The Winter King (52 page)

Agony exploded across her nerve endings as the black liquid touched her exposed skin. If passing through the veil in the tunnel had felt like having the flesh flayed from her bones, this was like being submerged in a vat of acid. On her wrist, the red Rose of Summerlea flared with pain and power. Kham fought her way back to the surface and bobbed up, screaming, in time to see the ice creature jab her spear into the Ice Heart. Rippling black liquid froze at the point of contact, crusting over in midripple. The hardening ice spread rapidly out across the surface.

All Kham could do was suck down a gasp of air and dive into the freezing pool before the spreading surface ice closed around her. The error of that instinctive reaction became immediately apparent. The layer of ice now covering the well was thick and solid. She beat against it with bare hands, but it didn’t budge. There were a few tiny air pockets—small shallow spaces formed near the apex of the frozen ripples—but those precious breaths would not sustain her for more than a few minutes.

Assuming she survived this murderous cold long enough to drown.

The sword. Khamsin, get the sword.

The Sword of Roland had unfrozen the Ice Heart nine hundred years ago. The sword would be able to break through the surface ice now.

She pressed her lips to the air pockets, sucking in as much air as she could, then she rolled upside down and pushed off the ice, diving down into the Ice Heart.

The world went black and sightless. All that existed was burning cold and pain. The Rose on her wrist burned with a pain so terrible she would willingly cut off her own arm to make it stop. Instead, she kicked and clawed her way deeper into the Ice Heart, dragging herself through the thickening sludge towards the promise of warmth and light that called to her senses. Her lungs burned as fiercely as her flesh, growing tighter and tighter with each passing moment.

She fought the need to breathe until her body rebelled. Her mouth opened against her will, and the freezing black liquid of the Ice Heart poured into her lungs.

Lightning exploded across her cells. A storm like nothing she’d ever conjured roared through her body as her fearsome weathergift battled the bitter invasion of a dead god’s icy essence. Flesh and bone savaged one another with brutal claws and razor-sharp teeth, ripping and tearing in a frenzy of ravening hunger.

Kham screamed and screamed and screamed in soundless futility. Her body convulsed, twisting and writhing. The legs scissoring through the thick, oily liquid grew heavy. Each tiny motion became a heroic struggle, then an impossibility as the strength leached from her limbs. Pain faded as her drowning body sank towards the bottom of the well.

Wynter, my love, forgive me. I have failed you.

Was this death?

Khamsin floated in blackness. The pain ravaging her body remained, but it was distant, separated from her consciousness, as if she were a mere observer of another woman’s torment. She couldn’t see anything, hear anything, and feeling beyond that strangely distant pain seemed an impossibility.

A forgotten memory niggled at her, tugging, pulling, nibbling at the edges of her mind.

The sword, Khamsin. Get the sword.

The sword. Roland’s sword. That’s what she’d come for, why she was here.

She could feel its presence through the impenetrable darkness. A blossom of beckoning warmth. So near. She reached for it.

The second she did, agony returned full bore—flooding her body, making her writhe and scream in torment. She persevered, fighting to reach the sword with every remaining ounce of strength she possessed.

Please. Please. Please.
She didn’t pray. She never begged. But for Wynter, she would do that and more. If there was any chance at all to save him, she needed Roland’s sword.

There! Numb fingers curled around the sword’s hilt. The moment she touched it, fiery heat roared up her arm, blasting its way through her body in a cleansing burn. With the heat came a flood of images, memories.

Helos the sun god, finding himself so enchanted with the mortal queen of Summerlea that he could not set her from his mind.

Helos pouring his divine essence into the mortal shell of his beloved’s husband. And in that husband’s skin, with that husband’s flesh, the god lay with the beautiful queen. And in the soft, sweet grass beside a still summer lake, with a profusion of red roses perfuming the air, the god gave the Summer queen a child.

Khamsin saw the birth of that child, who became known as Roland Soldeus. The child of Summerlea’s king but also the god’s divine being, he was the first Summer King to bear the red Rose birthmark on the inside of his right wrist—a mark given him in memory of the time the Queen of Summer had been loved by a god. As her dazed mind processed that, a new flood of memories swept her along like a swift current.

