The Winter King (55 page)

“So you plunged two kingdoms into war and ran away. Only to come back three years later to start another war. Oh, how proud Roland would be to witness the noble glory of his line.” Every word dripped with acid, and it pleased her to see how it stung.

Falcon spat in the dirt. “All those tales of Roland were myths, Storm. Legends! A tiny kernel of truth romanticized and prettied up for the ages. But this is real life. Real politics. It’s not noble. It’s not glorious. It’s bitter, brutal, and bloody. That’s what thrones are made of. That’s what kings are made of.”

“No.” She’d seen the truth, the story played out in her mind when she’d first gripped the sword. She’d heard the voice of a god, deep and pure, burning through her body like cleansing fire and taking every doubt with it. “Not all thrones. Not all kings. Roland was better than that. My mistake was thinking you were, too.”

Falcon’s lip curled in a sneer. “And is that husband of yours any better? How many innocents died by his hand? He froze an entire kingdom into submission!”

“Because you drove him to war! Yes, innocents died. But their blood is as much on your hands as his. And if you don’t let me take that sword to stop Rorjak from returning, the blood of every last living soul on Mystral will be on your hands as well!”

“Enough!” Falcon leapt to his feet and yanked Blazing from its sheath. The radiant diamond at the hilt’s center blazed with light. He jabbed the sword in her direction.

A hot wind sent her hair flying. Khamsin gasped and ducked, covering her head instinctively to protect against the gout of flame she expected to come pouring out of the blade. When the expected inferno did not engulf her, she risked lowering her arms.

Falcon was standing ten feet away, staring at her with an indecipherable expression on his face. The snow around the camp had completely melted, leaving bare, moist ground and the smell of damp wood and bracken.

“I . . .” Her tongue flicked out to moisten dry, trembling lips. “I thought you were going to—” She broke off. No need to give him ideas.

“What? Shoot fireballs at you?”

Then again, he’d read the same legends of Roland that she had. “Something like that.”

“It seems we’ve both read too many legends, Storm.” Anger and bitterness sharpened each word. He shoved Blazing back in its scabbard and slammed the hilt home.

“Pack up,” he snapped to his men. “Time to get moving.”

“I’m fine! I told you, I’m fine.” Wynter glowered at Tildavera Greenleaf, who had been after him the last half hour to leave the military planning to his second long enough to lie down and let her tend his wounds.

The Summerlea nurse sniffed. “You won’t be fine if you don’t hush and let me do my job. I’ve let you ignore me long enough. Now lie back, be quiet, and let me look at that wound. It won’t take a minute.”

“Gah. You are a tyrant, Tildavera Greenleaf. Has anyone ever told you that?” Just to get her out of his hair, Wyn eased into a chaise and leaned back.

“Many a time,” Tildy answered without rancor. “Always by patients with more stubbornness than sense.” She glanced up to give him a stern look. “And that includes your wife, for as much good as it ever did her.” She pulled up his tunic and made swift work of peeling back the bloodied bandage wrapped around his waist.

Wynter scowled at the back of Tildy’s gray head as she bent over his belly wound to poke and prod at him and smear some sort of pungent ointment on the wound. She sniffed again and rebandaged the wound.

“Well, you’re doing better than you should be, considering all the moving about you’ve been doing. But”—she wagged a finger under his nose when Wyn started to smirk—“you’re still a long way from being healed. One wrong move, and those stitches will pop, and you’ll be in one very unpleasant mess.”

“Just get me to a point where I can put on my armor and mount a horse. I can’t be carried into battle on a sickbed.”

“That’s out of the question for a week at least. If you go to battle before that, you won’t be coming back.”

“If I don’t go to battle before that, none of us will be coming back,” he countered. In a firm tone that brooked no further defiance, he said, “I don’t need your approval to do my duty, Nurse Greenleaf. All I require is that you get me in the best possible shape in the time available.”

Tildy put her hands on her hips. “Have I not been doing exactly that all this time? Did you think I would stop just because I know you’re going to ignore my warnings and do what you want anyways? Which of us raised our Khamsin from the time she was a wee babe? Or do you think
she
was a model patient all those years?”

The laugh slipped past Wyn’s lips before he could stop it. “Point taken. She is
much
more hardheaded than I.”

