The Winter King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  They both backpedaled now as the crack spread right into the fire pit in the center of the room. The fire crackled and spat when the logs beneath it were shaken loose and they tumbled deeper into the pit. It sputtered; some of the flames went out as sparks went soaring like mini fire-works. Several hit the furs, but sizzled out of life amidst the thick pile.

  The crack continued unhindered, racing across the room on the other side to hit the wall with the ice-carved bookshelves. There, it moved up the bottom shelf, cracking it in half as it went, shook the books that were housed there, and continued up the second shelf. On and on it went, dislodging several volumes to send them tumbling to the floor before it struck the ceiling.

  Foreboding washed over Kris. We have to get out of here. He knew, somehow just knew, that the entire room was going to come crashing down on them. “Come with me!” he commanded, grabbing Poppy by the wrist before he spun and sprinted out of the small room.

  She didn’t fight him; she wasn’t stupid. No doubt, she had the same impression of what the crack’s damage would do. He could feel her move right up alongside him, running at the same agile pace, despite the inherent slickness that ice should have posed to a mortal. She had a firm grip. She was already so much a part of this kingdom, despite not having taken a seat on her throne.

  Behind them, in the room they’d hastily evacuated, something crashed noisily to the ground, and Kris felt the impact in his heart. He gasped as pain throbbed through his chest, arresting his breath. He stumbled, releasing Poppy’s wrist so he wouldn’t take her down with him.

  Much to his horror, his fated queen stopped with him and knelt beside him as he fell. He wanted her to leave the castle, to get out to safety!

  Now he knew what was happening. At first, he’d been confused, but now he was certain. It was a terrible kind of certainty. Poppy had to get out of the castle; her safety was paramount above all else. But he could barely breathe, much less command her to leave him. And the fact that she instinctively wanted to help him was both a promise and a poison to his soul.

  “I – can’t – transport,” he gritted through his teeth. It was so hard to talk.

  The “cracking” noises in the ice castle were normally the sounds of the ice settling as it melted and re-froze over the course of time. However, this last crack had been much louder and much deeper because it hadn’t been just the castle.

  It was the crack in Yggdrasil. And Yggdrasil was the foundation of Winter.

  The men he employed to watch over the Great Tree had warned him that there was a hairline fracture in the trunk of the massive plant. However, hairline fractures were not an uncommon thing, merely a nuisance. They appeared every now and then, and were followed by weather anomalies. Winters that barely happened. Or winters that killed hundreds, if not thousands.

  The fruit of the Great Tree was unlike any other in the multiverse. Each one was unique, and that was the truth of it. For each fruit was a snowflake; it was where they were born.

  Without Yggdrasil, the Guardian Tree of the North, the Bringer of White, the Root of Winter, there would be no winter at all. The Winter Kingdom and Yggdrasil were linked at their core. The very foundation of everything Kristopher had become was tied to the roots of that Great Tree.

  And now those roots were coming undone. The crack that had reverberated through the castle was not a hairline fracture. It was a severance.

  One of the roots had been cut off.

  How has this happened?

  “I can transport,” said Poppy. “Stay close.”

  Kristopher said nothing, nodding instead. A moment later, a portal swirled around them and they were moving through space and time – but he could still feel the destruction taking place in the palace behind them.

  “What will happen to Meridian?!” Poppy half asked and half squealed as the portal opened, and they went shooting out into the room beyond. They landed hard, losing their grips on each other to roll to a stop on a rug not unlike the one they’d been sitting on moments earlier.

  Kristopher had just been thinking about the fate of the large bear when she’d asked the question, but now that they had arrived in their new destination, he was temporarily distracted.

  “What the…”

  “Did we not leave the castle?” Poppy asked, voicing his own thoughts.

  The room they were in looked remarkably like the rooms of the Ice Castle, but he had to admit it was just different enough. He didn’t recognize these carvings. And there was no magic emanating from the walls. No, this room was in a mortal dwelling.

