Madness of the Horde by Zoey Draven

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The dream felt muddled and hazy. It felt wrong as it tugged at the edges of my mind.

I was sobbing in this dream. And I knew it was a dream. So I did everything that I wanted that I couldn’t do in my reality. I cried and screamed until my throat was raw. I saw the stiff face of Lokkaru, looking up at me from her bed, where she’d died, only this time her eyes were open and staring deeply into me.

It made horror coil in my chest. Lokkaru’s face morphed into my grandmother’s, with her light blue eyes and grey hair that she’d always kept trimmed short and out of the way. Only I saw red blood appear across her throat.

It was a dream so I changed it, wiping away the image of my dying grandmother, but I sat huddled, trapped in the confines of my mind and not knowing what was happening or why.

I kept my eyes squeezed shut but I could hear what sounded like a stream nearby, though my vision was blackened, though I couldn’t see anything anymore.

Someone touched my shoulder.

I kept my eyes closed, feeling like a 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 awful lot like…betrayal.

“Davik knew?” I whispered, hurt spearing me. “This whole time, he’s known where the heartstone is?”

“He told me he did not want to seek it out. That it was better lost,” Lokkaru said. “I agree with him. The heartstone’s power is not well understood. It can be dangerous.”

“I need to know where it is,” I told her, deafened to what she was saying. Something shifted in my breast, possibly similar to the determination I’d felt within Davik last night, when he’d told me I would be his Morakkari. “My family will never be free without it.”

I will never be free, I amended silently…only I heard the words echo in the space between Lokkaru and I.

The heartstone was the only thing I had left to bargain with.

Her features softened. “Oh, cossa.”

“Please,” I begged, swallowing.

“It is dangerous,” Lokkaru warned.

“I would do anything for my family,” I told her, stepping towards her, though the distance between us didn’t shorten. The dream seemed to expand, shifting in its dimensions. “Please, Lokkaru. I need your help. I’m—I’m already dying. I don’t have much time left and I need to reach my family before it’s too late.”

“You plan to give the heartstone to the Ghertun?” Lokkaru asked softly.

My stomach sank when I heard the hesitation in her voice. “I need to,” I told her, unable to lie. “But the Ghertun cannot use Kakkari’s power. It means nothing.”

“Like I said, the heartstone’s power is unknown. Cossa, I cannot—”

“Please,” I whispered again. “I—I don’t even know if I’ll make it, if I have enough time to find it. But I have to try. I have to.”

Lokkaru peered at me closely. The veil over her face seemed to ripple with an unseen wind.

“I have to try.”

I tried not to think about Davik. That he’d known this entire time and said nothing.

The dimensions of the dreams shifted, narrowing and then widening. In my mind, I felt Lokkaru’s presence, both disturbing and comforting. I had never felt another in my mind but I knew this was what Davik must have felt.

“I will show you, cossa.”

Relief pricked me like a knife.

In my mind, she guided me east, the landscape passing before me, though parts of it seemed washed out and blurry, as if this was from her own memory and it was hazy. It went faster and faster but I remembered it all, as if it were a map stamped into my own mind.

The memory centered on one area. The ancient groves, I knew. The place Davik had told me about in his story about the heartstone.

Then Lokkaru showed me what I’d been seeking.

There was a beautiful, old tree. Weathered but strong. At the end of a stream, deep in the ancient groves, its black trunk stood proudly, its branches glimmering in sunlight. Its leaves seemed like they were painted in gold.

“My father,” Lokkaru said in my mind, unseen.

Tears pricked my eyes at the love I heard in Lokkaru’s voice.

“My mother buried him with the heartstone and this tree grew from him. It was nourished from him and his love. The heartstone is within. Somewhere, with him.”

My breath hitched. When I’d first met her, Lokkaru had told me, “She told me love grows and it grows true, as long as it is nourished. Like my father.”

She’d been speaking of her mother.

This tree was beautiful. The tree was Lokkaru’s father’s grave. His final place of rest. A shrine. A testament of his sacrifice for his family, of his love for them. He’d died so that his unborn daughter and wife could live.

And in order to save my family, I would have to desecrate it. I would have to destroy it, this place of love and beauty, in order to find the heartstone, in order to fulfill my agreement with the Ghertun king.

Lokkaru, still in my mind, said softly, “You will have the strength, cossa. You will do what needs to be done.”

* * *

I woke from the dream.A sense of calm had settled over me, though it was brittle.

Just as Lokkaru said in the dream, we were still riding towards the horde. It was late, the moon high overhead. The darkness of the plains settled over Dakkar like a heavy blanket.

I was on Nillima’s back and I felt Davik’s arms around me. The back of my head rested against his chest and the gentle sway of his pyroki beneath us threatened to lull me back to sleep. Because I was so tired. I felt so damned tired. Another symptom of the vovic, a warning of what would come in the next few days.

I heard dozens and dozens of pyroki behind us, as their Vorakkar led them home. The Vorakkar who I’d begun to trust.

The Vorakkar I’d begun to love, I thought, my heart pricking. It felt like my chest had been cracked and a little bit of me was leaking out.

“You’ve known,” I whispered, that sense of calm still swallowing me. Maybe it wasn’t calmness at all. Maybe it was numbness.

“Neffar, leikavi?” he rasped in my ear. He dipped his head, nudging the tip of my ear with his nose, an affectionate gesture.

But I didn’t feel anything.

“You’ve known this entire time.”

Davik stilled. Then he was turning my face towards him, his brow furrowed, his mouth downturned as he studied my features in the moonlight. Trying to read me.

“Neffar?” he said, his tone darker, more serious this time.

I realized he couldn’t know. Because if he knew, he might figure out what I planned next. And he might try to stop me, especially since he was so damned determined to have me as his Morakkari.

“Nothing,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I—my dreams were strange.”

At least that wasn’t a lie.

The mention of my dreams didn’t make his tension ease.

“I didn’t dream your memories,” I assured him. “Don’t worry.”

He relaxed slightly at that, seeming to shake himself. There was still something he didn’t want me to know. Something worse than Mala.

Turning forward, I looked over the dark landscape before us. I knew where we were. Lokkaru’s memories ensured that.

Keeping my head still, I turned my gaze west. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew the ancient groves lay hidden there, not far from the lake where Lokkaru was buried, perhaps a full day’s ride from the horde’s encampment. From there, it was another day’s travel to the Dead Mountain.

And that was only if I could secure a pyroki for the journey.

My icy skin and lingering exhaustion told me I had two or three days until the symptoms from the vovic would become more severe. Perhaps another two days after that before I would be completely incapacitated.

I have to leave, I knew. Soon.

When we returned to the horde, I would need to sneak away because I was beginning to suspect that Davik had never intended to let me go. Maybe in the beginning he did…but not now.

I was out of time. Closing my eyes, I found I couldn’t even drum up anger at myself, or even at Davik right then. I was still so numb.

This was my fault. I’d wasted so much time.

And I’d trusted someone I shouldn’t have.