The Winter King

  His eyes flashed up, bright and piercing, burning through the thick layers of her veils. Khamsin froze. Her heart slammed against her ribs. He knew. He’d touched her hand, breathed in her scent, and without the potency of arras to muddle his senses, he’d deciphered the truth in mere seconds.

  His hand shot out. Fingers curled around the corners of her veil and gave a swift yank. The pins holding the veils in place pulled loose. The unanchored layers of cloth slid free and fluttered to the ground. Cool air swirled around Khamsin’s bare head, tugging at the white-streaked curls dislodged by the sudden removal of her veils.

  “The little maid,” he muttered, sounding dazed. The moment of shock didn’t last long. His other hand shot out. He grabbed her by the throat and dragged her close. His eyes flared with ice-bright magic, and frost crackled on every surface of the room, leaving Khamsin and all the Summer King’s court shivering with the icy force of Wynter’s fury.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “And no more lies.” His voice was so cold and throbbing, the chandelier shivered overhead, and several of its frozen crystal drops shattered.

  Khamsin forced herself to lift her chin, forced her eyes to meet his with as much calm as she could muster. “I am the princess Khamsin Coruscate. Your wife.”

  Wynter paced the gleaming, intricately inlaid parquet floor of the luxuriously appointed private parlor Verdan had led them to after Khamsin’s unveiling. All three of the Seasons—Autumn included—stood pale and silent, ringed protectively around the little storm-eyed maid who bore the Rose and claimed she was Wynter’s bride. Verdan stood off to one side, smug and arrogant despite the pallor that testified to the torment he’d suffered last night. Valik guarded the door, silent and watchful. He knew how close his king’s temper was to breaking, and he knew what that would mean.

  Wynter stopped pacing. The sudden cessation of motion left the restless, wild energy of his magic with no outlet. He held himself still, letting the power gather and his anger grow so cold it burned.

  “I offered you peace, Verdan,” he said softly. “You answered with deception.” In a sudden explosion of motion, he spun around and lunged towards the Summer King. Gunterfys whipped from its sheath in single, flashing moment, and the business end of the razor-sharp blade kissed the vulnerable skin right beneath the Summer King’s jaw. “Give me one reason why I should not separate your head from your shoulders right now.”

  “I did not deceive,” Verdan retorted. The edge of his arrogance wilted a little, but he still met Wynter’s cold eyes head-on, without flinching. “You asked for a princess to wife—one of my daughters. I gave you one.”

  “Liar! It’s well-known you only have three daughters.”

  “It’s well-known I have only three? Or only three are well-known?” Verdan countered.

  Wynter’s eyes narrowed. The girl bore the Rose. He couldn’t deny that. He considered trickery—that Verdan had somehow managed to fake the royal mark—but there was no way to fake the surge of energy that sparked whenever Wynter’s Wolf covered the girl’s Rose.

  “A by-blow?” he asked. That would explain why he’d not heard of a fourth princess.

  “I wish she had been. Then, at least, my wife would still be alive.”

  “Father!” Summer and Spring exclaimed in unison. Autumn just curled her arm more tightly around the girl as if to ward off the king’s cruel claim.

  The girl—Wynter’s wife—winced and extracted herself gently from her sisters’ protective clutches. Her chin lifted. “King Verdan has four daughters,” she said. “All of us are legitimate heirs to the Summer Throne, though until our wedding last night, he’d only officially recognized my three older sisters. He blames me, you see, for my mother’s death.”

  Though she spoke softly, defiance sparked in her eyes. Wynter noted the pride, too, made obvious by the way she held her small chin so high. The pain, however, was so carefully shuttered he almost missed it.

  “He couldn’t banish me outright,” she continued, “so instead he kept me confined to a remote part of the palace, away from the court, and away from him. Then you came.”

  Images spun in Wynter’s mind like leaves on the wind. His first sight of the girl, standing in the oriel near the Queen’s Bower, garbed in cast-off gowns, as neglected as the tower around her. The way she’d snuck into his room—not a thief, just a girl retrieving her dead mother’s treasures. The gloating and open malice of Verdan’s toady, that Newt woman. The servants who claimed they knew nothing about her.

