by Mimi Yu
“Nokhai,” she whispered. The name felt at once forbidden and familiar in her mouth. She crouched down beside him. Her hand found his shoulder, clumsy and experimental. He flinched beneath her touch, but did not pull away. Her hand moved in progressively broader circles, until her fingers were tracing over his shoulder blades, the prominent notches of his spine.
“Omair knew what he was doing,” she told him. “He made a choice.”
“I owe him my life,” the boy said heatedly.
She could feel the warmth and the sorrow coming off him in waves, and she wanted to touch him more, touch him better than a mere hand to the back. To press so close against his skin she could draw the hurt out like a poultice draws poison from a wound.
“We’ll save him,” she said fiercely. “If we go back now, there’s nothing we can do. We’ll just be prisoners—corpses, even. But if we can make it to Yunis, I swear to you I’ll return with an army, and I’ll free Omair. Once my cousin is defeated, it’ll be the first thing I do.”
Behind his tears, she saw something else: a flicker of calculation in their black depths sparking to life and burning away his tears. There was something familiar in it. Perhaps he was not so different from her, after all.
“Why should I trust you?” the boy asked, shrugging her hand off as though he had only just noticed it.
Good question. There were plenty of lines she could feed him. Pretty notions of honor and civility and the word of royalty. Promises from the empire that had murdered his family and razed all sign or substance of his home from the earth. None of which would mean a damned thing to him.
“You don’t have a choice,” she said instead. “Either we trust each other, or we have no one. Is that good enough for you?”
Surprise flickered over his face. Finally, he nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. This bargain of necessity, this acquiescence to the distasteful needs of survival—this was something he understood. An ugly language that they now shared.
Lu stood and offered her hand. “Come on, then. Let’s save Omair.”
Nokhai stood on his own, but when he was upright he took her hand and shook it grimly.
“Let’s save the empire,” he said dryly.
Then he dropped her hand as though he couldn’t bear to hold it a moment longer. His face was still red and swollen, but his tears were gone.
They stopped for the night in a clearing far enough from the path that they wouldn’t immediately be seen by passersby. The air was cool, so Nokhai built a small fire. Because they had scarcely seen anyone all day, Lu reasoned, the blaze was unlikely to attract any attention.
As Nokhai worked, she inspected the rucksack Omair had given them before they fled. Lu unpacked two wool cloaks, a small jar of strong-smelling salve—she would have to ask Nokhai about its use later—a few rolls of cotton bandages, a sack of roasted chestnuts still in their husks, several sachets of dried teas and herbs, and a stack of some sort of fried flat-cakes bound in a clean cloth.
She kept the cloaks and the flat-cakes in her lap, then carefully replaced everything else. When she held up the flat-cakes in victory, though, she found Nok had moved from building a fire—now a pleasantly crackling blaze—to rubbing down the horse.
He had already removed its saddle and blanket and slung them over the low branch of a nearby tree, and in lieu of a comb, he was rubbing his fingers in a circular motion through the stallion’s coat.
“It’s all right, boy,” he murmured. “You can rest now.”
The sound of his voice was so unguarded that Lu found her shout of “Dinner!” dying upon her lips.
He must have sensed her stare; when he turned, the mask of suspicion had dropped down once more over his face.
“Omair packed …” Too late did it occur to her just hearing the name might inflict pain. “There was food in the bag,” she finished awkwardly.
Nokhai came over and examined the bundles. “Turnip cakes. Good.”
“There were some nuts, too. I thought we should save those for later.”
But the boy had set down the bundle and was now fingering a cluster of softly lobed leaves on the ground by his feet. “Sweet purple.”
“Sweet what?”
The boy worked his knife under where the leaves joined, and with a grunt, he pried a fat wine-colored tuber from the soft earth. He faced her with grim satisfaction. “Dinner. Goes well with turnip cakes.”
Lu frowned doubtfully. “Is it edible?”
