EXCERPT FROM
BITTER FROST
*****************************
Prologue
T
he dream had come again, like the sun after a storm. It was the same dream that had come many times before, battering down the doors of my mind night after night since I was a child. It was the sort of dreams all girls dream, I suppose – a dream of mysterious worlds and hidden doorways, of leaves that breathe and make music when they are rustled in the wind, and rivers that bubble and froth with secrets.
Dreams
, my mother always told me,
represent part of our unconsciousness – the place where we store the true parts of our soul, away from the rest of the world.
My mother was an artist; she always thought this way. If it was true, then my true soul was a denizen of this strange and fantastical world. I often felt, in waking hours, that I was in exile, somehow – somehow less myself, less
true
, than I had been in my enchanted slumber. The real world was only a dream, only an echo, and in silent moments throughout the day it would hit me:
I am not at home here
.
I would shake the thought off, of course, dismiss it as stupid, try and apply my mother's armchair psychoanalysis to the situation. But then, before bed, the thought would come to me, trickle through the mire of worries (boys, school, whether or not I'd remembered to charge my IPod before getting into bed, whether or not my banner would be torn down yet again from the homeroom message board) –
will I have the dream tonight?
And then, another thought would come to me alongside it.
Will I be going home again
.
And the night before my sixteenth birthday, the dream came again – stronger and more vivid than it had ever come before, as if the gauzy wisp of a curtain between reality and dream-land had at last been torn open, and I looked upon my fantasy with new eyes.
I was a fairy princess. (When waking, I would chide myself for this fantasy – sixteen-year-old girls should want to start a fruitful career in environmental activism, not twirl around in silk dresses). But I was a fairy princess, and I was a child. I dreamed myself into a palace – with spires reaching up into the sun, so that the rays seemed to pour gold down onto the turrets. The floors were marble; vines bursting with flowers were wrapped around all the colonnades. The halls were covered in mirrors – gold-framed glass after gold-framed glass – and in these hundred kaleidoscopic images I could see my reflection refracted a hundred times.
I was a toddler – perhaps four, maybe five years old, decked out in elaborate jewels, swaddled in lavender silk, yards and yards of the fabric – the color of my eyes. I hated the color of my eyes in real life – their pale color seemed to make me alien and strange – but here, they were beautiful. Here, I was beautiful. Here, I was home.
The music grew louder, and I could hear its melody. It was not like human music – no, not even the most beautiful concertos, most elaborate sonatas. This was the music that humans try to make and fail – the language of the stars as they twinkle, the rhythm of the human heart as it beats, the glimmering harmony of all the planets and all the moons and all the secret melodies of nature. It was a music that haunted me always, whenever I woke up.
Beside me there was a boy – a few years older than I was. I knew his name; somehow my heart had whispered it to my brain.
Kian
. All the palace around me was golden – with peach hues and warm, pulsating life – but Kian was pale, pale like snow. His eyes were icy blue, with just a hint of silver flecked around the irises; his hair was so black that ink itself would drown in it. He seemed out of place in the vernal palace that was my home – out of season with the baskets of ripe fruit that hung down from the ceiling, with the sweet, honey-strong smell of the flowers. But he was beautiful, and all the more beautiful for his strangeness.
We were dancing to the music, our bodies echoing the sounds we heard – or perhaps the sounds were echoing us. We were learning the Equinox Dance. It was the dance that we would dance on our wedding day.
It was a custom in this fairy kingdom that royal children would learn this dance – the most complicated and mysterious of all dances – for their wedding days. And so we all practiced, day after day (night after dream-rich night), for the day that we would come of age, and dance the dance truly, our feet moving in smooth unison, echoing the commingling of our souls.
My father was the fairy king of the Summer Kingdom – a place where everything tasted like honey and felt like the morning sun on your forehead. Kian's mother was the Winter Queen of the Winter Kingdom, a place beyond the mountains where cool breezes turned into arctic chill, where a castle made of amethyst stood upon a rocky peak, and evergreens dotted the horizon. And it was only fitting that our two kingdoms should meet, should join together; we were the chosen ones.
“You will be my Queen,” the boy whispered to me. His voice was confident, strong.
The dance was still difficult for us. I got tangled in my waves of lavender satin, tripping over his silver shoes. He in turn kept fumbling with his hands, trying to spin me around the waist and instead, elbowing me in the side – but somehow it didn't hurt.
