The Girl King Read online

“Slipskin?” she whispered.

  Nok’s heart dropped to the pit of his stomach. He’d been found.

  CHAPTER 3

  Duty

  Lu scarcely registered her father dismissing the court. She only knew that she had found herself in Kangmun Hall, the doors closed at her back, and her family and their respective attendants gone. The emperor hadn’t so much as looked at her—just allowed himself to be swept away in a deluge of eunuchs and chattering inner court officials. Lu had watched him go, feeling as though she were looking at a stranger.

  Someone cleared their throat. Lu looked up. Her dozen nunas stared at her with anxiety and embarrassment in their eyes. Hyacinth came to her side and gave her hand a squeeze, but Lu shook herself free. If she gave in to that bit of sympathy, that suggestion of softness, she would unravel completely.

  “What are we waiting for?” she said, forcing a smile like baring her teeth. She turned in the direction of the Hall of the Ancestors. “I still have my Analecta lessons, don’t I? Let’s not keep Shin Mung waiting.”

  In front of the double doors of the hall, twelve women draped in burnt-orange robes waited in two orderly lines. Ammas.

  Lu stopped short. She knew who she would find inside, and it was not Shin Mung.

  She could leave. Lead her nunas back to her own apartments, where—where what, exactly? She would bar the doors and crawl into bed? Weep and moan and tear out her hair, turn away food until the unlikely day her father changed his mind? Unthinkable. Some other girl in her position—Minyi, perhaps—might lower herself to that. But not Lu. She did not run, and she did not cry. If conflict came at Lu, she would rush to meet it.

  She squared her shoulders and walked into the hall, nodding at the ammas in respect as she passed. Her nunas followed closely behind.

  The empress was waiting for her at the far end of the hall’s long, incense-clouded colonnade, gazing up at the ancestral portrait of Emperor Kangmun. Her head was cocked thoughtfully, as though she had never seen it before. She still wore the full ceremonial regalia from court, drenched in layers of floor-length muted-vermilion silk. The trim was embroidered with flowered vines that clambered up her bodice and high-necked collar. They looked like they were reaching up to choke her.

  Lu cleared her throat. The sound echoed down the hall. Her mother did not tear her gaze away from the portrait. “Is that how you greet your empress? I know you were raised better than that. I saw to it.”

  “Where’s Shin Mung?” Lu demanded.

  Her mother finally turned, with a rattle of swaying jewelry and a disdainful purse of her painted lips. “Elsewhere. He had important matters to attend to,” she said. The implication was clear enough: Your lessons aren’t important. Especially now.

  Lu smelled the bait, bloody and rancid and old. She wouldn’t bite.

  “Were these theatrics really necessary?” she asked instead. “Tricking me into seeing you?”

  “It hardly seemed worth the effort, true. But I sent for you several times this past week, only to be told you were nowhere to be found. You’re a difficult person to track down.”

  “Well, you found me. What do you want?”

  Her mother raised one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “To begin with, I want you to address me with respect.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lu said. “What do you want, Your Highness?”

  Cold fury flashed in her mother’s eyes, but only for half a breath. When she turned her gaze toward Lu’s nunas, it was placid and cordial. “Girls, go wait outside with the ammas. We won’t be long.”

  Halting movement rippled through the handmaidens, as though the empress’s words were a physical force prodding them to action. They glanced nervously at one another, then looked to Hyacinth. Hyacinth was looking at Lu, still and implacable as the figures of the ancestral portraits surrounding them. She’d been the only one not to respond to the empress’s command. Lu loved her for it.

  “Stay,” Lu told them. It was stupid—a childish act of rebellion. But while she may have lost her father’s love and the throne in one fell hour, Lu was still a princess. And a princess alone directed her own nunas.

  She opened her mouth to say as much, but her mother spoke first, in clipped, irritated tones. “After the day you’ve had, do you really want to give them more fodder for gossip?”

  Lu’s jaw clenched. “They would never gossip about my affairs. I trust my nunas.”

