He was like a painting of Dorian Gray without the outright murderous evil, or a chance reflection of Narcissus, but quieter, gentler, and more intelligent. He reminded her of beauty that had tacked to it a terrible price. In William’s case, that price was eternity. It was something she was having a hard time wrapping her head around.
“Any… idea what she might have actually done to the throne?” Poppy asked, looking from William, who wasn’t paying attention to her at all, to Kristopher, who had braced himself with one arm against the mantle of the hearth and was staring fixedly into its multi-colored flames.
The Winter King said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
“I guess this means I can’t be queen then, huh?” she joked, adding a little laugh.
Now both men did look at her, and she felt the sudden, substantial weight of their combined gazes. The air in the room gained a vibration, as if someone had plucked the strings of an invisible, inaudible guitar. Her statement had certainly earned their attention.
Poppy shrugged nervously and shrank into her chair a little. “I only meant that –”
“You will be queen,” said Kristopher. His tone was final.
“Um….” She blinked.
In front of her, William sighed. “Miss Nix, you must understand that to one of the Thirteen, a queen means everything right about now.” He glanced up at Kristopher, who shot him a look somewhere between warning and exasperation. William continued. “The threat the Entity poses is ever present.” He snapped his book shut and turned back to Poppy. “You’ve learned of the Winter Kingdom, and it truly does seem as though you’ve come to accept that you belong here. The longer you delay in taking your place as queen, the more danger you place yourself in. And the whole of the supernatural world.”
The Time King’s eyes seemed to cut clear through her, and as she gazed into them, Poppy realized that when she’d said what she’d just said, she hadn’t purely been joking. There had been a part of her that was secretly relieved. And it looked as though both men had caught onto that.
And that kind of pissed her off.
She leaned forward. “Fine,” she said through a tight jaw. “Then tell me your plans. How do you propose we fix this so I can sit down on the goddamn throne?”
“We go to Valhalla,” said Kristopher. “We would have had to visit anyway in order to open the door to Yggdrasil. I have no idea what Toril did to the throne, but it doesn’t matter. I can undo it given enough time; all it would take is a few carefully placed spells. The problem is that as I said, it will take time.”
“There’s that, and… Toril may simply try for revenge again later,” added William.
Kristopher made a frustrated sound. “We will forever be on guard.” He shook his head and pushed away from the fire place, turning to face them. “She must be dealt with once and for all.”
“When you say, ‘dealt with,’ you don’t mean, ‘Let’s get some coffee, sit down and talk things out,’” Poppy said. “Do you?”
Kristopher smiled a tight smile. “The Valkyrie aren’t big coffee drinkers.”
Poppy gave him a dead pan look. Her stomach was beginning to churn. Everything about the idea of visiting Valhalla made her distinctly uneasy. She’d been wary of visiting it in the first place, but now that she knew they were going to actually confront someone there, she really didn’t feel good about it. It was Valhalla, after all. Everyone there was supposed to be dead. She wasn’t dead. She was very much alive, and she really wanted to stay that way.
“She’s going to stand out like a candle in a cave in that realm,” said William, who was still watching Poppy, but whose expression was now one of keen study. “We’ll need to be quick about this, or we’ll start a war that will bring down Yggdrasil for good.”
Kristopher was already moving. He crossed the study in three long strides. “Very well, then let us waste no more time.”
Poppy jumped out of her chair. “But, what if it’s a trap?” She ran to catch up with him as he exited the study and entered the hall. William was beside her at once. “What if Toril knew that Meridian was watching all along and she’s just trying to get you into Valhalla?” Or me, she added mentally. She obviously hates me more than him, or she wouldn’t have compromised my throne.
“She has a point, Kris.”
Kristopher stopped and turned to face William, who had also come to a stop. Poppy wound up between the two men, feeling like the stuffing in a king Oreo.
“What do you suggest?” Kristopher asked.
“Only that we think this out before we go headlong into what Poppy very intelligently pointed out might be a trap.”
Kris stared at him a moment, then took a deep breath. He ran a hand through his hair and paced a few steps away. Then he turned back. “The most important thing is you taking the throne, Poppy. We’ll tend to that issue now and go after Toril later. You can help – when you’re queen.”
Poppy realized she was suddenly biting her lip and forced herself to stop. She stood up straighter and rolled back her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. She nodded, just once. “How do I do that?”
“Sit on my throne.”
Poppy stared at Kristopher, dumbfounded. The double entendre of the suggestion rolled over and through her, and she immediately felt ridiculous for having noticed it in the first place. Before she could ask whether it would actually work, William spoke.
“It’s actually a brilliant idea,” he said quickly. Poppy turned to face him. Excitement had transformed his handsome features, shifting them from something slightly reticent to something that reminded her of an inventor on the verge of a discovery. “Throughout man’s history, queens and kings have often occupied the same thrones. It makes no difference. So long as you are both alive at the same time – you will be king and queen of the Winter Kingdom.”
