The Winter King

CHAPTER 24

Gifts of the Gods

Leaving six guardsmen to help dispose of the dead and sound the Valkyr’s horn, Khamsin and the remaining White Guard made their way up the winding mountain road to the Temple of Wyrn. Though she was screaming with mad grief in her mind, Khamsin kept putting one foot in front of the other. If Barsul was right, and the garm attack and men turning into ice thralls truly meant Rorjak had returned, then Wynter was lost to her. And if Wynter was lost, then Wintercraig needed her to find the sword of Roland now more than ever.

When they reached the temple, they found it as silent and deserted as Konundal had been. Their footsteps on the carved stone floor echoed in the temple’s cavernous main room.

Behind Khamsin, the White Guard pulled their swords.

“I don’t like this,” Ungar said. “Where are the two priestesses? Lady Frey’s with the king, but the other two should have returned here after the Hunt.”

“The second spear is still gone.” Sven nodded towards the altar at the far end of the room. The wall behind it was bare of the crossed ice spears she’d seen on a previous visit. Only the frozen mask of Wyrn remained, and Khamsin could swear the carved face of the goddess watched her approach with icy eyes. On either side of the altar, soaring archways led to sconce-lit hallways veiled by long strands of shimmering crystal beads. “Maybe they went after the garm that attacked Gildenheim.”

“On their own?” Ungar shook his head. “I doubt it. Your Grace, wait here with me. Sven, you and the others fan out and search the place.”

“But don’t go through that doorway to the left of the altar,” Kham added quickly.

To the left lies death. Do not cross that threshold.

The men went right through the veil of beaded strings. The beads, which resembled dewdrops frozen on threads of spider silk, tinkled like chimes when they moved, sounding a melodic alarm that echoed through the icy temple. This place might seem open and unprotected, but no intruder could pass beyond the altar room without sounding that alarm.

Several minutes later, Sven and the others returned. “Nothing. The place is deserted. No signs of struggle. Whatever happened to the priestesses, it doesn’t appear to be foul play.”

The White Guard still insisted on accompanying her through the private residence of Wyrn’s priestesses. And truth be told, Kham was grateful for their company. With each step deeper into the heart of the mountain, her connection to the sun waned, leaving her vulnerable and defenseless.

The sooner she got what she’d come for, the sooner she could leave this place.

The last door in the hall was silver gilt and etched with swirling, diamond-studded patterns of windblown snowflakes. Pulling the key ring from her pocket, Khamsin inserted the first of Galacia’s keys into the lock and turned it. The beautiful door swung inward, revealing a robing chamber the size of a small chapel.

Kham waited as the men fanned out to search the chamber and connecting rooms.

“It’s clear,” Sven announced when he and his men returned to the main chamber.

“Good. Now, I must ask all of you to return to the main temple and wait for me there.”

Ungar frowned. “We’re not leaving your side, Your Grace.”

“Oh, yes, you are. What comes next is not for your eyes.” There was a door in this room. A door known only to the priestesses of Wyrn. And now to Khamsin, as well.

“At least take my sword.” Ungar offered his unsheathed blade to her.

“I can’t.” Galacia had warned her that no man or mortal weapon could survive the path Kham was about to take. “Now, please, go. You cannot accompany me farther.” She waved the guards towards the exit. “If I’m not back by sunrise, then I have failed.”

Grumbling, clearly unhappy at being dismissed, the guards nonetheless filed out of the chamber. Once the door was closed and locked behind them, Kham shrugged out of her coat and set to work unlacing her gown. Normally, according to Galacia, the priestesses followed a ritual of cleansing and prayer using the bathing pool, sauna, and steam rooms in the adjoining antechambers, but that was more tradition than necessity, and time was of the essence. Khamsin deposited her shoes and clothes on a bench and slipped into one of the white, hooded robes hanging from a series of wall pegs.