  “That’s touching, but I would rather not suffer for your lack of judgment,” her mother replied. “And I do not have the day to sit about entertaining your misplaced loyalty.”

  “So go, then,” Lu snapped. “I wasn’t the one who ambushed you.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. I mean to speak with you now, woman to woman. Though I wonder if it will come to anything. Time and again, you insist on playing the child.”

  Lu crossed, then uncrossed her arms. No one could agitate her like their mother. She wasn’t certain if the reverse was true—her mother was easily agitated by so many things—but it often felt that way. At any rate, it was only a matter of time before one of them said something truly ugly. Perhaps it was better her nunas weren’t around to witness that.

  Lu glanced at Hyacinth and jerked her head toward the door. Her friend nodded once and directed the others back outside.

  Once they were gone, her mother slipped a pale, elegant hand from one sleeve and beckoned Lu closer. “Come here. I won’t have this conversation yelling across the hall at you.”

  Lu huffed, reluctantly closing the distance between them. Her mother’s citrus perfume and musky powders cut through the hall’s permanent fog of incense, and the combination turned her stomach.

  “What do you want to speak of?” she asked.

  “As your mother, it’s my duty to guide you through the journey you’re about to take.” The trill of triumph in the empress’s voice was unmistakable. It was as though she herself had been named heir to the empire.

  For her mother, this was likely as close to power as she could ever hope to get: Set, her blood, her beloved nephew, her proxy on the throne. Pathetic, Lu thought. Until she remembered that the same was now true for her.

  The empress continued: “The Betrothal Ceremony, your wedding, and all the duties you will have as the wife of the emperor, the mother of his children—the court will expect you to execute all of them seamlessly, as though it were in your very nature. But in truth, there is nothing natural about it; only hard work, planning, and practice will allow you to succeed.”

  Lu did her best to ignore the idea of bearing Set’s children. “Is that all?” she sniffed. “Since it seems my lesson with Shin Mung has been canceled, there are other matters I’d like to attend to.”

  Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “If you’re thinking of running to your father to wheedle an appeal to his decision, I wouldn’t bother. He indulged you—indulges you—far too much. It’s made you ignorant to the ways of the world. Do you think his choice of an heir was all his own to make? Do you truly believe all it takes to rule an empire as vast as ours is one man with a blessing handed down from the heavens? Not even you could be so simpleminded, surely.”

  Her mother had never been kind to her, but she had never before been quite so openly cruel. Or so open at all. While she henpecked Min in a way that could almost be described as doting, her disapproval of Lu was largely one of silence, discernible through absence rather than action: the lack of touch, the emptiness in her gaze, the indifference to her joys and triumphs. Min was their mother’s project, while Lu was their father’s. No one ever said as much, but it had been the unspoken rule of their family.

  “What do you know of me?” Lu demanded, the words lashing out of her. “You know nothing of what I am capable. How could you? You’ve never paid me any mind.”

  “I know more than you think,” the empress said. Her eyes drifted toward the door, where a moment ago Lu’s nunas had exited. “I have eyes and ears everywhere, child. They tell me everything. And I know far more than you.”


  A sour jolt of betrayal lanced through Lu’s gut. It was known the empress had spies embedded in each department of the court staff, but it had never occurred to Lu that any of her own handmaidens might be among them.

  Stupid, she told herself quickly. She’s lying. Lu had no reason to suspect disloyalty among her nunas—and yet, like a poison, the idea spread hot through her veins. Uncertainty, once felt, could not be unfelt. Her mother was trying to throw her off balance. Lu saw it, but that didn’t make the doubt any less acute.

  Her mother sighed. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now that your father did speak for you, against his advisers. But,” her mother shrugged, “he is easily swayed, easily shamed. He has no resolve. But he did have faith in you, even if it was misplaced.” And then, with just a trace of bitterness: “He loves you.”

  “Love?” Lu spat. “He humiliated me. In front of the entire court! The entire city!”

  “Yes, well, that is one thing at which he excels: humiliating others. You’ve learned that lesson today, and now it is time for you to learn another. This is the end of your childish aspirations. It is time to put away fantasy and focus on the life you have.”

