“What do you wish to know?”
Her gaze flickered down at the table.
“I—I want to know about your scars,” she said.
My spine stiffened in the washing tub but I laid my arms on the edge to conceal my sudden tension.
“The ones on your back,” she clarified. A soft breath escaped me in relief.
An easy enough story to tell.
“Lysi,” I said. “Very well.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mortification ran hot, trailing over my flesh. Mercifully, he decided to speak first.
“They are myVorakkarmarkings,” he told me, turning slightly in the massive bath so that I saw the deep whip marks. “The last hardship of theVorakkarTrials.”
Disbelief threaded through me.
“AllVorakkarwear them. Because if one does not, if they do not cover every part of his back, then he did not complete the Trials.”
I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. I had never given much thought tohowVorakkarwere chosen.
“And these Trials, you complete them all and you become a horde king?”
“Lysi.”
“How many are there?”
His grin made my belly heat. “Too many and not enough.”
“And…has aVorakkarever failed the last Trial?”
He began to scrub at his flesh, washing his body. “Nik. Because when you get to the last Trial, after them all, it is perhaps the easiest.”
“You think it’s easy to be whipped hundreds of times?” I whispered, aghast. I had thought that those scars had been the cause of the rage within him.
But now, I wasn’t so sure.
“Physical pain is fleeting,leikavi,” he said, his tone surprisingly…gentle. Like he was speaking of something else entirely more pleasant than having one’s back stripped of flesh.
AndallVorakkarsexperienced this. They all wore the scars. I tried to think back, to theDothikkar’sgrand hall, when the other horde king had given me his furs, if he’d had scars too. But I’d been too frightened to notice much of anything.
“What would you endure if it meant you could have everything you have ever wanted?” he asked me next.
My brows lowered.
To be free of the Ghertun, to have my family safe and together again, to live afreelife?
I would endure…anything.
“You wanted to be aVorakkarthat much?”
His red eyes glowed, water dripping down his cheek, over his scar.
“I wanted to right wrongs done against me and mine,” he rasped. “I wanted to return to wild lands under my own terms. Being aVorakkarallowed me to do that.”
