by C. L. Wilson
He bent his head, focusing his attention back on the maps spread out before him. The current location and troop strength of all Wintercraig’s battalions had been marked. Calbernans by sea posed a difficulty. Both Wintercraig and Summerlea had too many miles of shoreline to patrol—much less defend. Winter’s ice should see them safe until spring, but once the northern passage began its yearly thaw, opening a navigable seaway around the arctic rim, the invaders could land anywhere along Wintercraig’s thousands of miles of coastline.
“Reopen all the northern watchtowers and repair the four here that were damaged by last year’s storms. I want a pair of scouts at each tower, to be relieved every forty-five days. And send word to Leirik. At a minimum, I want towers built and manned in these locations.” He tapped a dozen points on Summerlea’s coastlines. “Tell him to move swiftly. Have him muster the locals to aid in the construction.” He glanced up. “What are you waiting for?”
Barsul and the generals filed out of the room, but Valik held back.
Wyn shook his head. “Don’t,” he commanded, hoping to head off his friend’s lecture about the danger Khamsin posed to them all.
“All I’m saying, Wyn, is be careful. Get your heir on her as quick as you can, but don’t let down your guard. You can’t trust what you feel for her. You know you can’t. She’s a powerful weatherwitch, but who knows what other arcane skills she might possess.”
“For the last time, Valik, I’m under no spell.”
“Are you not? I’ve seen the way you are around her, how you can’t take your eyes off her. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it either. Reika says—”
“Enough!” Wyn pinched the bridge of his nose and battled back the sharp edge of his temper. His friend was venturing into the realm of the ridiculous. “Your concern is noted, Valik. Now, please, you have work to attend to, and so do I.” He gestured to the door.
Valik heaved a sigh but bowed and took his leave.
When he was gone, Wynter walked to one of the south-facing tower windows and stared down at the baileys below. A small figure, easily identifiable by her dark hair and the bright Summerlander skirts peeping out beneath her pale coat, stepped out into the courtyard, a smaller white-blond figure beside her. He watched them cross the bailey and disappear into the slate-roofed armory.
“Is Valik right, wife?” he whispered. “Would you betray me to your brother?” He didn’t want to believe it. Everything in him cried out that it couldn’t be true. How could she give him such passion in their marriage bed, then plot against him?
But he’d been betrayed by a woman before. He couldn’t take the chance he would be betrayed again. There was too much at stake.
Wynter turned away from the window. Laci had banned him from Khamsin’s bed to give Khamsin’s womb time to heal from the effects of the poison. He would use the time to distance himself from her entirely. Perhaps, with his eye unclouded by desire, he would see her more clearly.
CHAPTER 16
The Gathering Storm
Khamsin saw even less of Wynter over the next several weeks than she had since arriving in Gildenheim. He canceled the samdar-hald and gildis, spent his days ensconced in meeting after meeting with his councilors, generals, and stewards, and ate his meals in private. The bedchamber adjoining hers stayed silent and dark long past the midnight hour, and the few times she heard him come to bed, she heard him leave again not long after.
Thinking he’d decided to take Reika Villani up on what she so eagerly offered, Khamsin began following him to see where he went at night when the rest of the palace was sleeping. But instead of heading off to meet a mistress, Wynter made his way to the Atrium, the one room in the palace she’d been forbidden to enter. He stayed there for hours—sometimes until morning.
One night, exhausted from spying on her husband, Khamsin dozed off in the adjacent hallway while waiting for him to emerge from the Atrium. She woke sometime later to find herself in his arms, being carried back to her room. She closed her eyes quickly and tried to pretend she was still asleep as he tucked her back into her bed, but he wasn’t fooled.
“Have you followed me enough now to satisfy your curiosity, wife? Or must I set guards at your door to keep you in your bed?”
She gave up the pretense and opened her eyes, scowling up at him. “How long have you known?”
“That you were following me? Since the first night.” He tapped the side of his nose. “I know your scent, wife. I would know it anywhere.”
So much for trying to be stealthy around him. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
She didn’t believe him. “Are you meeting someone in there?”
“No.”
“So what’s in there? Why can’t anyone else go in? What are you hiding?”
“What’s in there is none of your business. And no one is allowed inside but me because I said so. I am king, and my word is law. That’s why.” He cupped her face gently. His thumb brushed the rose shaped burn on her cheekbone. “And you will make no attempt to gain access to that room. You will not enter it or send anyone else to enter it in your stead. Is that clear?”
She glared at him in mutinous silence.
Her cheek prickled as the hand cupping her face grew cold. “I will have your word, Khamsin. Now.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “I won’t go into the Atrium or send anyone there on my behalf.”
“Good. Now go to sleep. And don’t follow me anymore. You’re supposed to be resting and healing.”
“This is ridiculous. I’m perfectly fine. I heal fast.” What she wanted was him back in her bed and at least some small measure of his attention. She was his wife, after all. But pride wouldn’t let her ask him to stay. It was too much like begging. Khamsin Coruscate had never begged for a thing in her life. She wasn’t about to start now.
But she did catch hold of the hand pressed against her cheek. “I’ve survived much worse, and you know it.”
