for the womb,” she informed me, looking at the wrapped beige ball in my hand. “Kasba root.”
The womb?
Davik made a chuffing sound in his throat and my face flamed with realization.
She thought…she thought that Davik and I…
I stuffed the ball into my mouth to avoid saying anything, to avoid meeting the horde king’s gaze. I looked anywhere but at him and my eyes caught on another table in the voliki. On it was a smaller basin fire that was heating what looked like animal fat in a clear jar, melting it into a liquid.
Next to the basin was a bucket, a stick wrapped in twine lying across it. I realized what it was. She was a candle maker. That was when I saw all the candles around her voliki, most melted down into pools, though none were lit now. Their color was chalky white, but back at my village, one of the women had made wax with vibrant colors, using things she’d foraged from the forest for dye.
An idea came to me. My grandmother had become quite forgetful in her old age too. Her memories came and went. Some were gone forever but others returned. I’d noticed that she remembered the most when she was not trying to remember. She would tell me stories as she wove strands of fiber together for a blanket or a shawl, stories she might not have told me otherwise.
“Do you make candles?” I asked Lokkaru softly, gesturing over to the table, the taste of the kasba root lingering in my mouth. It had a pleasantly sweet yet spicy aftertaste and the circle she’d wrapped it in was a thin dough, chewy and soft.
Her eyes followed my hand and her spine straightened when she saw her crafting station. “Lysi.”
“Will you teach me how to make them?” I requested. I gave her a soft smile when her eyes returned to mine, when her head tilted. “I’ve always wanted to learn.”
The Ghertun could see in the dark very easily, so there had been little use for candles, or fires, or light underneath the Dead Mountain.
The idea excited her. When I glanced over at Davik, he was regarding me with a stoic, almost calculating expression.
“Lysi, lysi,” Lokkaru said, rising from the table with surprising ease.
“A woman in my village used to add dye to the wax to make them colorful,” I told her. She rounded on me with an intrigued expression. “Perhaps we could try to add dye for some of them.”
Her expression was lively with the possibility. That mischievous smile was back. “We could steal dried kuveri from Arinu.”
My brows rose.
“Terun,” the horde king said, shaking his head. “Though you do not regard given names with importance, others do not feel the same. I have already told you this.”
My gaze flashed up to Davik’s and his jaw tensed when he saw me looking. His words were a reminder of last night. I knew his given name now. He’d asked me to say it, over and over, before he’d…
Before he’d kissed me. Again.
I cleared my throat.
Lokkaru’s head ducked. “My apologies, Vorakkar.”
“And no stealing,” he said, his voice a little gruffer after our exchanged glances.
He stood. As Lokkaru shuffled over to her candles, he leaned over me, his long, unbound hair brushing my cheek. I tensed, sucking in a small breath as he rasped in my ear, “You will stay with her?”
“Yes,” I whispered, tilting my head to look back at him.
His gaze burned. His nostrils flared when his eyes trailed to my lips, to the little cut in the corner where his teeth had accidentally cut me. I knew what he was remembering…the metallic taste of my blood that he’d licked.
Tension thrummed between us as Lokkaru hummed to herself.
“You have much to tell me tonight, leikavi,” he murmured, reaching down to brush the back of his claw over the cut on my lip.
I inhaled a sharp breath. About my gift, I knew.
“Do not let her light the candles you make,” he told me. His gaze traced up to Lokkaru’s figure. “She forgets them.”
I frowned but nodded.
He leaned forward, his teeth scraping across the side of my neck, and heat curled in my belly.
“I will return for you later.”
He made those words sound like both a threat and a heated promise.
Then he was gone, pulling away, and ducking under the voliki’s entrance before he disappeared from sight. Outside, I heard his heavy footsteps retreat, heading towards the front of the encampment.