The Winter King

by C. L. Wilson

  Jorgun, standing near Wynter’s elbow, handed him a small, capped pot.

  “What’s this?” Wynter growled, removing the lid and sniffing the gooey contents within.

  “The herbalist’s salve. For her wounds.”

  Wynter recapped the pot and tossed it aside. “What good has it done her? I’ll be damned if we waste another second on failed remedies. Don’t you have a better solution?”

  “I’m a surgeon, not an herbalist.”

  “But you’ve treated enough battle wounds to know a few basic healing aids for festering wounds. Tell me what you need. I’ll send men to find it.”

  The surgeon didn’t waste time arguing. “I need pine needles boiled in snowmelt for a wound wash to clear out the worst of the infection. Send some men to see if they can find fresh chickweed. If they can’t find fresh, then boil some of our dried supply along with chamomile and comfrey for a poultice. I’ll need honey to dress the wounds when I’m done, and willowbark tea to bring down the fever. And my king?”

  Wynter paused at the outer doorway and glanced back.

  Jorgun met his eyes with grim urgency. “If you want her to live, tell the men to hurry.”

  Wynter gave a curt nod and ducked through the tent flaps.

  Within minutes, a cookfire had been built just outside the tent, and several kettles were boiling away, one containing pine needles gathered from a nearby stand of trees, another filled with willowbark for fever. A dozen men were scouring the snow-covered countryside for fresh chickweed, but Wynter wasn’t waiting on them. A third kettle filled with dried chickweed, comfrey, and chamomile was boiling alongside the others.

  When the pine-needle concoction was ready, Wynter grabbed an old wineskin, packed a funnel with snow, and ladled the steaming wound wash into the funnel. The snow melted and cooled the mixture slightly. He repeated the process, testing the wash against his own skin as Jorgun had instructed, until the wineskin was full of hot, but not scorching, liquid.

  Grabbing up a stack of cloths used to bind soldiers’ wounds, he carried the pine-needle infusion into the tent and handed it to Jorgun. Jorgun’s assistant, Frig, was tucking bolsters of cloth around Khamsin.

  “I’ll need you both to hold her down,” the surgeon said. “She isn’t going to like this very much.” Jorgun waited for Wynter to grasp his wife’s shoulders and Frig to pin her ankles, then he uncorked the wineskin.

  The instant the hot, pungent liquid poured over her infected back, Khamsin reared up, writhing and screaming. She would have thrown herself off the cot had Wynter and Frig not held her fast. Runnels of steaming liquid washed over Khamsin’s skin and ran in streamers down her sides into the absorbent towels Frig had arranged around her.

  The wineskin emptied quickly, but a second was already waiting. As Jorgun aimed the spout of hot liquid directly into the worst of her lacerations to irrigate the inflamed flesh, a stream of filthy invectives poured out of her mouth.

  In the distance, thunder began to rumble.

  Wynter grinned, teeth clenched. “That’s it, little flower. Get angry.” But her supply of energy depleted quickly, and before the surgeon emptied the second wineskin, her slender body went limp. Wynter’s savage grin faded, and he shared a brief, grim look with Jorgun.

  The surgeon continued working in silence, probing Khamsin’s wounds, lancing several areas where the infection had gone deep, irrigating everything with fresh pine wash. When he was finally satisfied the wounds were clean, he stepped back and gestured to Wynter.

  “Hold her, Your Grace. And get as much of this willowbark tea down her throat as you can.”

  Wyn nodded and cradled her against his chest, pouring dribbles of tea into her mouth while Frig and Jorgun replaced the pine-wash-soaked blankets with fresh, dry bedding. When they were done, he laid her back down on the fresh, clean blankets.

  One of the men carried in the kettle that smelled of comfrey, chamomile, and chickweed. It was already swimming with soaked linen squares. Wynter fished them out with a stick, wrung them gently—hissing a little at the burn of hot liquid on his palms—and handed them to Jorgun, who placed the steaming, herb-soaked cloths over Khamsin’s back.

  When the poultices cooled, Jorgun removed them and smeared a generous layer of honey over the open lacerations to help prevent additional infection from entering the wounds.