  The corner of Verdan’s lip pulled up in a sneer. “You wanted a bride, Winter King. Well, now you have one. And may she deliver upon your House the same plague of misfortune and heartache she’s brought to mine.”

  Wynter stepped back and sheathed Gunterfys before the urge to slay Verdan overcame reason. Though his bride was not the Season he’d come for, the terms of the peace had still been met. He would not be the first to break them, no matter how strong the temptation.

  His enemy had outwitted him, he acknowledged grimly. He’d come to claim a beloved daughter, to make Verdan suffer as painful a loss as Wynter had when Garrick was slain. Instead, Verdan used the terms of peace as an opportunity to rid himself of a daughter he despised. The wedding was no punishment for Verdan. It was a boon.

  Wynter turned to the girl. The lethal threat of the Ice Gaze burned at the back of his eyes, and he knew he looked frightening. “Come here,” he commanded.

  The Seasons clung to her as if to hold her back and keep her safe from him. Verdan’s dark eyes gleamed with triumph. He was all but gloating. No doubt he and his daughters thought Wynter would kill the girl now. That was the reputation Wyn had spent the last three years earning. Those who deceived him died. Usually by ice, sometimes in a messier fashion.

  But Wynter remembered other things about last night. He remembered the slow, careful way his bride had walked to the altar. The curious smell of poppies and herbs that had made him wonder if she’d sought courage from a potion. The flinch when he’d put a hand at the small of her back and the way she’d refused to surrender her gown in bed—even when the only thing it covered was her back. Most of all, he remembered the blood—too much blood—on the sheets of their bridal bed.

  Khamsin stilled her sisters’ objections and pulled away from their fearful grips to approach him. He learned something else about his wife that moment. She was brave. He could see the paleness beneath her dark Summerlander skin, could smell the fear on her, but still she came to him, step after courageous step.

  “Take off that cape,” he ordered, when she drew near.

  For a moment, he thought she might defy him, but apparently she thought the better of it. She fumbled with the golden frogs at her throat until the fasteners slipped free. Fur-lined wool puddled at her feet.

  “Turn around.”

  She obeyed, then flinched at the snick of metal against scabbard as he unsheathed his dagger. He lifted the blade to the back of her neck and plunged it downward in a single, carefully guided thrust of restrained violence, slitting the ties of her gown and her underlying corset and chemise in one pass. Material parted, and she flinched again as the room temperature plummeted several dangerous degrees.

  With effort, Wynter sheathed his blade, stilled his hands from shaking and pushed aside the fabric to bare her back. He examined the extent of the damage without a word, fingers hovering so close to her skin little bursts of energy arced towards his hands as they passed. From one shoulder to the other, down the length of her spine to the inviting dip just above her buttocks, where her skin disappeared into her skirts, her back was a horror of yellowing bruises, angry red scars, and half-healed wounds.

  His hands withdrew. Without a word—he did not trust himself to speak—he bent to retrieve her cloak from the ground and handed it to her. She tugged it back into place to cover her naked back, refusing to look at him. She’d been beaten like a cur, an
d he could see it shamed her deeply to have him know it.

  He would not allow her even visual retreat. Cupping her face in one broad hand, he forced her with gentle implacability to face him. His anger was a burning flame, one that did not emit heat but rather consumed it. It grew even icier when he saw the mark, high on her left cheek. A shape very familiar to him, having only just seen it on scores of documents.

  The Rose of Summerlea. The king’s royal seal. Not the large, ostentatiously engraved seal of the office of the king, but the smaller simpler version made by Verdan’s signet ring. Burned into her cheek like a brand.

  “I will not ask who beat you,” he said. His thumb brushed across her cheek, over the ridges of the Rose branded into her skin. “As he signed his work, there is no need.” Then his voice dropped to a low whisper for her ears only. “Was marriage to me such a terrible fate that this was the better option?”