“Would it be dinner if it weren’t?”
“But it’s from the forest.”
He stared at her. “What do you eat when you’re out on a hunt?”
“Whatever game we catch,” she responded, folding her arms across her chest.
“And what if you don’t catch anything?”
“The cooks make a meal from the food stores we bring with us—”
“And where do the food stores come from?”
“Our crop fields.”
“And where do you think those crops came from?”
“Not the forest!”
“Maybe not, but they came out of the mud same as anything. Same as these sweet purples.” He shook the roots. Clods of dirt rained to the ground.
“I suppose you’re correct,” she sniffed.
“Of course I’m correct.”
As he cooked, Lu polished the edges of her sword until the blade gleamed white in the firelight. Nokhai’s back was to her, but when she leaned to the side she could see the purple tubers resting on a raised bed of stones around which he stacked pine needles and twigs. He lit the kindling with his flint.
The air soon filled with a warm, nutty smell and he announced that the tubers were done. He handed her one, swaddled in a rag. She pulled the cloth apart and yelped when the skin burned her fingertips.
“They’re hot,” the boy said.
“That’s very helpful!” she snapped.
She watched and did as he did, licking her fingers and using them to pull apart the crackling wine-purple skins to reveal the yellow flesh beneath. A swipe of her knife cleaved a chunk into her waiting hand. As she dropped the hot meat into her mouth her eyes widened in surprise.
“It’s sweet.”
“Hence the name.”
She looked up. Nokhai was—not quite smiling, but it was close. It gave her a start; jerked something hard in her gut to see him like that. With his face lit, he looked a good deal more like the bashful child she had met in the desert.
When he caught her gaze in his own, though, his smile slipped.
“What?” he asked.
She shrugged, taking another chunk of sweet purple in her fingertips. It was cooler now. “I thought you’d forgotten how to smile. It’s nice. You smiling, I mean.”
His ears reddened. “Haven’t had much reason to smile.”
She wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but it seemed he did not expect her to. He turned back toward the fire.
“Needs more kindling,” he said. “The bigger logs aren’t staying lit.”
As he bent by the fire, red light danced across his face, accenting the hollows under his cheekbones and the edge of his jaw where it drew up sharply to meet his ear. Lu stared at that juncture, watched it clench as he worked.
He’d been the first friend she’d ever made on her own. It was different from Hyacinth and the other nunas—she loved them as well as anyone in the world, but they hadn’t chosen one another so much as they were chosen for one another. She’d seen Nokhai in the crowd when their retinue arrived, and right then and there she’d known … what, exactly? Only that there was a familiarity in him, like finding some precious thing that she hadn’t even known she’d lost.
They spent that single afternoon wending their way through a chain of caves in the hillside while their Elders and her father convened in the Ashina encampment below. When they came across a nest of scorpions, Lu had wanted to crush them with rocks. But Nokhai had convinced her to let them be.
Aren’t you afraid? s
he’d asked.
He hadn’t understood. Yes, of course I am.
And she’d thought, Here is a boy that is soft as flowers.
They hadn’t known then that the evening would end in curses and vows of war; they’d only been children.
“You know,” she said. Nokhai looked up from the fire. “Even if the rumors about Yunis aren’t entirely true, there might be some of your kind left. Not your Kith, maybe, but others …”
Nok’s face closed off to her so swiftly as to be brutal. “Just because your kind thinks we’re all the same doesn’t mean we see ourselves that way.”
“I only thought, since we are going to the outer territories, maybe we could ask after your Kith. See if anyone … you know, if they—”
“Survived both the slaughter and the labor camps?”
She hesitated at the choice of words, but his tone was no more hostile than usual. “Yes.”
“No.”
She frowned. “No, you don’t think they did, or no you don’t want to ask?”
“No, I don’t want to know. No, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But if there’s any chance … you could have a home again.”
