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 wind-swept 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.
“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.
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? she’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.