Poppy looked from one king to the other. Kristopher caught her gaze and held it. “So?” he asked softly, moving closer so that he stood over her, and his presence and magic at once filled her world like a drug. “Will you do it?” His blue, blue eyes flashed, and tingling heat wrapped around her. Her nerve endings began to sizzle with the memory of what he’d done to them only hours earlier. “Will you take the throne and be my queen?”
“Yes,” she said breathlessly. At that moment, she very well might have done anything he’d asked her to.
Chapter Thirty-One
She didn’t hesitate or hold back this time. When they entered the throne room, she kept right on walking toward the dais with its thrones, head tall, shoulders back. The men and the bear behind her grew quiet, probably in anticipation. She made it as far as a foot from the dais, when she heard the hissing sound.
The human body is programmed to respond on a fundamental old brain level to a few vital things. One of these is heights. If our wiring is done correctly, then when we find ourselves at an elevated level looking down on our world, we experience a change in emotion. Another old brain trigger is the smell of death. We possess a reflex to this smell in order to detect rot in meat or spoiled fruit that can kill us and to warn us that there might be predators nearby. There are a few more old brain initiates, some more vital than others. And when Poppy heard the distinct sound of hissing and instantly came to an absolute stand-still, she couldn’t help but wonder whether the noise of a snake was one of them.
She froze in place, her eyes immediately shooting to the ground around her. But nothing moved across the blue-white ice floor or fur rugs splayed about. All was still.
Ssssssssssss….
Poppy’s head jerked up, and her gaze fell on the throne. In the seat of the massive king’s chair sat coiled a rather large serpent. A mixture of blue, white and gold, the snake’s scales were patterned intricately, and were actually quite lovely. But the snake hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It had literally appeared out of nowhere. Its unusual blue eyes stared steadily at her as its head bobbed very slightly back and forth.
The hissing sound came again, this time ma
nifold. Poppy’s gaze slid from the snake in the king’s throne to the floor between the two chairs. More snakes were coiled there, not quite as large as the first. In her throne, the one covered in ice-carved poppies, there were two more.
She tried not to make any unnecessary movements. If they really wanted to harm her, she was within striking distance of all of them.
“What the bloody hell – ”
Poppy recognized William’s voice.
“Poppy, just stay where you are. Don’t move.”
That one was Kristopher. The fact that he was telling her to do exactly what she was already doing made her bristle a little, but she gritted her teeth and bore it in silence.
“I thought the castle was warded, Scaul. Why are there serpents in your chairs?” William asked sardonically. Poppy could just imagine the look Kristopher was giving him in return.
“Obviously something happened when the root was severed,” said Kris quietly. His tone had dropped, his voice had lowered, and she could tell he was closer than he’d been before. He was coming toward her.
She was afraid that his drawing nearer would agitate the snakes. Oh gods, please don’t let me get bitten just because he wants to play hero, she thought. She felt frustratingly helpless. What she really wanted to do was cast a spell, but just like most magic, warlock magic required movement and speech, and she was frankly loathe to do either just then for fear of provoking the snakes.
She almost jumped when she felt a breath at her ear and a very strong presence directly at her back. “I’m going to transport us out,” he whispered. It was a warning, just a heads-up so she knew what was about to come. He gave the warning quickly, and a second later, the space around them melted. The snakes, either agitated by the feel of the king’s magic or alarmed at Poppy’s sudden apparent movement, took that moment to strike.
She cried out in surprise as the larger snake in the king’s throne sailed toward her, able to fly through the air in a way normal snakes could not. She put her arms up defensively, but in the next moment, both snakes and thrones vanished, and she was surrounded by the swirls of a fast-moving portal.
She spun in the portal, pulling out of Kristopher’s grasp. “What the hell was that, and why didn’t you just blast it with ice magic or something?” she asked. She’d always been a stubborn person, and now the fact that someone out there desperately didn’t want her to become queen of the Winter Kingdom was making her want it even more.
Kris shook his head. “My magic would have been useless against them.”
“Those weren’t normal snakes,” said William, who had joined them in the portal.
“What were they, then?” she asked.
“They were the children of the Midgard Serpent,” said Kris.
Norse myth told that the Midgard Serpent was a mighty snake wrapped around the Great Tree from its roots to its highest branches. Legend said that it would be the Serpent himself who brought about Ragnarok, which was the “end times,” for both mortal and immortal alike. Ragnarok obviously wasn’t about to happen, so the Midgard Serpent couldn’t be directly involved with any of this. He must have just had wayward children, and maybe the Entity even got to them somehow.
The portal opened up behind Poppy, and she would have been thrown backward into the unknown if Kristopher hadn’t reached out and wrapped his arm around her at same moment. She stumbled forward against his chest as Kris jumped with agile grace from the portal’s exit. Poppy regained her footing as the portal zapped shut behind all three of them, and they found themselves in a new world.
Kristopher slowly released her a second time, and Poppy turned to get her bearings. They stood atop a grassy knoll, with a view of an entire kingdom.
Poppy took it in with the slow fascination of someone watching an Imax film or flipping through a photography book. “Wow…” she whispered. If ever there had existed a place where the fantasy gardens and forests of artists’ imaginations came to life, this was it. The trees were full and devoid of dead branches or leaves. The floor was carpeted with thick, green grass without dead patches anywhere. There were mushroom rings and wildflowers galore, and there didn’t seem to be any bugs at all.