  “We did. This is something else,” he replied, getting to his feet despite the terrible sensations moving through his body. He was anxious; the feeling inside him was not a pleasant one. It was as if he were coming unraveled or had lost a piece of himself. He knew the castle was a reflection of that, as well as a representation of what was happening with Yggdrasil.

  Yggdrasil… How the hell did it manage to lose an entire root? He had men protecting it! Giants! Dragons! Nothing could get past the guardians he’d laid in place a thousand years ago! Cracks came and went, but this? This would have taken an all-out attack.

  “Wait,” Poppy said where she stood and turned a slow circle. “I recognize this! This is that hotel in Iceland! That one made of ice!” Her smile of recognition faded into a frown. “But this isn’t where I meant to bring us. I meant to take us to the cabin where Lalura trains us. My transport spell messed up again!”

  “It’s the Winter in you,” Kristopher told her. “It will remain in control of all you try to do… until you decide to take control of it.”

  She stopped and met his gaze. Her frown became an expression of stark concern. “You don’t look so good.” She moved toward him, just close enough to touch him if she’d wanted to, but stopped short of doing so. She didn’t seem to know what to do, in fact. He couldn’t blame her behavior. “What happened back there?” she asked. “What happened to you?”

  “We’re under attack,” he told her frankly. “But Meridian will be fine. Dire Bears can transport within the Winter Realm.”

  “Excuse me,” came a new voice.

  They both turned to face the door of the room, which was carved of ice just like the rooms in the Winter Castle. A young man stood in the doorway, dressed in ski pants and a parka, the majority of his face concealed by the faux fur around the parka’s hood.

  “I didn’t know someone was staying in this room tonight,” he said, his tone confused but also accusatory. He wasn’t just telling them that he wasn’t aware they were there – he was telling them that they weren’t supposed to be there.

  Poppy pushed around Kristopher, who had unknowingly stepped in front of her in a protective gesture, despite how completely messed up he felt. He let her by, and she proceeded to work a different kind of magic.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said with the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen. “We’re late arrivals and we just couldn’t help ourselves; we had to check out the room right away. We’ve heard so much about this place! Pictures of your hotel have been plastered all over my Facebook page for weeks now! You’re famous amongst my friends,” she laughed. “And I guess I just got carried away when we finally got here.” She giggled shyly, making Kris’s insides feel squishy with a new kind of desire. “We’ll head to the check-in desk right now.”

  The man’s face broke into a grin, which Kristopher could see reach his wind-wrinkled eyes. “Oh, it’s no problem at all,” he said in his heavy Icelandic accent. “It’s no rush, really. I’ll let the concierge know you’re here and will soon be checking in. You go ahead and take your time.” He nodded a few times, he and Poppy exchanged final chuckles, and then the man left.

  Kristopher’s chest ached, his head throbbed, he could feel a rift in his magic, and he was frankly terrified about what was happening to his kingdom. And he was also dumbstruck with appreciation.

  “You just might be the most powerful warlock I’ve ever met,” he said breathlessly.
>
  Poppy turned that brilliant smile on him, taking the rest of his breath right away. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I do kind of rock.”

  Chapter Twenty

  It had been months since it happened, but Lalura knew that to Dannai it felt like years. And seconds.

  The woman’s entire world had crashed in the day she crossed the border into the West Bank and entered the Land of the Dead. Her husband had been killed. She’d been killed. She’d entered the Duat – the West Side.

  And she’d met her father.

  She’d not spoken of it, not a word, but it was visible in her eyes. What had transpired in the course of that day had haunted her in the time that had passed. Lalura knew she had nightmares. She wondered if Dannai felt she’d never left the Duat, and she wondered if she ever would.

  It had taken this long to reach this point here and now, with the four of them at last gathered together, ready to hear what she had to tell them.

