I grunted.

“Though I haven’t truly learned much about you tonight,” she added with an assessing look.

I grunted again.

“And you won’t tonight,” I said. “Now stop talking, wife. Let me enjoy my wildness in peace.”

“You won’t tell me just one tiny thing?” she pressed.

I bit out a sigh. She had been open with me tonight, had answered my own questions without complaint.

I swallowed down my discomfort when I said, “Do you know how a Sarrothian Karath is chosen?”

“No,” she said, a little breathless, like she couldn’t believe her pressing me had actually worked.

“They are taken from a pool of the best acolytes and riders for the territory when the position becomes open, either when the previous Karath dies or relinquishes his position or is removed.”

“Removed?” she asked.

“By the Elthika,” I answered, knowing that was how my predecessor had gone. “These choosings only happen once in a lifetime, maybe twice, if that. And it happened to fall during my rider season. Perhaps luck, or perhaps fate. One rider from each of Sarroth’s villages is chosen and sent to the cliffs. Whoever claims a Vyrin more often than not comes out a Karath, though other riders can challenge them. In the weeks following, those challenges can seem endless, but not many are foolish enough to stand against a Vyrin and their chosen rider. Except other Vyrins.”

I saw Klara process the information. And when her brow furrowed, I knew she was filling in gaps, what went unspoken.

“Haden was like a brother to me,” I told her, swallowed deeply. “Going into the illa’rosh that year, he was favored to be the next Karath. We both tried to claim a Vyrin that year. Lygath rejected him. Zaridan chose me. Nearly all the acolytes died that year. I tried to save Haden…but in the end I watched him fall. And I was challenged relentlessly in the aftermath. Elysom allowed a law where I could be challenged for a full year afterward. There were many who believed I had murdered my own friend to claim the throne of Sarroth. So that’s why I don’t like to speak of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she breathed, and I barely heard her over the rush of the falls. What struck me was how sad she looked by my confession. As if she hurt for me. “Sarkin, I had no idea…”

“What’s done is done,” I said, steeling my voice. “That year taught me a lot. It was a trial, and I came out with the respect of my people. I had to go through it.”

I’m glad I did, I thought. It made me a better Karath in the end because it taught me to trust very few and to build an Arsadian stone wall around me, allowing no one close.

“Enough for tonight,” I told her, releasing her only when she began to tread water. “It’s late. And you need sleep.”

“Will you return with me tonight?” she asked softly. The question struck me as vulnerable.

I blew out a rough breath. There was a reason why I’d stayed away…but I realized I couldn’t run forever.

“Yes,” I answered. “I will.”

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 26KLARA

In this dream, I was in another forest. I breathed in the scent of damp leaves and woody trunks. The soil was fragrant at my feet, so black it looked like Zaridan’s scales. Low-hanging vines dipped into my view, and I pressed them aside, ducking underneath as I followed the path of what I thought used to be a riverbank. There was no water now, but the indentation of a stream still compressed the ground, rocks imbedded into the soil at the base of it.

This wasn’t the heartstone forest I’d seen before. This place was unfamiliar and unrecognizable, though I did feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise, a gentle breeze blowing behind me.

At the end of the dried-up river, I saw it. A great, ancient tree, its trunk as wide as Elthika limbs. Its branches were black. I would have thought the tree was dead if not for a few white leaves peppering its twisting branches. The leaves appeared to have blue veins within them, glowing a dull color.

My lips parted, and I looked around the clearing for some hint of where I might be. I didn’t have much time before I’d wake—anything could disrupt this moment—and I was seeing this tree for a reason. Dropping down into the bed of the dried stream, I began to dig into the wall at the base of the tree, my fingers nail scratching at the dirt. Quickly, I worked…and soon I was rewarded.

At the end of one root was a grouping of heartstones, though their light was dull. I counted five. A tree this big would have dozens of roots. How many heartstones could there be underneath the earth?

When I touched the root, I gasped, a thousand whispers pouring into my head. My blood pulsed in my veins. It was like being dragged under a roaring river. It was all I could hear.

I wrenched my hand away, stumbling back onto the earth, hitting the compacted, dry soil hard.

Staring up at the tree, now with slight trepidation, something nudged into my memory. A story. My mother’s story, passed down from Rath Drokka’s line about a whispering, bleeding tree.

My heart began to pound, so fast and quick that I felt it in my throat. I scrambled up the crumbling bank and went to the trunk, looking around for something sharp. I needed to know. Because that would mean…

I grabbed the first rock with a hard edge I saw. I touched the trunk, gritting my teeth when those voices filled my mind again. The tree was warm, like flesh and blood.

Blood.

I struck the trunk with the sharp edge of the rock. It was like striking a boulder, the strength of the tree reverberating up my arms, rattling my bones. I struck again, and a small piece of the trunk splintered off. I peeled it away.

The rock tumbled from my grip, and I walked back a few paces as the trunk began to bleed. A small trickle of golden liquid, rolling down the blackened bark.

Without another moment of hesitation, I ran. Underneath my bare feet, I cut my soles on rocks and exposed, spiky roots, but I didn’t care. Nothing mattered in dreams except the memory of one.

I sprinted in one direction, praying to Kakkari that I’d chosen the right way. I could get lost in here. But I kept my sights on the constellations overhead, letting them keep my path straight.

My lungs burned. I was gasping with the exertion. Vines tangled in my hair. One whacked me across my cheeks, making it sting and burn, but I kept going.

And at last, even as the moon began to dip in the sky, I saw a break in the forest line. When I burst out beyond it, I stopped, panting, sweating, swinging wildly around to try to find a marker. Something.

In the shadowy distance, I saw it. The familiar stretch of mountains that I could trace in my sleep because my horde had once lived in the East for a season of ungira hunting.

The Dead Lands.

The outer mountain range that protected what had once been the Dead Mountain, where a race called the Ghertun had lived before they’d all been killed with a heartstone. A heartstone wielded by Vienne of Rath Drokka. My ancestor.

I sank to the ground, breathing in deep. I fell back as my chest heaved, staring up at the sky, my mind reeling from my discovery.

“All this time,” I breathed.

All this time, the heartstones had been in Dakkar.

They’d been back home.

When I woke, it was quick. One moment I was dreaming of the Dead Lands…the next, I was staring at Sarkin’s chest rising and lowering as he slept.

I was crying, I realized, and I wiped my face in the darkness with my palm. The discovery in my dream didn’t make me happy or pleased. It made me sad. Angry. Because the priestesses had been using people as conduits for the last hundred years, trying to create a source of power that had been under our feet the entire time.