The sound of a babbling brook beckoned from somewhere nearby. A gentle breeze scented with something mildly sweet brushed through Poppy’s hair. A beautiful cobbled stone walkway cut through the fields and forests, winding its way into the far distance, where a castle of what looked like multi-colored gemstones rose from yet another valley and pierced the heavens high above.
“Where are we?” she asked breathlessly. “It looks like Eden….”
Kristopher joined her side. She felt his arm at her back and glanced up distractedly to find him smiling as if with pride. “This is Dvalin,” he told her. “The land of the Norse Dragons.”
“It’s one of my favorite places to visit too,” said William as the man moved right past them on the path to begin taking it down the hill. Poppy watched him go for a second, but found her feet didn’t immediately want to follow after him. She was rather glued to the spot because her eyes were too busy taking in all the candy, and her head was too busy processing what Kristopher had just said about dragons.
As far as she could see, there was not another living being for miles. At least not a non-plant living being.
“Did you say dragons?” she asked, seriously hoping she’d misunderstood. Kris moved around her so he was standing in front of her. Almost instantly, he encompassed her whole world, pulling her gaze to his.
“I did,” he said. “Dvalin is a beautiful realm Poppy, but there is much more here than meets the eye.” He gently cupped her cheek. His hand was warm. “Stay close and keep wary.”
She nodded. Damn, she thought. She hated it when there was so much more than met the eye. Why couldn’t something beautiful just be beautiful? Why couldn’t chocolate just taste good and not make you fat? Why couldn’t the sun just give you a tan and not skin cancer? And why did flowers and kittens have to come with allergies?
“But why are we here?”
Kris glanced down the stoned path. William had a good lead on them now, but Kristopher seemed unconcerned by the Time King’s wandering ahead. He turned back to Poppy. “The serpents in the throne room were children of the Midgard Serpent. Fortunately for us, so are the dragons in Dvalin. If you’ll recall – ”
“Dvalin was one of the doors we had to go through to get to Yggdrasil anyway,” she supplied, recalling the three realms necessary for activating the gateway to the Great Tree. “So they might be able to help us understand why the snakes appeared on the thrones and we’ll be closer to the Great Tree at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone.”
He nodded proudly. “Exactly. And it just so happens one of the dragons in Dvalin is working for me as a contracted guardian. He’s supposed to help keep an eye on both Yggdrasil, and the seed vault in Norway. Maybe he knows something I don’t about the broken root.”
Poppy blinked. “What? What seed vault?”
Kris’s expression went blank, then he shook his head. “I forgot I hadn’t told you about that yet.” He sighed. “There’s so much to show you…. In Norway, there is a building called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It’s just that – a massive, impenetrable building that cuts deep into a mountain and contains within its walls roughly two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand seeds from all over the planet. The seeds in the vault are placed there to protect them from forces that might otherwise lead to their extinction. It’s far underground, and the sub-zero temperature is steady. The idea is that should something happen to threaten the wellbeing of a plant species – drought, plant diseases, whatever – we can start all over again with the seeds in the vault.”
Poppy registered this, and mentally added the Svalbard seed vault as must-visit on her bucket list. “That’s incredible,” she said, meaning it. “But… why would you have dragons guarding it?”
“Because,” he said, and his expression grew serious. “The vault also holds t
he seed of Yggdrasil.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
In a good portion of the northern hemisphere right now, it was winter. Snow fell in some locations, and in others, it was sleet or slurry or freezing rain, whichever you chose to call it. There were pockets of heat here and there, but for the most part, people donned their long pants, weather proof boots, and jackets. The sky had taken on that low-lying quality that made people think of fire places and sofa throws and hot tea or coffee.
But where Lalura currently sat and waited for her first attacker, it was simply dark and quiet. The middle of the desert tended to be like that at night. All around her, the air was still, the sand was motionless in its dunes, and only the moon and stars above shed light on the land below. She rocked back and forth, creaking quietly in the rocking chair she’d chosen to wait in. That it was capable of rocking in the sand could only be chalked up to magic, of course.
Out here, in a place where peace had become sacred long ago, the only living being for miles was Lalura Chantelle. Out here, no one else could get hurt.
She’d brought a book to read while she waited. It was a good one too. The author had just that sort of story teller quality that pulled you out of the world around you and into another one. Kept you reading. Even while the minutes ticked away on the clock and impending doom drew nearer. Most individuals would have gone slightly mad waiting for their attacker second after second and hour after hour as she was doing. Time would have gotten to them, made them twitch and fidget. They would have given up or done something rash.
But Lalura didn’t mind waiting. Time and the way it moved was something she’d grown quite accustomed to.
Time was a fickle, haughty and punishing entity. Humans thought it to be a constant in the universe. Even as they came to realization after realization that space was not the constant they thought it to be – even as they discovered and un-discovered black holes and dark matter and anti-matter, they continued to believe that time was as they’d always thought it was. But nothing could be farther from the truth.