“Yes, and you and that bastard father of yours drugged me and tricked me into harming you further, then you hid your worsening illness from me until your wounds went septic and you nearly died.” He straightened up from the bed, pulling his hand from her grip. “I will not be manipulated into risking your health. Laci said six weeks of rest and healing, and six weeks it will be. Now close your eyes and go to sleep. If I find you wandering around at night again, I will be quite wroth, and you don’t want that.”
Thwarted, she flopped down on the bed and scowled at him in annoyance. Irritating man. He knew what she wanted. That infernal, supersensitive sniffer of his clearly hadn’t stopped working, so he had to know. Because all he had to do was enter the same room, and she could feel herself melting.
“Sleep,” he said again, sternly, as if she were a rebellious child protesting against bedtime.
Just for that, she made a show of squeezing her eyes shut. “There. I’m sleeping.”
“Good. Stay that way. And for once, wife, do as you’re told.”
She heard him blow out the candles by her bedside. The light shining through her closed eyelids went dark. She heard the tread of his feet as he exited the room and knew when he was gone by the empty ache that filled the places his presence made warm. With a frustrated groan, she rolled over on her belly and tried to resign herself to another lonely, achingly celibate night without him.
Wynter walked through the connecting rooms to his own chambers and sank down on the edge of his bed. He dropped his face into hands that shook. Wyrn help him. Khamsin had become like a drug to him.
Before her poisoning, the hours he’d spent in her room at night had grown longer and longer. He’d found himself counting down the hours until he could retire to her room, divest her of whatever frothy thing she’d chosen to sleep in, and sink into the seductive heat of her embrace. And even after the sex, when she lay sleeping, he
would remain awake beside her for hours, just marveling at the strength of his feelings. Leaving her bed each morning had become an act of sheer will. He could happily have stayed there, his body wrapped around hers, ignoring his duty and the very real threats gathering against Wintercraig. He was tired of war. He wanted peace. He wanted her, Khamsin, his volatile, temperamental, utterly intoxicating wife.
Valik was right. She had too much power over him. If she knew how easily she could drive him to distraction with just a touch, a look, a flutter of those long, silken lashes, he would be undone.
She’d wanted him to stay tonight. If he hadn’t pulled his hand free and beat a path back to his own room, he would have joined her in that bed and to Hel with the consequences. And that could have been bad.
She thought she was so tough, so hard to break, so easily and rapidly mended. But he remembered the sight of blood-soaked skirts, the unnatural paleness of her skin as she’d nearly bled her life out before his eyes. He hadn’t felt anything close to that stab of terror since the day he’d heard the wolves’ mournful howl and known something had happened to Garrick. So no matter how fully healed Khamsin declared herself to be, Wynter wasn’t taking any chances.
He lay down on the bed. His body was hard as a rock, and had been from the moment he’d picked her up to carry her back to her room. Finding some other woman to relieve his need was out of the question. Even if he hadn’t sworn an oath of fidelity, Khamsin was the only one he wanted. The only one for whom his blood and what remained of his humanity not only warmed, but burned.
His hand still tingled from cupping her face, stroking the creamy softness of her dark skin. He lifted his palm to his nose and breathed in the intoxicating jasmine-scented aroma that still clung to him. He reached his other hand down, loosened the laces of his trousers, and curled his fingers around the long, heavy length of his sex. His eyes closed. In the darkness, her face emerged. Luminous silver eyes. Curls of lightning-shot black hair. The fragile, slight-boned beauty of her delicate frame. The full, perfect breasts with their exotic, dark brown nipples.
He remembered how she’d been in the tent after the lightning storm, when he’d claimed her for the first time since their wedding night. Free of wine and arras and whatever else had been in that wedding-cup. She’d been scared, nervous but too proud to show it. But she’d overcome that fear, met his passion head-on, and returned it in full with passion of her own. He remembered, also, their first night here in Gildenheim, when she’d seethed with jealousy over Reika’s conspicuous familiarity, and how that anger had led her to stake her claim upon him in no uncertain terms. Her eyes full of storms, her skin hot and electric, facing him without the tiniest hint of fear and demanding his fidelity and attentions. If he hadn’t been completely enchanted with her before, that night had done the trick.
He could recall with perfect clarity the feel of her body, so wet and hot, muscles clamping tight around him. The glorious heat, melting the ice that lived inside him, making him feel, really feel, like he had not felt for three long years. His hand moved with each remembered thrust, stroking, stroking, until his muscles clenched and his seed spurted across the sheets.
After that night, Wynter made himself even scarcer. He never came back to his room at night. He didn’t eat meals with the court anymore. Except for occasional glimpses of him as she and Krysti roamed the palace halls, Kham might have believed Wynter had left Gildenheim altogether.
She almost wished he had. What small gains she’d made with the ladies of the court began to reverse as the nobles interpreted Wynter’s absence to mean that the new queen had fallen out of favor. The watchful eyes of the courtiers grew sly and knowing. Polite dinner conversation gave way to subtle innuendo, and titters muffled behind fans, all observed and encouraged by Reika Villani as she held court at the far end of the banquet hall in cold triumph.
