The Winter King (8 page)

Now, she was four portals away and still
moving at the speed of light through different dimensions,
crisscrossing her path as she went. She was not only hoping it
would slow her pursuer down, but that the obtuse use of magic would
draw the attention she was normally hoping to avoid. It was like
someone who desperately needed a cop choosing to go over the speed
limit on purpose for once just to get one to follow them.

She didn’t have the inherent ability to
transport like most of the magic users she knew. She was human, and
had to cast a spell to do it. Transport magic was powerful. It was
sure to get noticed. She just hoped whoever noticed it was on her
side.

Poppy saw the exit coming up ahead, a bright
circle of light surrounding the darkness of a way out. She bent her
legs, getting ready for the impact, and jumped when it came close
enough. But she realized, shortly after jumping, she needn’t have
been so careful. What she needed, instead, was snow boots.

At least two feet of snow met her impact as
she exited the portal. She dropped and rolled, picking up stray
flakes as she moved, like a building snowball. When she got to her
feet again, she stood still and looked around, her eyes growing
wider by the second.

“
What… the… hell?” She had
been trying to wind up in the study that she, Violet, and Dahlia
shared for magic lessons with Lalura. She had
not
been trying to wind up knee-deep
in fluffy, white snow on a vast, seemingly endless plain of
white.

The fear that had already been riding low
through her body ratcheted up several notches, and her heart began
pounding. She was lost. In the snow. And she had no idea at all how
she’d gotten here.

Orange-pink rays of newborn sunlight
shimmered on the snow top, forming rainbows of crystallized water
that bedazzled blindingly. Despite her sudden confusing situation,
Poppy found herself transfixed by them. But something about the
reflected sunlight struck her as odd. When she realized what it
was, her eyes widened again.

The sun was just barely coming up over the
horizon, and that shouldn’t have been the case. When she’d left her
apartment, it was barely into night, no later than eight or nine.
How long had she spent in the portals? Had she somehow skipped
time? Or – her fear thrummed hard and spiky at the thought – could
she have slipped into another dimension altogether?

She swallowed hard and turned a slow circle,
leaving an impression beneath her boots as she did. She looked
down, thinking about her feet suddenly, and it occurred to her that
they weren’t cold. She was two feet in snow on a plane of ice and
her feet, in their lace-up combat boots, weren’t even slightly
uncomfortable.

There was a slight wind; it moved her hair
around her face. It wasn’t wild, but it was definitely there,
caressing her cheek and sliding some of the snow dust across the
top of the field of ice. Yet, she wasn’t cold. Not at all. No part
of her felt uncomfortable.

“
This isn’t possible.” Now
she was
really
scared. Was she dead? Unconscious and dreaming? Had something
happened just after she’d cast the transport spell and she’d never
made it out of her apartment at all? Had that guy – Kristopher –
actually caught up with her and done her in?

The edges of panic tickled at her, its
greasy, prickly fingers scraping the tips of her nerve endings with
foreboding malice. She began to feel queasy, and a little dizzy,
and she realized that her chest was tight. Panic attacks were
something she’d unfortunately experienced in the past. Sensitivity
to the environment around her tended to bring more than empathy for
her fellow man. It brought things like migraines and anxiety along
with it too. Little extra surprises that were the “curse” of the
“gift” of being a not-all-bad human being.

Poppy felt that rising inside her now, but
she recognized it for what it was, and rather than stand there in
the snow that wasn’t cold and allow it to consume her, she closed
her eyes and turned her attention outward. Not to the snow – but to
the multiverse. Slowly, she began to mouth the words to yet another
transport spell. She could feel a drain on her already taxed
magical resources, but this one was less complicated than the ones
she’d cast before, and if it worked, it would simply take her back
to her apartment. No one would expect her to go right back to the
place she’d left.

Once there, she could call Lalura again, or
try to get ahold of Pi by starting a fire in the hearth. She would
figure it out. First things first. “Okay,” she said aloud, eyes
shut tight, power thrumming through her. “Take me home.”

