“I thought they were all dead,” said Poppy. “Except for some kids?”
“Clearly the Entity thought to ‘save’ a few for himself. No doubt, they’re working as his slaves now.” He stood up, shaking his head. “It makes sense that he would use them here. By coming up through the ground, they were able to bypass all the wards I placed on the walls. I didn’t even think about warding the ground.”
Poppy felt strange inside – squishy. It was hard to describe, but it was not a good feeling. “Did he get the seed?” she asked.
“No. I’d originally hidden it amongst the potato seeds here from Ireland. It’s no longer here, but I can feel that it’s still in the vault, somewhere nearby. My guess is one of my guards moved it before they disappeared to wherever they disappeared to.”
“Can you find it?”
He nodded. “Yes. It’s a part of Yggdrasil, so we’re connected. Give me a few seconds.” He closed his eyes and turned slowly in place. Then he opened his eyes and nodded at the door.
From their side, it was unlocked, so they simply turned the handle and stepped back out into the hall beyond. “It’s down there,” he said, nodding at the door on the far end of the hallway. They moved quickly but cautiously, as if every step they took might blow up underneath them. They had no idea where the gargoyle was that had killed the human. For all they knew, he could still be there, in the walls or ground, watching them.
They reached the door, where Poppy did her thing with the lock and Kristopher dispelled the wards, and they turned the knob and went in. It would have been wise for them to proceed through this third door in the careful manner with which they’d gone through the other doors, but they didn’t. So Kristopher took the full force of the punch the gargoyle threw at his face when he came through the other side.
Poppy screeched and tumbled to the side as Kristopher’s heavy form flew past her and out into the hall beyond the storage room door. She watched him hit the ground, but then turned her attention immediately to his assailant.
“Freeze, asshole!” she yelled, raising her hands in an offensive warlock’s position. He was in human form, dressed up as a man of medium height and medium build, and his disguise even wore a pair of glasses. But she knew better. She knew he weighed a ton, his punches had the force of heavy stone behind them, and that there was practically nothing she could physically do to that stone to bring it any harm.
The gargoyle faced her. There was really no point to waiting. She’d only told him to “freeze” to make him think she was going to wait to attack, and to give her that extra half second lead on him.
She funneled her power, pulling it in like Luke Skywalker harnessing The Force, and felt it infuse her hands to the tips of her fingers. “Lapis ut carnem!” she yelled, releasing the magic all at once.. A pulse of thick, dark power escaped from her palms and slammed into the gargoyle.
The gargoyle was surprised by the sudden attack, but he didn’t go flying backward as Kris had. Instead, he looked down at his chest, where the spell had struck him. Shimmers of dissolving magic cascaded over his chest and then fizzled out. The gargoyle’s brow furrowed. He looked back up and shook his head, smiling darkly.
“Well, it was pretty,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
Poppy smiled right back. “Wait for it.”
The gargoyle’s smile slipped a little. He blinked, clearly trying to figure out what her game was. But then his eyes grew very wide, his skin rippled as if there were bugs underneath it, and he opened his mouth to scream.
No sound came out; it was choked with pain as his skin gradually shifted from flesh toned to the gray of stone and finally back again. When it had finished moving and switching through the color spectrum, the gargoyle stumbled backward and hit the wall, breathless. He slid a little, his knees buckling under him, and stared wild-eyed at Poppy.
“What the hell did you do to me?” he cried desperately.
“I leveled the playing field,” she said. She walked toward him.
“Poppy, step away from him,” commanded Kristopher, who stood in the doorway, looking as though nothing had hit him at all except for the fact that his eyes were glowing again.
Poppy smiled reassuringly from where she stopped a foot away. “Why? We’re good here,” she told him. Then, without looking back at the gargoyle, she raised her leg forcefully and kicked him square in the balls.
The gargoyle went down like a sack of potatoes, unconscious before he hit the floor. Poppy stepped back to allow the man’s sleeping form to sprawl. For a moment, she wondered if she’d done serious, permanent damage. She even wondered if she’d killed him.
She started to kneel in order to take his pulse, but Kristopher’s fingers slid around her wrist, holding her back. She stood up and faced him.
“Well done, blossom. Just promise me you’ll never try that trick on me.”
“That trick wouldn’t work on you, your majesty,” she said with a smile. “It was a stone to flesh spell.”
Kris’s blue eyes slowly lost their glow, but his smile was predatory through and through. “You’re right,” he said. “It wouldn’t work on me.”
Poppy swallowed hard. She hadn’t missed the entendre. His hand was very warm and very firm on her wrist.
She forced herself to look back down at the fallen man and cleared her throat. “It’s not permanent. So we should get going.”
“Fine. But if you think I’m going to let you fight all my battles for me little one, think again.”
Poppy stared him down, a hard smile on her lips. Screw being demure. “If I recall correctly, you said you wanted a queen as your mate. And the queen is the most powerful piece on the board.” She glanced at his lips and then back at his eyes. They were that impossible light turquoise-aqua color, like clear icebergs. Yet his body was very warm so close to hers. “Remember? Without me the game would be lost?” she said, repeating the words he’d told her not an hour earlier.
