The Winter King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  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.

  But the day was peaceful. The sky was clear, not the angry and dim sky he had seen over Norway earlier, but blue. Blue. It had been so very long since he’d seen a blue day, a light pure blue that reminded him of the topaz his father had given to his mother for their wedding. And all around him, in the water, rather than a distant shore, splinters of wood, and the frothy aftermath of a rogue wave, Erikk saw more blue.

  It was the blue of a calm, cold sea on a bright, sunny day. It was the blue of his eyes.

  He had never seen the sea look like that.

  When he could finally pull his gaze from the sea and sky, Erikk looked out over the ocean distance to find the shoreline.

  However, this was not the shoreline he had left behind in TromsØ. This was not a rocky cliff side, sparse grass, and sturdy, lovely poppy. This was snow, pure and white and cleanly fallen. It came thick and undisturbed directly to the line of the sea.

  Beyond the snow, standing like rows of sentries in the water, were two lines of icebergs, stretching out toward him as if someone had rolled out an icy, wet carpet, and they were the guards on either side.

  That carpet led up onto the pure, white shore and up a set of equally icy steps, cut clean and straight out of what appeared to be an entire island made out of a single glacier. It wasn’t rare for the north, but it was not what he was accustomed to.

  What the steps led to, he couldn’t see. They seemed to lead literally nowhere; they stopped at the top of the mountain and vanished altogether.

  “Very well,” he muttered through chattering teeth. He supposed he hadn’t made it after all. He was dead. But if he was lucky, Valhalla was on the other side of that ice mountain.

  Chapter Twelve

  Present Day - The Winter Kingdom

  Kristopher heard her words as if she’d whispered them in his ear. The sound of them, so close, so soft, froze him in place in the middle of the portal that swirled around him. Take me home.

  It was almost a plea, a desperate whisper, beautiful. There was so much yearning encompassed within it that Kristopher’s chest literally ached. She was frightened. And instinctively, he wanted to protect her. The crazy thing was, he knew it was him she needed protecting from. The even crazier thing was, despite her obvious fear, the man in him seized the sound of her voice – and the exact words it had uttered – as the clue he needed to finish hunting her down. He knew where she was going. The smart girl was doubling back to her apartment. She was headed “home.”

  And he could get there first.

  Kristopher looked at the portal around him and considered his options. He could do this one of two ways. He could either transport back to her apartment and wait for her, or he could cut her progress off in the portals themselves by latching on to her by the sound of her voice. The very fact that he’d heard it meant she was close by. He was probably almost upon her.

  Why wait? He was pressed for time anyway.

  He switched his magic, locked on, and felt his body grow warm. It nearly stole his breath. Just the touch of his magic upon hers had an intense effect on him. Her magic felt like the brush of fur against bare flesh, comforting and warm, but also like the lick of a flame when you got too close to a fire, hot and dangerous.

  If her magic feels like this… he couldn’t help but wonder what her body would feel like against his. His hands curled into fis
ts at his sides, and he had to close his eyes. He lowered his head, waiting for the desire roll through him and away. But it didn’t leave. He wanted to jump right into that fire and feel it burn.

  “Shit,” he muttered, raising his head and opening a second portal off the first one. He strode into it with purpose and prepared himself for his inevitable second meeting with his queen.

  But something in the portal drew his attention, pulling his thoughts outward. The streaming lights around him should have been the colors of the place he was headed into – as multi-hued as the mortal world. However, they were not multi-colored. Instead, they were primarily white. Some of the white was touched with a turquoise blue, so similar to the color of icebergs, Kristopher knew it at once.

  It was the color of his eyes. And, as fortune had it, it was the color of Poppy’s eyes.

  It was the color of the Winter Kingdom.

  Confusion stole over him. He was firmly locked on to Poppy’s trail, and she’d claimed she was headed home. From the feel of it, that was certainly what she was asking her transport magic to do for her. But Kristopher would have recognized the path to his realm even if he’d been stinking drunk on bjorr.

  Which he had been. A few times. Well, more than a few. But that was a long time ago.

  Okay, that was last week.

  The Winter King’s eyes began to glow as he neared his home, and he felt the crisp fresh air of his world greet him as it blew into the portal.

  *****

  Poppy saw the exit of her final portal coming up and once more prepped for the landing. However, for the second time that night, her transport magic seemed to have betrayed her, because instead of the soft carpet of her apartment, it was the cold, hard, and smooth surface of ice that greeted her boot as she stepped quickly out of the spinning tunnel.

  Those leather-soled boots slid for just a second before she willed them to stop, and miraculously, they did. She stood in place and stared at her surroundings as the portal sucked shut behind her.