A dash of wet brushed Nok’s cheek. Rain. He looked up. The sky had grown dark and marbled as a new bruise. He cursed under his breath. With luck, it would just be a passing summer shower rather than the first thundering downpour of monsoon season.
“Come on, hurry,” Nok muttered, pushing Bo’s stubborn bulk in the direction of Omair’s house. It had been a long day of delivering medicines around Ansana, but Nok was grateful. Work meant doing rather than thinking, and after his encounter with the shamaness, Nok could do with less thinking.
A vision of the beggar woman flashed in his mind.
Slipskin?
His throat tightened, and unconsciously he scrubbed his eyes, as though to wipe the old woman away.
Around him, the village was still under the threatening sky. Only Mother Wang was out, shooing a stray chicken into its coop. At the sound of Nok’s approach she looked up, her face souring. Nok did not know the woman well. The closest they’d come to talking was last spring, when he had made the mistake of cutting through one of their fallow fields on his way back from the city. She had set their dogs on him.
Dogs usually liked Nok, but these were mean creatures. He had barely gotten away with the clothes on his back.
When he reached the path leading up to Omair’s house, Nok noted light glowing from the small windows at the base of the trunk. A pleasant tendril of smoke, purpled in the gloaming, curled from the chimney. Omair would have porridge simmering over the waning fire. Nok’s stomach growled in anticipation.
He pulled a reluctant Bo toward the stable. “Why we even keep you around, I don’t know,” he muttered. Then he gave the old mule a gentle scratch behind the ears, where the hair was surprisingly downy and soft. “Ready for dinner?”
Nok opened the stable door and froze. There was a horse inside. A big one, with a lean, proud build. The dirty saddle blankets draped over its back didn’t quite manage to hide the lustrous black-brown coat beneath.
A Hana warhorse. Unmistakable. Nok had seen enough to recognize one ten lifetimes from now. A cold finger of fear scraped down his spine.
For their part, Bo and the strange horse snorted at one another with a look of mutual disdain.
“Well, Bo,” Nok said, slowly backing out. “Looks like we have a guest.”
Had Omair ever had a guest before? He occasionally received patients from neighboring villages and settlements. Farmers, mostly. Certainly no one who would be in possession of a horse like this.
Nok left Bo in the yard and made his way cautiously toward the rear of the house. The late summer night air had only the barest hint of autumn chill, but the sweat drying on his skin left him cold.
He lifted a hand to open the door. Muffled voices came through from the other side. Nok dropped his hand and crouched by the window instead.
The stranger was speaking. His voice was gruff, as though from years of tobacco smoking, but his accent refined, lofty. Definitely Inner Ring. At least. It matched the mystery horse in the stable. “I’m telling you, Ohn—”
“Omair.”
A snort. “Omair? Is that what you’re going by these days? What is that, southern?”
“It doesn’t hurt to be cautious. They were looking for me a long time.”
“To that end, you would do well to think less about your name and more about your reputation. How do you think I found you? A country apothecarist with your talents—word spreads.”
The whispers of the villagers wormed their way into Nok’s thoughts: Unnatural. Magic, its manipulations of energy, its sacred rites, had been banned within the empire since the Yunian War. But that didn’t mean it went away. There were still places in the Second Ring where you could find fortune-tellers, vendors touting love spells, fast wealth with the swig of a potion.
But that wasn’t Omair. Nok had always known the old man was special—a true healer among the usual crop of charlatans. Now, though, he wondered just who Omair—Ohn?—was. What he was. What he had been.
Nok wrung his hands together, felt his scars catch. It wasn’t that these questions hadn’t occurred to him; more that he didn’t wish to know. Let dead things stay buried. That was the way it had always been with Omair—they didn’t need to know their pasts to trust one another. Did they?
Absently, Nok palmed at the knife in his boot.
“Something tells me,” Omair said pointedly, “I don’t think you came all this way under the cover of dusk to talk about my name.”
The stranger conceded with a grunt. “You’ve heard the emperor named that Hana boy his successor?”
“Indeed. And that Princess Lu has challenged him for the title,” Omair replied. “We do hear things out here.”
Princess Lu. Nok’s stomach clenched at the sudden memory of her narrow face, hair dark and iridescent as the wings of a raven. He pushed the vision away. He’d hoped those memories were behind him, in the dust of the North, with the bones of his family.
“The princess has challenged him, it’s true, but the boy behaves as though the throne is already his. I’ve been watching him—who he meets with, what he promises them. He’s building support, mostly among the military. And there are well enough many in court who would sooner follow a Hana man—any man, any Hana—than her. Set knows it. Lu, she’s too young to see it. Too sheltered. She thinks that her wits and pedigree and the love of her father will be enough to carry her. But Set’s planning something. I just don’t know exactly what.”