A spasm of anger seized his face. “There is no home without …,” he broke off. “You killed my home when you killed everyone I knew.”
Lu shook her head. “I don’t understand. You were a princeling; if you had the chance, wouldn’t you want to rebuild your people?”
“We don’t—we didn’t have princes. We weren’t like you.”
“But your father was a prince—”
“He was a Kith father. It’s not the same thing. We didn’t have princes.”
“Still, he was important.”
Nok stood abruptly and seized their pail. “My family is dead. My home is gone. I’m going to get water; sweet purples are dry eating.”
She watched him stalk off down the slope toward the river.
She scrambled to her feet. “Nokhai!” Her voice seemed to tear out of her at its own volition.
He stopped, but did not turn.
“I’m sorry.” The words wrenched from her, guttural and haggard and absurd in how useless she knew them to be. “I’m sorry about your family.” I’m sorry about everything.
His back stiffened, almost imperceptibly. Finally, at length, he said, “I’m sorry about your father.”
It took her by surprise. In truth, she’d been doing her best not to think about her father. But she thought of him now, like a wound reopening at the soft brush of Nokhai’s words.
“No … I mean, it’s not the same thing,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry. Truly. I wish … I’m sorry.” She wished she could will him into believing her.
“I understand,” he said. Then he slipped off into the night.
While the boy was fetching water, Lu began unpacking some of the supplies that their stolen warhorse had come laden with. They’d dumped some of the heavier items before fleeing, but she came up with a small silver hatchet, a grooming kit with scissors and a comb, and a sack of coins. She wasn’t sure what it might buy them; she’d have to ask Nok. One of the saddlebags contained a musty woolen blanket and a stretch of thick, roughly hewn canvas bedding that had had been coated in wax to keep out the wet.
She had laid out the bedding beside the fire by the time he returned with the water.
“For sleeping,” she told him, gesturing unnecessarily toward the bedding.
He nodded. “I’ll take first watch,” he said, sitting down against a tree.
“It’s cold,” she told him, climbing under the blanket. “You could just sit up next to me. Put your half of the blanket over your lap. We’ll warm each other.”
Was it a trick of the firelight, or did his face flush? “N-No,” he stuttered. “It’s fine, I’ll just sleep here.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Lu said before she could think to temper her words. “The ground is damp; you’ll catch cold. The last thing I need is a sick companion to take care of.”
“I’m fine.” He scowled, crossing his arms across his middle. “We peasants are a little hardier than you royals.”
“Maybe you could try cauling again—I bet you’d be warmer in that wolf body,” she suggested.
Something almost like guilt—shame?—flared in his eyes. Finally, he mumbled, “I already tried. I think—I think it’s lost. I haven’t been able to do it since that first day.”
“Oh,” she said dumbly. She couldn’t know what it would mean to lose the promise of that power, the Gift, then gain it back … only to lose it once more. She could guess.
“Well, give it time,” she said weakly. “I’m sure it’ll return to you.” She winced at how stupid, how useless she sounded. “Are you sure you don’t want the blanket?”
But he merely settled back against his tree and closed his eyes. “No.”
Lu wanted just a little bit to shake him.
CHAPTER 21
Bandits
“Aww, does my cousin love her little puppy?” Set cooed, his eleven-year-old’s voice creaking rustily on the words.
“Shut up!” Lu screamed. “Stop calling him that!”
“Didn’t your mom tell you to stay away from him? She said he’s dangerous. Just to be safe I had better—” The Hana boy drew back his leg suddenly and landed a solid kick to Nok’s knee.
His boots were hard black leather tipped in a point of ornately tooled bronze. Nok’s bones screamed as he went down into the sand. The sun was falling, but it was still hot.
Stupid! How could you not see that coming?
Set was turning back toward the Ashina boys Mitri, Chundo, and Karakk with a smirk when Lu’s fist caught him in the left eye. He stumbled backward with a yell.