Tildy harrumphed. “I don’t think I’d go so far as to say
that.
The pair of you seem astonishingly well matched in the stubborn department. There was a time, when she was six . . .”

Telling stories of Khamsin’s youthful exploits was a tactic Tildy employed to keep Wynter calm and resting. He’d discerned her ploy from the start, of course, but he played along because he liked hearing the stories of his wife’s childhood. Khamsin had run her poor nurse ragged—always getting into some sort of mischief or other, never sitting still for long, thwarting every attempt to mold and confine her. Like the storms that answered her call, she was a force of nature, wild and reckless and free. And Wynter wouldn’t have her any other way.

There was a knock on the door, and Valik walked in. Galacia Frey followed close on his heels. Wynter was surprised to see her. She’d taken off without a word last night after receiving a message flown in by a snow eagle.

One look at their grim faces, and Wynter knew their troubles had just increased.

“So, let me get this straight. All this time, you and every High Priestess before you for the last nine hundred years has known the Sword of Roland was at the bottom of the Ice Heart?” Wynter sat at the hunting lodge’s large dining table and tried to keep the freezing power of his Gaze in check. Frost prickled across the wooden tabletop. The pair of them were lucky that the planks of old pine were the only thing frozen at the moment.

“Wyn—”

“And you sent
my pregnant wife
to dive down to the bottom of the Ice Heart—
the most deadly dangerous magic in all of Wintercraig
—to fetch it? Have I got that right?”

“Wyn, you don’t understand—”

“
Is that what you did?
” His fist slammed on the desk, and he half rose from the chair.

Laci blew out an exasperated breath. “Yes! Yes, that’s what I did. That’s exactly what I did, and I would do it again, given the same circumstances.” She flung her arms up. “You were unconscious. There was no certainty you would survive, much less be any use to us in battle, and the Calbernans and Summerlanders were invading. We needed a weapon—and that was the most powerful one I knew of.”

“And now my wife is gone, Ungar and his men are dead, the sword of Roland is gone, the second of Thorgyll’s spears is missing, and the Summerlanders and Calbernans are still invading. Oh, and Rorjak’s army is on the march, too. What were you thinking?”

“We were thinking we could save Wintercraig without losing you!” she spat.

“By sending my wife to retrieve Roland’s Sword from the bottom of the Ice Heart?” Wynter ran both hands through his hair just to keep from wrapping them around Laci’s throat and squeezing tight. He turned a glare on Valik. “And what happened to your suspicious nature? Weren’t you the one telling me all along that Khamsin was in her brother’s service—that she’d betray me the first chance she got?”

“Maybe I should have listened to myself,” Valik muttered. “Maybe that’s exactly what happened.”

“No!”

All three of them turned in surprise as Tildavera Greenleaf burst through the door leading to the lodge’s bedchambers. Clearly, after being dismissed so Valik, Laci, and Wynter could talk in private, Khamsin’s nurse had decided a bit of eavesdropping was in order.

“Whatever you believe, you cannot think Khamsin would betray you. She wouldn’t. Not to her brother, not to anyone else. I know, because I gave her the chance to do exactly that, and she refused.”

Wynter scowled at her. “Explain yourself, Nurse Greenleaf.”

“When they brought me to tend you, I was in communication with Falcon Coruscate. I thought you were planning to kill her at year’s end, so I arranged to bring her to him.” Tildy blurted out all about the birds she’d used to send messages, knocking out everyone with an herb in the evening meal, telling Khamsin to come with her. “But she wouldn’t leave you. And she wouldn’t let me leave without doing everything in my power to save you, either. If she found the sword, the only place she would have brought it was back to you—to defend you. She loves you, for Halla’s sake!”

“Guard!” Wyn called. To the man who answered his summons, he said, “Escort Nurse Greenleaf to the other room and keep her there.”

With a look torn between frustration, irritation, and despair, Tildy turned and marched out of the room. The door closed behind her.

“Wyn, if she’s right . . .”

“Then Coruscate has the sword, and he has my queen,” Wyn summed up grimly.

“He must have solved the Book of Riddles,” Galacia murmured. “If he’s got that sword . . .”

