Madness of the Horde King - Zoey Draven Page 0,106

small child though I was grown.

“Cossa,” came a voice. A familiar one. My breath hitched, my eyes flying open, and there stood Lokkaru, wrapped in her golden cloth that she’d been buried in, a transparent veil over her features. “You see? I told you dreams are powerful.”

“L-Lokkaru?”

She looked alive. She looked well. But I knew this was a dream, that it wasn’t real.

Or was it?

I thought of Devina, of her plea to me. She’d showed me a memory, an important one to her, and I had believed that real, hadn’t I?

“You’re here?” I whispered, rising from my crouched position. When I looked down, I saw the black veins on my arms had disappeared. “How?”

“We are never gone,” she said. “Though only some possess the gift to see us.”

Like Davik.

“Did you go to him yet?” I asked. “In his dream?”

“He has not slept yet, cossa. You are riding back towards the horde and you sleep in his arms on his pyroki.”

I knew that. Even still, speaking with her felt like wading through water. Heavy and slow. It made me drowsy, though I already slept. It was strange. So strange.

“I appeared to him as he can see me,” she said. “But he rejects his gift from Kakkari.”

“He does not understand it,” I whispered, a flash of guilt piercing me. “I don’t even know if I understand it. This.”

“You are not meant to,” she said. “I never questioned it. It is simply a part of you, as it was a part of me.”

My vision swam. The tears that leaked down my cheeks felt like ice. I was surprised when they didn’t shatter, frozen, at my feet as they dropped.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m…I’m so sorry, Lokkaru.”

“For what, cossa?”

“For—for not checking on you earlier. You died…you died alone. I found you and you were so cold. I tried to enter your mind and all I felt was…n-nothing. I felt nothing at all.”

Her face never changed.

“I did not die alone, Vienne,” she told me. “My mother and father welcomed me and I went with them gladly. It was time. But this new life is strange. It works in different ways. I feel my hold on your world lessening and I want to say goodbye. Because I do not know what comes next.” She wore a secretive, mischievous smile, one very similar to when she’d gleefully imagined stealing kuveri for our candles. “But I am excited to see, to learn.”

Would she come back? In my dreams?

“The mind is powerful, Vienne,” Lokkaru murmured, looking at me intently. “Yours is as strong as I have ever seen. You fear your gift, as Davik fears his?”

“Yes,” I whispered. Because I knew it was changing. I felt it.

I realized this might be my last chance to speak with Lokkaru, to see her. The faces of my family flashed in my mind. When I looked down at my arm, I swore I saw a shadow of black veins but then it was gone.

“I have to ask you something,” I said, urgency infusing my tone.

Lokkaru inclined her head. “Is this what you have needed to know? I realize now you were trying to ask me something, but my mind came and went.”

“It’s about the heartstone,” I said.

Her face was smooth and unblemished. The longer I looked at her, I swore I saw her features flicker to a younger version of herself.

“You want to know where it is,” she guessed.

“Yes,” I whispered. “You asked me yesterday…you asked me where my family was and I said far from here. You assumed they were dead.”

She inclined her head.

“But they are slaves under the Dead Mountain,” I told her, a lump in my throat, my breath coming fast. “I need the heartstone, any heartstone, in order to free them. That’s why I’m here. Davik…he said you might know where it is.”

Lokkaru’s expression did change then. Sightly. A small downturning of her lips. It was puzzlement.

“Davik knows where it is, cossa,” she told me.

Even in this dream, my stomach dropped.

“What?” I whispered. I shook my head. “No, he—he said you might remember. But that your mind was—”

“I told him where the heartstone was when he accepted me into his horde, Vienne,” Lokkaru said. “The exact location, the one my mother told me herself. Because she thought that one day, I would go seek it out, that it would give me Kakkari’s protection. I did seek it out but I did not take it when I found it.”

Disbelief spread through me, in addition to something that felt an