The Girl King

by Mimi Yu

  “How was this not brought to our attention sooner?” demanded the empress from Set’s far side. Min started. She had forgotten her mother was there at all.

  Set frowned at the interjection but nodded. “Yes, it’s been days! How are we—how am I only hearing of this now?”

  The other guard stepped forward. “If you please, Emperor Set, we tried to bring him before you as soon as he was discovered, but in the chaos—that is, the confusion of mourning the late emperor Daagmun, we were not permitted to enter the city. We had to hold him in one of the city jails.”

  “You should have informed the captain of the imperial guard!” Set cried.

  “Begging your pardon, we did, Your Majesty,” the second guard said. “But again, we were told no one was to enter or leave the palace grounds for the safety of the imperial family.”

  Set crammed agitated fists to his hips, turning as though to pace the floor of the cell, only to find the quarters too close to do so. Seemingly frustrated by this, he took a deep breath and refocused on the old man now hunched on the floor before them. “What is his name? How did he come to know my cousin?”

  “The villagers in Ansana call him Omair. He is an apothecarist, allegedly. They say he appeared out of nowhere some years ago. He has no known relations, though there was a young man, an apprentice boy living with him—”

  “And where is this boy?” Set demanded impatiently.

  “He, ah, he disappeared, Your Majesty,” admitted the guard. “We have men searching for him. He may be with the princess.”

  Set’s mouth hardened into a red line. “Go,” he managed to bark out. “I’ll deal with you later. Out.”

  When they’d gone, Set whirled on her mother, almost accusatory. “You see?” he demanded. “Spies and conspirators everywhere. I told you Lu was plotting against me this whole time!”

  “Lower your voice,” her mother hissed. “You think the guards outside the cell can’t hear? And what about him?” She gestured at the prisoner still cowering on the floor at their feet.

  “You said she was just a dumb little girl,” Set continued. He spoke more softly now, but it only seemed to intensify the malevolent sting of his words. “That she had no friends. And yet she has allies as far as Ansana!”

  “This means nothing,” her mother said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Who is this man? A peasant. She likely coerced or tricked him into housing her.”

  Set fixed his gaze back on the prisoner. “Is that what happened, old man?” he demanded. When the prisoner did not respond immediately, Set seized a handful of his beard and yanked him to his feet. The man swayed, clearly unsteady, kept upright only by the force of Set’s grip. “Who are you?” Set screamed in his face, slamming him against the wall of the cell.

  Min jumped back, her whole body running cold.

  The old man winced at the flecks of spit spraying his face. “If it p-please Your Majesty, your Emperorship, I am an ap-apothecarist. Nothing more.” He turned his face to the side, like a nervous dog, mouth wet and trembling.

  “An apothecarist, are you? A healer?” Set released his hold on the prisoner abruptly, sending him crumpling to the floor. “You’re going to need a very, very good healer when I’m done with you.”

  Then her cousin drew back his handsomely booted foot and kicked the man in the ribs. Once, twice—the man yelped each time Set made contact, but the blows came faster, wild, uncontrolled, until his voice became a continuous shriek, and then a low moan.

  Stop! Please stop! Min thought, but she wasn’t sure if she meant it for Set or for the prisoner. Her heart swelled, squeezing the air from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. All she could do was stand there, pummeled by the man’s wail. And beneath it the frantic, panted demands of her cousin.

  “Where is she? Where is Lu? Where is the little bitch? Who else are you working with?”

  It could only have been a few minutes, but it felt like hours later when her cousin stilled, breathing raggedly. Min stared at his heaving back and for the first time prayed he wouldn’t turn around and look her way.

  He thrust a palm against the wall, leaning heavily against it. A ring of sweat soaked the neck of his robes. The old man curled in on himself like burning paper. The acrid stink of fresh urine filled the cell.

  Her mother drew back in revulsion. “He’s soiled himself.”

  “Good,” snarled Set. “That means he’s afraid. As he should be.”

  “I don’t know anything!” wailed the old man.

