The Girl King

by Mimi Yu

  “What is it?” Min asked, her body going cold, as though Snowdrop’s fear were so potent as to be catching.

  “Princess …,” Butterfly began, for once seemingly at a loss for words.

  “It’s your father,” Snowdrop blurted, tears welling in her eyes. “The emperor is dead!”

  CHAPTER 11

  Stalked

  Another arrow flew, this one so close to Lu’s head she felt it whisper past her hair. It planted itself in the earth with a soft thunk.

  Run.

  Chaos broke. Shouts went up from her men—there was a flash of steel as weapons were drawn. A crossbow twanged and someone in Hu reds fell to the ground. Lu tried to track who it was, who had shot—who, if anyone, was on her side, and who was the enemy.

  “Don’t shoot, you idiots!” Set barked. “You’re too close! We’re going to hit each other!”

  Set. The dissonant pieces of the puzzle fell into place. This was her cousin’s doing.

  Yaksun reared, nearly tearing Lu from Yuri’s grasp, but the old man clung on with one hand, using the other to still his horse.

  “You knew? Why didn’t you tell me?” she hissed.

  “I didn’t know—not until just now. Listen. There’s no time. Go North. There’s an apothecarist named Omair in the village of Ansana. He will help you. Trust no one, not even your own men.”

  His words cut deep. “My own …? They wouldn’t …”

  He growled and shook her hard. “I know you think you’re invincible, but you can’t fight them all on your own. Now, push me away, and make it look good. If you ever loved me, ever trusted me, you’ll do what I say.”

  But did she trust him?

  There was no time. No choice. She gave him a theatrical shove. The old man tumbled from his horse in a controlled fall; he hit the ground and rolled.

  “Ya!” Lu yelled, digging her heels into Yaksun’s broad sides. The elk gave a bellow and lunged forward in a full gallop.

  Behind her, the clash of steel on steel rang an eerie song into the quiet wood. Not everyone had been part of Set’s ambush, then. She hazarded a glance over her shoulder as six Hana men on horses broke out of the fray in pursuit.

  “She’s getting away!” Set screamed.

  Lu urged Yaksun on. The elk picked its way over the forest floor; he was equipped to deal with this terrain. The Hana in their arrogance had never given up their attachment to horses, Lu thought with grim satisfaction. She yanked her reins to the left, urging the elk up an embankment, kicking up further distance between them and her pursuers. She cut a jagged path through the trees, pressing toward where they were densest. It was a risk; one misstep and they would be on the ground.

  Yaksun ran until he was frothing at his bit. He stumbled, and a lance of fear drove itself through Lu’s belly, but the elk hadn’t tripped, he was merely exhausted. How long had they been running? Lu looked back again, but there was only the stillness of the trees now. She reined up and the elk stopped. Had she lost them?

  Something large moved in the undergrowth.

  Lu froze, wondering if she had imagined it.

  Keep going, stupid, she scolded herself, digging her heels into Yaksun’s sides. If there was something there, better to present a moving target than to freeze like some witless deer.

  It’s only a boar, she told herself. Or a badger, or—

  A silent blur of blue-gray advanced, then receded in the corner of her right eye. In spite of herself, she reined up and stopped. She was being followed. Stalked.

  Around her, the wood was once more maddeningly, mockingly still. She could hear the diffuse, nebulous screech of cicadas in the treetops, the lazy fall of dead leaves and twigs. Nothing else.

  Stupid, she repeated. You’re like a scared little child, turning shadows into ghosts.

  “Come on,” she whispered to Yaksun, guiding him on, a bit faster now.

  The elk stopped, let out a guttural low.

  “Yaksun,” she hissed, kicking at his sides. But the elk snorted in agitation, stamped backward, and threw his head, limpid brown eyes wide, ringed white and lolling.

  The dam inside her broke, and all at once fear rushed down her spine in an icy rivulet. The thing was close. She felt its eyes on her from the shadows.

  This time the streak of blue-gray came threading through the trees on her left, fast and close. She could see it now: thick fur, and flashing black eyes.

  A wolf?

