The Winter King
Page 163

The garm shrieked, and a cloud of blue vapor billowed forth.
Wynter shot up out of bed, abruptly and completely awake. The bandage covering his eyes was still tied around his head. He reached up to rip it off.
He was sitting on a wooden table by the hearth in one of the hunting cabins that scattered the mountains of Wintercraig.
At his sudden movement, several guards and Galacia Frey came running. Galacia held one of Thorgyll’s spears, ready to strike.
Wynter held up his hands. “It’s me. It’s still me.”
But he wasn’t so sure. His chest felt tight and cold. As if everything inside had turned to solid ice.
“Get Valik,” Laci instructed one of the guard. The man nodded and sprinted for the door.
“What happened?” Wyn asked. “Where are we?” He glanced down at his body, examining the bandages around his waist, realized that whatever was beneath those wrappings hurt like a Feury.
Quickly, Galacia filled him in. She told him about the Great Hunt. How he’d followed the garm track and gotten separated from the rest of the hunters. That the tracks had led him to Khamsin, and between them, they’d killed at least two garm. That he’d been hovering on the brink of death or worse ever since.
As Laci spoke, the memories came tumbling back.
“Four,” he said. “It was four garm. I only managed to kill two of them.” He’d fallen after dispatching the second, leaving Khamsin to face the remaining two on her own. Alone and injured.
Khamsin.
“Where’s my wife?” He grabbed the edges of the table, bracing himself for the worst. “Laci, where’s Khamsin?”
“She’s safe, Wyn. She’s fine. You need to calm down. Now.”
Laci hadn’t lowered the spear. Her body was taut as a bowstring, her blue gaze watchful and unwavering. The eyes of a hunter, ready to strike. She smelled of fear, but her expression and posture exuded pure, grim resolve.
That’s when he realized the wood around his fingers had turned to solid ice.
Wyrn save him. He closed his eyes and tried to push back the glacier running through his veins. He stood on the lip of a precipice. One fraction further—or one crack in the crumbling ground beneath his feet—and he would fall, tumbling into ruin and taking the world with him.
Not today. Not yet. Wintercraig needed him strong enough to defend them. Save Wintercraig first.
He could feel the heat of the fire against his back. He concentrated on that, willing the warmth to infuse his flesh and melt the ice so hungry to claim him.
Where was Khamsin? She could have pushed back the ice with a single touch.
Lacking her presence, he filled the darkness behind his closed eyes with his memories of her face, her smile, her laughter, the silver flash of her eyes when she was angry. The feel of her skin, so warm and soft, smelling of jasmine and wildness, so exotically dark against his own golden flesh. The reassuring warmth of her body nestled against him through the long, dark hours of the Craig’s winter nights.
The tightness of his chest had loosened. He drew a breath, then another. The fingers curled so tight around the tabletop relaxed. Moisture gathered as the frozen wood began to melt. He took another, longer breath, and opened his eyes.
Laci was still poised to strike, and Valik had just come in from outside. Wynter looked around the cabin. That woman from Summerlea—the spy, Khamsin’s nurse, what was her name? Tildavera Greenleaf—stood beside a table covered with all manner of herbs and pharmacopeia. Half a dozen armored White Guard were also in the room, looking as wary and watchful as Laci. But the face he wanted to see most was still nowhere to be found.
“Where is Khamsin?” he asked.
“I sent her to Gildenheim with some of the White Guard.” Laci must have realized that the immediate danger had passed because some of the tension faded from her body. She straightened from her crouch, and the tip of her spear lowered a few inches. “So it’s true, what Khamsin said. She really did incinerate two garm with her lightning.”
Wyn frowned. After he fell to the garm, everything got hazy at best. But he remembered the smell of lightning and garm vapors. And he remembered sight of his wife running, ropes of lightning shooting down from the storm-tossed heavens, finding her unerringly. Her body, lifting up in the air, lit from within. Two garm close on her heels. The devastation of knowing he’d failed her.
“I . . .” He remembered the lightning crashing so close it shook the ground. One deafening crack after another. The smell of scorched flesh. “Yes, she did. She killed them both. With no weapon but her weathergift.” He looked up at Laci. “She survived? The garm didn’t kill her?”
“She survived,” Laci said. “She burned them until there was nothing left, which is why some of us didn’t believe her at first.” Laci cast a disgusted glance at Valik, who had just joined them.
“How are you feeling?” Valik’s gaze raked Wynter from head to toe. “You look like Hel.”
Wyn gave a choked laugh, then groaned when pain streaked across his belly. “Always full of compliments, you are.”
“Thought we’d lost you a time or two. Or four.” There was a look in Valik’s eyes Wyn had never seen before. And a shimmer of betraying brightness.
“I’m fine.” For now. Wyn rubbed his chest. The ice there had softened, but it was far from gone. If he put his hand in Laci’s flame right now, the fire would probably remain bright and blue. “How long have I been here?”