Madness of the Horde King - Zoey Draven Page 0,112

The columns of the blue-colored candles they’d made together sat discarded on Lokkaru’s workbench. It smelled of kuveri but I scented the lingering of death and it made bile rise in my throat.

Hedna found me when I stumbled back from the empty voliki.

His brows were furrowed, his features concerned. “I did not see her anywhere.”

“Vok,” I said, trying to think. I stood still, closing my eyes, trying to regulate my breath and the frantic beating of my heart.

Then her words came to me. Words she’d whispered last night as she emerged from sleep.

You’ve known. You’ve known this entire time.

Unease slid down my chest, settling in my belly.

“The mrikro,” I rasped, already turning to the pyroki enclosure. Hedna was fast on my heels and we found the mrikro mucking out the enclosure. He straightened when he saw me, alarm entering his gaze. I wondered what I looked like to cause him such immediate wariness. “Are there any pyroki missing?”

The mrikro immediately swung his gaze to the enclosure.

Surely, she wouldn’t try to venture into the wild lands on foot. Surely, she knew she wouldn’t get far.

I waited impatiently, pacing alongside the fence like a beast. Even the pyrokis closest to me began to back away, as if they sensed something dangerous and feral in me as I waited for the mrikro to do his counts.

“One is gone, Vorakkar,” the mrikro said, his voice soft. Shocked. His eyes were wide as he turned to me. “A young, unbonded pyroki. A female. They were all here when we returned from the burial. On Kakkari, I swear it.”

Hedna clasped the mrikro’s shoulder, smoothing over the older Dakkari’s distress because I was in no state to do it.

“Why would she leave?” Hedna asked, still hovering beside the mrikro, who wouldn’t quite meet my gaze.

Because she felt like she had no choice, I knew. Because I’d given her none.

Vok!

My mind was on the verge of splitting and I needed to be present. I couldn’t dwell on the fact that she’d somehow figured out my betrayal, or that she was alone in the wild lands with only my dagger for protection, or that she’d knowingly left me, perhaps with the knowledge that I would never see her again.

She was unprotected. In danger. I knew that Ghertun still lurked. I knew that she would not abandon her family to the Dead Mountain and yet, I had done nothing to help her, to assuage her fears that all would be well.

Vienne was seeking the heartstone blindly on the back of an untrained pyroki, in the dangerous wild lands of the east.

She couldn’t know the direction of the ancient groves. Or could she? Had Lokkaru said something to her in her last days, something that Vienne had pieced together?

Or…had she dreamed the memory of when Lokkaru had told me the heartstone’s location?

“Send darukkars in all directions,” I told Hedna, already striding into the pyroki enclosure. “Have them ride out for a full day looking for her.”

“I will. And you?” Hedna asked, his jaw tight.

Nillima came to me and I swung up on her back. I didn’t even have my sword with me but there was no time to spare and I couldn’t waste another moment. Every second she was in the wild lands alone risked her life and that knowledge filled me with cold, icy fear. Fear I hadn’t felt since I’d watched my sister die.

“I will find her,” I said quietly but my words were meant as a reassurance for myself.

Nillima bolted forward on my command and she sprinted through the gates until we were out on the plains.

I set my gaze west, towards where Lokkaru was buried, the direction we’d just come from in the early hours of morning. Vienne couldn’t be that far ahead of me and Nillima was one of the fastest pyrokis in the horde.

“I will find her,” I said again.

Then I couldn’t help but think: What if she doesn’t want to be found?

Chapter Forty-Two

The ancient groves were darkly beautiful. Eerie. Quiet. Yet, there was a calmness, a sense of peace that weaved around the towering black trees, that threaded through the black vines hanging down from their branches, and gave that seemingly endless place a strange warmth that was entirely unexpected.

Only, it was warmth I couldn’t quite feel as I urged my pyroki into the ancient groves’ depths and darkness. I had been riding since the early hours of morning and now the moon was hanging overhead, a constant reminder that I was dangerously close