  Her eyes shot up to lock with his. Her full lips trembled. “I—”

  His lips thinned, and he stepped back. “Go with your sisters. Put on a different gown. Something loose-fitting that will not damage you further.”

  He waited for his wife and her sisters to leave the chamber, then advanced on Verdan with slow deliberation.

  “You sought to deceive me. You beat your own child within an inch of her life so she would go along with your deception. Which hand did you beat her with, Verdan? Which hand did you raise against the woman you gave to me as wife? This one, I think.” His hand shot out, snatching Verdan’s right wrist—his sword arm—and holding it in a grip of stone.

  “You made a mistake, Summerlander,” Wynter continued. “She is my wife now. By the laws of the Craig, it is my duty to seek justice for any crimes done against her—even those crimes committed against her before we wed. The blows you struck against her are now blows struck against me.

  For the first time all morning, genuine fear crept into Verdan’s eyes.

  “This hand, which beat my wife until she could scarcely stand, you will never lift again against another. She lives, and so you live. But the hand you raised against her dies.” Power came to his call, burning his veins with ice, traveling down his arm to the hand that gripped Verdan’s right wrist.

  Verdan hissed as the first, painful tingles of cold shot through his skin. As the blood and flesh began to freeze, his eyes widened, and he began to struggle, but Wynter grabbed him by the throat and squeezed, sending the Summer King to his knees.

  The frost spread, creeping up the Summer King’s arm to his shoulder and down to the tips of his fingers. His choked cries turned to outright shrieks as the skin of his frozen hand and arm began to harden. Relentless, icy, unmoved by the other man’s pleas for mercy, Wynter held his grip until the arm was a dead, useless hulk of flesh.

  Through it all, Wynter felt nothing. No remorse, no pity. Not even a particular rage. His heart was an unmoved block of ice in his chest. When he released his enemy, the once-haughty Summer King hunched over his dead arm, weeping and moaning, his body racked by shivers.

  “If ever again you consider deceiving me or harming anyone under my care, remember today,” Wynter advised in a voice of pure ice. “And consider this also: I will now do everything in my power to ensure that Khamsin’s child—the child of the daughter you loathe—will be the next ruler to sit on the Summer Throne.”

  Leaving Verdan huddled on the floor, Wynter strode out of the room.

  Khamsin was waiting for him outside, standing near the golden Summerlea coach he’d commandeered for the long journey back to Wintercraig. Her sisters were ringed around her, weeping, while she stood stoic and brave despite all she’d suffered. Feeling returned to Wynter in a painful rush, and he wanted to turn back around and freeze what he’d left of Verdan.

  Instead, he drew a breath and started forward. “Time to go, wife. Say your farewells.”

  Storm gray eyes met his. “My fa— King Verdan?”

  “He lives, but he will never raise that hand to another. Say your farewells and get in the coach. I weary of Summerlea.”

  She hesitated, almost as if she considered defying him, then thought the better of it. Turning to her sisters, she gave each a final hug.

  “We each put a gift inside the coach for you,” Spring told her. “A little bit of Summerlea to take with you to your new home. Remember what I told you last night.”

  “Write to us,” Summer entreated, “as often you can. Let us know you are well.”

  “I put the growing lamps in the coach as well, and more of Tildy’s herbs,” Autumn said. “Be sure to use them each night until you’re fully healed.”

  He gave her a few minutes more, until impatience outweighed generosity. Did her sisters not see she was already tiring? “Enough. Get in the coach.” He reached for her, and his approach was enough to drive her sisters back, as he’d expected it would. He took her slender hand and helped her into the carriage. At the touch, he felt again that little jolt of electric warmth, and the frigid ice surrounding his heart began to thaw.

  The maid Verdan had insisted Wynter take to care for his bride was already inside, huddled in the far corner of the roomy coach, next to a collection of potted plants—most ridiculously ill suited to the world Khamsin was about to enter. Rosebushes, citrus trees . . . and was that a birdcage? Chirping song warbled from the cloth-covered cage, confirming his suspicions. Winter’s Frost! Songbirds. Probably the delicate, summer-fond kind that would keel over on their little pampered birdie feet and die at the first hard frost.

