“Then tell me how you came to be in their possession,” he murmured, his voice low, almost like a purr, like he was weaving a spell around me. I stiffened when his hand dipped up the back of my cloak, until his hand curled around my hip. His palm was hot. I felt it even through the thickened material of my tunic.
“I—” I started. “I don’t…”
Before us, the sky was beginning to lighten. We hadn’t quite reached the end of the Dothikkar’s road but I could see where it gave way to the plains. The quiet, endless plains of Dakkar.
The only sound I heard was the clattering of his pyroki’s taloned feet on the stone. And a slight rustling of a breeze through the trees.
It was almost…peaceful.
My shoulders sagged.
I licked my lips and said, keeping my voice hushed, “About a year ago, they attacked my village. They came at night. We had no warning.”
I could still hear the screams. I could still feel the terror. I remembered my grandmother shuffling us into the hidden cellar, which my father had dug out years before. But just as my mother, my brothers, and my sister had dropped down into it, the door behind her had crashed open. I remembered the rasping sounds of their laughter, the wet sound of their blade as they plunged it into my grandmother. Her blood had dripped down, through the cracks in the floor.
Her sacrifice had meant nothing because the Ghertun had found us anyway. They’d killed my grandmother because she was too old to be of use to them.
“They slaughtered most of the village. They looted what food we had, the food we’d grown, pillaged our homes, and took some of us back to the Dead Mountain as slaves.”
“They chose you and your family?” he asked.
“Yes,” I whispered. “They—”
I frowned.
“I—I didn’t say anything about a family,” I said.
“I assumed,” he murmured and I stiffened when his hand came to brush my hair aside, draping it over one of my shoulders. “Why else would you do this if not to protect those you love? I know desperation better than most. I know the lengths to which we will go to protect our family. Or to honor them.”
I need to be careful with him, I thought.
He was intelligent, that much was obvious. He was a horde king. He was a leader. Of course he was intelligent. And observant.
“Why did they choose your family?” he asked next.
My lips pressed together.
Because I’d used every last bit of my gift to make them spare us. I’d used it on every last Ghertun that had attacked our village, persuading them to choose us, though I’d been passed out for days afterwards and the pain hadn’t subsided for weeks.
“I answered your question. I want my story now,” I said.
He chuffed out a sharp exhale that I felt whisper across my neck. His hand tightened on my hip.
For a moment, I thought I’d been fooled. Misled. Then he started, “Over a century ago, a horde warrior stole a heartstone during its transport to an outpost. It has been lost ever since and this is the heartstone we need to find.”
My stomach sank. Lost?
“There are only five in existence that we know of. Do you know what they do?”
“No.”
I hadn’t given much thought to the heartstone, only that Lozza wanted one desperately. I didn’t much care what it did.
“They possess great strength because it is said that Kakkari’s power lies within them. That they are fragments of her divine power.”
“And this darukkar…he stole it?”
“His wife was pregnant with their first child,” the horde king told me. “She had fallen ill and the horde’s healer believed that the child would be lost…as would his wife. The warrior would lose both in one single moment.”
My heart twisted in my chest, my brows lowering in understanding.
“He was desperate,” I whispered.
“Lysi,” he rasped. “He stole the heartstone, spirited his wife and unborn child away from the horde and to a place of Kakkari. There, he asked for her help in healing them both.”
“Did it work?”
We were nearing the end of the Dothikkar’s road. When I cast a quick glance behind us, I could only see the glittering turrets of the city, high and proud in the sky. The Vorakkar turned his pyroki east. Towards the Dead Lands.
“Everything has a price,” he told me gruffly. “He paid it with his life.”
I sucked in a breath.
“But lysi, leikavi,” he murmured into my ear, his lips brushing the shell of it,