The Sovereign was a true beauty. Her platinum wig ringlets framed a perfect oval face with impossible blue eyes. And Hoarfrost met the look of those eyes with a stunned glare, and a jaw that would have fallen slack had not his frozen facial muscles held it fixed in place.
At Hoarfrost’s side, Lady Ignacia Chitain of Balmue dropped into a deep curtsy.
The Sovereign took a step toward Hoarfrost, and then slowly strolled around him, examining him up and down with a close scrutiny and a perfectly unreadable countenance.
It occurred to Hoarfrost that he was being appraised like an expensive thoroughbred stallion, before a purchase decision was to be made. And so he towered over her, a giant of frozen lake debris and snow and old blood, a wild briar thicket of hair frosted with crystalline ice. And he observed her in turn out of his fixed round marbles of eyes, daring her not to cower from his terrifying round-eyed glare.
At last, the remarkable sky-blue eyes blinked, and a faint smile gathered on her lips. “Hoarfrost,” she said, and her features came alive. “You are a splendid creature! You will do very well.”
Duke Hoarfrost gaped. “Oh, is that so? I will do well, you say? I? And what of you? Your Royal—what does she call you, Shininess?” and he turned to Lady Ignacia who gave him a quick, disturbed glance, before muttering softly, “Her Brilliance. . . .”
“Yes, yes, that’s right, Her Brilliance!” Hoarfrost picked up, and again trained his face upon the Sovereign. “We’ll just have to see how truly Brilliant you are, in your fancy carriage and with your Army of pretty boy tin soldiers, all lined up in rows!”
“Ah, and do you approve?” said the Sovereign, completely disregarding his tone and looking around them lightheartedly, as though they were out on a picnic. She moved, hands lightly spread outward at her sides, almost whirling in place like a girl, and her sable and ermine cape whirled around her, lighter than snow. Another moment, and she would be laughing, it seemed to Hoarfrost, and her laughing voice would sound precisely like a tinkling spring, soft and crisp and sparkling like bubbly wine that some of the fancy sops at Court so loved to drink. . . .
He forcibly made himself stop thinking along those lines, because it was almost a strange thing, an unnatural thing, that his thoughts were suddenly so buoyant and lighthearted, at the mere sight of her, this strange woman who appeared out of nowhere in his presence and made his usually sluggish thoughts gallop like rabbits that needed skinning—
Damn, there he was doing it again.
Or maybe, it was all her doing. . . .
And Duke Ian Chidair, known as Hoarfrost, made himself stop and look at her closely, with a measure of caution, in an attempt to understand who and what she really was.
There had to be a good reason why this foreign queen held such a great influence over so many. He was going to find out.
“Hoarfrost!” The Sovereign stopped circling him and looked up at the distant battlements of Letheburg, where the dead were packed tight as fish, straining against the invisible warding barrier. “Why are you and your army still out here, and not in there, within those walls?”
“Your Brilliance,” Lady Ignacia spoke up, curtsying again. “Your command has been to surround the city and to wait for Your Brilliance’s arrival. . . .”
“Ah yes, my dear Lady Ignacia, yes, of course,” Her Brilliance replied, glancing once in her direction. “It had certainly been the command given, and yes, you have done well and entirely as directed in conveying it, dear girl, and you have certainly earned your Eternity. But the assumption had always been that our delightful Chidair Ally would eventually lose patience with such a silly thing as a command and merely enact the inevitable. Therefore, why has this city not been taken yet?”
And with that, the Sovereign turned to look directly at the Duke, and had he been alive, he would have flinched from her gaze.
“Well, well,” he replied, the first thing blurting out of him on the remaining exhalation of air before he decided to pull in more to fill his inner bellows. “And what if I tell you, Your pretty Brilliance, that I have been trying to get in there since day one, and your command be damned?”
“To that I would say, well, well done, Duke Hoarfrost! So, what has kept you from succeeding?” Her words, her countenance—all of her was mocking him.
