by Nora Roberts
her memories back so clearly. She remembered her first glimpse of those bold blue eyes, that first foolish brush of lips.
She would give Phelan precious paper and ink to scribe the story. She would bind it herself in leather tanned from deer hide. In this way, she thought with pride, her love would live forever.
One day, their child would read the story, and know what a man his father was.
She cleared the path past jeweled benches, toward the great frozen rose while the boy told his tale and labored tirelessly beside her.
“And the beautiful queen gave him a rose carved on a brooch that he wore pinned over his heart. For days and nights, with his faithful horse, Cathmor, and the valiant and true Dilys, he fought the wild storms, crossed the iced shadows of the Forgotten. It was his lady’s love that sustained him.”
“You have a romantic heart, young bard.”
“It is a true story, my lady. I saw it in my head.” He continued on, entertaining and delighting her with words of Dilys’s stubborn loyalty, of black nights and white days, of a giant tree crashing and leading them toward a stream where water ran over rock like music.
“Sunlight struck the water and made it sparkle like diamonds.”
A bit surprised by the description, she glanced toward him. “Do you think sun on water makes diamonds?”
“It makes tiny bright lights, my lady. It dazzles the eye.”
Something inside her heart trembled. “Dazzles the eye,” she repeated on a whisper. “Yes, I have heard of this.”
“And at the edge of the Forgotten grew wild roses, firered. The handsome prince plucked one, as he had promised, and when its sweetness surrounded him, he said his lady’s name.”
“It’s a lovely story.”
“It is not the end.” He all but danced with excitement.
“Tell me the rest, then.” She started to smile, to rest on her shovel. Then there came the sound of wild cheering and shouts from without the garden.
“This is the end!” The boy threw his shovel carelessly aside and raced to the archway. “He is come!”
“Who?” she began, but couldn’t hear her own voice over the shouts, over the pounding of her blood.
Suddenly the light went brilliant, searing into her eyes so that with a little cry of shock, she threw a hand up to shield them. Wild wind turned to breeze soft as silk. And she heard her name spoken.
Her hand trembled as she lowered it, and her eyes blinked against a light she’d never known. She saw him in the archway of the garden, surrounded by a kind of shimmering halo that gleamed like melted gold.
“Kylar.” Her heart, every chamber filled with joy, bounded in her breast. Her shovel clattered on the path as she ran to him.
He caught her up, spinning her in circles as she clung to him. “Oh, my love, my heart. How can this be?” Her tears fell on his neck, her kisses on his face. “You should not be here. You should never have come back. How can I let you go again?”
“Look at me. Sweetheart, look at me.” He tipped up her chin. “So there are tears now. I’d hoped there would be. I ask you again. Do you love me, Deirdre?”
“So much I could live on nothing else my whole life. I would not have had to risk yours to come back.” She laid her palms on his cheeks. Then her lips trembled open, her fingers shook. “You came back,” she whispered.
“I would have crossed hell for you. Perhaps I did.”
She closed her eyes. “That light. What is that light?”
“It is the sun. Unveiled. Here, take off your cloak. Feel the sun, Deirdre.”
“I’m not cold.”
“You’ll never be cold again. Open your eyes, my love, and look. Winter is over.”
Gripping his hand, she turned to watch the snow melting away, vanishing before her staring eyes. Blackened stalks began to crackle, break out green and at their feet soft, tender blades of grass spread in a shimmering carpet.
“The sky.” Dazed, she reached up as if she could touch it. “It’s blue. Like your eyes. Feel it, feel the sun.” She held her hands out to cup the warmth.
On a cry of wonder, she knelt, ran her hands over the soft grass, brought her hands to her face to breathe in the scent. Though tears continued to fall, she laughed and held those hands out to him. “Is it grass?”
“It is.”
“Oh.” She covered her face with her hands again, as if she could drink it. “Such perfume.”
He knelt with her, and would remember, he knew, the rapture on her face the first time she touched a simple blade of grass. “Your roses are blooming, my lady.”
Speechless, she watched buds spear, blooms unfold. Yellows, pinks, reds, whites in petals that flowed from bud to flower, and flowers so heavy they bent the graceful green branches. The fragrance all but made her drunk.
“Roses.” Her voice quivered as she reached out to touch, felt the silky texture. “Flowers.” And buried her face in blooms.
She squealed like a girl when a butterfly fluttered by her face and landed on a tender bud to drink.