Omair made a sound of acknowledgment. “It’s hard to believe that Daagmun—that the emperor hasn’t caught wind of this.”
“You’ve been away too long,” the stranger said. “You forget how the court works—secrets are both currency and weaponry. The clever ones hoard them until the right opportunity. And if you’re not clever, you don’t survive.”
“Then how are you still around?” Omair retorted, but his voice was fond. Nok had never heard the old man speak this way—it felt not unlike how Adé teased Nok.
“That’s good,” snapped the stranger. “That’s very funny. Well, here’s another joke for you: Set believes he’s found Yunis.”
Nok frowned. Yunis. The Gray City in the North. Where rites and devotions and diplomatic meetings between the half a hundred Gifted Kith took place for a thousand years. Until the imperials razed it a year before Nok’s birth.
It had been beyond a dark time for all the Gifted—Nok’s mother often said he and Nasan had been born after the end of the world. But of course, she hadn’t known what was yet to come.
“Yunis was destroyed,” Omair said, as though echoing Nok’s thoughts. There was a creak as he leaned back in his chair.
“The old city was,” countered the stranger firmly. “There were always rumors of survivors—”
“Just rumors.”
There was a long pause. “I still have friends in the North. Men I fought beside in battle. Men I trust my life to.”
“And?”
“I have it on good faith that Prince Jin—the youngest of the Triarch—was recently seen patrolling their borders with a force ten thousand strong.”
“That’s one royal. If there’s any truth to the story at all.”
The stranger chose to ignore Omair’s second comment. “That one royal is the one that matters—he controls their army.”
“It seems unlikely there would be anywhere left for them to hide,” Omair mused. “The colonies have grown so. I hear they’re using sparkstone to crumble the mountains.”
“Just the foothills, here and there. If anywhere could hide a city, it would be the Gray Mountains,” the stranger said. Then he snorted. “And the situation up there is far more precarious than the emperor would like—than his advisers let on. I suppose you heard about the prison break earlier this moon? Fifty slipskins and convicts freed—”
Nok’s breath caught in his throat. Slipskins. For half a heartbeat, his sister’s face hovered in front of his own and something in him soared. No, he said, yanking it back down. It was a familiar feeling; how many times had he woken thinking the past year, then two years, five years, had been a terrible dream, only to remember it was all too real?
Fifty slipskins. He slammed down the spike of hope and exhilaration and fear that surged in him at those words. They had nothing to do with him. Everyone I ever loved is dead. He’d seen them die.
“What does Set want with the Gray City, anyway?” Omair asked, drawing Nok back into their conversation.
“I don’t know.” The stranger sounded frustrated. “None of us seem to, except for his monk, and he’s not telling. But whatever it is, Set seems willing to commit half the imperial army toward getting it, even if it means beggaring the empire along the way. If the girl doesn’t prevail, war may be at hand again.”
“The girl,” Omair said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” His voice took on a new edge. Bitterness, Nok realized. “You want me to make a new king.”
“You did it before.”
“And did you forget what happened then?” The pain and loathing that clung to his words was unlike anything Nok had heard from the old man before, but he recognized their shape nevertheless. Shame. Guilt. Loss. All things Nok himself wore like a second skin.
“This time won’t be like the last. I’ve trained Princess Lu since she was a child,” the stranger said, his voice vehement. Not angry, though; proud. “She’s green, but strong. Smarter than her father ever was. And she has a good heart. She will need guidance, but I believe in her.”
When Omair spoke again, his voice was soft: “Does she look like her mother?”
The stranger scoffed. “It isn’t like that.”
Omair lapsed into a weighted silence. Nok could imagine with perfect clarity the look on his face: the glint in his shrewd, appraising eyes, the way his mouth would turn down slightly at the corners in restrained disapproval, as though waiting for your shame to occur to you.
“Don’t look at me that way,” the stranger snapped. But there was something almost affectionate in his tone. “It’s not going to work. I’m not eighteen anymore. I’m an old man.”
Omair said nothing.
“There’s something about the princess that recalls her, certainly—how not? But no, she looks nothing like her. And so what if she did? Like I said: I’m an old man.”
The princess’s mother …? Did the stranger have romantic feelings for the empress? Nok recalled the radiant, stately woman with cold gray eyes. Eyes that to his mind inspired fear over affection, but then, he knew some men could be quite stupid about pretty women.
“I’m not accusing you of anything untoward,” Omair said. “It’s only, old men get sentimental.”
“Do we?” the stranger scoffed. “All except you, I suppose. Always cold as stone.”
