The Winter King (29 page)

Poppy was also told that a Valkyrie’s wings
only emerge when she descends to the mortal realm to acquire a
fallen warrior.

And Winter had
secretly
told her, by
whispering it into her mind, that her magic was behaving now
because Poppy had accepted her place as queen. The only reason the
slowing spell had iced over was because Winter thought it would be
prettier that way.

Poppy had taken it all in stride. She’d just
bested a Valkyrie. She could handle anything.

When she finished healing and they both
finished quenching their thirsts, Poppy and Kristopher transported
out of Valhalla, back to their palace of ice. At once, Poppy could
see that something had changed.

“
Something’s wrong,” she
said after the portal closed behind her.

Kristopher didn’t say anything, but Poppy
could tell he was on high alert. His gaze slowly combed the warded
safe room they’d been transporting from. There was nothing in the
room, no furniture to speak of and no decoration. There were only
the four walls around them and the floor they stood upon, so there
was no obvious, visible sign that anything was different. It was
just a feeling she had.

Using that same instinct she’d used in the
fight against Toril, Poppy made her way to the winding stairs and
began ascending. Half-way to the top, she heard it. It was the same
hissing sound she’d heard just before attempting to take her seat
on the throne.

“
What the –”

“
Stay behind me,”
Kristopher said. He’d come up beside her, and now passed her on the
staircase. Poppy watched him climb. With each step he took,
something about his figure changed. First it was the boots. Then
the jacket disappeared. Then he had a sword strapped to his
back.

By the time he reached the top with her
right behind him, he was in full-on Viking mode, bare from the
waist up other than his sword, tight leather breeches hugging every
deliciously muscled curve from the waist down. She would have given
just about anything at that moment to be able to sit back and enjoy
the view. But unfortunately, the slithering, undulating mass of
snakes just beyond the first step of the hidden passageway drew her
attention instead.

“
Oh my God,” she whispered.
There were thousands of them. They were obviously more of the
Serpent’s children; their brilliantly colored bodies filled the
study two-feet deep. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t
like snakes. In fact it was just the opposite. She
did
like snakes. She
thought they were a little cute with their
kinder schema
– their enormous eyes
and tiny mouths. To her, they looked like anime characters or
babies. But seeing them piled up possibly a million deep was
unsettling on so many fundamental levels, she couldn’t help her
physical reaction. Not only that, she was pretty sure the ones on
the bottom were suffocating or being completely squished by sheer
weight. And she hated cruelty to animals.

Kristopher looked down at the line they
seemed unable to cross. “The wards are keeping them out of the
stairwell. He leaned to the left and craned his neck to see around
the study door and into the hall beyond. “They’re in the hall
too.”

“
So it’s safe to assume
they’re all over the castle.”

Kristopher sighed. “That would be my
guess.”

Right about then, it would have been the
norm to ask “So what do we do?” but the question seemed pointless.
Obviously, he was trying to figure that out. And she was too.

Transport magic would take them throughout
the castle, but they wouldn’t be able to land anywhere. It also
wouldn’t do any good to wrap personal shields around their bodies
since they still wouldn’t be able to push through the snakes
without great effort and without killing a whole lot of them in the
process.

Poppy knew that the only reason they would
bother venturing out of the transportation room anyway would be so
that she could take her throne and gain her queen’s powers before
heading into whatever trouble the Midgard Serpent had waiting for
them. If they couldn’t walk through the throne room or take a seat
on the either of the icy chairs, then leaving this stairwell would
be pointless.

Then again, it seemed to
Poppy that they didn’t
need
to transport into another realm in order to face
something Jormungand had waiting for them; the Serpent had
literally brought it to their doorstep.

“
I think I should try
transporting onto the throne,” she said. If they aimed just right,
she could stand on it or something, and maybe they could protect
her legs from any bites or –

“
I know what you’re
planning, but it won’t work,” Kris told her. “Those teeth out there
will sink through anything, even metal. Some are old enough that
they can bite through magical barriers, like armor spells. And the
poison they carry kills almost instantly.”

Poppy took a deep breath
and ran a hand through her hair. Her fingers caught on a knot, and
pain made her wince as she ripped several strands out at once.
Apparently, she’d made a bit of a mess of herself during that
tousle with the Valkyrie. She wanted a shower right about then. She
would
seriously
love a bath. Especially if Kris joined her in it….

The very beginning embers of an idea sparked
somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind. But she had no time to
fully develop it, as Kristopher turned around and pushed past her
again, heading back down to the warded transportation room.

“
What are you doing?” she
asked.

“
We’ll have to deal with
this at the source,” he told her. “I’m going to face Jormungand. I
would ask you to stay here, but –”

“
But you know that’s
pointless.”

He smiled, and though it was a proud smile,
it was also very tight and didn’t reach his eyes. He was clearly
frightened for her sake. “Please at least stay close and stay
behind me?”

“
You are always telling me
to stay behind you, Kris. What’s up with that?”

“
I’m very proud of my ass,”
he said, and now his smile spread, and a bit of it actually did
touch his eyes.

She shook her head. “Okay, fair enough.” She
descended the stairs and joined him at the center of the room.
“Bring on the snake.”

Kristopher chuckled, and goose bumps covered
Poppy’s arms as warmth rushed through her middle. “I love it when
you talk like that,” he said.

Chapter Forty-Four

They came out of the portal once again in
the center of a forest.

“
If there was this much
forest left on Earth, there wouldn’t be enough room for the
oceans,” Poppy muttered. She’d never seen as many different kinds
of trees as she had in the last few hours of her life. This time,
they were shorter than the Valhallan trees, but the leaves were
purple and red, and the bark was spiked like the outer layer of a
cactus.

