Broken by the Horde King (Horde Kings of Dakkar #4) - Zoey Draven Page 0,38
far more quickly than I ever could—and then sat down. I laid a pot in the basin, nestled amongst the fire fuel, and filled it with water from the water skins. Hopefully it would begin to boil soon.
I maneuvered behind him. Strangely, I felt him tense up. Thinking it was due to the pain, I gave him a vial of the mokkira’s potion, mixed from boiled down terruni leaves and mashed and fermented pova roots. Begalia would be better for the pain—at least for a Dakkari—but I didn’t have any on hand.
“Drink this,” I murmured, moving his hair away to drape over his front, exposing the expanse of his back. I felt him stiffen further. “What’s wrong?”
He took the vial from my fingertips but he didn’t move to drink it. He brought his knees up to his chest and draped his arms over the tops of them. Next to me, his tail flicked wildly, splattering drops of blood across the springy hill.
“I am not used to it anymore,” he finally told me, his voice gruff.
“Used to what?” I asked. “Getting slashed by ungira talons? This has happened before?”
He chuffed out a breath. He twirled the vial between his fingertips and the golden liquid flashed in the fire’s light.
“Having anyone at my back,” he said.
My fingers paused at the straps of his tunic, his words making my chest pinch, making some of my carefully curated detachment float away. Desperately, I tried to draw it back around me, like a shawl around my shoulders and a calming balm for my mind.
Once he left for Dothik, even before the Trials had happened, he always returned home changed. He started pulling away from his male peers that he’d trained with daily, from the childhood friends he’d grown up with. Everyone except me. Partly because…I suspected I didn’t let him pull away from me.
But his words just now revealed that he’d built up walls around himself too. Not just me.
I didn’t reply. I wasn’t even sure what I would say.
Tugging at the straps of his tunic, I released them and then took a sharp, slim blade from its sheath, one that my father had given me when the mokkira had taken me on as an apprentice. I used it to cut the tunic from his back and then slid the material down his arms and away.
The wreckage of his flesh met me. But it wasn’t the ungira wound that momentarily made me freeze, that made burning horror rush up my throat, the bile stinging it.
It was his Vorakkar markings.
Hundreds of whipping scars, some long—running from his shoulder blades to his tail—some short, though they looked deeper.
In my mind, I knew this was a mark all Vorakkars wore. The last test of the Trials in Dothik. Only the strongest survived and I never had any doubt that Kiran would.
But to see it…knowing the pain that the whipping marks would have caused, knowing the burning agony that Kiran must’ve endured, knowing that he’d always been meant for this pain…
It ripped my feeling of detachment clean away until my hands trembled and I had to focus on breathing through my nostrils.
One breath in, one breath out.
“I never wanted you to see them,” came his guttural rasp.
His words jolted me from my stupor and I swallowed, my eyes tracking to the ungira wound, the wound I could heal.
He’d never wanted me to see the scars?
His words were strangely…vulnerable. Intimate.
They shook something in me. Grabbed at my heart that had been broken and haphazardly patched together again. His words threatened all the hard work I’d done to forget him and forget the overwhelming feelings he’d always stirred in me.
Earlier that morning, he’d threatened to make me remember the girl I once was. His seffi.
I had almost laughed in his face. But now…
Now, I began to fear that he might manifest that girl back into existence. At least the memory of her.
Nik, I thought, snapping back the warmth that had begun to spread.
I grappled for control and I looked away from his back, down to my travel sack of supplies. I laid out everything I would need next to me in even rows and then snagged the water skin.
His body stiffened when I poured the water down his back. It wasn’t boiled but I needed to see the depth of the wound.
My lips pressed together. The cut was deep. I would need to stitch the line of it down the entirety of his back and make sure infection didn’t take root.