  Which idiot sister had given her those things? He was the Winter King, emphasis on Winter. What part of that did they not understand? He pressed a hand to the bridge of his nose, squeezing as the first throb of a headache began to blossom. She already thought him such a monster that she’d let herself be beat near to death before agreeing to wed him. How much more would she hate him if he let her little tropical remembrance garden die? Or had that been the whole point of such a wedding-gift?

  His arrogant claims to Valik and his own original plans to the contrary, Wynter had discovered he didn’t want a cold, political marriage. Last night, albeit beneath the influence of a potent drug, he’d shared one of the most intensely passionate nights of his life. With her. Khamsin Coruscate. His wife. Not the studied perfection of Elka’s lovemaking but something wild and elemental and very, very stirring. Just one taste had already addicted him. The hunger to experience such powerful, unleashed passion again was already an ache so deep it hurt.

  “Are you . . . not riding with me?” she asked when he made no move to enter the carriage.

  “No. Get what rest you can. Have your maid see to your back.” He slammed the carriage door shut and stepped back. It wouldn’t do to let her know the power she held over him. Unwilling though she might have been, she’d had a hand in deceiving him. She was a Summerlander witch, just like the rest of them. He could not forget that.

  He whistled, and his white stallion, Hodri, trotted to his side, tossing his head and sending the long, silvery strands of his mane flying. Wyn thrust a plated boot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle in a smooth, practiced motion. Beneath him, Hodri pranced a little as he adjusted to the weight, then settled.

  “Come, my loyal friend,” he whispered, stroking Hodri’s strong neck. “Time to leave this Summerland behind.” He lifted a gauntleted hand, and cried out, “Men of the Craig! The hot springs of Mount Freika are waiting, as are the lonely arms of your wives. Let’s go home.”

  The gathered Wintermen gave a great cheer. Wynter clucked a command, and Hodri began his elegant, high-stepping walk down the long, curving lanes that led out to the valley below and north to the mountains beyond. The carriage holding Khamsin gave a lurch, and the iron-shod wheels began their rumbling forward motion. Within moments, thousands of hooves were ringing against cobblestone, filling the city with the sound of their departure.

  CHAPTER 7
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  Summer’s End

  Shards of pain shot up Khamsin’s back as the coach jolted northward along the frozen rutted roads of Summerlea. The journey was made longer by the presence of a young maid, Belladonna Rosh, who’d been chattering since the moment they left Vera Sola. At first, Kham had enjoyed the conversation. She’d spent so much time alone, it was nice to have a companion. But after the second hour and the third . . . well, silence was a gift she’d never truly appreciated.

  Each hour, Bella changed the dressings on Kham’s back and rubbed a fresh layer of cream on her skin, but the dutiful attention made little difference. The meager sunlight that filtered through the gray clouds was not nearly enough to catalyze Kham’s natural healing ability, and the constant jostling of the carriage tore open more fragile, healing seams of flesh than Bella’s ministrations could keep up with. To make matters worse, Khamsin discovered she wasn’t a good traveler. The constant rock and sway of the coach left her feeling decidedly queasy. Her insistence on sitting upright didn’t help matters, but she’d had enough of feeling helpless and weak. Eventually, each time the carriage hit a hard bump, Bella would leap across the carriage to Khamsin’s side and start wailing over her like she was on death’s door.

  “For Halla’s sake!” Kham finally exclaimed. “If I need your help, I’ll ask for it. Until then, go sit there on that side of the coach and find some way to occupy yourself that doesn’t include hovering over me.”

  Bella bit her lip and sank back into the cushioned seat on the opposite side of the coach. She managed to remain still and silent for all of three seconds. Then, clearly unable to help herself, she rummaged around in the small bag by her side, produced yarn and needles, and began industriously knitting away. And resumed talking.

  “They say it will take almost a fortnight for us to reach Gildenheim.”

  Gods help me. “So I understand.” Two weeks, stuck in this tiny space, with Bella. Kham would go mad.