  She whipped the bow from her back and scanned the trees, arrow nocked, heart thrashing against her ribs. Could it truly be a wolf? There hadn’t been wolves in the Northwood since long before the Hu had conquered the Hana. Farmers had complained of losing livestock, and the king—she could not remember which, nor the dynasty—had initiated a campaign to have the creatures slaughtered. If it was a wolf …

  They’re pack animals, she thought with rising panic. Perhaps it wasn’t just one wolf but several she was seeing.

  A branch snapped to her right and she whipped her bow in the direction of the sound.

  Not now, she thought, furious. She hadn’t made it away from her cousin’s grasp only to be felled by some animal, no matter how big.

  The rage pulsing under her skin gave her an odd comfort. She might be at the precipice of losing all she knew, but she still had herself.

  Another flash of gray. Lu instinctively shot, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of the arrow bedding itself amid the bracken.

  And the animal was before her, claws digging into the rotted log upon which it stood.

  She opened her mouth as though to yell, but the sound caught in her throat.

  It was massive. Half the size of Yaksun.

  But instead of crouching and leaping at her, the thing gave her a curiously intelligent look, then loped off into the trees.

  She lowered the bow, cold sweat prickling her forehead, the back of her neck. What game was this? Was it toying with her? Where had it gone?

  Lu hesitated, staring at where it had been. If she let it go now, it would likely return.

  She patted Yaksun on the neck and directed him in the direction the wolf had disappeared. She would kill it before it killed her. That was the rule of the wood.

  As she followed, she caught fleeting glimpses of it between the trees, emerging amid a clump of ferns, disappearing behind rocks, fleet as water. She flung an arrow at it, then another, but each fell useless to the wayside, as she somehow knew it would. It felt, she thought, as much like a dance as it did a chase.

  Turn back, a voice inside her hissed. But something in her heart, something giddy and certain as the blood thundering there, propelled her forth. Even Yaksun seemed to have lost his fear, surging on as though he understood that she was now the hunter, and not the hunted.

  The trees fell away, leaving them at the edge of a precipice. The wolf stopped at its edge, still and large and implacable as truth. Lu reined up quickly, scarcely more than a stone’s throw away. Below them, she could hear the narrow trickle of a stream.

  “Well met,” she heard herself say, breath heaving in her chest. She pulled the bow once more from her back and nocked an arrow, drew. For a moment, they stared at one another, the wolf and the girl. Its eyes were black, and somehow uncannily human. It seemed to be waiting for something.

  What it was never came. She let her arrow fly.

  Its course was true. She could almost see it sinking deep into the plush fur of the creature’s chest, lacing delicately between its ribs, and finding the meat of its heart.

  The wolf leaped over the edge of the cliff. Her arrow thunked safe and disappointed into the soft earth where the creature had only just stood.

  Stunned, Lu leaped from Yaksun and ran to the precipice, slamming down beside her spent arrow to peer over the edge.

  Below, she could see the little stream she’d heard, and lying prone, half in the water, was the wolf.

  Dead, she thought, oddly bereft.

  But then, it stirred. At first she thought she’d imagined i
t, the tremor was so slight. Then it lifted its head, rose on its front paws, and stood. Only—she gasped at the sudden realization—only now it was transparent as a thinning fog. She could see the stream and ferns and trees through the blue-gray haze of its body.

  A ghost, she thought wildly, feeling dizzy. Feeling unreal, like she had taken leave of her own flesh. Like in all the folk stories. Strange beasts and ghosts in the wood.

  The wolf shook its massive head, gazed up at her. Seemingly unimpressed, it turned and loped off into the trees beyond the stream, its form growing fainter and fainter as it went before dissolving completely.

  She heard a low moan, and only then did she notice the body the wolf had left behind in the stream, like a cicada leaves its spent skin. Or a spirit leaves a corpse. Except what lay below lived, trembling and heaving. Flesh and bone. And it resembled nothing of the ghostly wolf that had abandoned it.

  It was a boy.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Forest

  The world was spinning and Nok’s mouth was full of metal. He rolled to one side and spat a gob of blood. He must have bitten his tongue in the fall.

