Whether he stiffened at my proximity, my words, or the press of the cloth to his wound, I didn’t know.
The silence was broken only when I wrung the cloth out, trickling water counting the seconds as they passed. He leaned forward at my urging so I could inspect the back of his shoulder. My lips pressed when I saw the sword had gone through, though the exit wound wasn’t as wide.
As I tended to him there, I heard him ask, “Which village did you belong to?”
Once I was finished cleaning the blood away, I pressed a hand to his chest to gently lean him back. The wound had stopped bleeding. Dakkari healed fast, which was fortunate for him. This wound would have been fatal for a human, from the blood loss alone.
“We lived in the north,” I whispered, wondering how hard Benn would strike me if he ever found out I was here tonight. A part of me almost…welcomedthat pain. “Near the bogs.”
“The Orala Pass?” he questioned. I shrugged. I didn’t know what the Dakkari called the area. Then he commented, “That village burned two years ago. We thought none survived.”
So he knew it.
“Yes,” I whispered, my throat suddenly going tight. “It did.”
The Ghertun tunnels stretched far and wide. Some had been made before the humans even settled on Dakkar over thirty years ago.
Unfortunately for our village, the Ghertun had ended one of their newest tunnels close to our settlement. There had been reports of Ghertun sightings in the tall, swampy forests of our land, though not many had been taken seriously. Until it was too late.
“Many were lost,” I said quietly.
“Perhaps I have seen you before,” he commented. The words made me pause. His tone was musing and soft. Had he thought before that I seemed familiar to him?
“Why do you say that?”
“I went to that village once,” he told me.
My eyes met his and I frowned. The only horde king that had ever come had…
“The funeral pyre,” I murmured, my eyes widening.
An older woman in our village had taken ill. She’d died shortly after and we’d held a funeral for her. The ground had been frozen over, however, leaving us with the only option of burning her body, which we often did in the frost season. We only prayed that noVorakkarswere nearby to see the smoke because unconfined fire was forbidden to us. The Dakkari viewed it as an ultimate insult to Kakkari, their earth goddess. Fire was never meant to touch her earth.
That frost season, our luck had run out. A horde kinghadbeen nearby to see the dark smoke that curled into the still sky and shortly after the ashes had blown away, we’d been faced with a group of Dakkari at our gates.
Song, our village leader, had walked out to meet them. I remembered his head held high though his fate was evident. He’d been willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of his village.
My father had taken me back to our little house, which we shared with my aunt. The Uranian Federation had given each settlement building supplies but the wood of our house still let in a terrible draft and it went damp with the cold. Father had often been sick during the frost—plagued with a deep, rattling cough—because he bundled me up in most of our furs and gave my aunt the rest.
In the end…the horde king had beenmerciful.
He’d investigated the pyre and left as quickly as he came. The words he said to Song that day had quickly traveled through our village, whispered with disbelief and a small smile among many.
“May Kakkari guide her way in death,” the horde king had said. “But be cautious during the frost,vekkiri. Another may not choose mercy.”
The next day, the fresh carcass of a massive beast had shown up at our gates, along with bundles of dried meat.
“During the frost,” I whispered to the horde king, my eyes widening in quiet realization and memory.
I’d nearly forgotten it. It had happened so long ago. In that memory’s place, tales of vengefulVorakkarsacross Dakkar had risen. Tales so soaked in blood and horror that I’d forgotten one horde king’s act of mercy, the only horde king our village had ever known.
He inclined his head.
“Yo-you fed us,” I said. “Why?”
He turned his head away, a tendril of his dark, long hair falling forward to shield his expression.
“That frost was brutal for us all,” he murmured. “I know how difficult the northlands can be.”
