The Winter King
Page 109
His predilection for secrecy had actually been a boon to her. If not for those times when she’d followed him from his room to the Atrium, she would not have known the schedule of the guards or the back-stairs path least likely to result in an encounter with some wandering servant or dallying courtier.
The Atrium’s twelve-foot-tall doors were fashioned from carved and gilded white wood inset with large panes of frosted glass. Etched snowflakes and curling lines swirled across the glass’s translucent surface. The doorknobs were shaped like two great silver wolves rearing up on hind legs, their bushy tails the cunningly disguised lever door handles. Each wolf held a gold ball between its diamond teeth. The ball on the right sported a keyhole.
Kham knelt by the right door, pulled the lockpicks from her skirt pocket, and went to work. Krysti had taught her well. In less than a minute, the lock clicked open. Kham pulled down on the wolves’ tails, and the doors opened. She slipped inside, careful to close the doors behind her, and pulled the shade from her lamp. Light spilled out in a bright circle around her.
“Now, Wynter of the Craig, let’s see what you’ve been hiding.” Lifting her lamp high, Khamsin turned to investigate her husband’s private sanctum.
She wasn’t sure what she expected to find. Private military secrets, perhaps. Treasures vast enough to buy entire kingdoms. Sacred antiquities. Possibly even some dread, terrible evil Wynter hid behind his handsome face and winning smile. (Although despite her best, angriest efforts to paint him a foul, blackhearted villain, she honestly didn’t believe that last one.)
But when the light from her lamp spilled out across the Atrium’s shadowy secrets, she didn’t find dazzling treasure. She didn’t find a secret vault of sensitive military or political documents. She didn’t find war plans, or holy relics, or a bloody altar to the dark gods.
What she found, instead, was beauty. Breathtaking beauty.
Her mouth open in a soundless gasp of wonder, Khamsin stepped forward into a glorious, ghostly white forest carved entirely from ice. Moonlight, spilling through the leaded-glass dome overhead, sparkled on the delicate, ice-carved leaves and needled boughs, making the entire room shimmer like diamonds in soft silver light.
“Summer Sun.” The shocked, reverent whisper echoed in the total silence of the room. She tilted her head back. The life-sized ice trees soared seventy feet high. The Atrium roof soared higher still, and in the space between the tops of the trees and the sheltering glass panes of the glass roof, flocks of carved ice birds were frozen in flight, wings outstretched as they wheeled and dipped through an imaginary sky.
Glittering snow covered the Atrium floor, and as she approached the first few trees of the ice forest, she discovered an astonishingly lifelike baby deer carved from frosted ice standing on spindly legs beneath the watchful eyes of his mother. Just beyond, in a small clearing beside a tiny brook carved of clear ice, a family of Winterfolk were having a picnic.
Snow crunched beneath her slippers as she moved closer and brought her lantern up to illuminate the family. There were four figures: a man, a woman, a young boy, and an infant lying on a blanket between his parents. The sculptures were astonishingly lifelike, right down to the expressions of doting, parental love on the adult faces and the beaming, mischievous exuberance on the face of the boy as he cupped a tiny bird in his hands.
Who had made this place? Why was it here?
She moved deeper into the ice forest. The snow on the ground was packed in places, providing trails that let her walk through the trees without worrying that she might damage them. With each step, she discovered new statues and scenes hidden amongst the ghostly tree trunks. Squirrels, wolves, foxes, bears, birds, flowers, waterfalls, frozen ponds. And everywhere, life-sized ice sculptures of happy families hiked through forest paths, danced among the trees, skated on frozen ponds, climbed frosted rocks and trees.
After the fourth or fifth family tableau, she realized that the people in each exquisitely rendered family scene were all the same. A mother, a father, and two sons—one at least ten years older than the other. The people aged from scene to scene—most notably, the youngest child grew from infant to toddler, and the boy went from youth to young man—but they were the same people, the same family, carved over and over again.
And then she noticed a scene or two that featured only the boys when they were much older. A handsome teenaged boy with hair that tumbled in his eyes. A towering older brother now grown to manhood, with a face she recognized better than her own.
The truth froze Khamsin where she stood. The statues in this room weren’t just beautifully sculpted art. They were carefully rendered scenes from Wynter’s life.
These statues were memories. Wynter’s memories.
Scenes of his family, his brother, sculpted in ice and hidden here, away from the world. Frozen proof of the love and happiness he’d known before her brother had slain his.
Khamsin tried to stay away from the Atrium. Once she realized the room was a shrine to the family Wynter had loved and lost, going there seemed like an intrusion, a trespass in a sacred space. But the more she tried to stay away, the stronger the place pulled at her.
She told herself not to be driven by her emotions, to keep focused. What was in that room would do nothing to help her survive the coming year. There was no secret, no treasure she could use to bribe her way to safety. No military or political information that might buy her asylum in another kingdom.
And yet, several times a day, she found herself standing before those locked, frosted-glass doors, aching to open them and slip back inside the secret world of happy memories Wynter had created for himself. She’d never known the joy of a close, loving family. Since birth, she’d been reviled, feared, isolated from the warmth her sisters and brother shared, from the love Verdan Coruscate had unstintingly showered upon them. Wynter had grown up with everything that she had been denied: a mother and a father who loved him, laughter, happiness. Belonging.