  “If you’re going to kill him,” her mother said, “call the guards in to do it. This is a waste of our time.”

  “I won’t kill him yet,” Set said. “Not until I’ve wrung out every drop of information he has to give.”

  He delivered a final, disgusted kick to the man’s side, but his aim was skewed by exhaustion; the toe of his boot merely glanced off the prisoner’s ribs and hit the stone wall. He hopped back, cursing.

  “This old peasant dog here couldn’t have been working alone,” he said. “He must have connections in the court.”

  “I’m telling you, Lu is relying on dumb luck,” insisted her mother. “It will soon run out. I have spies everywhere—they would have told me if she’d begun covertly planning anything.”

  “Your spies are either useless or lying to you, Aunt Rinyi!” snapped Set. He turned away then, heading for the door of the cell. “I will get to the bottom of who can be trusted and who knows Lu’s plans. And when we find her, I’ll kill Lu with my own bare hands.”

  The cell door slammed hard behind him. For a long moment, her mother stared at it, as though contemplating the space where Set had stood. Then, without turning, she spoke.

  “Omair,” she mused, her voice low, but clear. Intentional. Both Min and the prisoner looked up sharply, as though her words were a lead tugging at their necks. “An unusual name. Sounds southern.”

  She turned back to where the prisoner remained crouched amid the dirty rushes scattering the floor. “Though, I suppose that’s what you were hoping for, weren’t you? Much less provincial than Ohn, I’ll grant you that.”

  It was as though the name was a spell her mother had recited. The old man slowly rose from his defeated crouch. He winced, leaning his back against the wall, the pain still clear on his face.

  But as Min watched, he slowed his breath, closed his eyes. She felt it—the way she could feel her own heart beating or a breeze against her skin. His energy leveled, drawing the pain from his side, his mouth, shifting it to a sustaining equilibrium. The change came slow and subtle, the way a new flower unfolds. When he opened his eyes, the weight of a dozen years seemed to slip from his shoulders. Gone was the slack, cowed expression—the mask of a frightened peasant replaced with the canny certainty of a man no longer out of his element looking royalty in the face.

  “I thought perhaps you’d forgotten me,” said this new man.

  “How could I?” Her mother’s tone was bitter. She did not appear to notice the man’s quiet metamorphosis. “Pissing yourself. That was a nice touch. But, no. I didn’t forget. Do you know how many years I spent looking for you? How much I paid, to how many mercenaries—all for empty promises of your swift, discreet death? You were my one loose thread.”

  “And here I sit,” the man said lightly. “Ready to be snipped.”

  “Not quite,” the empress said reluctantly. “My nephew grows more paranoid by the day. Do you know how many guards are standing outside your door? You have Set’s interest now—you’ve become the key to his conspiracy. The thing that proves to his mind how dangerous Lu truly is. If I am the last person to see you alive, what would he make of that? What would he do to me?”

  “And what of the princess? Are you not worried about her?”

  “Lu? Please. She’s more naïve than she is anything else. I may not be the girl’s mother, but I did watch her grow up.”

  Min whipped around to face the empress. Not Lu’s mother? No. She had misheard—


  Did you? The shamaness’s hiss echoed through the room, but when Min spun around to find her, she wasn’t there.

  “Naïve?” the prisoner repeated with a faint smile. “Perhaps. But I think you underestimate her other qualities.”

  Her mother sniffed. “Still playing the part of enigmatic savant, are we? Well, it won’t work on me. I wasn’t lying when I told Set that I’d been tracking her for years, that I have spies everywhere. If she’d had any wits at all, Lu would have had her own. She would have had the network of support, of loyalists that Set thinks she has. Even her beloved Shin Yuri—your old friend, wasn’t he? What an opportunistic man he grew up to be. He’s been in my pocket for years. She has no one.”

  “She has me.”

  The empress’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe she did. But now I do.”

  “So, where does that leave us?” the prisoner asked, drawing himself up straighter.