  Dannai sat across from Lalura, Lily Kane, and Diana Chroi, in the massive study of the Goblin Kingdom castle. In the corner, three bassinets were rocked steadily by little impish creatures who were apparently very good at taking care of the Goblin Queen’s triplets. Four visible cats and probably countless unseen felines rested in varying positions and locations around the room. A baby goat chewed on a leather cover to a book on the bottom shelf of a set of bookshelves against one wall. And two goblin dogs rested comfortably on blankets in front of the fireplace. They were similar to dogs from the mortal realm, but squatter, with shorter snouts, longer ears, an extra layer of hair, and spots of bright purple.

  The animals in the room had all been rescued at one point or another and brought here by Diana, who had a soft spot in her heart for animals of all kinds, supernatural or otherwise.

  “You remember that only I could cross the river, Lalura.”

  Lalura nodded. “I recall.” She remembered that quite well.

  When the two of them had entered the Duat together in order to retrieve Lucas Caige’s body from the Land of the Dead so that the warlocks in the mortal realm could resurrect him, it had turned out only Dannai could cross the river that separated the West Bank from the rest of the world. A bridge appeared for her use, but when Lalura stepped foot upon it, it crumbled before her, separating her from her adopted daughter.

  So, Dannai had gone on alone and Lalura had been forced to wait for her in the ever-reaching sands on the other side. She could have attempted to use magic in order to go on, but magic was always a gamble. Any wise magic user knew this. Magic in an untried dimension was exponentially so.

  “Well, once I crossed the bridge and looked back, you’d vanished. So I’m assuming you couldn’t see me either.”

  “You assume correctly,” Lalura said calmly.

  Dannai nodded. Then she took a deep breath. “I would rather not go into detail about what happened next. But you need to know this much. My father met me as I entered the City of the Dead. Because of my lineage, I was allowed to bring Lucas’s second body back. But my father also told me what it is the Entity wants.”

  This was it. This was the secret Lalura knew was swimming beneath the surface of her daughter’s thoughts. It was a truth that no magic could bring out. The things that had transpired that day were too terrible, and the knowledge was buried too deep. Digging it out forcibly would have caused scars.

  The information, no matter how badly the Thirteen Kings wanted or needed it, would have to come in its own time.

  Now was that time.

  “My mother lies sleeping on the West Bank,” Dannai told them. “But it was not Kamon Re, my uncle, who put her there. It was my father.”

  Lalura straightened as this information sank in.

  “What?” asked Diana. “I thought Kamon had her under some sort of coma or sleeping spell or something!”

  Dannai shook her head. “My uncle can speak with her for brief periods. The blood of a god runs through his veins as well. His power is great. Therefore, he can enter her dreams, and strangely enough, her dreams can enter reality. For a few seconds at a time, she can even appear awake. But my father’s spell is the one that keeps her under. It’s Amon Re who makes sure she remains in the Land of the Dead.”

  The confusion was palpable amongst Dannai’s listeners. Lalura waited, but she didn’t have to wait long.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” said Lily. “Why would your father want to kill your mother?”

  “Because before he placed her under his spell,” Dannai told them gravely, “she had been possessed by the Entity. She was the most powerful magic user in any realm when he claimed her. She was his end-all, his ultimate body. With her as his host, he could take over the world. But my father recognized what was happening just in time and placed her in a stasis inches from death.” She paused. “Kamon wants her to awaken. Because Kamon works for the Entity. And the Entity wants nothing more than a body – and a magic – like hers to call his own.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You don’t look so hot.” Okay, that wasn’t actually true. The truth was, he looked very hot, like ridiculously hot, like melt-in-your mouth hot, and she’d never seen a more beautiful specimen of a man. But he also looked as though he’d just finished jiu jitsu sparring with the devil, and Beelzebub had gotten in a few illegal hits below the belt.

  He looked like he was in pain. And he looked really, really angry.