Chapter Eleven

793 AD, North Sea off the coast of northwest
Norway

From the time they were babes, Erikk’s
people learned to read the sea. The body of water was a story
waiting to be told, and all it needed was to tell it to someone who
understood its language. Erikk understood it all too well. Right
now, the story was telling him that he shouldn’t be on the water.
It was telling him that he was probably going to die on it. Or
under it, rather.

The sky had turned wrong in the space of
mere moments. It was a sky filled with impending fury. That was the
only real way to describe a set of clouds and color that looked
like this. It had grown dark, but not a warm dark like that before
a peacefully flurry. It was not the dark of true night, as that was
still a ways off, even here. And it was not the dark that brings
with it the purple and green strings overhead that his people
called the Northern Lights. This was a sky owned by Ullr. Winter
was coming, and this time around, it was angry.

“
I’m a dead man,” he
muttered. He was ill. The draught that Jorunn had given him roiled
in his belly. He knew it was keeping him alive, but medicine was
always a bitter thing. He felt it bring warmth to his heart, and
sickness to his gut.

Bjarke’s longboats were nowhere in sight.
Their head start must have been substantial, and Erikk had been a
proud fool to come after him believing there was anything he could
to stop a man so murderously intent on success, he’d poisoned the
chief’s entire family. All but Ylva. Whom he planned to marry.

“
Over my dead body,” Erikk
hissed as if he hadn’t just whined over that particular dilemma
only moments earlier.

The boat lurched on a new wave, and Erikk
turned to look out over the stretching sea. It was becoming choppy,
disturbed. In the distance, the line of the horizon was broken into
parallels. He squinted at it, hoping he was not actually seeing
what he was seeing.

But he was. There were parallel lines
because the horizon was split in two. One line for the bottom of a
wave.

One for the top.

“
Oh, Magni,” he whispered,
as the reckoning came over him. “Give me strength.”

There was no way he would
survive the wave. It would smash his small boat to splinters. If he
remained within the boat, he would be taken out right along with
it, probably speared through by one of the wooden shards, or
crushed by the hull or the mere weight of the wave. His only hope
of surviving… was to get into the water.
Deep
into the water.

He would need to dive down far enough that
the wave would ride far overhead, sparing him its watery death. He
would need to hold his breath for some time. The water was cold.
The shock of it would increase his heartrate, which would cause him
to go through his air faster. He knew this from experience. The
pull of the tide would throw him about like one of Ylva’s seal skin
dolls. He might have limbs torn from his body, and he might hit the
bottom.

But it’s my only
hope.
He could merely pray – to Odin or
Modi or Ullr, to whoever would listen – that whatever practice his
father had forced him to endure in his younger years would now pay
off.

Erikk hastily gathered the bottles and
pouches Jorunn had tossed into the boat and shoved them into the
sewn pockets of Ronald’s furs. Then he climbed out of the hull of
the small boat and balanced himself on the carved wood bench that
stretched across its girth. He tried not to think about Ylva, tried
not to think about what he would do if he even survived out here in
the middle of the ocean with no boat and no supplies and land miles
away. He tried not to wonder whether his parents had come out of
their poisonous sleep or how far Bjarke had gone, or how much the
water was going to hurt as he shoved downward through it. He tried
not to think of anything but slowing his heart, breathing deeply,
and timing everything just right.

Beneath his boat, the water
began to pull outward to sea.
This is
it
, Erikk thought. The tidal wave was
gathering momentum, sucking the ocean into itself like a hungry
beast. He was out of time.

He took a very deep breath, filling his
lungs to the point of pain. Then he let the same breath out as
slowly as he could with his mind spinning, making sure to push out
every last bit of old air from his lungs. When he was empty, he
inhaled carefully and deeply, filling the shadowy corners of his
insides with the air that was going to have to see him through this
ordeal. It would either give him life, or it would be the last
breath he ever took. He made it count.