  Her mother shrugged daintily. “We find ourselves in a strange alliance, don’t we? I intend to take the secret of Lu’s parentage to the grave, and I imagine—out of whatever misplaced loyalty you still bear to Daagmun and that witch mother of hers—that you will do the same. Only, I fear you will reach the grave much sooner than I. Between Set, his men, all their combined paranoia, and your age, I needn’t bother trying to kill you myself.”

  That seemed to amuse Omair—or was it Ohn? “I admit, I’m surprised you haven’t told Set about Lu’s birth yourself. It would delegitimize her entire claim. It’s the answer to your nephew’s problems.”

  “His problems, perhaps. But what of mine?”

  Omair searched her face with keen, curious eyes. “What holds you back, exactly? It can’t just be your pride.”

  Her mother flared. “Don’t speak to me of pride. I have already given everything else I had—my name, my birth, my youth, my beauty, my life—to a husband who wanted none of it. I’ve spent the last seventeen years planning and plotting on my nephew’s behalf. I deserve to keep this bit of pride for myself. Have you ever considered what it might feel like to have the entire empire know my emperor husband flouted our union for some lowborn foreign shamaness?”

  Min’s eyes widened. A shamaness? Lu’s mother was—she couldn’t mean. No. Not the same shamaness … She cast about again for the girl in white, but she had not reappeared. Somehow, Min knew she would not again, not here.

  Her own mother inhaled sharply. “And what for? Nothing. It is all done and in the past. No one is left who can attest to the truth of it. All it would do now is cast more uncertainty, more instability into the court. They may start doubting Minyi’s legitimacy—insist Set annul his vows to her, even. It’s too risky.”

  The empress sighed, walking toward the door, picking a delicate path amid the soiled rushes. “I’ve worked too hard to secure Min’s place in this world to chance losing it.”

  The man tracked her mother’s movement with a sedate, cautious curiosity.

  “You truly love your daughter,” he said in mild surprise. “You would do anything to protect her.”

  “What mother wouldn’t?”

  The prisoner slumped against the wall of the cell, and Min once more felt the pain sparking from his side, the absence in his mouth where his missing tooth had been. He was powerful, whatever he was, but clearly even he had his limits.

  “I think you and Tsai had more in common than you know.”

  “Princess?”

  Min felt a sharp tug on her arm. She blinked. Before her eyes, the cell dissolved, taking her mother and the prisoner with it.

  “Princess?”

  Another tug. Harder now, almost painful. She winced, blinked—

  “Princess Min!”

  She opened her eyes. Brother kneeled over her. She was on the floor; she must have fallen from her seat—

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw …” She pushed herself up on shaky arms.

  Tell him. Tell him about Lu. It will please Set. It will give him all he needs to secure the throne. Maybe he’ll stop hunting Lu. Maybe he’ll even let her come home and everything will be—

  Her mother’s words echoed back to her, though: They may start doubting Minyi’s legitimacy—insist Set annul his vows to her, even.

  “Princess?” Brother persisted.

  “I saw—I was h-having a nightmare,” she stammered. A thin, naked slip of a lie. “Amma Ruxin was angry with me. She was screaming.”

  For a breathless moment, Brother searched her face with those unyielding, temperate eyes. Then he sighed, clearly disappointed. “Very well,” he said, helping her to her feet. “I fear I’ve overextended you. Let us get you back to your apartments.”

  She nodded, trying not to appear overeager.

  He took her arm in his own, leading her to the door. She suppressed the urge to glance back into his mirror; she already knew what she’d see there. A girl who could be anyone. A girl who could be nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 20

  Exile

  Crying was a weakness, and Lu was not weak. She would choose fury over fear, and her fury would sear away any tears that might well inside her. This was what she decided on the trail north.

  She rode with the reins of the horse in hand, the Ashina boy seated behind her. He sat stiffly, as though trying to avoid touching her, but otherwise was so still, so silent she might have thought him asleep. The soft, lethargic sway of the windswept pines and the high trill of breeding cicadas had more to say than he did.