Barefoot and naked except for her hooded robe, she approached the small tabletop altar built into a recessed arch. Two round wall sconces with crystal shades shaped like flames flanked the tiny altar. Kham gripped the crystal sphere at the bottom of the right sconce and turned it to the left, then pulled the flames-shaped shade towards her. With a quiet hiss, the wall behind the altar slid inward and rotated sideways, revealing a secret doorway.

Inside, blue flames flickered in sconces just like the ones flanking the altar. The cool light illuminated the smooth, seamless blue-white walls of a round tunnel carved through solid ice. A puff of cold air flowed out of the tunnel into the warmer air of the private chapel. It riffled through Kham’s hair and bathed her face with dry coolness.

Kham took a fortifying breath and stepped into the tunnel.

Without the sun’s power to warm her, the icy chill seeped quickly into her body as she walked. Her flesh pebbled, hairs raising on her arms. Her bare feet went numb, then began to burn, but she continued, steadily placing one foot before the other. The tunnel went straight back for about a hundred yards, then curved sharply to the left.

Kham made the turn and nearly fell over the body sprawled across the tunnel floor. She recognized the younger of the two priestesses. Someone must have pierced her with Thorgyll’s spear because her body was frozen solid.

So much for the assumption there’d been no foul play.

Khamsin whispered a prayer for the slain priestess, then stepped around her body to approach what looked like a sheet of glass covering the tunnel. As she neared, she realized the glass was a steady, falling sheet of crystal-clear water.

Kham hung her robe beside two others, braced herself, and stepped naked into the wall of water.

The goddess tests all who attempt to enter her domain. Whatever you do, do not scream and do not run. If you panic, you die. Galacia’s dire warning made perfect sense now. Just keep silent and keep moving.

It was all Kham could do not to run. The cold was so intense, she could swear her flesh was being sliced off her bones. Not screaming was easier. She had no breath left in her lungs to make a sound. She forced herself forward, pushing her body through the falling water.

After what seemed like a lifetime, she passed through the icy veil to the open tunnel on the other side. There, the cold air of the tunnel actually felt warm against her skin. Kham continued shuffling forward until she felt a rough, woven mat beneath her numb feet. Finally, it was safe to stop.

To the left, shelves had been carved from the ice, and several pairs of white leather boots with spiked soles had been laid out in a neat row on one of the shelves. Folded, white, fur-lined robes were stacked on another. Khamsin slipped on one of the robes, tying the wraparound sashes at her waist and pulling the fur-lined hood up around her face, then she stepped into the pair of shoes closest to her size and laced them tight. The clothes were much warmer than the thin robe from the purification room, and the spikes on the bottom of the boots gripped the ice when she stepped off the mat, enabling her to walk down the next, descending stretch of icy tunnel.

This part of the tunnel went on forever, long and steep enough to make her knees and thighs ache well before she reached the bottom. It didn’t take long to lose sight of the shimmering wall of water and the landing, then there was only endless, descending blue-white ice around her, broken intermittently by the occasional sconce burning its eerie, flickering blue flame. She began counting the sconces to give herself some measure of passing time.

One hundred sixty-five sconces later, the tunnel leveled off and opened to a chamber deep within the glacier on the other side of the mountain.

Khamsin thought she knew what to expect. Galacia had said there was an ice palace, like the one Wynter had taken her to during the Festival of Wyrn. Well, it was a palace, and it was made of ice. But that was where all similarities to the wintry delight she’d visited in the Craig both began and ended. The sheer enormity of what lay hidden in the glacier beneath Wyrn’s temple defied description.

The Palace of Wyrn lay situated in a cavern so large it could fit the whole of Gildenheim with room to spare. Massive columns—each wide enough that ten grown Wintermen standing fingertip to fingertip would barely circle them—soared a hundred feet into the air, holding aloft a mighty pediment carved with the bas-relief figures of Wyrn and her once-mortal god-husband Rorjak. Rearing, fifty-foot snowbears stood guard at the base of the broad steps leading into the palace. An ice garden almost as beautiful as the one Wynter had created in his Atrium bordered a wide path that led to the palace . . . all built on a giant’s scale.