“
Stay away from the
needles,” Kris warned. “They’ll put you to sleep.”

“
Right.” She made a mental
note. They turned in a slow circle. “What are we looking
for?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never been here
before. I know of the Slumber Saps from stories that have been told
of them in other realms. But everything else is new. If we’re lucky
enough to find the broken root before we find the Serpent, we can
plant the seed. Otherwise, anything we go up against will have to
be done without –”

The ground shook beneath their boots. Poppy,
completely unprepared for the disruption, toppled to the side.
Kristopher caught her at once, bent and lifted her into his arms.
The ground where she’d been standing the second before split
violently in two.

Kristopher took several long cautionary
steps back, hugging Poppy tight to his chest. Hands clasped firmly
around Kristopher’s neck, Poppy stared dumbfounded as the fissure
continued to spread, widening to reveal a deep darkness
beneath.

The ground stopped shaking. The world grew
still but for the sound of their ragged, nervous breathing.

Then something rose from the crack.

At first, it was a slow reveal of scales and
something that looked like leather stretched between wire. The
scales were gold and white, beautifully iridescent. The leather was
stretched taught, tan where it was thick at the wire, but nearly
transparent at its most extended. They watched it in awe-struck
silence as it continued to climb, emerging and taking shape. It
rose further and further. Up and up.

Then, just when they figured out that the
scales were the side scales of a massive head, and the leather was
the skin of a massive wing, the Midgard Serpent erupted from the
crack in full and shot straight up into the air.

I guess we fight without
the extra strength of the healed root,
Poppy thought. It was a distant thought though, almost
drowned out completely by the insanity of what she was
seeing.

The power with which the
monster took to flight was so strong, the backlash of wind knocked
Kristopher to the ground. They rolled together, Kris being careful
not to smash Poppy’s much smaller body beneath his. He gathered his
wits before she did, and as she came up to her knees, Kris shoved
her backwards
hard
, one hand on each shoulder.

Her head snapped forward and she went flying
to land twenty feet away, where she rolled to a stunned stop. “Stay
out of the way!” she heard him bellow, but the last of his cry was
drowned out by a mighty roar that filled the world with terrifying
sound and got inside her, making even her soul cower in its fleshy
hiding place.

Poppy rolled to her stomach and pushed
herself up on her elbows, but she was definitely stunned. She
looked up, feeling the soreness in her neck from Kristopher’s rough
shove. But when she saw what was in the ground exactly where she’d
been kneeling a few seconds earlier, she understood his sudden
treatment of her.

The ground had been hollowed out where she
had knelt. It looked as though it had been struck by an asteroid; a
massive crater had been carved into the ground, and its edges
crackled with slowly dying fire. Kris had managed to get her out of
the way just in time.

And now he faced off with the Midgard
Serpent, and Poppy found herself staring at a scene that meant
everything in her world. It meant the end of all that was good… or
the saving of it. Her entire future was there, in the mighty figure
of the Winter King and his even mightier enemy, the Midgard
Serpent.

The monster dove at Kris, then he coughed
fireballs at him, then he slashed at him with the length of his
serpentine body, and with each dive and each attack, time slowed
down, giving Poppy a surreal perspective as the Viking warrior
dodged, rolled, cut, sliced, and used the magic of Winter against
his opponent.

Poppy forced herself to
stay where she was on the sidelines. She desperately didn’t want to
be the typical distraction that got a man killed while in battle.
She knew this was not her fight; Kristopher –
Erikk
– really was the
proverbial
Thor
with his hard, frozen weapon in hand, blue eyes sizzling with
electricity, and long blond hair whipping around in a magical
frenzy. This was his battle – until it wasn’t any longer. Pending
that moment, should it come, all she could do was watch.

She’d seen renderings of Jormungand when she
was younger. She’d looked through books her teachers had given her,
and the images she’d studied were indeed impressive. The Serpent
was drawn as a massive sea serpent with spikes running all down its
back, or it was drawn with a head resembling some sort of lizard,
with the spikes splayed out around it like Dracula’s cape. She’d
seen paintings where the scale of it was meant to be so large, each
spike encompassed a mountain range. It had been drawn in every
color of the rainbow, both winged and without wings, in the sea and
in the sky.

And now Poppy knew, gazing
up at the terrible monster who would one day bring about Ragnarok,
that they were
all
right. And they were all wrong.

There was no end to the Serpent. It came out
of the chasm and soared what must have been half a mile high. But
the rest of its long, long body remained in the hole from which it
emerged, hidden from sight. Therefore, there was no telling how
large it actually was. Its body was covered in shimmering scales of
all colors, and as it moved and dove and swung around in its
attempts to strike Kristopher down with its fangs, those scales
shimmered and shifted, changing colors like a crystal moving
through the visible spectrum.

The Serpent definitely had wings. But when
the snake dove for its opponent, the wings pressed against the side
of its body and vanished, blending into the scales like a
chameleon’s skin. She could see how some accounts of the beast
would claim it was wingless and others would insist on the
opposite.

Once the Serpent had made its attack, the
wings emerged to lift it back into the sky. They spanned the length
of a football field on either side…. At least, that was as much of
them as Poppy could see. They disappeared behind the trees blocking
her view, so they might have been much larger. Each wing was
constructed like a giant kite, with a support system of bones or
cartilage that fanned out, six long rods on either side. Between
these poles of support stretched the Serpent’s skin like tanned
leather. This was the only part of the Serpent that was
monochromatic, and when his wings were fully extended, the sun
shone directly through them, proving Poppy’s theory as to why. They
were thin, colorless, and nearly transparent in order to better
blend in with its scales when they were folded in.