Khamsin feared she might fry them all—including her husband—with a lightning bolt if she lost her temper, so she began finding excuses to be away from the palace.
She and Krysti became an inseparable pair. At her insistence, Bron selected a pony for the boy, and the two of them continued Kham’s riding lessons together. Once they were both comfortable in the saddle, no place within four hours’ ride of Gildenheim was safe from them. Khamsin, Krysti, and their armored guard soon became a common sight in the villages and mountains of the Craig.
And the villagers, despite their wishes to the contrary, soon became the focus of Kham’s determined efforts to win them over. With the threat of Mount Gerd looming over her future, she was determined to do everything in her power to ensure that mercy, not death, awaited her.
Befriending Winterfolk, however, turned out to be even harder than winning over the ladies of the court. Winterfolk were wary of strangers, their villages small and closely knit. They were disinclined to be friendly to start with, and Kham’s relation to the hated Summer King made them even more standoffish. The first time she rode into Skala-Holt, one of the larger villages nestled at the foot of Mount Fjarmir near the pass that led to Frostvatn on the western coast, many of the villagers actually snatched their children up off the street and hustled them inside as if Khamsin might cast an evil eye upon them, or some such nonsense.
Still, she persevered. Taking unabashed advantage of her rank—hoping the villagers would fear Wynter’s wrath too much to snub his queen—she squeezed an introduction out of each person she met. Corbin, the beefy white-haired tanner of Brindlewood; Leise, the curt-bordering-on-hostile pubkeeper in Skala-Holt and her neighbors Derik and Starra Freijel, who raised sheep and spun wool on a stretch of land at the base of Mount Fjarmir: Khamsin committed their faces and many others to memory and made a point of greeting them by name when next they met. Not that it helped. The Winterfolk remained unwelcoming and taciturn.
“This is useless,” she complained after yet another day of cold shoulders and unwelcoming villagers. “They’ll never see me as anything but a Summerlander.”
“Winterfolk warm slowly to outsiders,” Krysti said. “If you want them to accept you, you might start by accepting them.”
“What do you mean? I’m riding out to meet them. I’m being as nice as I know how. What else can I do?”
“Well, you might try dressing more like us for starters.” Krysti nodded at the bright, jewel-toned clothing Khamsin had refused to give up.
“But I like my clothes. They remind me of home.” The bright colors and rich fabrics made her feel warm, happy. And, yes, defiant. She clung to her Summerland colors as a form of rebellious independence, a symbol of her determination never to be cowed by these harsh, distant people and their cold gray-and-white world.
“I’m just saying, if you dress and act like a foreigner, you shouldn’t be surprised when they treat you like one.”
Khamsin frowned. She’d watched the Summer court enough to realize the wisdom in Krysti’s advice. In fashion, manners, interests, behavior, many of Summerlea’s courtiers strove for a sense of personal distinction, but few of them strayed far from acceptable conventions. People were like the flocks of birds she’d watched from her mother’s Sky Garden. What one did, the rest followed.
“I’ll think about it.” That was the most she was willing to concede for the moment. She rebelled against rules and conformity and other people’s expectations of her. She always had. If she gave that up—gave up her individuality, her fierce independence—what would be left of Khamsin?
“Even though it may not seem like it, you are making progress,” Krysti assured her as they rode away from the Freijels’ sheep farm. “That was the first time Mr. Freijel offered to water your horse.”
“It was, wasn’t it?” She glanced back over her shoulder, at the small, stone cottage built into the side of the mountain. Smoke curled from the chimney. Fat, fluffy sheep wandered the hillside, snuffling at the snow in search of grass. Derik Freijel had already turned away to continue his work, but
his wife Starra was still standing on the stoop watching Khamsin and Krysti ride away. Kham raised a hand to wave. Starra did not respond in kind. She merely tucked a flyaway strand of hair behind her ears and ducked inside the family’s stone-and-sod home.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t read much into that offer to water my horse,” Kham said with a grimace. “He was probably just taking pity on the horse.”
Krysti glanced back at the small farm and sighed. “Give them time. Even a mountain wears down from the wind.”
“But only after a few millennia of effort,” she pointed out. “I don’t have that much time.” She’d been here almost two months already and was no closer to winning over her new people than the day she arrived. Like it or not, her way was not working. She needed to change tactics. “Come on. Let’s get back to Gildenheim. I need to speak to Vinca about bringing that seamstress back in.”
Wynter noted the change in his queen’s attire, as he noticed everything about her. Day by day, bit by bit, she shed her jewel-toned Summerlander clothes for Wintercraig fashions in shades of icy blue, cream, pale taupe, and white.
At first, he approved of the change. Her bright Summerlander colors made it easy to spot her in a crowd, and his eye was instantly drawn to her whenever she entered a room. Since he’d spent the last month trying to avoid being drawn to her, he thought her altered wardrobe would be a good thing.
It didn’t quite work out that way. The paler colors set off her dark skin and black hair, amplifying the contrast to an even greater effect, the way diamonds enhanced the beauty of colored gems. Instead of helping her blend in, her new clothes only called attention to how different she was from the rest of his people, how exotically beautiful.