“You want to fight someone, fight me,” Lu snarled, raising her hands.
“You! Y-you should not have done that!” Set screamed at her. “Do you forget who I am? Do you forget?” Nok heard the terrible sigh of steel against steel as Set yanked his sword free and began waving it at her.
“No!” Nok gasped.
“Don’t worry,” Lu told him. “A sword’s no good if you can’t use it properly.” But she was eyeing the metal blade uneasily.
Set fixed narrowed, red-rimmed eyes on her. “Watch your tongue.”
“Not for you,” she retorted.
He lunged toward her. Lu darted forward, easily dodging his clumsy horizontal swipe, and yanked the wooden practice sword free from his belt as he pitched forward. She turned and brought her foot down hard on his lower back. He dropped face-first into the sand.
She helped Nok to his feet as her cousin floundered. “Are you okay?”
He grimaced. It didn’t feel like anything was broken.
“Bitch!” Set was spitting like a cat as he scrabbled to his feet, as furious as Nok had ever seen anyone. “Bitch!” He ran at them, sword raised high.
Nok raised his hands as Set slashed wildly at them. The blade was so straight, so clean, that Nok barely felt the tip of it whisper across the length of his palms, then plant the ghost of a kiss on his right cheek.
“Nokhai!” he heard the princess scream. He looked down at his hands. They were painted red as a setting sun.
Lu ran at Set, swinging his wooden sword like a club. There was a horrible crack, and suddenly Set was reeling across the sand.
“I’ll kill you!”
The princess was upon her cousin. She flung away the wooden sword and pummeled him with her fists until she drew yelps of Mercy, mercy, mercy! Something had dropped from the boy’s body, glinting pretty blue-white against the sand. Jewelry?
No—teeth. Three of them, slick with blood.
“Nokhai! Nokhai!”
He closed his eyes against the sight.
“Nokhai!”
“No,” he protested. It will end, he told himself. Even the worst dream always ends. Just a bit longer, hold on, feel nothing, it will end …
“Nokhai?”
A hand was on his shou
lder, his face. He flinched, closed his eyes. But the touch was gentle. He wanted to surrender, sink into it. Don’t, he thought deliriously. A trick.
“Nokhai!”
He jolted awake. Coppery eyes gleamed in the faint dawn light. The princess. His body flooded with relief, followed by an odd tenderness, misplaced across time.
“They stopped bleeding,” he stammered, throwing up his hands. “I’m fine.”
She narrowed her gaze at the puckered scars crisscrossing his palms, and he remembered where he was.
The princess shook his shoulder again, insistent. “Wake up!”
The dream slipped away, taking his tenderness with it.
“I’m awake!” he snapped, sitting up. “Clearly.”
“Shh! Keep your voice down. Someone’s watching us.”
He was on his feet. “Where? Soldiers? How many?”
“Not soldiers,” she said. “I went to make water, and when I was coming back I saw someone following me through the trees. They disappeared, but I took a roundabout way back here in case they were still tracking me.”
Nok frowned. “It’s pretty dark; are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
He licked his lips before glancing into the shadows around them. “It could’ve been a deer or something.”
“I know what I saw,” she snapped. “It was a person. A girl, I think. And she was definitely following me. Doing a good job of it, too. Stealthy. I think it was a bandit.”
“A bandit?” he repeated incredulously.
“The northern foothills are rife with them,” she continued, ignoring his tone. “We keep getting reports of them in the capital—some of them even infiltrated a labor camp. Caused a riot. They’re said to be migrating farther south. We’re probably right in their path.”
Nok shrugged doubtfully. “Well, whoever it was, either you lost them or they decided we weren’t worth robbing.”
She shook her head. “Whoever it was, they gave me a bad feeling. Omair’s map says there’s a town not too far up the road. We should stop there, stay at an inn tonight.”
“Absolutely not,” Nok countered. “We don’t know the area. If the town’s too little, we’ll draw attention.”