“Themrikro,” I rasped, already turning to thepyrokienclosure. Hedna was fast on my heels and we found themrikromucking 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 anypyrokimissing?”
Themrikroimmediately 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 thepyrokisclosest to me began to back away, as if they sensed something dangerous and feral in me as I waited for themrikroto do his counts.
“One is gone,Vorakkar,” themrikrosaid, his voice soft. Shocked. His eyes were wide as he turned to me. “A young, unbondedpyroki. A female. They were all here when we returned from the burial. On Kakkari, I swear it.”
Hedna clasped themrikro’sshoulder, 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 themrikro, 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 untrainedpyroki, 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?
“Senddarukkarsin all directions,” I told Hedna, already striding into thepyrokienclosure. “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 fastestpyrokisin 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 mypyrokiinto 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 to failure. To death. Death that I had felt begin to creep up on me as the day dragged, as my furious heart seemed to pump and thicken the poison running through my veins even faster.
The pain had started, a couple days earlier than I had anticipated. Though it was night now and I could barely see a few feet in front of thepyrokiguiding me through the groves, I knew that the veins in my right arm were completely blackened and were steadily trailing up to my shoulder, across my neck.
As I’d always known, the symptoms of thevovicwould come on fast. It had been weeks since my last dose. So, in reality, the pain was right on time. It wasmethat was late.
I trailed my fingers over thepyroki’sscaled neck, feeling the muscles underneath shift with its gentle but hesitant trots.
“There is nothing to fear here,” I whispered down to the creature. I didn’t know how I knew that but I did. Perhaps it was Lokkaru’s own knowledge. Perhaps it was the knowledge that the heartstone kept this land cleared of threat, of danger.
It was not the groves I feared.