“Oh!” There was so much, almost too much, and she was dizzy from it. “See how it moves! It’s so beautiful.”
In turn, she tipped her face back and drank in the sunlight.
“What is that across the blue of the sky? That curve of colors?”
“It’s a rainbow.” Watching her was like watching something be born. And once again, he thought, she humbled him. “Your first rainbow, my love.”
“It’s lovelier than in the books. In them it seemed false and impossible. But it’s soft and it’s real.”
“I brought you a gift.”
“You brought me summer,” she murmured.
“And this.” He snapped his fingers, and through the arch, down the path raced a fat brown puppy. Barking cheerfully, it leaped into Deirdre’s lap. “His name is Griffen.”
Drowned in emotion, she cradled the pup as she might a child, pressed her face into its warm fur. She felt its heartbeat, and the quick, wet lash of its tongue on her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she managed, and broke down and sobbed.
“Weep, then.” Kylar bent to touch his lips to her hair. “As long as it’s for joy.”
“How can this be? How can you bring me so much? I turned you away, without love.”
“No, you let me go, with love. It took me time to understand that—and you. To understand what it cost you. There would have been no summer if I hadn’t left you, and returned.”
He lifted her damp face now, and the puppy wiggled free and began to race joyfully through the garden. “Is that not so?”
“It is so. Only the greatest and truest love, freely given, could break the spell and turn away winter.”
“I knew. When I plucked the rose, I understood. I watched summer bloom. It came with me through the forest. As I rode, the trees behind me went into leaf, brooks and streams sprang free of ice. With every mile I put behind me, every mile I came closer to you, the world awoke. Others will come tomorrow. I couldn’t wait.”
“But how? How did you come back so quickly?”
“My land is only a day’s journey from here. It was magic that kept you hidden. It’s love that frees you.”
“It’s more.” Phelan wiggled his way through the crowd of people who gathered in the archway. He gave a cry of delight as the pup leaped at him. “It is truth,” he began, “and sacrifice and honor. All these tied by love are stronger than a shield of ice and break the spell of the winter rose. When summer comes to Rose Castle, the Isle of Winter becomes the Isle of Flowers and the Sea of Ice becomes the Sea of Hope. And here, the good queen gives hand and heart to her valiant prince.”
“It is a good ending,” Kylar commented. “But perhaps you would wait until I ask the good queen for her hand and her heart.”
She dashed tears from her cheeks. Her people, her love, would not see her weep at such a time. “You have my heart already.”
“Then give me your hand. Be my wife.”
&nbs
p; She put her hand in his, but because she must be a queen, turned first to her people. “You are witness. I pledge myself in love and in marriage, for a lifetime, to Kylar, prince of Mrydon. He will be your king, and to him you will give your service, your respect, and your loyalty. From this day, his people will be your brothers and your sisters. In time, our lands will be one land.”
She let them cheer, let his name ring out along with hers into the wondrous blue bowl of sky. And her hand was warm in Kylar’s.
“Prepare a feast of celebration and thanks, and make ourselves ready to welcome the guests that come on the morrow. Leave us now, for I need a moment with my betrothed. Take the pup to the kitchen, Phelan, and see that he is well fed. Keep him for me.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“His name is Griffen.” Her gaze met Orna’s, and smiled as her people left her alone with her prince. “There is one last thing to be done.”
She walked with him down the path to where the reddest roses bloomed on the tallest bush under thinning ice. Without a thought, she plunged her hand through it, and the shield shattered like glass. She picked the first rose of her life, offered it to him.
“I’ve accepted you as queen. That is duty. Now I give myself to you as a woman. This is for love. You brought light to my world. You freed my heart. Now and forever, that heart is yours.”
She started to kneel, and he stopped her. “You won’t kneel to me.”
Her brows lifted, and command once again cloaked her. “I am queen of this place. I do as I wish.” She knelt. “I am yours, queen and woman. From this hour, this day will be known and celebrated as Prince Kylar’s Return.”
With a gleam in his eye, he knelt as well, and made her lips twitch. “You will be a willful wife.”
“This is truth.”
“I would not have it otherwise. Kiss me, Deirdre the fair.”
She put a hand on his chest. “First, I have a gift for you.”
“It can wait. I lived on dreams of your kisses for days in the cold.”
“This gift can’t wait. Kylar, I have your child in me. A child made from love and warmth.”
