Madness of the Horde King - Zoey Draven Page 0,114
was wider, taller, its branches fuller and laden with white leaves whose veins glowed blue. That was where the blue light was coming from. Its leaves. Thousands of them, spread across its black, strong branches. The stream ended at its trunk.
Nourishing it. Feeding it until it grew strong.
I patted the pyroki’s neck as we stopped in front of it. With great effort, I managed to swing my leg over its back and slide to the ground, though I fell to my knees on the moss-covered earth. It was soft and cushioned my fall. I had the stray thought that I could just curl up in the moss and sleep forever, that I could die in this place and no one would ever find me.
A sense of loneliness hit me, so hard that I almost gasped as my eyes filled with tears. I didn’t think it was all my own. This clearing, as beautiful and safe as it felt, cut off from the outside world, felt sad.
Had Lokkaru’s emotions lingered in this place? Had her mother’s? Or perhaps they were her father’s?
On shaking legs, I walked forward, sensing that my pyroki lay down on the moss to rest behind me. I craned my neck up but the tree was so large that it blocked the night sky and any hint of the moon I’d come to hate.
The bark looked like skin, papery and thin, but dark and weathered with age. And beneath that skin, the trunk seemed to glow not only blue, but gold. I swore I could see the individual layers of the bark underneath, each as thin as the last.
When I pressed my hand to the trunk, it felt warm. It throbbed like a heartbeat as I snatched my hand away, surprised, disturbed.
The heartstone was inside, or so I assumed. I could see its glow, its beckoning, its taunting. An unseen wind picked up in the clearing, rustling through my hair and chilling me to the bone, though my skin felt clammy and hot. I grappled for the dagger I’d stolen from Davik, peering down at it in the blue light that glowed from the leaves.
Its handle was made of black bone, intricately carved in swirling words of Dakkari that I couldn’t read, but I swore that those same words were tattooed into Davik’s skin. Longing made my heart squeeze tight. I smoothed my fingertips over the words, just as I had over Davik’s flesh, tracing those tattoos though I hadn’t known what they meant.
He would know I was gone by now. Night had fallen long ago. He would come after me if he hadn’t already. And I needed to be long gone from this place by the time he did. If he found me again, he wouldn’t let me go. I wouldn’t have the willpower, or the mental strength, to leave him again if I felt those arms around me.
With that thought in mind, though every part of me wanted to wait for him here, I wedged the dagger into the tree, grunting with the effort. The trunk was sturdy and hard, despite its appearance, and I felt my strike reverberate up my arm and ring in my brittle bones until I thought they might shatter.
My grip wasn’t strong enough, however. My arm was weakened from the vovic and my long ride on the pyroki. The dagger fell to the ground. That small action had winded me and I gasped for breath as I stooped to pick it up.
When I raised my arm to strike again, I paused, my lips parting as I saw liquid began to drip down the wound in the tree.
Blood.
Golden, shimmering blood that ran down its papery thin skin like a caress.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, my mind yelled.
Frozen, I could only stare as more dripped from it, weeping down that old tree in that ancient place.
A thought came to me and slowly I lowered the dagger. My gift hadn’t worked on Nillima, Davik’s pyroki, but I needed to understand this.
Gathering the energy of my power before me, I slowly pressed it forward, reaching out my hand towards the blood to ground it. It was hot, seeping over my hand, and I wanted to recoil in horror but I held my palm firm.
As always, my gift felt like dipping my hand into a cool stream. There was slight resistance and underneath the surface, it always felt a little strange, hushed and quiet and hazy.
I imagined doing that now as I closed my eyes. I pushed forward,