  The fall. The Gifting Dream. The wolf.

  Wild, impossible memories surged over him like water …

  Water?

  Nok lifted an arm. It was wet. He was lying in a creek bed.

  He rolled out of the stream, trying not to shudder. The forest swam drunkenly before him. He closed his eyes against it.

  This isn’t happening, he told himself. In a moment, I will wake up in Omair’s house. I’ll see wooden walls and a dirt floor. The stink of fresh salve will fill the room.

  But no, that wasn’t right. Omair wasn’t safe anymore, and Nok had nowhere to go. He opened his eyes.

  A massive bull elk stood over him, blinking inquisitively, blocking out the sun.

  Nok opened his mouth to shout, but the sound shriveled in his throat. When he tried to sit up, the beast let out a blustery snort and stepped back. It turned as it did so, revealing the rider atop its back.

  She was tall and athletic, wearing a plush cloak of scarlet and a look of guarded amazement on her tawny face. One gloved hand grasped the elk’s reins, the other hesitating in mid-reach toward the jeweled pommel of the sword on her back.

  Nok knew her the moment their eyes met.

  Hers were contoured with an exaggerated line of black paint, emphasizing dark brown irises flecked through with copper and gold. Lively like fire. Twin mirrors reflecting his own shocked recognition.

  She blinked.

  Nok scrambled to a stand but slipped in the muddy bank. His body cried out in protest from half a hundred places. Ignoring it, he leaped back, instinctively putting a boulder between them. His wrist was already swelling from where he had wrenched it against the ground. When he flexed it, pain blossomed through his arm, but it moved well enough. Not broken.

  “I know you,” the girl said, her words hushed in wonder.

  He licked his lips.

  “I know you. I know your face.” She had the lofty, imperious voice of someone accustomed to people listening to her. It was lower than it had been all those years before, but familiar nonetheless.

  “I—” Nok shot a look to his right, spotting the telltale rutted dirt and tunneled bracken of a deer trail cutting through the underbrush. All at once his senses flared, as though part of the wolf were still in him. He was assaulted by the musky residue of the creatures. His eyes dilated, drawing his focus to a tuft of white-brown fur clinging to a branch at its entrance. A flash of images: hurtling through the wood, snapping at hooves, the clench of his jaws around a haunch of flesh, blood on his tongue that was not his own. Absurdly, his mouth began to water.

  He shook his head hard and the world retracted. He wondered if the fall had not done some permanent damage.

  “Will you say something?” the girl demanded, guiding her elk a step closer.

  “I’m not—I’m not anyone you would know,” Nok said, looking back up at her. Focus. Stay alert.

  His answer seemed to displease her. She frowned and asked rather more impatiently, “Don’t you know who I am?”

  “The Hu princess.” That much was obvious. Even if they hadn’t met before, he’d know. Even if he hadn’t tried and failed to forget her these past five years.

  Could he run? He wasn’t certain. Should he try? He flicked his eyes toward the deer trail again, then back to the princess’s war elk. The beast’s shaggy legs were thick as the trunks of young trees. If the princess gave chase she would overtake him, though he might be able to lose her in the dense brush.

  “You don’t remember my name?” She sounded almost disappointed.

  Of course I remember your name—how not? he thought. Your people were the most exciting thing to happen in all my young life. And the worst …

  The elk took another step toward him. “I remember your name, Nokhai.”

  He started. And when he looked her in the eyes he was drawn back to that day in the desert, under the high noon sky, when the emperor and his retinue had arrived at the Ashina’s summer encampment. It had seemed to him in the years to follow that that was the moment his life had bent, as though over a knife’s edge, and clove itself in two.

  She had appeared in a gilded litter back then, rather than on a war elk. There had been two princesses: she’d worn scarlet, while her sister was swathed in a blue paler and thinner than the sky. Their hair was decorated with a bricolage of jeweled pins and golden combs and little white star-shaped flowers so fresh and crisp Nok thought only magic could keep them alive in the heat.