Then, with one last glance at the
approaching doom that had now grown like a storm cloud on the
water, Erikk jumped off the boat. The water hit his face like a
cold slap, and his reflex was to gasp, to intake breath. He
squelched the instinct and shoved downward. The furs on his body
caused drag, making his work harder, but if he survived this dive,
he would need the furs later, so he kept them on.

The cold spread, seeping rapidly through his
clothing and into his skin, then into his muscle, and finally into
his very bones and the joints that held them together. An ache
settled at every one of them, rebelling against the temperature in
the water. Already, he yearned to release the air he held and draw
more in. But he wasn’t deep enough, and the pain had only
begun.

He knew the more he used his muscles, the
faster his air would run out, so he allocated just what he needed,
swimming downward and westward as quickly as he could without
exhausting himself. Once his ears had popped several times and he
felt he’d gone far enough, he paused, glanced up, and watched the
very distant, very dim light far overhead. He began to count. At
count twenty-seven, a darkness began to creep over the faint
remaining light.

Impossibly, the water turned colder around
him. His lungs pulsed, his heart quickening behind them, sped on by
spiking fear. He strained to look up, but as the sea around him
turned dark and the tide pulling on him grew stronger, he lost
track of what was up and what was down. The cold water stung,
rushed past, sucked out – and then hit him like a rock, pounding
into his chest and face like a frost giant’s fist.

Erikk knew he couldn’t cry out. He knew if
he did, it would be over. But the pain of the ocean’s first angry
assault strengthened, becoming unbearable just as the sea drew back
and came in for another attack. It punched him again, this time in
the side, and the air he had struggled so hard to hold was brutally
knocked from his lungs.

Rather than the wail of agony he longed to
release, his voice was expelled in a gurgling gasp. Erikk’s eyes
widened, terror gripping him. He felt the sea bed scrape along his
knees and knuckles, and knew the weight of the sea had thrown him
to the ground, as he’d feared. He needed to swim to the surface for
more air – but it was now too far.

I won’t make it.

This really was it. He would never see Ylva
again, and he wasn’t even going to join his grandfather in
Valhalla, for he was not dying in battle. Did Valkyrie even come
for a man at the bottom of the sea?

He was thinking odd thoughts, finding a
comfortable delirium at the end of his pain. But he still hadn’t
inhaled. He had yet to draw in that killing mouthful of water. The
tempest roared in his skull, his heart pounded in his throat, and
his eardrums were bleeding, he knew it. But he could not –would not
– inhale.

There are all kinds of battle, Erikk.

He heard his grandfather’s
voice in his head now, comforting him from beyond the boundaries of
life and death.
Fight until your final
breath, and you die in battle.

He supposed that was one way of looking at
it. Another was that he was already beginning to lose his mind.
Because even as he was listening to Chief Ohthere in his mind, he’d
apparently begun swimming. He came into this awareness with a
terrible start that nearly broke his surface-bound stride. Not only
had he continued to hold his breath, and not only had he made it
through the ocean’s brutal attacks with life and limb intact, he’d
actually begun swimming upward.

He overcame his initial shocking
realization, understood that he’d been in his head because he’d
simply been trying to escape the pain, and he kept moving up. His
ears screamed. His heart pounded. He felt his chest would explode,
for certain. Any moment now. He had to breathe. Any moment
now….

Any… moment….

Oh gods!

Like a revelation, his head broke the
surface. He inhaled sharply, and cold, clean air slammed into his
lungs. It hurt like a knife, sharp and severe, and for just a
moment, as he coughed and ached and thrashed in the water, he
wondered if he might die after all. But then his lungs adjusted,
and the air filled him, and his raw, aching chest settled into a
rhythm it remembered and understood.

His eyes adjusted to the lack of salted wet
and the new, dimmer light of early afternoon. As soon as he could
see clearly, he spun in the water, looking for any sign of the wave
or the damage it must have caused, fragments of his boat –
anything.