Page 75 of The Horde King of Shadow

KLARA

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 areason. Dropping down into the bed of the driedstream, 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 soilhard.

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 waswarm, 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, spikyroots, 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 ofungirahunting.

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 backhome.

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.

My own mother had died because of it.

I stifled a sob, feeling the urge to scream. Feeling the urge to tear down theorala sa’kilan, the priestesses’ temple in the icy and desolate North Lands, stone by stone until it lay in ruins at my feet.

This level of anger was frightening. It wasn’tme. But I’d been keeping my own grief suppressed for so long. This dream had unlocked a truth that I hadn’t been ready to face.

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