“Then we are lost.” Wynter sank back in his chair. Despair weighted him down. When the only threat was Coruscate and the Calbernans, victory had been questionable. Wynter had resigned himself to giving his life to protect his people. But now with Roland’s sword in play and the army of the Ice King on the march, Wintercraig was hopelessly outnumbered and woefully underequipped.

“Maybe not quite yet,” Valik suggested. “Roland’s sword is supposed to be the deadliest weapon in the history of all Mystral, right?”

“That’s what the legends say,” Galacia acknowledged. “And considering that without it, the Ice Heart has turned back into an indestructible block of ice, I’m inclined to believe them.”

“And you believe it might be effective against the Ice King’s army?” Valik prompted.

She hesitated. “I don’t know. When I sent Khamsin to get the sword, I was only thinking about using it to repel the invaders since Wynter was so close to turning.” She sent an apologetic glance Wynter’s way. “But I suppose, considering the effect that it had on the Ice Heart, it might be effective against Rorjak’s army.”

“Then why not use that to our advantage?” Valik said.

Wynter leaned forward. “What are you thinking?”

“You said Rorjak’s army could sense your presence right? That they were coming for you?”

“Yes.”

“So, we use that. We use you as bait to lead Rorjak’s army straight to Coruscate. Kill two birds with one arrow.”

“That could work,” Galacia said.

“Or Rorjak could just turn Coruscate’s army into ice thralls and double the size of his fighting force in a matter of minutes,” Wynter pointed out.

A little of the wind left Valik’s sails. “There is that,” he agreed. “But do you have a better idea?”

Wynter wished he did. “No.”

The three of them regarded each other in grim silence.

Valik was the first to break the silence. “So what do we do, Wyn? What’s your call?”

Wynter took a deep breath. “Send word to Gildenheim. I want every eye in the forest looking for Coruscate and his men. We’re going to lead Rorjak’s army to the invaders. And along the way, we’re going to come up with a plan to rescue my wife.”

For the next several hours, as she rode in fully hooded darkness, Khamsin replayed the same scene over and over in her mind. Falcon pulling the sword. The diamond in Blazing’s hilt flaring to life. The blast of heat that had knocked her back and melted every ounce of snow and ice near Falcon.

Clearly, he’d called on the power of the sword. Just as clearly, he’d released that power at her.

So why was she still alive?

A little flicker of hope flared in her heart as she recalled the angry way he resheathed Roland’s sword, and said, “It seems we’ve both read too many legends, Storm.” Maybe Falcon wasn’t quite as ruthless as he tried to appear. Maybe
that’s
what he’d been angry about—that for all his talk, he didn’t have it in him to kill her. Or maybe he’d been mad because remembering their hours of discussion about Roland, all the legends of his heroic tales, had reminded him of the vital aspects of his character he’d sacrificed on the altar of ambition.

Maybe she was getting through to him after all.

Kham hugged that possibility to her heart. He’d loved her once. She was sure of it. Surely some part of the brother she’d idolized still existed inside him. If she could reach
that
Falcon, make him listen, make him understand what was at stake, maybe there was still a chance to save Wynter.

But the next time they stopped, her brother was no longer with them.

“Where is Prince Falcon?” she asked, but the only answer she received was a flask of water shoved in her face and a curt command to “Drink and be quiet, or the hood goes back on.”

Anger flared at the man’s impertinent rudeness. Prisoner she might be, but she was still Queen of the Craig and a princess of Summerlea. Kham narrowed her eyes and considered setting a fire in the seat of the man’s pants.
That
would certainly teach him to mind his manners when dealing with an Heir of the Rose. The thought of it made her smile.

“What’s so funny, princess?”

Kham’s smile winked out. She cast a withering glare upon the scarred, mean-eyed Summerlander standing to her right. “Your Grace.”

“What?”

“The proper form of address when speaking to a queen of Wintercraig is ‘Your Grace.’ ” Each clearly enunciated word ended with a sharp clip.

“How’s about I give you the proper form of my fist right across that mouth of yours?”

She smiled, eyes flaring liquid silver. “Oh, by all means, do try.”

“Leave off, Blackwood,” another Summerlander advised. “Get her mad enough, and that one will fry your balls like eggs on a griddle.”

Blackwood shook his fist under her nose. “Saved for now,” he muttered, adding with a sneer, “
Your Grace.
”