“You’d be surprised,” Omair said, sadness softening his voice.
Nok shifted uncomfortably, his knees popping slightly as he did so. It seemed wrong to eavesdrop on this strange, private turn the conversation had taken.
“Do you still think of her?” There was an edge of reproach to the question.
“Of course I do,” Omair snapped. “I should ask the same of you. You know what happened to her, what we did to her, and you still dare to ask me for this—”
Something hot and wet and soft brushed down the back of Nok’s neck. He toppled over with a yell.
“What was that?” The stranger’s voice came closer, as though he were already on his feet and moving.
Nok scrabbled back on his elbows and looked up. Bo gazed back expectantly.
“Nokhai?”
Omair was standing in the doorway, framed in the warm yellow light of the kitchen lamps.
Nok scrambled to his feet, brushing off his legs. “I … fell,” he muttered, as though that explained anything.
“Are you all right?” Omair asked, a smile on his warm brown face. “My, the time got away from me. You’re very late—good thing you made it home before the rain.”
The stranger sidled up beside Omair, allowing Nok to place a figure to the voice at long last. He was a tall, well-built man. A plain rough-spun cloak draped loosely over his head and shoulders. Nok squinted, but lit from behind, the man’s face was just a shadow under his cowl. One hand slipped under his cloak to rest on something at his waist. Nok went cold. The man had a sword.
“This is the boy?” The stranger sounded skeptical. “I thought he’d be taller. His father was a big man.”
The blood drained from Nok’s face. This man knew—had known his father. What else did he know?
The stranger’s arm snapped forward. He gripped Nok by the chin, tilting his face up. Nok caught sight of cool, intelligent eyes, a sharp brow, hard jaw, black hair laid tight around his forehead as though bound back severely. The stranger was close enough now that Nok’s nose filled with his smell—dusty and horsey from his ride to Ansana, but beneath that, clove and well-oiled, costly leather.
The man squinted, then carefully, as though the wound were still fresh and not years old, thumbed over the silvery lick of scar marking Nok’s right cheekbone, just below the eye. “That healed up ugly, didn’t it?” he remarked.
And then Nok knew him.
The princess’s voice hurtled out of the darkness cloaking the past: “I’ll kill you!”
Nok shrunk within himself, as though trying to escape it, this fragment of time that ricocheted around inside his head like a wayward bat. He closed his eyes, but he could still see the blade swinging in a wild, crooked hack. The edge was so straight, so clean; it scarcely whispered across the length of his palms. The unsteady backswing planted the ghost of a kiss on his right cheek. His hands were wet. Something glinted blue-white upon the sand—
“For heaven’s sake, Yuri!” Omair’s voice erupted through the memory. “Let the boy go. You’re frightening him.”
The stranger’s hand disappeared. Nok stumbled, as though his body had been lifted from the past, then dropped unceremoniously back into Omair’s warm kitchen.
The stranger … no, Nok realized. Not a stranger after all. But not a friend. Not to him at any rate. But he was to Omair. There was no mistaking the affection between them. So what did that make—
“He’s one of them,” Nok blurted. “Did you know that?” His voice was shaking, louder than he’d meant it to be. “He’s a soldier. An imperial. A guard for the prin—he’s inner court. He’s a servant of the royal family.”
A glimmer of surprise crossed Omair’s face. “Ah. You remember him?”
Nok’s heart skipped. Wildly, he thought about the knife in his boot. Omair seemed to see it happen, interpret Nok’s fear. His face fixed into one of concern. Familiar and yet—
“Nok,” he said softly, reaching for him. Nok flinched as the old man’s hand touched his shoulder, reassuring, gentle—
A new voice arose in Nok’s mind. One he had worked so hard to wall up, lock away brick by brick. Taut and thin as tendons, it broke through. I won’t let them take us—I won’t …
Nok knew what was to come next. The jumbled mess of blood and flesh and dark, browning fluids that his mind had mashed his family into: here, his father’s sightless eyes gazed up at the stars, the red pulp of his unnamed baby brother seeped through his mother’s cold, disembodied hands, and everywhere, under every flap of skin and jutting bit of bone, appeared his sister’s mouth, screaming promises a child couldn’t ever keep.
“I won’t let them take us! I won’t!”
“No!” Nok screamed, throwing the apothecarist’s hands off. Desperately, he shoved past the stranger—the soldier—and ran outside.
He scarcely registered the thunder booming overhead, but he felt the rain. It came down in sheets, streaking his vision, running sopping tendrils of hair down his forehead. He ran regardless, ran from the stranger, from Omair, the memories. He ran until his legs and his lungs burned. He did not stop, he never stopped—he fell. His foot caught a furrow and he went down hard, knees planting in the saturated earth.