  Lu barked out a laugh. “You’re enjoying this. You love tearing me down, you always have. You never wanted me to succeed.”

  The empress sighed again. “Don’t flatter yourself, child. This has nothing to do with you. I’m merely satisfied to see the empire set down the right path. That is what matters. Not your vanity, nor your hopes, nor your happiness.”

  “So, I should settle to be miserable and powerless, like you?”

  For a moment, Lu thought the empress was going to hit her. Absurdly, she felt a sudden prickle of fear. They had come a breath away from blows before, but their mother always stayed her hand, as though she knew Lu wouldn’t hesitate to strike back. Or, more likely, her father’s favor had protected Lu like a shield. The fury with which her mother beheld her now, though, looked set to tear through it.

  Instead, her mother stiffened, then folded her arms carefully across her chest. “Listen to me, girl: you will never rule. Men may derive some amusement from a spirited girl, but they will not tolerate a willful woman, let alone deign to be ruled by one. You were never destined for anything greater than what you have—far less, truly. You can bend to that reality, or you can be broken by it. I won’t waste my time with you further. Come see me when you’re ready to learn your place.”

  She strode across the hall, the clack of her high pot-bottomed shoes methodical against the floor. At the doorway she paused to call back:

  “Do you know, when you were born, I came here and lit a candle before each ancestral portrait, from your late uncles to Kangmun. To thank them you were a girl.”

  Lu stared at her, met those glacial gray eyes in confusion. Her mother regarded her unblinking. “Had you been born a boy, you would have been so much harder to crush.”

  The doors swung shut hard behind her. At their close, Lu sank to her knees, suddenly exhausted. As though her mother had wound all the energy in Lu’s body around her wrist like a ribbon, dragging it behind her as she left.

  She cast her eyes upward, to Emperor Kangmun’s portrait. Her great-grandfather’s painted face gazed back down, ferocious and square jawed and unyielding, wreathed by a backdrop of stars and fire, a tiger pelt hanging from his shoulders.

  “Help me,” she whispered. No answer came but for the frantic thumping of her own heart.

  Kangmun’s effects were displayed beneath the portrait in a glass case: a slender sword in a beautiful scabbard of onyx, gold, and emerald, and close beside it, like two lovers lying side by side, a rather more crudely hewn blade of iron—his first sword, from his days as a slipskin king. A marriage of his two identities. Beside the two weapons were arrayed a handful of rings and seals, a scrap of paper that bore his calligraphy, and a lock of hair bound with gold thread.

  Next to the case, on a dress form, hung a set of his emperor’s robes, the dye of Hu imperial scarlet still clinging to their age-embrittled silk. Lu fixed her gaze upon them; judging from their cut, Kangmun had been a large man. Broader and taller than her father, even.

  Infuriatingly, Lu felt her eyes well up at the sight of those robes. At the legacy and the honor they bespoke. She blinked the tears back fiercely. She had been so close. What had turned the tide against her?

  She could not say how long she stayed there on her knees. Her mother was right. There was no taking back her father’s decision, not when he had announced it before the whole empire. This was her life now. She would walk through the same unhappy motions of marriage, of childbirth, of managing palace staff and the small manipulations of gossip and whispers, like a hundred generations of women before her, starting with the Betrothal Ceremony, where again she would be paraded and humiliated in front of the entire court, and—

  The Betrothal Ceremony.

  Lu looked up sharply, eyes falling upon the broad, ghostly form of Emperor Kangmun’s robes and tiger pelt. And an idea took root. A stupid, rash, childish idea. One that might just work.

  Her mother’s voice echoed in her mind: You can bend to that reality, or you can be broken by it.

  Let them try to break her, then.

  CHAPTER 4

  Slipskin

  “Slipskin.”

  Nok’s throat was closing up.

  The shamaness studied him with bright, eager eyes. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes. And Ashina at that. The blue wolves. A strong people. But what you have … I never felt that in any of you before …”

  His free hand dropped the morning’s purchases and shot to his chest, as though to push away the massive weight crushing him—but of course, his hand grasped at nothing but his tunic.