  An hour later, the process started over again. Throughout the afternoon and deep into the night, Jorgun, Wynter, and Frig worked to defeat the feverish infection that held Khamsin in its grip. The battle continued through the next day, and the next, but despite their efforts, the infection would not give up its hold. The poison had settled deep, and no matter what sort of progress they made, a few hours later the battle would rage again.

  Close to midnight on the third day, her temperature spiked, and she began rambling in delirium and thrashing about. Electricity crackled along her fingertips as wild energy sought an outlet. A tempest gathered in the sky. The tent walls shuddered in howling gusts of wind. Rain sluiced down in sheets, falling so fast and furious, it was as if a river were pouring from the sky. Lightning shattered the darkness in merciless barrages, illuminating the tent walls like shades over a candle and turning cloud-blackened night as bright as day. Concussive thunderclaps shook the earth and left Wynter’s ears ringing.

  “Winter’s Frost!” The tent flaps flung open, and Valik, who had been standing guard with the men, leapt inside. “That lightning struck so close, it damned near singed my eyebrows!” He scowled at Khamsin’s thrashing body. “It’s her, isn’t it? She’s feeding this storm. You’ve got to knock her out before she kills us all.”

  Wynter scowled at his friend. “I will not hit a woman, and especially not my wife.”

  “Wyn, those clouds will spawn a cyclone if she keeps feeding them energy.”

  “No! She suffers now because of what her father did to her. I will not hurt her more.”

  “Well, you’d best do something! A few more minutes of this storm, and we’ll all die, including your precious Summerlander bride.”

  As if to prove his point, the whole tent suddenly went bright as day, and a thunderous boom nearly knocked them all off their feet.

  Wynter swore beneath his breath. Valik was right. The storm outside was deadly. It had to be stopped. He laid a hand on his wife’s burning forehead. Khamsin’s fever was driving her delirium, and her delirium was driving the storm. If he could bring down her fever, the storm should calm. Since none of the surgeon’s remedies had worked, there was only one other way Wyn knew to lower Khamsin’s temperature.

  He closed his eyes and drew on the coldness within him, summoning the power of the Ice Heart. Not much. He wanted to cool her fever, not freeze her to death. Even so, just that tiny summoning ate away at the small reserve of warmth inside him.

  That was the insidious price of the Ice Heart. Each use of its power, no matter how minute, robbed him of some irretrievable portion of his humanity. After three years of war and death, so little of his former self remained, he felt even the tiniest additional loss like a hammer to the heart. He could literally feel himself growing more distant, more unfeeling, more like the dread, soulless monster of legend.

  When the backs of his eyes began to burn, he opened them and stared down at Khamsin, releasing the cold in a long, sweeping Gaze that traveled up and down the length of her body. The temperature around them dropped, becoming brisk. Her breath puffed out in small clouds of steam. His did not. What lived inside him was so much colder than even the frozen wastelands of the north that each exhaled breath grew warmer rather than colder when it hit the air.

  He smoothed his hands across her flesh, rubbing the skin so his Gaze chilled but did not freeze and bending close to breathe cool air upon her in its wake. The burning heat in her skin began to cool. Her thrashing stilled.

  Outside, lightning still crashed and boomed as strong
as ever.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” Valik shouted over the din.

  Wynter swore under his breath. “The storm has already gathered enough energy to sustain itself.” It was a fearsome storm, far, far worse than the little thundershower she’d summoned last week in Vera Sola. “I’ll need to bleed some of it off before things will settle down.” Wyn cast a glance back at his friend, and his eyes widened. Valik’s hair had begun to lift in a pale halo around his face. The air around him had begun to glow an eerie shade of violet. “Valik!” he cried, “Move!”

  Only swift reflexes honed by years of battle saved him. Valik leapt a scant instant before lightning struck the spot he’d been standing. The tent flashed with blinding light, and thunder cracked with earsplitting fury. The canvas caught fire, but pelting rain extinguished it almost as soon as the first flame flickered. Electricity jumped and sparked along the metal binding of the tent pole, then leapt in frenetic arcs towards Khamsin’s body.