Khamsin was acutely aware of her own insignificance as she crossed the distance from the tunnel opening to the palace steps. Those steps were as massive as the rest of the palace, each riser easily five feet tall, but in the center, a series of smaller, mortal-sized steps carved into the giant treads allowed her to scale the stairway with relative ease.

At the top, a colonnaded exterior gave way to an enormous, open room dominated by two massive thrones, each holding a gigantic seated figure carved of pure ice. Wyrn, resplendent in flowing robes and wearing a crown of giant sparkling snowflakes. And Rorjak, her mortal love turned god, whose spiky, ring-of-icicles crown struck Khamsin as an eerie premonition of things to come.

A number of passages led from the throne room, but Kham headed straight for the arched, pillared opening at the back. She passed through several more chambers, each more magnificent than the last, but spared the glittering beauty little more than a passing glance. She was on a mission to save the man she loved, and all the greatest wonders of the world could not have tempted her from her path.

At last, she reached the final room at the rear of the palace. The body of the second priestess, frozen like the first, lay sprawled near the threshold. Kham whispered an apology and stepped around the woman to enter the great, domed rotunda.

All around the perimeter of the rotunda, life-sized statues of male and female warriors stood sentry in columned bays. Unlike the other statues in this place or the frozen bodies of the priestesses, each of these sculptures appeared lifelike, as if living people had been posed on their pedestals and encased in a layer of clear ice. Each sported a fabulous jeweled weapon worth a king’s ransom. Swords, staves, bows, pikes, shields: treasures to distract would-be thieves from the real treasure in the room, bait for those fool enough to try stealing from a god.

Don’t touch anything. The statues are enchanted and will defend what rests here.

At the center of the room, rimmed in a circle of ice blocks, lay what looked like a pool of black oil eight feet in diameter.

This was it. What she’d come for.

Khamsin’s nerves jangled as she approached the Ice Heart. The contents of the well were dark and unfathomable, the surface still as glass and glossy enough to see her reflection.

She’d never given much thought to the gods. Oh, she made her devotions to them, of course, but she’d never truly considered the idea that the gods had once walked amongst the people of Mystral, that the tales of their exploits had been true.

Until now.

The gods were real—their tales were true—and the existence of this well of dark power proved it.

And somewhere at the bottom of that black pool—the distilled essence of a corrupt god—lay the legendary sword of Roland Soldeus. She could sense its presence now, as if some part of the sun had broken off and fallen into the well.

Now, she just had to retrieve it.

Despite being buried deep within the heart of a glacier, warmth danced at her fingertips as her power rose in response to Blazing’s proximity. Laci’s hopes about Kham’s ability to withstand the frigid depths of the Ice Heart might actually have merit.

You are a Summerlander, your weathergift one of the strongest in centuries. I’m hoping that gift will allow you to survive the Ice Heart.

A sound, like crackling ice, and a flash of movement in her peripheral vision made Khamsin spin around. Searing pain sliced across her upper arm as the spear aimed at her unprotected back ripped through her furred robe and scored a deep furrow on her arm. Her arm fell limp to her side, paralyzed. Indescribable cold screamed along every nerve ending.

“What the—?” Kham gaped as she got her first look at her attacker. One of the statues had stepped off its pedestal and lunged at her. This one was a woman, tall with long, white hair and blue-white skin. Her eyes were pale and colorless, but just looking at them drained the warmth from Khamsin’s skin. She advanced on Khamsin, a long white spear clutched menacingly in her frozen hands. With each measured step, the ice coating her skin cracked and fell away in a thousand tiny flakes, then re-formed almost instantly.

“But I didn’t touch anything!” Kham protested. The ice woman clearly didn’t care. She jabbed her spear, and only Kham’s swift reflexes spared her an impaling. As it was, the spear pierced the sleeve of Kham’s robe and froze it solid. Kham’s eyes widened. “Wait, is that one of Thorgyll’s spears?”

