Cursed by Ice

D
AVINE
(Dah-vēn)

D
ETHAN
(Dē-than)

I
SAELLE
(Is-ah-el)

J
ONA
(Jō-nah)

S
ARIELLE
(Sah-rē-el)

V
INQUA
(Vin-kwah)

WRENA
(wren-yah)

PROLOGUE

Garreth stumbled and fell for what had to be the thousandth time since this journey had begun. His brothers, each a mighty warrior in his own stead, had been forging the way up the mountain for hours, more determined than ever to reach their goal. But Garreth … He was frozen through, and a horrible sense of foreboding had settled on him. Finally he voiced aloud what he had been thinking for the past few hours.

“This mission is cursed,” he said, falling to his knees in the deep, hard snow, the painful cracking of his skin ripping around his mouth with every spoken word. His breath clouded hard upon the air, and his moustache and beard were laden with icicles. The air was so thin up on that high mountain point that it was a wonder he could breathe at all. Several of his fingers were turning black, and he had already lost some of his toes. All for what? For the promise of a fantastical prize that could easily not even exist.

His brothers were convinced it existed. They were convinced it was atop this very mountain. They had only a little farther to go, they said. All Garreth knew was that if they didn’t find the font of immortality at the top of this mountain, he was going to die upon it. He
was already maimed by this frigid venture; his hands had been ruined, and he would never swing a sword again. And since his sword was how he made his way in the world, he didn’t know what he would do. He was a fighter. A man of honor who fought for those who could not fight for themselves. He may not be the golden warrior his brothers Maxum and Jaykun were or the great conqueror his eldest brother, Dethan, was, but he held his own in a fight and his sword was highly valued. He did not sell his sword as Maxum did and he did not sit at Dethan’s right hand as Jaykun did, but he chose the noblest adventures out there to be found.

This was not a noble venture. It was a selfish one. His brothers were cheating the gods, seeking a shortcut to immortality. They sought the waters of a magical fountain that would give them health and longevity for the rest of time.

He had come with them only after much cajoling, as brothers were wont to do to their youngest sibling. He had thought the mission to be pure folly and had long since been convinced of it. He had been on many noble quests in his young lifetime, but never for his own selfish ends. He should have known better.

“Come, brother. Don’t be such a woman. Get up and move on. We are almost there,” Dethan said, coming to take his arm and pull him up out of the snow. But Garreth’s legs would not work. They were two frozen stumps that he could no longer feel or force to his command.

In the end, the blackness rushed up on him so suddenly that, in spite of Dethan’s hands on him, he fell forward, his face planting in the snow as if all that was needed was a spring sun to grow a flowering bush in the spot.

The next thing Garreth was aware of was the feel of being jogged hard against a body, his head hanging in
the open air as he swung about. One of his brothers had thrown him over his shoulder. A brother who was now running across the frozen mountaintop. Suddenly Garreth was pitched onto the ground, his body so cold he didn’t even feel the ice and snow he was sure was seeping into his clothing. He was sick and dizzy, unable to breathe.

“Look, brother!” Dethan called excitedly. “We have found it! The fountain! It will restore you!” Dethan hurried to take a drinking horn from his pack and filled it with water from a jeweled fountain, which flowed freely in spite of the frigid temperatures. The gems encrusting it were large and fine, glittering in the glaring sun.

Dethan could have drunk from the horn first, but all he was concerned with was Garreth’s well-being. It was so very much like his brother, to care for him first, above all others. Dethan had raised him from boyhood to a man after their parents had died, orphaning them all at very young ages. Dethan had always felt responsible for him, often funding his expeditions and ventures of honor.

And yet Garreth questioned the wisdom of what they were doing. He warned his brothers one last time that he had an ill feeling about this. That perhaps it was better to freeze to death on that mountain than to flirt dangerously with the fountain of the gods.

His brothers ignored him.

When Dethan pressed the cup on him, he had no strength to fight him. The water flowed past his cracked lips and onto his tongue. He could not swallow, so Dethan massaged his throat until the water slid down. It was refreshing at the very least. He knew it was of the gods, else it would not flow so freely in the forsaken place, but would it do what his brothers thought and hoped it would do?

He had his answer almost immediately. His body began to warm from the inside out, as if he had drunk a horn of mulled mead. The warmth spread through his veins with a peaceful perfection. There was no pain, as there had been every night by the fire as he had tried to warm his frozen fingers and toes. He had welcomed that pain when it came, knowing it meant there was still life within those digits. It had not come the last time they had camped.

But now feeling was creeping into his fingers and his toes. He could feel the bitterness of the cold—was still frozen by it, he knew—but sensation was returning.

And that was when the pain hit him. He cried out with a bellow of agony, his body jerking into spasms. His brothers could do nothing to help him, for as soon as he had drunk, they had drunk, and now they too were writhing in agony. He knew his body was changing, that he was never going to be the same, but changing into what? How would he be different?

The pain subsided and a wondrous sensation was left in its place. A sensation of being more alive and healthier than he had ever been before. He leapt to his feet, shaking off the remaining cold from his limbs, and laughed.

And then a mighty clap of thunder rocked the mountain, shaking it to its bedrock. Angry lightning streaked the nearly cloudless sky.

That was when the gods appeared to them.

He knew they were gods because they were much bigger than any mortal man might be. And the goddesses were so beautiful it hurt to look upon their faces. At the forefront was a goddess dressed in a warrior’s armor, with a breasted chest plate and a golden skirt that reached to her knees and no farther. She stepped forward, a golden spear in her hand and a wey flower tucked into her hair behind her ear.

Weysa, the goddess of conflict. He would have known her anywhere. The statue depictions in her temples were wrong, for they could never truly match the pureness and grandness of her beauty, the fierceness of her posture.

“You dare to steal this reward when you have not deserved it in our eyes?” she said in a deep, booming feminine voice. “You dare to do so without permission, without honor? You will pay for your folly, foolish, arrogant worms. You will pay for your immortality with blood and bone and flesh. We cannot take this gift back, but we can see to it you wish you had never dared to think you could push the hands of the gods to your will and your liking.”

And in the next instant his brothers were whisked away, taken from his sight. Suddenly chains sprouted from the icy ground and manacles seized his wrists and ankles, yanking him down to the ice and flat on his back. Hella, the goddess of fate and fortune—a goddess with beautiful blond hair that flowed down her back, her legs, and then onto the ice, where it curled around and around into a golden puddle—moved over to him and bent down to hiss words into his face.

“This is your curse, a curse given to you by the gods. Now you will pay for your insolence, freezing here in this wasteland again and again, within sight of the very fountain that gifted you with immortality. And so your fortune will be until the end of time. I once smiled upon you for your heroic deeds; now I will spit upon you for your hubris.”

And then, before he could say a word in his own defense, the gods were gone, leaving him there to do exactly as Hella had said. To freeze.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Dethan had done it. He had gambled everything and won. He had his mortal life and his beloved wife, and soon they would have their child. He had bargained everything, and now his brother had been freed. Weysa had freed Garreth from his chains on the mountainside, which had seen their folly all those many turnings ago. Now, as Dethan sat in front of the fire, warming the block of ice that was his brother, he tried not to think of the curse that would still follow Garreth for all the rest of his days and to focus instead on the freedom he had been given … the reprieve.