Roland, now a young man, visiting the lakeside where he’d been conceived. And there, rising from the grass, a great and mighty blade, whose hilt was set with an enormous ruby as red as the roses that had blossomed the day of Roland’s conception.

Roland reaching for that sword, being swept away at first contact by the same flood of memories that carried her now.

Along with those memories came the realization that the god had placed into Blazing a part of himself, a connection to his divine power and his own memories, so that through the sword, Roland and his heirs could come to know the truth of their beginnings.

Never without his golden sword, Roland had lived up to his divine parentage, leading the armies of Summerlea in battle against its enemies, guiding the kingdom of Summerlea to enviable greatness, peace, and prosperity.

It was that greatness and prosperity that convinced the equally powerful Winter King to offer his beloved only daughter in marriage to Roland.

Kham stood witness to the day the princess of Wintercraig arrived for her first meeting with her betrothed. It wasn’t love at first sight. Far from it, but Roland was dazzled by her pale, exotic beauty and by the fires that burned beneath her cool exterior. With the patience and determination for which he had become renowned, Roland courted his betrothed until, at last, one cool summer night, on the same shores of the lake where the god of the sun had possessed his mortal queen, the Winter princess surrendered to Roland her heart. And there, in the soft grass, like his father before him, Roland claimed his love.

But as Khamsin knew, theirs was not to be a happy tale. Alarmed by the threat of a united Summerlea and Wintercraig, powerful kings from across the sea conspired to destroy Roland and Summerlea. They launched their armada, a naval-borne army the likes of which had never before been assembled.

The sword showed her the very battles she’d spent a lifetime reading about and imagining in her mind. Her imagination didn’t come close to the reality.

An ocean thick with ships as far as the eye could see. A coast, overrun by foreign invaders, swarming like ants on an overturned anthill. Roland and his defenders being pushed back and back and back again, until only one final line of hills stood between the invaders and the fertile heartland of Summerlea, where Roland’s beloved waited.

Roland, desperate to save his love, calling upon the power of his sword, and through it, the god’s own power. And thus came the great, blinding explosion of light, the enormous cloud mushrooming into the sky, the feat that ended Roland’s life, defeated the enemy invaders, and forever enshrined his name in legend.

But Roland had not perished without issue as Khamsin and the rest of the world had always believed. His beloved bride from the north discovered after his death that she was with child. To save her child the stigma of bastardy—and to ensure that Roland’s only child would inherit his father’s kingdom and pass down his great gifts—the Winter princess wed Roland’s brother, Donal. And to keep safe her son’s true heritage, she spirited Roland’s sword away from Summerlea and hid it in her father’s kingdom. She intended to retrieve the sword and present it to her son when he reached manhood, but she died in childbirth with her third child. And her father, fearing that King Donal or his heirs would use the power of the sword to subjugate Wintercraig, never returned the blade to its rightful owner. Instead, he hid it securely away and devised an intricate series of clues to lead to its whereabouts, to be safeguarded until such time as an Heir of Roland was born to the Winter Throne. Those clues had been written in a book passed down from one Winter King to another.

But though more than one Wintercraig princess wed into the House of Summer, not one Summerlea princess had ever been crowned Wintercraig’s queen. And so the sword remained hidden for many centuries until one enterprising Winter King, having followed the clues to the sword’s hiding place, brought the magic weapon back to his kingdom. Although unable to unlock the sword’s great power himself—as only an Heir of Roland could do—he thought perhaps the sword’s magical, sun-born heat could melt the Ice Heart so he could claim that power, instead. But when he struck Blazing deep into the center of the frozen block of black ice in the Ice Heart well, Roland’s sword melted the Ice Heart so completely that the entire frozen mass of it turned liquid, and Roland’s sword sank to the bottom of the well, there to remain until a young daughter of Summerlea, a princess of the Rose with the soul of a storm, reached out a hand through the cold darkness to grasp the hilt of Roland’s divine sword, Blazing. And at her first touch, the memories stored in the sword poured into her mind, filling her with centuries of history so vivid and real it was as if she’d just lived each event herself.

The flood of memories halted as quickly as they’d begun.