The woman lunged, moving far swifter than a block of ice should, aiming a lethal blow at the center of Khamsin’s chest.

Kham didn’t dare let that spear touch her again. She flung herself backward, bending like one of Vera Sola’s famed fire-stick dancers ducking beneath a flaming horizontal pole. The white spear missed Kham’s chest but scored a burning line across her jaw as momentum carried her back up. The side of her face went numb, then flamed with pain. She staggered back, stumbling against the blocks of ice surrounding Ice Heart. Tipped off-balance, Khamsin fell backward into the well.

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.

“Wyrn and Helos protect me.” Kham stared at the sword in her hand. Bright and golden in hue, with a clear, brilliant white diamond the size of a goose egg in its hilt, the Sword of Roland was everything the legends had foretold.

And now, many thousands of years after Roland’s death, Khamsin Coruscate Atrialan held the same sword the god Helos had forged for her legendary ancestor and prayed the sword would grant her the power to save her Winter-born love, just as Roland had saved his.

Though, hopefully, with a happier outcome.

He walked through a field of fresh snow. The world was white, crisp, pristine. The sky a blue so deep and rich it dazzled him.

The sun shone high in the sky. A bright, golden white globe.

All around, the trees grew tall and strong, their evergreen branches laden with snow.

He moved silently through the powdery snow. It swirled around his calves, deep enough that he could not see his feet when he walked but so powdery, it was like walking through fog.

Ahead, on the crest of a small hill, stood a large snow wolf. Its fur riffled in the breeze. The wolf howled.

The call caught at a place deep inside him, singing to him in wordless communication, urging him to follow. He walked towards the wolf.

The snow grew thicker. It was up to his knees now. Then up to his thighs. His waist.

The wolf was just ahead now. Its call wrapped around Wynter like a fisherman’s net, hauling him closer and closer still.

The snow had reached his chest.

More wolves began to howl. Their howl was a song of warning, sharp and fearful, made up of many voices. He glanced to his left and right, then behind him. Dozens of wolves had gathered on the surrounding peaks. All were barking, howling, baying at him.

He turned back to the wolf he was walking towards.

The snow was shoulder deep now.

The wolf on the hill turned with shocking swiftness.

Only it wasn’t a wolf. It was a garm.

Malevolent red eyes gleamed. Rows of sharp, pointed teeth gaped in a ferocious snarl. Past the garm, down in the valley on the other side of the hill, he caught a glimpse of a mighty army. Frost Giants. Garm. Ice thralls. They looked up at him and roared.

The garm shrieked, and a cloud of blue vapor billowed forth.

Wynter shot up out of bed, abruptly and completely awake. The bandage covering his eyes was still tied around his head. He reached up to rip it off.

He was sitting on a wooden table by the hearth in one of the hunting cabins that scattered the mountains of Wintercraig.

At his sudden movement, several guards and Galacia Frey came running. Galacia held one of Thorgyll’s spears, ready to strike.

Wynter held up his hands. “It’s me. It’s still me.”

But he wasn’t so sure. His chest felt tight and cold. As if everything inside had turned to solid ice.

“Get Valik,” Laci instructed one of the guard. The man nodded and sprinted for the door.

“What happened?” Wyn asked. “Where are we?” He glanced down at his body, examining the bandages around his waist, realized that whatever was beneath those wrappings hurt like a Feury.

Quickly, Galacia filled him in. She told him about the Great Hunt. How he’d followed the garm track and gotten separated from the rest of the hunters. That the tracks had led him to Khamsin, and between them, they’d killed at least two garm. That he’d been hovering on the brink of death or worse ever since.

As Laci spoke, the memories came tumbling back.

“Four,” he said. “It was four garm. I only managed to kill two of them.” He’d fallen after dispatching the second, leaving Khamsin to face the remaining two on her own. Alone and injured.

Khamsin.

“Where’s my wife?” He grabbed the edges of the table, bracing himself for the worst. “Laci, where’s Khamsin?”

