The Winter King
Page 161

Roland, now a young man, visiting the lakeside where he’d been conceived. And there, rising from the grass, a great and mighty blade, whose hilt was set with an enormous ruby as red as the roses that had blossomed the day of Roland’s conception.
Roland reaching for that sword, being swept away at first contact by the same flood of memories that carried her now.
Along with those memories came the realization that the god had placed into Blazing a part of himself, a connection to his divine power and his own memories, so that through the sword, Roland and his heirs could come to know the truth of their beginnings.
Never without his golden sword, Roland had lived up to his divine parentage, leading the armies of Summerlea in battle against its enemies, guiding the kingdom of Summerlea to enviable greatness, peace, and prosperity.
It was that greatness and prosperity that convinced the equally powerful Winter King to offer his beloved only daughter in marriage to Roland.
Kham stood witness to the day the princess of Wintercraig arrived for her first meeting with her betrothed. It wasn’t love at first sight. Far from it, but Roland was dazzled by her pale, exotic beauty and by the fires that burned beneath her cool exterior. With the patience and determination for which he had become renowned, Roland courted his betrothed until, at last, one cool summer night, on the same shores of the lake where the god of the sun had possessed his mortal queen, the Winter princess surrendered to Roland her heart. And there, in the soft grass, like his father before him, Roland claimed his love.
But as Khamsin knew, theirs was not to be a happy tale. Alarmed by the threat of a united Summerlea and Wintercraig, powerful kings from across the sea conspired to destroy Roland and Summerlea. They launched their armada, a naval-borne army the likes of which had never before been assembled.
The sword showed her the very battles she’d spent a lifetime reading about and imagining in her mind. Her imagination didn’t come close to the reality.
An ocean thick with ships as far as the eye could see. A coast, overrun by foreign invaders, swarming like ants on an overturned anthill. Roland and his defenders being pushed back and back and back again, until only one final line of hills stood between the invaders and the fertile heartland of Summerlea, where Roland’s beloved waited.
Roland, desperate to save his love, calling upon the power of his sword, and through it, the god’s own power. And thus came the great, blinding explosion of light, the enormous cloud mushrooming into the sky, the feat that ended Roland’s life, defeated the enemy invaders, and forever enshrined his name in legend.
But Roland had not perished without issue as Khamsin and the rest of the world had always believed. His beloved bride from the north discovered after his death that she was with child. To save her child the stigma of bastardy—and to ensure that Roland’s only child would inherit his father’s kingdom and pass down his great gifts—the Winter princess wed Roland’s brother, Donal. And to keep safe her son’s true heritage, she spirited Roland’s sword away from Summerlea and hid it in her father’s kingdom. She intended to retrieve the sword and present it to her son when he reached manhood, but she died in childbirth with her third child. And her father, fearing that King Donal or his heirs would use the power of the sword to subjugate Wintercraig, never returned the blade to its rightful owner. Instead, he hid it securely away and devised an intricate series of clues to lead to its whereabouts, to be safeguarded until such time as an Heir of Roland was born to the Winter Throne. Those clues had been written in a book passed down from one Winter King to another.
But though more than one Wintercraig princess wed into the House of Summer, not one Summerlea princess had ever been crowned Wintercraig’s queen. And so the sword remained hidden for many centuries until one enterprising Winter King, having followed the clues to the sword’s hiding place, brought the magic weapon back to his kingdom. Although unable to unlock the sword’s great power himself—as only an Heir of Roland could do—he thought perhaps the sword’s magical, sun-born heat could melt the Ice Heart so he could claim that power, instead. But when he struck Blazing deep into the center of the frozen block of black ice in the Ice Heart well, Roland’s sword melted the Ice Heart so completely that the entire frozen mass of it turned liquid, and Roland’s sword sank to the bottom of the well, there to remain until a young daughter of Summerlea, a princess of the Rose with the soul of a storm, reached out a hand through the cold darkness to grasp the hilt of Roland’s divine sword, Blazing. And at her first touch, the memories stored in the sword poured into her mind, filling her with centuries of history so vivid and real it was as if she’d just lived each event herself.
The flood of memories halted as quickly as they’d begun.
Still clutching the sword, now filled with renewed vigor and sense of purpose, Khamsin planted her feet at the bottom of the well, bent her knees to gather power, and leapt upwards through the long dark of the Ice Heart well, the sword held before her like the tip of a spear.
She burst through the layer of ice sealing the well in a geyser of steam and melted Ice Heart droplets that refroze and fell back to ground as chips of ice. She landed hard, knees bending to absorb the shock.
The sound of crackling ice behind her brought Kham spinning around in time to see the frozen woman heave her spear. The creature’s aim was perfect. The spear should have pierced Kham’s heart and pinned her body to the rotunda’s icy wall. Instead, moving with reflexes and speed she’d never before possessed, Khamsin caught the ice spear in midflight with her left hand and threw Blazing with her right. The sword shot across the distance, and struck the ice woman’s chest so hard it sent her flying. She landed twenty yards away and skidded through the rotunda’s arched doorway, leaving a trail of blood that changed from blue to purple to red as it went.