Nok clenched his fists, watching the princess storm outside. If only she were leaving for good.
“I’m sorry.”
He turned and saw Omair regarding him sadly.
Nok swallowed. “For what?”
“For keeping the truth from you.”
“You never lied to me,” Nok said flatly. “I didn’t want to know anything I didn’t ask for.” Perhaps, he thought belatedly, Omair had taken advantage of that. Well, if so, he’d been a willing collaborator.
Omair was studying his face. “I saw . . . I saw your caul,” he said finally. “Magnificent. Have you ever done it before?”
“No!” Nok said immediately. “No, never. That was the whole . . . it was shameful that I couldn’t. I was the son of a Kith father and I couldn’t caul.”
“And yet, today, you did. How?”
“I don’t know,” Nok sighed, running a hand through his hair in agitation. “First I had this strange experience in the woods—”
“The Gifting Dream?”
“I suppose that’s what it must have been. But after that . . . I couldn’t control it. It came and went of its own accord, really fast.”
“Can you try now? Just to see if you can will it.”
“I . . . I don’t know,” Nok repeated doubtfully. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine the feel of the caul descending upon him, soft as snow, warm as sun. Tried to imagine pacing the earth with massive paws, black-blue hair sprouting over his shoulders and all down his back . . .
He opened his eyes, shaking his head. “Just now, back in the forest, I think I sort of was able to force it, but maybe that was only because my life was in danger.”
Omair considered the logic of this. “And you were in danger the first time as well?”
The memory of the Wangs’ dogs snapping at his legs flooded Nok’s vision. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “But it kept hold of me even after the danger was gone. I only came out of it after I found—after I saw the princess.”
The wolf had been looking for her, he remembered with an unpleasant jolt. Seeking her out.
He didn’t share the thought with Omair, but the old man seemed to hear it anyway. “And how did you find her?”
“The princess?”
“Yes.”
Nok didn’t have an answer for that; he didn’t want one. He didn’t want to think about her at all. Omair raised his eyebrows at Nok’s silence but didn’t press the question.
“Your Kith must have passed down ways to control the caul, from generation to generation,” he said instead.
“They did. But children learned it from the elders upon receiving the Gifting Dream. No Gifting, no initiation.” Nok barked out a laugh. “And now, there’re no elders.”
“Do you remember anything about the labor camp?” The question was gentled by the softness of Omair’s voice.
Nok hesitated. It was nothing he wanted to think on, but he couldn’t refuse Omair. He closed his eyes, trying in earnest to recall that time. See it fully, for the first time in four years.
That small, soft-spoken man had entered their barracks. If he had a name, he didn’t share it, only introduced himself as the camp’s healer. He was accompanied by two soldiers armed to the teeth and carrying lanterns. Nok and Nasan had shared a bunk—the room was overcrowded, piled high with crying, unwashed children. Half of them didn’t speak any common languages, but they were all united under the imperial slur: slip-skins. Most were ill, coughing and shivering with fever in their bunks.
The healer ignored them, though, only stopping when he reached Nok and Nasan. A soldier had held a lantern up to their faces. “That’s the one,” the healer had said. “The girl.”
Nok’s hands shook, recalling how tightly he’d clung to her, how she’d dug her fingernails into his arms and bared her teeth—her blunt, all-too-human teeth—and fought. She’d always been the fiercest child in their Kith. But how could the fists of a child compare to batons the soldiers brought down upon their hands and faces, separating them blow by blow?
He never saw Nasan again.
The next day, a burning fever caught in Nok and wouldn’t quell. They brought him to the camp’s sickroom—little more than a flimsy tent stretched over a pile of overheated, slowly dehydrating, slowly dying bodies. Periodically, someone would come through with a barrow to collect the dead. Finally they came to collect him, so Nok had assumed he was dead, too.
Only it hadn’t been an undertaker who took him—it had been a soldier.
“Yuri,” he blurted suddenly. He opened his eyes, tearing himself back into the present. Back to Omair. “It was Yuri who brought me to you. I remember now.”
“He had just abandoned his post,” Omair said. “He was sick to death of the killing, the senseless brutality. He grabbed you on the way out—I suppose he saw it as the least he could do, some gesture at redemption.” The old man sighed. “He knew he couldn’t take you to the capital, so he found me. I hadn’t seen him in years. And then, there he was, at my doorstep, holding a half-dead boy.”