“She’s safe, Wyn. She’s fine. You need to calm down. Now.”

Laci hadn’t lowered the spear. Her body was taut as a bowstring, her blue gaze watchful and unwavering. The eyes of a hunter, ready to strike. She smelled of fear, but her expression and posture exuded pure, grim resolve.

That’s when he realized the wood around his fingers had turned to solid ice.

Wyrn save him. He closed his eyes and tried to push back the glacier running through his veins. He stood on the lip of a precipice. One fraction further—or one crack in the crumbling ground beneath his feet—and he would fall, tumbling into ruin and taking the world with him.

Not today. Not yet. Wintercraig needed him strong enough to defend them. Save Wintercraig first.

He could feel the heat of the fire against his back. He concentrated on that, willing the warmth to infuse his flesh and melt the ice so hungry to claim him.

Where was Khamsin? She could have pushed back the ice with a single touch.

Lacking her presence, he filled the darkness behind his closed eyes with his memories of her face, her smile, her laughter, the silver flash of her eyes when she was angry. The feel of her skin, so warm and soft, smelling of jasmine and wildness, so exotically dark against his own golden flesh. The reassuring warmth of her body nestled against him through the long, dark hours of the Craig’s winter nights.

The tightness of his chest had loosened. He drew a breath, then another. The fingers curled so tight around the tabletop relaxed. Moisture gathered as the frozen wood began to melt. He took another, longer breath, and opened his eyes.

Laci was still poised to strike, and Valik had just come in from outside. Wynter looked around the cabin. That woman from Summerlea—the spy, Khamsin’s nurse, what was her name? Tildavera Greenleaf—stood beside a table covered with all manner of herbs and pharmacopeia. Half a dozen armored White Guard were also in the room, looking as wary and watchful as Laci. But the face he wanted to see most was still nowhere to be found.

“Where is Khamsin?” he asked.

“I sent her to Gildenheim with some of the White Guard.” Laci must have realized that the immediate danger had passed because some of the tension faded from her body. She straightened from her crouch, and the tip of her spear lowered a few inches. “So it’s true, what Khamsin said. She really did incinerate two garm with her lightning.”

Wyn frowned. After he fell to the garm, everything got hazy at best. But he remembered the smell of lightning and garm vapors. And he remembered sight of his wife running, ropes of lightning shooting down from the storm-tossed heavens, finding her unerringly. Her body, lifting up in the air, lit from within. Two garm close on her heels. The devastation of knowing he’d failed her.

“I . . .” He remembered the lightning crashing so close it shook the ground. One deafening crack after another. The smell of scorched flesh. “Yes, she did. She killed them both. With no weapon but her weathergift.” He looked up at Laci. “She survived? The garm didn’t kill her?”

“She survived,” Laci said. “She burned them until there was nothing left, which is why some of us didn’t believe her at first.” Laci cast a disgusted glance at Valik, who had just joined them.

“How are you feeling?” Valik’s gaze raked Wynter from head to toe. “You look like Hel.”

Wyn gave a choked laugh, then groaned when pain streaked across his belly. “Always full of compliments, you are.”

“Thought we’d lost you a time or two. Or four.” There was a look in Valik’s eyes Wyn had never seen before. And a shimmer of betraying brightness.

“I’m fine.” For now. Wyn rubbed his chest. The ice there had softened, but it was far from gone. If he put his hand in Laci’s flame right now, the fire would probably remain bright and blue. “How long have I been here?”

“Since the hunt? A week. But we don’t have the luxury of staying much longer. Coruscate is making his move.” Valik brought Wynter up to speed. “We’ve only got days—a week at most—before they reach Gildenheim.”

“We’ve got less time and more trouble than that,” Wynter said. “The Ice King’s army has gathered.”

“What?” Valik stared at him in shock. “How is that even possible? Rorjak may be close, but you’re still you. We’d know if you weren’t.”

“I don’t know how. But I know that they’ve gathered. And they know where I am. They’re on the way here.”