  I’ll kill you!

  The girl’s voice cried out again. It was only in his head, he knew, and yet he could hear it, surer than the blood thundering in his ears.

  The beggar woman’s hand tightened around his wrist, her nails digging painful little crescents into the flesh, bringing him back to the present.

  His breath came back to him with a gasp. “Let go!”

  She released him. He stumbled back, and for a taut moment the intimacy of his secret reared between them, terrible and unexpected, like a trod-upon snake. Nok stooped and retrieved his bag, never taking his eyes off her.

  He ran.

  “Your secret is safe with me, little pup!” The woman’s voice rattled after him. Her laugh was rough and sad. As he turned the corner, he heard her add: “We’re both a long way from home, aren’t we?”

  Nok couldn’t say for how long he ran, but he finally stopped in a narrow alley with his heart pounding like it was set to kill him. The alley let out down into the harbor; he could see the Milk River, hear dock workers shouting at one another, tossing crates of cargo.

  I’ll kill you!

  He whipped a glance over his shoulder. The alley was empty—of course it was. He mashed a hand against his eyes. What was he expecting? The shamaness? Soldiers wielding steel? The whole imperial army at his heels?

  Get ahold of yourself.

  The only danger was his own fear, his own memories. And he knew how to control those.

  “Nok!”

  He jumped, but it was only Adé. She was smiling and waving, but as she neared the cheer drained from her face. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Her words almost made him laugh. He stumbled instead.

  Adé leaped forward and caught his elbow. “Do you need to eat something? I bought an apple—”

  “I’m all right,” Nok managed to wheeze. “I’ll be fine,” he told her. “Just got a bit dizzy.”

  He threw up. Water yellowed with bile splattered the ground.

  “Oh gods,” Adé cursed. “All right, definitely no food then. Sit.”

  She led him toward a stack of packing crates. A trio of dingy chickens pecked at the dirt before them. Adé shooed them away, and Nok
collapsed onto the crates gratefully, dropping his head into his hands. The scars on his palms and face were aching as they hadn’t done in years, the pain quick and lancing and panicky. It was as though with a croaked word, the shamaness had released some sickness that had lain dormant in his bones.

  “Nok?” Adé’s voice sounded distant. She dropped down beside him.

  His heart was hammering so loudly. Surely Adé could hear it. Surely the whole city could hear its pounding, screaming out who he was. What he was.

  She rubbed his back, murmuring comfortingly in his ear, but he could not understand the words; the dissonance, the confusion of them made his stomach roil. He focused on trying to breathe.

  “Dunno what’s wrong with me,” he muttered finally. “Guess I just got overheated.”

  Adé’s brow furrowed. “Drink some water, then.”

  Nok fumbled for the bladder he kept slung over one shoulder and drained a few weak drops onto his tongue before offering it to her.

  “You need to drink more than that,” she told him matter-of-factly. “Finish it.”

  “Oh, what are you now? A healer?” he teased weakly. “Some sort of apothecarist’s assistant?” She stuck out her tongue but watched him carefully to make certain he took another swig. The water in his mouth felt foreign and metallic and wrong. He forced himself to swallow.

  He set down the bladder. Adé was staring off toward the harbor, where docked boats were bobbing lazily on the murky salt river. It was one of the rare things Nok had seen that made her sad: sailors and ships.

  Her father, Tesfa Mak, had been a foreign mapmaker and navigator from the Western Empire, where the people dressed in silks of blazing white and deepest indigo, taking refuge from the heat in blanched palaces of marble, drinking iced nectar.

  But now Tesfa was dead, along with Nok’s parents, gone wherever it was dead parents went.

  Adé seemed to sense his gaze and turned back with dark, nervous eyes. They held his for a moment, then dropped. It wasn’t just melancholy for her father, Nok realized. Something else was on her mind. “Listen, Nok,” she said, reaching out a tentative hand. “I was trying to tell you earlier …,” she trailed off.