“Oh I remember,” he said. His tone had lowered. He gave a gentle but firm tug on her arm where he had her, and she was forced to move up against him. He kept her there as he leaned in closer, and she held her breath. “And I meant it,” he said. “Thank you for reminding me… my queen.”
The words were said with a ringing that could no doubt be heard throughout the multiverse. It was final and resounding. The Winter King was naming her, claiming her, and worshipping her, all at once. And if they didn’t have a Valkyrie to confront, Midgard Serpent to stop from destroying the world, a gargoyle passed out a few feet away, and a seed to fucking plant, she was betting he would have shown her exactly how much he meant it – right there on the floor of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Chapter Forty
They had the seed, which looked to Poppy like a massive uncut diamond. It was tucked safely into the inner pocket of Kristopher’s leather jacket. Their next stop was Jotenheim, the land of the giants.
Before transporting, Kristopher filled Poppy in on what to expect. It turned out that far from being the dangerous, angry, crag-filled place that comic books and movies would have it out to be, Jotenheim was actually no more than a mirror of the human world, but with giants. And the giants were not the Earth-shaking, stomping and furious twenty-foot-tall beasts legends had them out to be either. At least, not all the time.
Apparently, giants had three different forms. In Jotenheim, they could appear either slightly large or very large. Because appearing very large took a lot of magical energy, giants preferred their more natural form, which happened to be about the size of the aptly named Andre the Giant. They were big, but not Goliath big.
The most surprising thing Kristopher told her about them was that it was in the human world where giants took on their third form. In the mortal realm, giants were in fact on the small size. Poppy scoffed at this, but Kristopher swore that if you ever met a giant in the human world, he was guaranteed to be on the shorter side of normal. And the skinnier side of normal.
“You’re kidding,
right?”
He just chuckled and shook his head, making the sign of a cross over his heart.
“Jeez,” she said. “It’s like… the opposite of all these guys with tiny penises who are drugged up on vein-popping, ball-shrinking steroids and blowing their tops at the slightest provocation. Real giants, on the other hand, are enormous but appear small.” She laughed. “I love it. You know, I’ve known quite a few skinny guys in my time. I wonder if any of them were giants?”
“Were they smart?”
“I don’t associate with idiots.”
Kristopher laughed again. It was starting to get to her. What was it about his damn laugh? “Then your chances are good,” he said. “Also unlike the perception Hollywood and even my own mythos have attempted to foster, giants are not the bumbling morons they’re made out to be. Quite the opposite, in fact. They’re highly intelligent.”
Poppy stared at him a moment. “What you’re telling me is that giants are nerds.”
“Yep.”
“Oh my God. The quarterback on the football team is a shrinky-dink, and the math tutor is from Jotenheim.” She threw back her head and laughed as she recalled all of the chess club geniuses she ate lunch with in high school. She may have been dressed in torn jeans and combat boots, and she may have had a few rebelliously colored streaks in her hair, but when it came down to it, she simply could not stand to surround herself with anything but open minds and quick wits. So she’d hovered around the geeks. “All that time, I was kicking people’s butts for picking on my friends, and they didn’t need my help at all.”
“Believe me, in this world, they’re as physically helpless as they appear. You were probably their very own shield maiden. At least, that’s how they would have seen you.”
She stared at him. “Really?”
“Really.”
“But…how? Why didn’t any of them ever just, I don’t know, transform? Or at least tell me what they were? And why would they even come here to begin with?”
“Like I said, they’re highly intelligent. They crave education. When a child is born to a couple in Jotenheim, they make the decision to either have them tutored by former mortal realmers in the giant’s realm or send them to live with the mortals, where they can learn alongside humans. I will say one thing for humans. They may be closed-minded on the whole, but a few of them are brave enough to focus on the problems of the universe and seek answers to those problems. While everyone else is far too wrapped up in things they can’t prove, the great ones, for now, continue to share the things they can prove. When they stop doing so, whether by choice or because they’re forced into silent submission by their peers….” Kristopher took a deep breath and blew it out quickly with a shrug. “Well, the giants will probably stop coming then. There will be no point any longer. Humanity will have regressed into the stone age.”
“So giants haven’t always come to the mortal realm?”
“Gods, no. This is a recent development, more sixteenth century and beyond. And at first, they couldn’t manage it. When they finally developed the magic that would allow them to do so, it came at a cost. Here in the mortal realm, they would lose what made them giants. It was the sacrifice they had to make. Their strength and stature would vanish. In return, they would be allowed to live in the mortal realm until they’d learned all they could learn. Then they would return to Jotenheim and become teachers themselves.”
“About how long does a giant live?”
“I’d say around a thousand or so of your years. I know of one who lived to be a thousand, three hundred.”
Poppy digested it all and they prepped to transport through Jotenheim. Kristopher referred to it as transporting “through” the realm rather than “to” the realm because they were running short on time. Concern over what the Midgard Serpent might do next was elevating with each passing minute. If Poppy wanted to, she could always visit the realm later. She had a lot of realms to decide whether or not to visit.
Wow, she thought. Life was opening up to her. She felt like man on the verge of flight… new worlds were available to her now, and if and when she became queen, she would have an immortal lifetime with which to explore them.
