name or the clothes. Presumably the mountains predated both.
In any case, the Yunians had found some red cloth to mark and honor her Hu heritage. Nasan, of course, had immediately pointed out that it was the wrong red. Not that Lu would ever say it aloud, but the Ashina girl was right. The tone ran too dark and cool, more crimson than scarlet. But she appreciated the gesture.
It wasn’t just a color. It was a symbol, and symbols were important. The red marked her as Hu, a royal of the Empire of the First Flame. Moreover, the effort that had gone into procuring that symbol signaled to the court she was of value to the Yunian Triarch.
The stole she could have done without, she thought as it slipped once more down her shoulder. The fur dulled the damp mountain chill, but keeping it on seemed to require some skill she had never learned.
Hazarding a glimpse out at the gathered Yunian public, Lu wondered how they saw her. A spark of violence in their hard-won solitude? Some of the hostile eyes looking back at her seemed to suggest so, while others were more sedate, skeptical.
Vrea the Oracle, Shen the Steward, and Jin the Warrior ascended the dais. It was strange, seeing these figures from her history lessons come to life. They looked just as they’d been described in the remaining accounts from Yunis—unchanged all these seventeen years. Eerily preserved by the stasis of the Inbetween.
According to Yunian legend, before the city fell, every time one of the Triarch died, they would soon be reborn anew. The Yunian gods, the Ana and the Aba, would send a sign to the surviving siblings, and the baby would be found and taken to be raised to fulfill its role in the Triarch. Allegedly, the families of those chosen had been greatly honored to lose their sons and daughters in this way.
Vrea and Shen took their seats upon identical thrones cut from stone. Prince Jin went to a smaller chair located at his brother’s side. It made him rather look like a child sitting with his parents. The prince caught her gaze and smiled, though, so perhaps he didn’t find the arrangement diminishing. Lu returned his smile briefly.
Out of the three, she’d spent the most time with him. Shen was aloof, Vrea evasive and odd, but Jin was friendly and startlingly ordinary. She’d even grown accustomed to the way his face would seem to shift ages when he was excited or distressed—“slippage,” he called it. It had happened to him ever since they’d entered the Inbetween. No one knew why, though Vrea hypothesized it was a manifestation of his nostalgia, his homesickness for the world they’d left behind.
On the dais, Prince Shen gave a quick, spare nod, and the crowd took their seats.
Lu took that for permission to speak and bowed low. “I, Princess Lu of the Empire of the First Flame, come seeking audience before the Triarch of Yunis.”
“The Triarch of Yunis welcomes Princess Lu of the Empire of the First Flame to its court,” Prince Shen announced. “What is your purpose here?”
“I come before you today the rightful heir to the throne of my empire. Through the machinations of a few evil men, I was usurped by my cousin, Lord Set of Family Li of the Bei Province.”
Lu winced internally, hearing beneath the lofty polish of her words a hint of nervousness, a tremor in sync with the anxious skip of her heart.
Keep on, she told herself. No one else has noticed.
She straightened the fur stole over her shoulders and continued. “Since taking the throne, Lord Set has instituted policies for the empire that spell certain disaster and violence for our neighbors to the north—including the city of Yunis. In his greed and hubris, Lord Set put in motion a false war, based on lies, in order to take your land, your resources. He would see anyone who stands in his way obliterated. His reign will bring you nothing but a continuation—no, an intensification—of war and loss. Suffering and violence like never before.”
Kindly ignore, Lu thought, that it was my grandfather who initiated that war and violence, and my beloved father who kept it alive.
She looked up to see if the irony had registered among the Triarch, but the priestess merely stared back with that bemused, neutral face of hers. Prince Shen gave little more, and Prince Jin looked almost pitying. How was she meant to reach them?
Perhaps it wasn’t them she had to reach.
If she could not get what she wanted from the Triarch, maybe she could appeal to their people. She turned to face the audience, and caught a flash of annoyed surprise illuminating Prince Shen’s stoic face. It was a brief thing, but it gave her some satisfaction.
The audience looked no less hostile than the Triarch, though. A thousand scrutinizing eyes raked over her face, tugged at the hem of her skirts. The only familiar face was Nasan’s . . . and beside Nasan sat Nok, skinny and drawn and beautifully alive.
His shoulders were anxiously hunched; it couldn’t have been easy for him to be there, with his broken body, his distaste for crowds, his suspicion of royalty and politics. But there he was. Her breath hitched as his gaze settled on her.