  He had his hand pressed to his rock-hard abdomen, which carelessly slightly lifted his shirt, exposing an inch or two of his toned midriffs in all their ripped glory. But that hand was clenched, clutching his shirt tightly like he needed to crush something and there was nothing crushable around. Well, except for her. Which is why she stood across the room from him and just spoke loudly.

  His breathing was a little too fast for someone who wasn’t in pain. His teeth were clenched behind his closed lips, and she could see the muscles of his jaw tensed and tight just like the rest of him was. But most telling of all was the fact that his eyes were glowing. Not – “Hey, your eyes are so bright and sparkly, they are almost glowing” glowing, but actually glowing. They’d been giving off blue-white light since just after the hotel’s employee had left them alone in the room.

  He ignored her comment and made his way to the bed that was against one wall. It was covered with furs that looked remarkably like the ones in the ice castle. With a grunt of pain that he tried to hide but couldn’t quite squelch, he sat on the edge of the bed and closed those glowing eyes. Then he said through those clenched teeth, “I’m the Winter King. Hot isn’t something I’m supposed to be anyway.” Proving he hadn’t ignored her after all.

  Poppy took a few tentative steps toward him. “What happened back there?”

  Without opening his eyes, he said, “Someone has attacked the tree. Cut off one of its roots. As a result, both the castle and myself have taken damage.”

  Poppy frowned. “Tree?” she asked, feeling stupid.

  “Yggdrasil,” he said.

  “The World Tree?” she asked, remembering the name of the tree from her high school mythology class. In the Norse mythos, Yggdrasil was supposed to encompass something like nine worlds, from the realms of giants and elves to the heavens, where the branches extended. Most believe the name “Yggdrasil” was derived from “Odin’s Horse or Odin’s Gallows,” given that it was this massive ash that Odin, the Norse All-Father god, sacrificed himself upon by hanging. Yggdrasil, in short, was very sacred to the Norse, no matter which interpretation you followed.

  Kristopher opened his eyes. They were still glowing. It was especially unnerving that he now settled them on her. “Popular mythology strikes again,” he said derogatorily, but gently and without any real acid in his tone.

  “You mean it’s not the World Tree?”

  He shook his head, then took the pillows and furs from the bed and piled them up against the wall before settling back against it in a relaxed seated position. His skin color was a little more pale than it
had been when they’d first met. And not a single muscle in his body had yet relaxed. “Humans never quite get it right,” he said, “and I say that as a man who was once human myself. For one thing, no matter what our beliefs, we entrust those beliefs to words spoken or penned down by human beings. Humans are by nature fallible. But then we exacerbate the problem by taking our initial beliefs and pushing them relentlessly through time, which changes. Because time changes and we must therefore change with it, we add to our beliefs here and subtract there. Or worse, we refuse to. Over time, the story is either edited so much it loses its meaning, or it forces man to adhere to something downright ridiculous. Either way, the heart of it is blurred by time and human error, and it loses its soul. The plotline and characters are by this point unrecognizable.”

  Poppy took a few more steps toward the bed. As she drew closer, she caught strange vibrations in the air. It was the power she’d sensed coming off him before, the power of a king. But it was jagged and disrupted, like a magnificent beast that had been tortured and teased until it was damaged and furious.

  “Then… what is Yggdrasil?” she asked cautiously.

  She stopped a few feet from the bed, which was a king sized block of ice covered in furs. She wondered if they were real. She hoped not. There was no reason for them to be real here in the mortal realm, not with equally warm substitutes available just about everywhere.

  “Yggdrasil is a holy tree. But it is not the World Tree for mortal realms. It is the World Tree for the immortal realms, especially the realm of winter. We know it as the Great Tree. Each fruit appears as a snowflake, and represents the beginning of the season. It is what allows me to move freely between the Winter Kingdom and the mortal realm, because its roots bind the two together.”

  She digested this. “And something attacked one of those roots? Who? And does that mean that we can’t go back now?”