His words tightened my nipples, which was not the response I’d expected.
“It’s different with you,” I confessed after a short pause. “Even that first night. There was something different and I—I don’t know why or what it is.”
“Maybe because my mind does not work like others’. Maybe because I am…” he trailed off.
Mad?
Was that what he was going to say?
I didn’t think that was what it was.
I thought…I thought it was because he was likeme. Different. He was connected to something larger, something beyond himself.
He had a gift all his own…only he didn’t realize it. He thought it was made of hallucination, of madness. Whereas it was very likely he’d been born with it. Just like I’d been.
When I opened my lips to tell him these things, no sound came out.
“Tell me how you discovered my name,” he commanded softly, staring at me from across the table. He’d stopped eating, though he had to be starving. I wondered if he thought any differently of me now. If I would catch him staring at me like I’d sometimes caught my mother staring at me: with wariness. “You said you can only sense and change emotions.”
I lifted the goblet of wine to my lips to ease the dryness of my throat. “I said that I think my gift might be changing.”
He waited. He’d brought a hand up to trace the line of the deep scar on his left cheek, an unconscious habit, perhaps.
“I’ve never had reason to change someone’s emotions more than once,” I said. “And with you, I’ve done it twice now.”
“The first night inDothik,” he murmured. His brow furrowed. “And with the Killup.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I think it’s connected. That night when I said your name…I’d been dreaming. And I think—no, Iknow—I’d been dreaming a memory of yours.”
His spine stiffened. The tension in thevolikigrew so thick it was suffocating.
“Which one?” he growled.
Chapter Thirty
Vienne looked at me steadily. For once, she seemed…calm. Unafraid of my temper. Perhaps she knew by now that just because I was quick to anger, that anger did not mean I would hurt her. That anger wasn’t even directed at her. It was directed atme. Myself.
She surprised me—my littleleikavi—when she reached across the table and took my hand. Her touch was soothing and I felt my shoulders loosen. I watched as her eyes darted over my features, studying me, before they trailed to my lips.
“I dreamed of you when you were young,” she whispered, as if speaking too loudly would crumble the careful sense of peace she was building within me. She wasn’t using her gift, however. Just her gentle touch, which I was coming tocrave.“Here. In the eastlands. Your firstungirakill.”
I knew the memory she spoke of. It rose in my mind. That sun-filled day, Devina’s laughter as we walked further and further away from our encampment, our souls filled with the desire to roam and explore.
“And I knew your name,” Vienne said quietly, “because your sister was screaming it because she was so frightened for you.”
I shut my eyes, pain blooming in my chest. I swore I could still feel the slicing cut of theungira’stalon across my belly—where there was a small scar to remember that day—but in reality, it was only my loss, my grief.
Some days, losing Devina, losing my family, was still as fresh as the moment after I’d watched her die—the moment after I’dfelther die inside my own soul.
“Davik,” she whispered.
I opened my eyes and found Vienne was next to me, kneeling by my side, her hand on my face. When had she moved?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
But I didn’t think it was for the stolen memory, the inadvertent intrusion.
I think sheknew. That Devina, my sister—mytwin—was no longer alive.