Still clutching the sword, now filled with renewed vigor and sense of purpose, Khamsin planted her feet at the bottom of the well, bent her knees to gather power, and leapt upwards through the long dark of the Ice Heart well, the sword held before her like the tip of a spear.

She burst through the layer of ice sealing the well in a geyser of steam and melted Ice Heart droplets that refroze and fell back to ground as chips of ice. She landed hard, knees bending to absorb the shock.

The sound of crackling ice behind her brought Kham spinning around in time to see the frozen woman heave her spear. The creature’s aim was perfect. The spear should have pierced Kham’s heart and pinned her body to the rotunda’s icy wall. Instead, moving with reflexes and speed she’d never before possessed, Khamsin caught the ice spear in midflight with her left hand and threw Blazing with her right. The sword shot across the distance, and struck the ice woman’s chest so hard it sent her flying. She landed twenty yards away and skidded through the rotunda’s arched doorway, leaving a trail of blood that changed from blue to purple to red as it went.

By the time Kham reached her side, the icy shell encasing the woman had melted away, leaving a mortal Wintercraig beauty who watched Kham’s approach with pain-glazed blue eyes. She lifted trembling hands.

“Please . . .” she begged on a shallow breath. The word came out weak and thick. Blood was already filling her mouth and throat, making it difficult to speak. Kham’s had been a death blow, striking lung and heart. “Stop . . . her . . . stop . . .” She broke off, coughing blood.

Kham set the ice spear on the ground, well out of reach, and gripped the woman’s shoulders. “Who are you? Who do you want me to stop?”

“Reika . . . she never meant to help me get the sword. . . . she wanted the Ice Heart.” The woman’s fingers clutched weakly at Khamsin’s robe. “She has . . . unleashed him.”

“What are you saying? Did Reika drink the Ice Heart? Did she bring Rorjak back to life?”

“P-please . . . tell . . . him . . .” One trembling hand dropped to the woman’s chest, fingers closing weakly around the pendant at her throat. “Love . . . him.” Then her body went limp, and her head lolled to one side. The hand clutching the pendant fell away, revealing a gold circle carved with the image of a falcon, soaring through beams of sunlight, a rose clutched in one claw.

Khamsin sat back on her heels.

She recognized the pendant. She’d looked forward to seeing it—or rather the man who wore it—every day as a child in Summerlea. It was her brother’s personal crest.

The presence of that sigil could only mean that the woman Khamsin had just killed was Elka Villani, Wynter’s former betrothed, Reika Villani’s sister—and the woman Khamsin’s brother had started a war to possess.

“Oh, Falcon.” Her brother must have sent Elka to the Temple of Wyrn to retrieve Roland’s sword. Apparently, Reika had come along, too, only she’d used Roland’s sword as the pretext to gain access to her real goal: the power of the Ice Heart.

Kham’s heart slammed against her chest. If Reika was the one who’d summoned the Ice King—if she was the reason for the ice thralls—there was still a chance to save Wynter.

For the second time that day, Kham sent up a prayer.
Please, Helos. Please, Wyrn, let him be safe. Let him still be my husband.

Hands shaking with pent-up emotion, Kham slipped the pendant from Elka’s throat and put it around her own neck for safekeeping. Then she stood, pulled the sword from Elka’s chest, and wiped the bloody blade on the still-damp fur of her coat.

She cast one final look at the Ice Heart. Without the heat of Blazing hidden in its depths, what was held in the well was liquid no more. The immortal, indestructible essence of Rorjak, the Ice King, had returned to the solid, frozen state that Thorgyll’s spears had put it in so many millennia ago. She hoped it would stay that way for many centuries to come.

The crack and tinkle of splintering ice behind her chimed a warning. She spun back to find the corpse of Elka Villani once more fully encased in ice and rising to its feet. In an instinctive response born of memories not her own, she stabbed Roland’s sword at the rising corpse and cried, “Burn!”

The diamond in Blazing’s hilt flared with sudden light. The rose on her wrist went red-hot. A great gout of flame shot from the tip of the sword and engulfed Elka. The Winterlady’s arms lifted like a startled babe’s, and she burst into flames. Within moments, the body of Elka Villani turned to char, then crumpled to the floor as a formless pile of ash.