The Atrium’s twelve-foot-tall doors were fashioned from carved and gilded white wood inset with large panes of frosted glass. Etched snowflakes and curling lines swirled across the glass’s translucent surface. The doorknobs were shaped like two great silver wolves rearing up on hind legs, their bushy tails the cunningly disguised lever door handles. Each wolf held a gold ball between its diamond teeth. The ball on the right sported a keyhole.
Kham knelt by the right door, pulled the lockpicks from her skirt pocket, and went to work. Krysti had taught her well. In less than a minute, the lock clicked open. Kham pulled down on the wolves’ tails, and the doors opened. She slipped inside, careful to close the doors behind her, and pulled the shade from her lamp. Light spilled out in a bright circle around her.
“Now, Wynter of the Craig, let’s see what you’ve been hiding.” Lifting her lamp high, Khamsin turned to investigate her husband’s private sanctum.
She wasn’t sure what she expected to find. Private military secrets, perhaps. Treasures vast enough to buy entire kingdoms. Sacred antiquities. Possibly even some dread, terrible evil Wynter hid behind his handsome face and winning smile. (Although despite her best, angriest efforts to paint him a foul, blackhearted villain, she honestly didn’t believe that last one.)
But when the light from her lamp spilled out across the Atrium’s shadowy secrets, she didn’t find dazzling treasure. She didn’t find a secret vault of sensitive military or political documents. She didn’t find war plans, or holy relics, or a bloody altar to the dark gods.
What she found, instead, was beauty. Breathtaking beauty.
Her mouth open in a soundless gasp of wonder, Khamsin stepped forward into a glorious, ghostly white forest carved entirely from ice. Moonlight, spilling through the leaded-glass dome overhead, sparkled on the delicate, ice-carved leaves and needled boughs, making the entire room shimmer like diamonds in soft silver light.
“Summer Sun.” The shocked, reverent whisper echoed in the total silence of the room. She tilted her head back. The life-sized ice trees soared seventy feet high. The Atrium roof soared higher still, and in the space between the tops of the trees and the sheltering glass panes of the glass roof, flocks of carved ice birds were frozen in flight, wings outstretched as they wheeled and dipped through an imaginary sky.
Glittering snow covered the Atrium floor, and as she approached the first few trees of the ice forest, she discovered an astonishingly lifelike baby deer carved from frosted ice standing on spindly legs beneath the watchful eyes of his mother. Just beyond, in a small clearing beside a tiny brook carved of clear ice, a family of Winterfolk were having a picnic.
Snow crunched beneath her slippers as she moved closer and brought her lantern up to illuminate the family. There were four figures: a man, a woman, a young boy, and an infant lying on a blanket between his parents. The sculptures were astonishingly lifelike, right down to the expressions of doting, parental love on the adult faces and the beaming, mischievous exuberance on the face of the boy as he cupped a tiny bird in his hands.
Who had made this place? Why was it here?
She moved deeper into the ice forest. The snow on the ground was packed in places, providing trails that let her walk through the trees without worrying that she might damage them. With each step, she discovered new statues and scenes hidden amongst the ghostly tree trunks. Squirrels, wolves, foxes, bears, birds, flowers, waterfalls, frozen ponds. And everywhere, life-sized ice sculptures of happy families hiked through forest paths, danced among the trees, skated on frozen ponds, climbed frosted rocks and trees.
After the fourth or fifth family tableau, she realized that the people in each exquisitely rendered family scene were all the same. A mother, a father, and two sons—one at least ten years older than the other. The people aged from scene to scene—most notably, the youngest child grew from infant to toddler, and the boy went from youth to young man—but they were the same people, the same family, carved over and over again.
And then she noticed a scene or two that featured only the boys when they were much older. A handsome teenaged boy with hair that tumbled in his eyes. A towering older brother now grown to manhood, with a face she recognized better than her own.
The truth froze Khamsin where she stood. The statues in this room weren’t just beautifully sculpted art. They were carefully rendered scenes from Wynter’s life.
These statues were memories. Wynter’s memories.
Scenes of his family, his brother, sculpted in ice and hidden here, away from the world. Frozen proof of the love and happiness he’d known before her brother had slain his.
Khamsin tried to stay away from the Atrium. Once she realized the room was a shrine to the family Wynter had loved and lost, going there seemed like an intrusion, a trespass in a sacred space. But the more she tried to stay away, the stronger the place pulled at her.
She told herself not to be driven by her emotions, to keep focused. What was in that room would do nothing to help her survive the coming year. There was no secret, no treasure she could use to bribe her way to safety. No military or political information that might buy her asylum in another kingdom.
And yet, several times a day, she found herself standing before those locked, frosted-glass doors, aching to open them and slip back inside the secret world of happy memories Wynter had created for himself. She’d never known the joy of a close, loving family. Since birth, she’d been reviled, feared, isolated from the warmth her sisters and brother shared, from the love Verdan Coruscate had unstintingly showered upon them. Wynter had grown up with everything that she had been denied: a mother and a father who loved him, laughter, happiness. Belonging.