“Wait,” she said, holding up her hand to place it on Kristopher’s arm just as he was making the motions of calling up a portal.
He froze. “What is it?” he asked, at once concerned.
“I’m sorry, I just – I’ve been wanting to ask you something. If I become queen, will that make me immortal like you? Or will you just have to get another queen in fifty to sixty years?”
Kristopher laughed a relieved laugh, and of course she absolutely loved the sound of it. “You will live as long as you wish, blossom. Immortality is relative.”
“It is?”
“Just ask William.”
Poppy frowned. Then she shook her head and asked, “And when I do, will I age twenty years like you did? I mean… living forever is a grand idea and all, but I’d rather do it from my age and not my mother’s. If I’m being honest.”
He laughed again. He laughed easily. Poppy’s eyes dropped to his lips. Every damn time he laughed, she wanted to kiss him and swallow the sound up. It was like he was laughing cookies or something.
“Winter turned me from a boy to a man because no king should be frozen in eternal adolescence. You on the other hand, will remain as you are. If anything, you’ll feel younger than you do now. The surge of power that comes with taking the throne is indescribable.”
Poppy’s eyes widened a little. She imagined herself sitting on that throne now, absorbing that power. Feeling younger! Would that mean… no more pain? No more headaches?
Kristopher leaned in, chuckling softly. “I see it in your eyes now, blossom,” he said as he slid his arm around her waist and wound his other fingers through her hair to gently grasp the back of her neck. “You can’t wait, can you?”
She kissed him. Because it was the laugh that did it.
He kissed her back. Because that was how he was.
And when they parted a full minute or so later, she asked breathlessly, “What the hell is it about your laugh that gets me so damn hot? It makes me… I don’t know! I feel like I just got a new car for Christmas or something!”
Kristopher’s lips slid into a slow, knowing smile. “Well, in all honesty, that makes a lot of sense.”
“What? How?!”
“The name Winter gave me is Kristopher Scaul,” he told her. “Every now and then, I add an ‘e’ to the last name, just to keep smarter people doubting. But even then, the resulting name is a homophone of the real one – if you scramble the letters up a little….” He trailed off, turned away, and began opening the portal.
“Scaul,” she said softly to herself. “S-C-A-U-L….” In her head, she unscrambled them and placed them back together in different orders. Once. Twice. Third time was the charm. Her heart began pounding as she said the name in her head. Her ears started ringing. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
As the portal swallowed them up and took them into another world.
Chapter Forty-One
For all intents and purposes, they really did pass through Jotenheim, transporting to a forested location outside one of Jotenheim’s cities and transporting back out again before anyone could notice them there.
They headed back to the castle to regroup before opening the third portal they would need to activate a gateway to Yggdrasil.
“Now for Valhalla,” said Poppy. She’d hoped to keep the worry out of her tone, but she failed miserably. She was worried. Someone in Valhalla wanted her dead. Which meant she had two options. She could either stay here and let Kristopher deal with that someone himself, or she could look her problem in the eye and deal with it too.
“She doesn’t really want you dead, Poppy. She just wants to get even with me.”
Poppy looked up at Kristopher. It was as if he’d read her mind.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re my king. I’m your queen.
So this is my game.” She nodded to herself and peered deep into his aqua blue eyes. “And sometimes you just have to take people off the board. That’s the nature of chess.”
Kristopher didn’t smile. He didn’t laugh. But there was something different, something deep and indescribable in his eyes. He didn’t take them off her as he summoned up the portal. And when the passageway was complete, he stepped aside to allow her entry first.
Poppy rolled her shoulders back and stepped into the portal. Time and space swirled around her, shifting and pulling and shortening and straightening until the exit opened up on the other side. Before it had even fully formed, she was stepping out.
Once again, it might have been wise to proceed into a new environment more warily, and this was something that shot through her mind just after a fist connected with her jaw, her head snapped to the side, and her body followed sluggishly after.
She hit the ground in some indeterminate manner, so numb in shock from the attack that she literally couldn’t tell what part of her hit the ground first. But half a second after she hit, she started to get her bearings. She was on mixed turf, grass and dirt. She was rolling, and the rocks bruised where they contacted bone. Her face hurt, but the attack had impacted her jaw, not her teeth. That was fortunate; dental implants were not fun. Someone was yelling; she recognized Kristopher’s voice and the voices of several women. She continued to roll and forced herself to her feet.
More pain instantly assaulted her, radiating out from just beneath her ear, where her jaw joints met. Probably they were torn, hopefully not broken. She decided to ignore the pain in that certain way that only people in the middle of a fight could do.
She was standing in a man-made clearing amidst a forest of giant trees that looked like a cross between Aspen and Redwoods. They were as tall as Redwoods, but their bark was white as snow. The ground was soft brown dirt covered in patches of thick, green grass. At the center of the clearing was what looked like a fire pit.
Several yards away, on the opposite side of the fire pit, the portal came to a close and vanished. Feet from where the portal had been, Kristopher stood tall and strong, and held a woman out at arm’s length, one of his hands wrapped firmly around her neck.