  Her eyes flew open, shifting silver, glowing as the wild energy surged through her. Her back arched; her hands splayed out, fingertips sparking with flashes of light. The curling, white-streaked strands in her midnight hair began to move, rising as Valik’s had done on invisible bands of energy while a violet glow surrounded her. She wasn’t controlling or feeding the storm any longer, but she was still a lodestone for its energy.

  Wynter lunged towards her, but the lightning reached her first. The explosion of it flung him backward with such force that it drove the breath from his lungs. He lay on the tent floor, stunned and gasping as the lightning speared her, filling her slight body with shining light. Another bolt struck, its white-hot charge seeking her out with unerring accuracy.

  He lurched to his feet and stumbled out of the tent, summoning his power as he went. He could not control lightning or storms, but by the Frozen Gates of Hel, he could certainly summon enough cold, dry winter to rob this tempest of its fuel. He reached deep into the bottomless well of power that was the Ice Heart, shouting with a mix of pain and defiance as the devastating fury of it ripped through him. His head flung back, his eyes flew open. Power erupted in a shining column, shooting high into the atmosphere. Rain froze and shattered. Water vapor flash-froze to tiny flakes of snow and ice.

  He dug deeper into the icy depths of his power, plunging into the abyss, gathering the bitter cold and driving it into the sky like a sword thrust to the storm’s heart. Magic and nature exploded in a collision of power. But a storm—even a great storm—could not sustain itself when robbed of its warmth and moisture. The clouds shrank, bleeding their strength out in showers of brittle snowflakes.

  Wynter held the Ice Heart’s dread power with unflinching determination, until the wild, roiling storm transformed to clear, cloudless sky, filled with stars so bright they dazzled the eye and a cold so bitter it sent every man and beast in the encampment running for shelter and the warmth of campfires and huddled bodies. Only then did he release his hold on the magic.

  His body felt stiff and hollow. As if there were a terrible, empty void within. Some elusive memory niggled at his mind, some faint alarm whose meaning he could not remember. He turned and stepped back into his tent.

  Valik had beat out what flames the rain had not extinguished. Now, shivering violently, he was crouched over Khamsin’s still form. His hands were shaking with cold as he dragged furs and blankets over her to protect her from the dangerous drop in temperature.

  “Does she live?” Wynter asked in a voice bereft of emotion. Some part of his brain remembered that Valik was his beloved friend and that the woman lying on the heap of furs was his wife, whom he was pledged to protect. But the memory felt coldly detached, as if the concept of emotion was little more than alien words on a page. He felt . . . dead inside . . . frozen.

  Valik turned to look at him, concern etched across his face. “Wyn? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” His vision had changed. Everything seemed paler. Whiter. A red glow emanated from Valik’s chest and radiated outward through his body, down his arms and legs, growing fainter as it extended. Heat bloom. Wynter was seeing the heat of life in Valik’s body.

  He glanced down at his own hands and saw white with the barest hint of pink. The girl . . . Khamsin . . . his wife . . . looked white, too, but there was something different about her that he couldn’t define. “Is she dead?”

  “What? No. Far from it. I don’t know how she did it, but damned if your Summerlea bride didn’t just use that lightning storm to heal every wound on her body. Here, see for yourself.” Valik moved aside so Wynter could come closer, then hissed in sudden surprise as Wyn drew near. “Thorgyll’s freezing spears! You’re cold as ice!” His body went stiff. His hand fell to the hilt of the sword still strapped to his waist. “Wyn?” he asked again in a cautious, clipped voice. “You all right?”

  Wynter ignored him. He crouched down beside the pallet and reached out his hands towards the unconscious woman. Now he understood the difference in her whiteness. It wasn’t the chill of death. It was heat. A concentrated, simmering well of it. So much stronger than what lived in Valik that it glowed bright as day. Not the white of ice, but the white of a blazing summer sun. He could feel it tingling across his palms, thawing his frozen skin. Nerve ends prickled with returning sensation.

  He leaned closer and drew a deep breath. His eyes closed as her warmth infused his lungs and drove back the frozen hollowness inside him. “Yes,” he murmured, suddenly weary. “I’m fine, Valik.” He rose to his feet and turned to clap a hand on Valik’s shoulder. “I know what you fear, but for now, at least, there’s no need. Go,” he urged, “get some rest. I’ll stay here with her.”