  She let him keep his quiet. He’d been through enough. They both had.

  Her father was dead. Her father was dead, and everyone believed she’d been the one to kill him.

  Not Min, she thought. Surely her sister couldn’t believe she could do such a thing, could she? Their mother, though … she wasn’t so certain. But Min …

  Poor Min. Sweet, innocent, simple Min. Sold off to Set by their mother like some prized mare. The thought slid through her, oily and repugnant.

  Pushing away the thought, she looped the reins around a wrist and held up Omair’s map, studying the browned paper rotely for the hundredth time.

  As she folded it back up, Nokhai shifted behind her. Lu felt she ought to speak, but she could all but feel the mistrust radiating off him. How could this be the traveling companion the heavens had chosen for the most important journey of her life?

  Omair trusted the boy to guide her, she reminded herself. And Yuri trusted Omair.

  Did she trust Yuri, though? Even if his heart were loyal, he hadn’t left her with much to work with. Was there anyone she could rely on?

  Not anymore. Out here, I’m alone.

  Fear sluiced through her gut as the horse stumbled beneath her. Horses, Lu thought in annoyance, were a decidedly inferior mount to elk. She yearned for Yaksun’s broadness, his sure-footed strength. This creature, for all its meticulous breeding, seemed to spook at every pit and root it stumbled on.

  And there were plenty of pits and roots on this jagged, narrow forest lane. She’d wanted to take the well-maintained, slate-paved Imperial Road, but the boy had insisted—rightly, she had to admit—that they try a route less frequented by hordes of imperial soldiers.

  The horse stumbled beneath her again. She frowned.

  “You have a mule,” she mused aloud. “Mules aren’t so different from horses, are they? How frequently do you need to reshoe a mule?”

  The boy at her back was silent for a long moment. Then he whispered, “Bo.”

  “What?”

  “The mule’s name is Bo. We left Bo behind,” he said, sitting up straighter. There was now a panic in his voice that alarmed her.

  “I know …,” she said. “We had to.”

  “Oh gods,” he croaked. “Omair. We have to go back.”

  “Wait!” she cried, but too late. The boy slipped from the saddle and was running down the trail, back in the direction they had come.

  It occurred to her for a frozen moment that she could leave him. Let him run back into the waiting arms of
the soldiers probably still swarming the old apothecarist’s house, searching the nearby fields for them …

  Cursing, Lu turned the horse after him.

  She overtook him in no time at all; perhaps horses weren’t entirely useless. When she was close enough, she reined up and slipped from the saddle.

  The boy was still running, but when she caught him by the shoulders he stopped, breathless. At first she thought he was winded, but then she realized he was having some sort of fit. He could scarcely breathe.

  “Omair,” he hissed. “We need to go back for Omair.”

  “It was Omair’s command for us to continue to Yunis alone. He saved us so that we could—”

  The boy whirled on her at those words. “He saved us, and we left him. Oh gods, I left him …” He hunched on the ground, head clutched in his hands. Lu watched him quiver, tufts of coarse black hair peeking out between his clenched fingers. “Gods.” His voice was so quiet Lu could barely make out the words. “I’m a coward. I’ve always been a coward.”

  Lu hesitated. She had never been very good at comfort. From an early age she had learned that to lose one’s composure was unbecoming, so she had taught herself to keep hers wrapped tight around her like a cloak, to drape it over her unsightly pain. In turn, though, she had never learned how to soothe pain in others. When little Minyi had cried over some harsh words from Amma Ruxin or their mother, it had been Butterfly or Hyacinth who held her sister’s hand, stroked her hair as she wept.

  And when she’d made Set cry all those years ago in the desert, Lu had laughed.

  Because he deserved it, she’d told herself. And because he was a boy, and boys were supposed to be warriors, and warriors didn’t cry. She had learned that before she’d learned to swing a sword. She didn’t get to cry, so why should he?

  But here in the woods there was no Butterfly, no Hyacinth. And the boy hunched before her was not her cousin. He was no warrior, either. But perhaps that was all right.