Nok spread his hands helplessly. “So why did he do it? Why me?”
Omair looked him in the eye. “Whatever they did to your sister?”
Nok nodded.
“You were next.”
Nok turned away, angry and ashamed. That was no good answer. “There must have been a hundred others on the list right after me. I wish he’d saved one of them instead. I wish he’d saved Nasan.”
“I know.”
Nok looked up. Dark shadows weighed heavy along Omair’s cheekbones and under his eyes. The apothecarist was far from young, but he appeared to have aged about ten years in the last day. “I know,” he repeated. “But, Nok, he didn’t. He chose you. And now your Kith’s wolf has chosen you. It brought you to Princess Lu.
The princess.
“Maybe that means something,” Omair pressed.
“Maybe it doesn’t.”
“Perhaps not. But you’re alive now. You have a chance to do something with that life. To help change the course of the empire.”
Nok shook his head before Omair even spoke. “I need you,” he said. “The princess does, too. I’m old; I won’t have the strength—we won’t make it without your help.”
Nok stood, agitated. “You need someone brave, someone good. That’s not me. That was Nasan. Your friend should’ve chosen better. He should’ve developed a conscience sooner.”
Omair sighed, sitting back. “At least think on it over the next few days while the princess recovers.”
Nok opened his mouth to object, but Omair held up a conciliatory hand. “You can just pretend to think on it. Do that much for me.”
Nok set his mouth and stared down at his hands. “Fine.” Omair beamed up at him. “Thank you. Now, why don’t you go tell our guest to come back inside?”
The girl was standing by the dense bracken along the edge of the forest when he found her. He felt a flush of annoyance. She should stay hidden; anyone could see her out there. Before he could call to her and say as much, she hunched forward and vomited.
“Did the porridge sit poorly with you?” he said.
She whirled around, startled. As she turned, he saw her hand was already upon the handle of the dagger at her waist. Strong reflexes; she might survive out in the world on her own.
“Not used to peasant food, are you?” he said.
The princess relaxed, hand dropping to her side. She used the back of the other to wipe her mouth, then spat. “I was thinking about earlier. That boy I . . . the boys I killed.”
As he drew closer, his lamp cast long shadows across the girl’s face. Her eyes were rimmed red and the skin below them dark as a bruise. In the low light it gave her a haunted, wary look.
He understood, suddenly. “You’d never killed anyone before.”
“It was not what . . . it was not as I expected. Killing, I mean.” A shudder seized her and she hugged herself around the waist. He thought for a moment that she would be sick again, but she closed her eyes and seemed to will herself still.
“What did you expect it would be?” he demanded. “Bloodless? Clean? Triumphant?”
“Not bloodless,” she retorted. “Only, I was taught to fight the Hu way—with pride. There is no pride in defeating, let alone in killing . . . slaughtering . . . someone weaker than you. A child.”
“Is that the Hu way? My people would be delighted to hear it, if only they were around to.” Nok laughed and was startled by the bitterness of the sound. “There is no pride in killing. Nor in fighting, nor in dying, nor in living. Not the sort you mean. There is only despair and blood and fear.”
The princess shivered again, though whether from the chill night air or from his words, Nok could not know. Her eyes were a tumult of flint and outrage, and something like sorrow.
He turned away toward the house. “Come back inside before someone sees you out here.”
Before he could walk away, she snatched his wrist, wrenching his hand upward until the fingers splayed open.
“Hey!”
Ignoring his protests, she examined the flesh of his palm. Just as abruptly, she dropped his hand and grabbed him by the chin, raising his face up so she could better see it.
“You still have the scars,” she said, almost in wonder, tracing a fingertip over the twisted purpled flesh beneath his eye. “I could scarcely believe it’s you, but those scars don’t lie. You really are the same Ashina boy I met all those years ago.”
He jerked away from her. “Don’t touch me!”
“Why did you lie to me in the forest?” Her voice was full of accusation and something that sounded remarkably like hurt.
They glared at each other in silence until at last he said, “I didn’t lie. That boy . . . he’s not me. Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “I liked him better than whoever you are now.”
“Then you shouldn’t have killed him,” he snapped.
Nok turned and left her standing there. For a moment he thought she might try to stop him, but for once she was quiet.