He righted himself, wheezing raggedly. The animal panic clutching his heart subsided enough for a more rational panic to set in: Where do I go?
Adé’s face arose in his mind’s eye, but he shut it out. No, she wasn’t an option. He had no one but Omair. And now he’d lost even that.
A white flash lit the sky and he jumped. Lightning. It flashed again, and he saw he was in the Wangs’ soybean fields. He rubbed his dirty palms against the thighs of his pants to dry them, but the cloth was just as wet. He was soaked through; he needed to find shelter.
That was when he heard the dogs. Lightning flashed again, and for that brief illuminated moment he saw them: three lanky, underfed mutts, goaded on by the Wangs’ two eldest sons, brandishing sticks and whooping.
Nok ran, making for the edge of the imperial Northwood that crept in at the edge of the Wangs’ lands. Slipping on the rain-slick earth, he reached the lip of the forest. Night had truly fallen by now and he hesitated at the dense, dark press of trees. But he could hear the shouts and barks growing closer over his own ragged panting, and so he plunged ahead, kicking up damp clumps of pine needles and moss.
He threw himself upon the first hospitable tree he saw, leaping to catch the lowest bough. The sleeve of his tunic caught on one of its branches and tore as he shook it free. His wet boots scrabbled for purchase against the slippery bark. He’d nearly hauled himself up when the first dog’s jaw closed around his ankle.
A shout burst from him as he fell. The wet bedding of fallen leaves and brush did little to cushion him. His ears rung with the impact. The dogs were all around him now, nipping and snarling at his hands as he struggled to bring them protectively over his eyes. The dog that had pulled him down was still worrying his leg, though Nok noted dimly that it hadn’t broken the skin.
He hazarded a look between his fingers, but saw no evidence of the Wang boys. One of the dogs, drawn by the movement, seized Nok’s hand in his mouth. This time it drew blood.
The smell stoked them to a frenzy. As the teeth sunk deeper into his palm, Nok let out a panicked cry, wrenching his arm away. Stupid—the flesh tore, and blood poured from the gash. Heavy paws slammed against his back, sprawling him facedown against the ground.
I will die, he realized. If I stay here, I’m going to die.
Would that be so bad? He was never meant to live this long. Death had erred five years ago; it was past time to rectify the mistake.
No. Not like this.
He made to rise again, hissing as the pain in his hand flared to life. The dogs were back on him, leaping two at a time now, in waves, pushing him down.
Something else was there.
Nok sensed it dissonantly, like turning two pages of a book when he only meant to turn one—jerked out of his own sequence of events, and into a different reality. The dogs still bayed around him, but something in the air was different.
The rain had stopped.
The hairs on the back of Nok’s neck rose as a warm, powerful wind swept through the forest. It settled right above him and the dogs. A fresh shower of pine needles and bark rained down from the trees and he blinked furiously to keep it from his eyes. The dogs were lowing as though they’d been struck.
Nok opened his eyes and saw them slinking away, eyes wide and liquid with fear. He rolled over onto his back, breathing hard. His hand was still bleeding, but he no longer felt it. Or perhaps he no longer cared. Rising above the pain, above the fear, he felt a sense of oddly sedate eeriness. The dogs gave a final whine—the bravest among them verging on a snarl—then tucked tail and ran, leaving Nok alone.
No—not alone. Someone was there with him. Something. Nok pushed himself up with shaking arms, turned to face it.
And looked into the wet, glowing eyes of a wolf.
The creature was massive, half the size of Bo. Larger than any ordinary wolf.
But its eyes struck Nok as most unnatural—instead of nocturnal glinting gold, they were black and vast as caves.
Its stare was a heavy, tangible pressure on his skin. Nok knew he should look away, that returning the creature’s gaze would only agitate it, but he found himself frozen.
There were predators in and around Ansana. Foxes and coyotes and wild dogs. The odd cougar. But he’d never seen anything quite as large or majestic as the creature before him now.
Not since the Ashina had broken the Pact and lost their Gifts.
He felt no fear, strangely. He was too tired for that now. He was spent.
Fitting that this is how he should die: the last living Wolf, who never learned how to be a wolf, eaten by a wolf. He could have laughed in spite of everything, but something about the beast before him demanded solemnity.
The wolf advanced. Nok closed his eyes, waited for the blow of those tremendous paws upon his chest, the tearing of teeth on his throat.
I’m coming, Nasan. I’m coming, Ma, Idri. Ba …
Instead, he felt the creature still, standing over his body. It sniffed at his face, huffing, and its breath was a warm wind of earthy forest smells tinged with blood.
