The Winter King (9 page)

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 Troms
Ø
. 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 fists 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.

Quiet surrounded her, long and hollow.
Distantly, a cracking sound echoed, muffled and deep. Then it
happened again, but smaller. And again. Little by little, she
realized it was a background noise to this place she was in,
wherever that was. She recognized the sound from winters on the
lake with her grandfather. It was a sound you heard often during
ice fishing, the noise the ice made as it settled beneath you.

She seemed to be standing in the middle of
an enormous antechamber. It spanned out around her in a wide circle
of thousands of square feet in every direction. She could have fit
basketball courts on either side of her without any issues. The
floor, walls, and ceiling were white-blue in color, a beautiful
arctic hue. In each wall of the massive room were a set of closed
double doors, four sets in all, that led to some unknown
destinations.

The palatially high ceilings rose more than
a hundred feet overhead, crowning in a huge dome made of an
enormous, round pane of glass. This allowed a crystal clear view of
the sky above. Through that glass, Poppy could see that the sun
that had been merely peeking over the horizon moments earlier was
now slightly higher, shedding more orange-pink light into the
gigantic room, giving it an otherworldly and warm glow.

Which was an odd thing for
this room to have – since it was a room of
ice
.

The walls and floor of the
room were constructed of pure, hard, perfectly carved ice. At
least, it was either ice or blue-white marble that looked
remarkably
like
ice. But given the sounds it was making, she was betting on
the former rather than the latter. Besides, it smelled like ice
too, that clean, cold, and hollow scent that was impossible to
describe other than to say it smelled like frozen water.

Carvings in the ice along the walls were
deep enough and tall enough that she could make them out clearly
even from where she stood at the room’s center. The images that
graced the walls were those of majestically detailing dragons and
giants, great Viking battle ships atop deadly waves on what was
most likely the North Sea, and of lightning bolts on mountaintops
and polar bears trekking across vast, flat landscapes of frozen
water.

They seemed to tell a story, these pictures
that blended perfectly, one into another, and the story was one
that felt familiar somehow. She’d grown up in Canada, so the
culture of the north and of the cold were not alien to her. But it
was more than that. There was something here so recognizable, she
could almost begin narrating, as if the words would simply pop into
her head and flow from between her lips with flawless delivery.

She turned a full circle, then craned her
neck and just looked up at the changing colors the sun made upon
the crystal of the glass overhead. Now she knew she was either
dreaming or dead. “I’m standing in a Viking castle,” she whispered
to herself.

“
You’re close,” came a
familiar voice, deep and resonant. It filled the massive space of
the antechamber and brushed along her skin like a caress. Yet, it
also filled her with dread. It was sort of a…
delicious
kind of dread. Like death
by chocolate.

She turned slowly, her mind spinning, her
will reaching out for any and all magic she had left in case even
in this dream world, she was going to have to throw down with a
Norse god.

But he stood at ease, his
hands at his sides, and though his exceedingly tall frame and broad
shoulders were anything but benign, he made no moves to attack in
any manner. Instead, he gestured to the antechamber around them.
“This is the domicile of a sovereign,” he told her, his glacial
blue eyes glinting, no,
glowing
, in the early morning light.
“It lies in the
Ice of Time
just beyond the
Frozen
Sea
in a realm reachable only by those
with Winter in their blood.” He smiled, his flashing eyes catching
hers and gripping tight. “It is the Castle of the Winter King.
Welcome to my home.”

Chapter Thirteen

793 A.D. – The Winter Kingdom

Erikk pulled his soaking body out of the
water and onto the fresh white snow of the iceberg mountain, and
immediately got to his feet. For being a dead man, he was awfully
cold. Weren’t you supposed to be comfortable once you were dead?
His feet were like ice cubes of their own in his boots, icicles
were forming on the ends of his eyelashes and braids, and his skin
was thrush with tiny bumps that were chafing irritably against his
wet leathers. He needed to get moving, find peat moss for a fire,
and light it.

His people always carried flint and iron on
their belts for fires. All he needed was something to light. But
his expression grew dour as his gaze scoured the landscape to find
only thick, bright white. If he wasn’t careful, not only would he
not find fuel for a fire – he would go snow blind.

He gritted his chattering teeth to keep them
from breaking and placed his hand under his eyes to block the glare
of the snow as he trudged through the white and began climbing the
smooth ice steps that led nowhere. He’d expected to slide on them,
or at least stick to them, given he was completely soaked, but they
actually gripped well, and his passage upward was easy. Why he was
climbing, he had no clue. Curiosity, he supposed. Plus, the stairs
had to have been built by someone. Maybe that someone would have a
fire.

At least from up high, he would be able to
see further.

He climbed and climbed, and as he reached
the top, he slowed before the last two steps. The view from where
he stood was vast. The stairs really did seem to lead nowhere, for
beyond the final step up ahead, a yawning chasm waited. Erikk could
not even see the bottom of it. It was a mighty canyon in the center
of an island of ice, and at the other side, far, far way, more
white stretched until it once again hit the ocean.

“
What in the name of
Ullr….” By gazing down into the chasm, Erikk could see that there
would be no peat to burn. There was no earth at all. The island was
well and truly one giant iceberg. Beyond the iceberg island
stretched nothing but sea, a beautiful clear blue the likes of
which he’d never before witnessed.

It was possible he had gone mad. Perhaps
Jorunn’s medicine had saved his life but sacrificed his mind, and
he was standing on the prow of his little boat, looking down into
the water, but mistaking it for an ice canyon. Or maybe he’d
survived the wave, but had hit his head. The ocean had been brutal,
so it was possible.

As he thought these things out, he took the
final two steps to the top of the stairwell, if for no other reason
than to simply finish the climb.

The moment he reached the very top, however,
the view changed. The air before him shimmered. He thought he heard
something like chimes, the way ice crystals sounded when the wind
blew them where they dangled from tree branches. An odd warmth
brushed past him, unfathomably welcome in the terrible cold, and
the chasm of ice that was in front of him was replaced by something
else.

At first, he thought it was the Northern
Lights somehow recessed into the crater at the center of the
island. Shimmering colors pulsed and grew stronger, swirled and
moved through the giant hole, filling it up. As they deepened in
color, they coalesced, drawing together in lines of solidness. The
solidness then took on form and shape, and Erikk found himself
wanting to take a shocked step back, one stair down to safety. But
Erikk Rangvaldson had never been a man to back down, and he didn’t
do so now.

Instead, he stood his ground and continued
to stare in wide-eyed wonder as the shimmering eruption finally
settled into the starkly beautiful, starkly clear lines of a
massive, larger-than-life castle.