  She had drawn his eye somehow. While her younger sister had fidgeted nervously, thin fingers of sweat creeping down her brow, the elder girl sat remarkably still, like a satisfied, imperious cat. Every muscle trained by perfect will.

  Then, as though feeling his gaze—though how could she? Everyone there must have been looking at her—she had turned and met Nok’s eyes. He had opened his mouth, then shut it when he realized there was nothing to be said.

  A heartbeat and it was over; the princess had looked away.

  She did not look away now.

  His ears pricked. All at once, his senses—the wolf’s senses?—flared back to life. He smelled saliva, hot blood, animal musk, and acrid sweat. He heard a murder of crows explode from the treetops half a league away. And beneath it, he heard barking.

  “What is it?” the princess asked him, seeing the change in his face.

  “Didn’t you hear it?” But of course she couldn’t. He shouldn’t even be able to.

  This cannot be.

  “Didn’t I hear what?” she demanded.

  Recognition dawned on her face as the sound reached her ears.

  “Hounds,” Nok said needlessly. He looked around for some mark of the landscape that might point him homeward, but all he saw was dense wood and shadow. He had never been this far into the forest before, he realized, fear quickening to panic.

  “Get on,” the princess said abruptly, closing the distance between them with her elk. Nok jumped back. “Get on,” she repeated impatiently. Nok stared stupidly at her. She frowned.

  “You’re lost, aren’t you? I can tell you are. They’re hunting me, but they’ll rip you apart just as soon. Either that or my cousin will capture and torture you until you tell them where I’ve gone.”

  The idea of being killed was bad enough, but to be killed for aiding her …

  “I don’t know anything about you,” he snapped.

  “Maybe not,” she agreed. “But they won’t know that. And I doubt they’ll stop to ask. At the very least, they’ll arrest you for trespassing in the forest during a royal hunt.”

  She was correct, of course. With an internal growl of fury, he threw himself upon the elk’s back. The animal stamped at his touch, trying to shrug him off.

  “Don’t you know how to mount an elk properly?” the princess demanded, looking far more irritated than someone in her position had time to be. “You sit like
you’re used to riding donkeys.”

  “A mule, actually,” he shot back.

  Would that Bo were here now, he thought. The fat, surly creature would never be able to outrun imperial-trained hounds, but he might have bitten a few, as well as the princess, before they went down.

  “Hold on,” she told him.

  Where? he thought, sweeping his gaze down her back and reaching for her waist instinctively. Only—that didn’t seem appropriate. A flush flowered up his neck and he quickly moved his hands back, finally settling them on her shoulders.

  She turned her head, incredulous. “Oh, so you want to fall off?”

  He gritted his teeth and wrapped his arms around her waist. The girl’s belly muscles tensed slightly under his touch, but she seemed otherwise unimpressed by the situation. He supposed this was hardly the time for good manners.

  “Ya!” the princess yelled, digging her heels into the elk. The creature lunged forward into a full gallop.

  Nok’s stomach dropped, and for a moment he thought he might fall off from fear alone.

  “Hold on tighter!” the princess shouted. It took a moment for his fear-blank mind to understand she was speaking to him. He did as he was told.

  They launched into the dark of the wood.

  CHAPTER 13

  Hunter

  Not fast enough.

  “Ya! Ya!” Lu bellowed, urging Yaksun on with her heels. The forest became a green smear around them, but still the hounds gained.

  She heard the Ashina boy gasp in her ear as the elk leaped over a fallen log. A moment later she thought she heard him do it again, but—no. This time it was the hiss of a crossbow bolt flying past, a finger’s width from her head. Behind her came the yelling of men and the crash of horses through the brush.

  “They’re here!” the boy cried, his fingers digging into her waist.

  Shin Yuri’s voice rang in her ears. I know you think you’re invincible, but you can’t fight them all on your own.

  “Time to find out, Shin,” she muttered, reining up hard with one hand, using the other to yank her sword loose from its sheath. The elk let out a bellow as a blur of dusky gray hounds laced between his legs, nipping and baying. He kicked one in the head, breaking its neck with an audible snap, The hound’s body sprawled across the grass. The rest backed away, bristling but newly cautious.