Nok opened his eyes. The creature was regarding him with almost human curiosity, appraising him in silence. A nighttime breeze sailed over them peacefully, lifted Nok’s hair, playing like fingers through the ruff of heavy gray-blue around the wolf’s neck.
Without quite knowing what he meant to do, Nok reached out and rested a shaking hand upon the wolf’s head.
A cavalcade of visions ran through him with the swift violence of a sandstorm, strange and slippery and visceral as a dream:
A skinny girl screaming soundlessly, belly big, legs spread, pushing out a baby. Her life’s blood—running red against sun-kissed skin blanched white, and when her eyes opened, they, too, were red.
A warm hand against his cheek, fingers petting idly at the gray fur there; his fur …
His own face—no, not quite, sharper, cannier and the hair longer, tossed carelessly over one eye.
A man of twenty, twenty-five, walking down a dark corridor, back stiff, step mouse-like and nervous. He turned back and looked at Nok with Omair’s face, only impossibly, unimaginably young. The man pushed open a pocket door and Nok felt the dread that shook his hands, filled his throat …
The wide, implacable horizon of the desert. Setting sun spilling searing pinks and purples and violent orange across the sky, the sand still hot with daylight under his paws.
Abrupt as silence, a tableau of gray and white: a fog, a patch of cloudy sky, placid lake, a stony shore …
A voice, drifting down steady and deliberate from above him, a voice with weight and authority (it is time), her (was it a woman?) words equal parts question and statement …
A pair of eyes stared at him. Flecked with copper and familiar. A girl. Black hair. Shrouded from behind with a lush canopy of green, and beyond that, the sky so wide and blue.
He opened his eyes and found himself running, loping through the whipping underbrush swatting back at him—too slow, too slow. The wet ground tore beneath his paws, soft as moss.
Paws? Nok looked down, saw massive shaggy blue fur.
His body was gone.
He was inside the wolf. He was the wolf.
A spear of panic stabbed through him, and the creature came to a standstill, as though confused by it.
A high-pitched hysterical laugh caught in his throat, unreleased when he discovered that his mouth—no, the wolf’s mouth—could not move to form it.
Bored by Nok’s thoughts, the wolf focused on something small and legless sliding across the forest floor thirty paces behind him. Rainwater flew through the air in its wake, clinging to a stop amid the bracken. From far off came the senseless trilling of frogs.
The sky was still dark with night above him—and yet, impossibly, he could see as clear as though it were midday. The great barrel of his chest heaved as he panted—no, not his chest. The wolf’s. His chest and the wolf’s.
It occurred to him then that this was not a dream. Not in the ordinary sense.
The Gift.
They always said it would come, only it never had. Until now.
But that was impossible—the Ashina Pact had been severed, the gift lost forever to time and war and trampled beneath the feet of the invading Hu, buried under the imperial mining colonies. Only one chosen by the beast gods could carry a caul without a pact in place. Only a Pactmaker. And he was no … he couldn’t be. Couldn’t even bear the thought. It was too sick and cruel and absurd, after all these years. After he had lost anyone who would understand or care …
Those were Nok’s thoughts. The boy’s thoughts.
The wolf stamped its front feet impatiently. The wolf did not know irony. Did not care for the names assigned to things by men. It knew the dark of the forest—how to find clean-running creeks, how to cut the quickest path through the high grass. And it knew blood, not a hundred paces off, hot and alive and bound up in the bristling flesh of some small, soft creature. It knew hunger.
It occurred to Nok then that he was feeling all this, too. Through the creature’s body, yes, but perhaps … he thought to lift the wolf’s snout into the air, but it did not obey. This body wasn’t his yet, he thought. Back home, the elders would’ve taught him how to integrate his mind with the wolf mind, but they were all gone now …
At the realization, he sunk deeper into the wolf, and his own concerns—those of a lost, scared little human boy—felt less real. As though before he had been hovering around the blood and tissue and muscle, and now he was a part of it all, diffuse and indelible.
Somewhere in the distance, a man yelled a name. Nokhai. Meaningless.
The smell of the forest flooded him then, overwhelmed him to the point where, were he still in his boy’s body, he might’ve found tears stinging his eyes. Instead he huffed in the smells of damp bark and soil, of animal urine, and of rot. The musk of a thousand predators stalking just as many small, trembling deaths.
The wolf snarled in distaste, low and mild. Fear. It had an acrid, yellow smell. The wolf had no fear, but he recognized it. Knew it well, even: how to arouse it and just as well how to end it. They could do that. Both of them.
The wolf ran, taking Nok with it.