The hand that had touched her face slid bonelessly to her shoulder. “A child?”
“We’ve made life between us. A miracle, beyond magic.”
“Our child.” His palm spread over her belly, rested there as his lips took hers.
“It pleases you?”
For an answer he leaped up, hoisted her high until her laughter rang out. She threw her arms toward the sky, toward the sun, the sky, the rainbow.
And the roses grew and bloomed until branches and flowers reached over the garden wall, tumbled down, and filled the air with the promise of summer.
A WORLD APART
1
IN the sweltering jungle, under the blood-red sun, Kadra hunted. Her steps were silent, her eyes—green as the trio of stones that encrusted the hilt of her sword—were alert, watchful, merciless.
For four days and four nights she had tracked her prey, over the Stone Mountains, beyond the Singing River, and into the verdant heat of the Land of Tulle.
What she stalked rarely ventured to these borders, and she herself had never traveled so far in the south of A’Dair.
There were villages here, small enclaves of lesser hunters, settlements of farmers and weavers with their young and their animals. The young were as much food to what she hunted as the cattle and mounts were.
She trod on the mad red flowers that were strewn on the path, ignored the sly silver slide of a snake down the trunk of a tree. She saw, sensed, scented both, but they were of no interest to her.
The Bok demons were her only interest now, and destroying them her only goal.
It was what she had been born for.
Other scents came to her—the beasts, large and small, that inhabited the jungle, and the thick, wet fragrance of vine and blossom. The blood—no longer fresh—of one that had been caught and consumed by what she hunted.
She passed a great fall of water that raged over the cliffs to pound its drumbeat into the river below. Though she had never walked upon this ground, this she knew by its light and music as a sacred place. One that no demon could enter. So she stopped to drink of its purifying waters, to fill her water bag for the journey yet to come.
And poured drops from her hand to the ground in thanks to the powers of life.
Beyond the falls, the busier scents of people—sweat, flesh, cooking, springwater from a village well—reached her keen senses.
It was her duty to protect them, and her fate that none among them could ever be her companion, her friend, her lifemate. These were truths she had never questioned.
At last she caught the overripe stench that was Bok.
The sword streaked out of its sheath, a bright battle sound as she pivoted on the heels of her soft leather boots. The dagger, its point a diamond in the sun, flipped from its wrist mount to her hand.
The dark blue claws of the Bok that had leaped from a branch overhead whizzed past her face, missing their mark. She set into a fighting stance and waited for his next charge.
It looked oddly normal. Other than those lethal retractable claws, the scent, the needle-sharp fangs that snapped out when the lips were peeled back for battle, the Bok looked no different from the people they devoured at every opportunity.
This one was small for his species, no more than six feet, which put him on a level with her. He was naked but for the thin skin of his traveling armor. Except for claws and teeth, he was unarmed. The vicious gouges across his chest and arms were stained from his pale green blood. And told her he had run afoul of his companions and had been forced out of the pack.
A distraction for her, she imagined, and didn’t intend to spend much time dispatching him.
“They sacrificed you,” she said as she circled. “What was your crime?”
He only hissed, flicking his long tongue through those sharp teeth. She taunted him with a happy grin, muscles ready. Above all else, she lived for combat.
When he leaped, she spun her sword up, down, and severed his head with one smooth stroke. Though the ease of the job was a bit of a disappointment, she grunted in satisfaction as the green blood sizzled and smoked. And the body of the Bok melted away to nothing but an ugly smear on the ground.
“Not much of a challenge,” she muttered and sheathed her sword. “Still, the day is young, so there is hope for better.”
Her hand was still on the hilt when she heard the scream.
She ran, her dark hair flying behind her, the band of her rank that encircled her head glinting like vengeance. When she burst into the small clearing with its tidy line of huts, she saw that the single Bok had been but a brief distraction, delaying her just long enough.
Bodies of animals and a few men who had tried to defend their homes lay torn and bleeding on the ground. Others were running in panic, some holding their young clutched to them as they scattered. And she knew they would be hunted down and rent to pieces if a single demon escaped her duty.
Sorrow for the dead and the thrill of upcoming battle warred inside her.
Three of the Bok were crouched in the dirt, still feeding. Their eyes glowed red, their vicious teeth snapped as she charged. They sprang, mad enough with blood to choose fight over flight.
She cleaved the arm from one, leaped into a flying kick to knock another out of her way as she plunged her ready dagger into