“Silly,” cried the other girl watching us. She, like Kian, was stunning – her hair was as long and lustrous as a starless night; her eyes were silver, like the pelt of a wolf. She was called Shasta, I knew. “Silly – that's not how you dance.” She giggled, and her eyes glittered with her laugh.
And then everything changed and became chaos – my home was suddenly ripped apart and replaced by a new scene. Something –
something
– was attacking, something with teeth and horns and claws that ripped, something that made a great and bellowing sound I could hear even when I pressed my hands tightly to my ears.
The Minotaur.
The screaming came from all directions; everybody was running – me and Shasta and Kian – and the adults, all of them – away from the Minotaur, into each other. Everyone had gone mad. And then someone – someone – was fighting it, a cavalcade of fairy knights each shining in his golden armor – and some knights from the Winter Kingdom too, in their silver.
The Summer King and Queen were there, and the Winter Queen was there too. She looked like Shasta, but older – and her face was different. There was something hard and glinting in her eyes that I could not see in Shasta's, like the shiny specks in stone. I was afraid.
“This is your fault!” a voice snapped – I could not tell to whom it belonged.
“No – it's yours!” Another voice – equally angry, equally cold.
“If it hadn't been for your kingdom...”
“Don't give me those excuses – the Minotaur is a device of your court!”
The voices grew higher and stranger, angrier, louder, quicker and quicker in their retorts until I felt like I was surrounded in a cacophony of rage, bellowing over and over again until at last all I heard was:
“
It's all because of that girl!
”
And for a moment, they were all silent, and all of them were staring at me.
I could not understand, but it did not matter. Before I could think, could understand what was going on, what was happening to me, the scene had changed again.
I felt his arms around me. That was the first thing; I felt it before I could see anything, see him. I felt his arms encircle my shoulders, feel him brushing my shoulder blades lightly with his fingertips. I shivered. His hands took mine. I could see him. It was Kian, but he was older, now, and so was I – both a young man and a young woman – staring at each other. Age had only made us more beautiful; his hair was longer, now, and his eyes sharper, with greater depth. I could see my reflection in his eyes; my hair was longer too: a deep, warm brown with flecks of gold studded throughout. And I could see my expression – full of fear, full of joy – as he bent down closer to me, as his lips came ever closer to mine.
“Oh, Breena,” he said to me. “My Breena.”
His blue eyes took on a look of sharp determination; he stared at me with such intensity that I felt that his eyes had penetrated into the truest part of my true soul, a part hidden even to the rest of this strange and wonderful land.
“I will kill you, Breena. It is what I have to do. It is decreed.” He cupped my face with his hands, and I could feel his cool breath whispering upon my cheek. “We are mortal enemies.”
Always, every night, that same dream – that same fear, that same joy. When I woke up each morning, I felt a profound sense of loss, a yearning that stretched so deeply it crossed the bounds of reality itself. The alarm clock would ring, and everything would change. I was a nearly-sixteen-year-old girl, with suede boots, with T-shirts bearing sayings I believe in.” I had an IPod, a cell phone, my laptop (with pages full of html code for my brainchild, teensforgreatergood.com). I spoke in rushed slang about the latest films and television shows, played video games with Logan, teased him when he won, teased him when he lost. I wore little to no makeup and complained about homework during G-Format. The idea of dating – of fumbling high school boys trying to score in between stolen keg stands, of Facebook relationship statuses and hastily-texted endearments – repulsed me.
But for a few hours each night, I was somebody else. I was a princess in a castle, with a dress made of lavender and besides me there is a prince with arctic-blue eyes, and arms wrapped closely around me, and lips coming nightly ever closer to mine...
I was home
.
From Top Author for Young Adults
Kailin Gow
BITTER FROST
All her life, Breena had always dreamed about fairies as though she lived amongst them… beautiful fairies living amongst mortals and living in Feyland. In her dreams, he was always there – the breathtakingly handsome but dangerous Winter Prince, Kian, who is her intended. Then she sees Kian, who seems intent on finding her and carrying her off to Feyland. If she is his intended, why does he seem to hate her and want her dead? And her best friend Logan has suddenly become protective. Things are getting strange…
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