  Valik reached up to cover Wynter’s hand with his own, and enough human warmth must have returned to Wyn’s fingers to reassure him because he nodded, and the rigid, battle-ready tension of his muscles relaxed slightly. “I’ll send someone to repair the tent.”

  Wynter glanced up at the scorched holes in the canvas roof where the lightning bolts had shot through. Stars twinkled in the crystalline night sky. The air was still now, with no hint of a breeze. He hadn’t been able to feel the cold in three years, and with the heat radiating from Khamsin’s body, he doubted she would be able to feel it either.

  “Leave it ’til morning. We’ll be fine.”

  “They can clear up the mess, at least,” Valik insisted. He poked his head outside the tent flap and shouted a series of quick commands. Moments later, half a dozen shivering men gathered up the twisted, melted remains of the growing lamps and everything else that had been damaged in Khamsin’s delirium-induced storm and carted the wreckage out. When they left, much of the tent had been stripped bare.

  Wyn waited until they were gone, then arched a brow. “Satisfied?”

  “No. But it’ll do for now.” After a last, brief hesitation, Valik bowed and left.

  When he was gone, Wynter moved back to the pallet and lay down on the furs beside Khamsin, moving close to the waves of heat emanating from her. The pleasure of that warmth sinking into his flesh was sublime, and so sensual it was nearly erotic. He curled and arm around her waist, threw a leg over hers, and snuggled closer.

  Once she was healed, he decided, he would find out exactly how much of the shattering pleasure they’d shared on their wedding night had been real rather than arras-induced.

  Khamsin woke to the nip of frost in the air and the heavy, warm weight of furs draped over her. She opened her eyes and glanced around to gain her bearings. She was in a tent. Wynter’s tent, she realized. Only most of the furnishings were gone, and there was a fine layer of frost lying over everything that remained. The tiny ice crystals sparkled in shafts of bright sunlight like the sugar coating of Tildy’s favorite pastry.

  Frost? Sunlight?

  She sniffed the air and caught the acrid remnants of char. Something had burned, and the scorched smell was familiar. She looked up with
burgeoning dread and found bright morning sunlight streaming through dozens of holes in the canvas roof overhead. There were three large, gaping rents, and at least two dozen smaller, coin-sized punctures, all surrounded by a sprinkling of tiny pinpricks. The edges of all the holes were blackened, scorched.

  It was as if someone had upended a pail of embers on the roof of the tent. Only she knew no one had. In the way that Wynter could detect the faintest of scents, she could feel the electric echo of lightning. Her lightning.

  She’d called a lightning storm down upon this tent. Upon the encampment.

  How many men had she killed?

  She sat up with a sudden, graceless jolt. The furs covering her body fell away, and she gasped at the slap of freezing air against her naked skin. Naked? She stared down at her bare breasts, the nipples hardened to small, dark points by the cold. Her mind scrambled for the fragments of memories. She’d not felt well. Her back had begun to fester. The last thing she remembered, she’d been riding in the coach, praying for death to end her torment.

  Kham reached a hand behind her towards her spine. Fingers fluttered over smooth skin, feeling the small raised ridges of scars but no torn flesh or scabs. She stretched her arms and twisted her back experimentally. There was no pain, not even the twinge of bruised flesh. Her wounds had healed. Completely.

  But at what price?

  Without warning, the tent flaps parted. Cold air swirled in. Khamsin gasped and slapped her hands over her breasts just as Wynter ducked into the tent, a steaming kettle in one hand and a cloth-covered pot of something that smelled delicious in the other.

  All worry over what she might have done evaporated in an instant. Her mind went blank. Her mouth went dry. She couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it.

  He was nearly naked. Bare-armed, bare-chested, with shoulders so broad and arms so powerful, he looked like he could bear the weight of the world. Over seven feet of impressive golden muscle, clad in nothing but a grayish white, animal-pelt loincloth and a pair of furred boots strapped to rock-hard calves. Silvery white hair spilled down his back and over his shoulders like a snowfall. The air outside was frigid, but he seemed not to notice it at all. His vivid eyes, pale and piercing, fixed on her with breathtaking intensity.