Hoarfrost’s eyes bulged in their sockets. The thick tree trunk limbs that were his beefy arms moved and he flexed his elbow joints with effort and then put hands on hips. “What has kept me? Why, damned sorcery!” he roared. “Look up there, pretty queen! See all my boys pressing at nothing but air? They’ve got some kind of witchy ward put on those walls, and the old coward King Osenni hides behind it, and peeks around the skirts of his women, like that little slip of a Grand Princess he’s got hidden away there, little Claere, the Emperor’s daughter! She’s a dead little thing, but at least was plucky enough to talk to me from the walls above, while the old King won’t even show himself much less parlay! First they had the fires burning two stories tall all around, and now this infernal magic, as of yesterday!”
The Sovereign watched him calmly without a blink of her perfectly blue eyes. “Have you tried passing through the city gates?” she asked.
“What?” Hoarfrost felt the crush of new breaking ice in his lungs from the brutal effort of his roaring speech. “Are you listening to me, girlie queen? Did you just hear anything I said to you, or do you take me for a daft man? The gates are closed! What, you think they’d leave them open? Maybe open ’em wide for us, like a whore? I’ve got me a good mind to wring your pretty little neck and have you try for yourself to open the damn gates!”
“Would you like to try?” she asked, smiling softly.
“Try what?”
“Come, Hoarfrost . . . come and wring my neck.” And suddenly she pulled the ties of her sable cape and let them fall open, reveling pomegranate velvet underneath and a pearl-encrusted grand collar of lace gracing her swan neck. She swept her collar apart, revealing even more of her alabaster skin.
“Come, my creature . . .” she said, and her voice mesmerized. “Come and break me and make me like yourself, neither alive nor dead, but this strange wonderful offspring of both that has filled the land around us.”
Hoarfrost reacted instinctively, fury driving him to motion, and he raised one giant hand and reached for her, since it was high time she was taught a lesson indeed. . . .
He moved his hand—rather, tried to move it, and grunted with the effort of doing so, but to his disbelief, he was held motionless by an inexplicable force over which he had no control. His hand remained at his side, frozen in a new kind of metaphysical rigor mortis.
And Hoarfrost realized in that instant that she was holding him, holding him fixed with the mere blink of her eyes, a flutter of her eyelids, the curve of her lips. He was fixed within a new prison—not of his pitiful dead corpse, but in a prison of her.
“What are you waiting for?” she taunted, laughing like the tinkling stream that he had imagined before he even knew the sound of her laughter.
“So you’re a witch too, is that it?” Hoarfrost said at last, ceasing to force his limbs, ceasing to fight her, and relaxing in her invisible hold. And he glared at her with his marbles of eyes.
“No, unfortunately she is far worse—she is a goddess!”
A new voice sounded just behind him. Lady Ignacia made a stifled exclamation, while the Sovereign released the monstrous Duke from her gaze and slowly looked in the direction of the voice, coming directly from his back.
Hoarfrost slowly turned his barrel torso around.
A woman stood there, having appeared out of nowhere.
A woman—and yet, she was not. For she was a golden torch in female form, a bright source of radiance that spilled over at the snowed ground, turning it to shimmering honey for ten feet around her. Even the air seemed to become brighter, and daylight grew vibrant in contrast to the dull monochrome overcast, as though the sun itself had taken residence within her body. So bright it ha
d become that they who stood nearest her cast new shadows behind them.
The golden woman was attired in a long flowing garment of iridescent pallor, with her hair molded in a braided crown of wheat around her noble head. Her bare arms held golden wide braces and bands of molded gold, and a torque studded with jewels was around her throat. Her face exuded warmth and beauty like the late rich days of summer.
Beauty and immortality. . . .
“Hello, Mother—sweet Mother of Bright Harvest,” uttered Rumanar Avalais, the Sovereign of the Domain, while Hoarfrost, Ignacia, and the dead multitudes stared at her.
“Hello, Persephone, my beloved daughter,” gently replied Demeter, the Goddess of Tradition, of the harvest and the fruits of the earth.
“What?” Duke Hoarfrost said. “What is going on here? Who are you—both of you? What manner of madness or new sorcery is this?”
Lady Ignacia Chitain made another small stifled sound, and this time it was not to be mistaken for anything but terror.
But the two goddesses had eyes for none but each other.
“Why have you come here, Mother of mine—or am I the mother of you, now?” said the Sovereign who was Persephone. “I thought you had no taste for war or blood? Or have you changed your mind and would join me now and serve me?”
“Ah, Persephone, my poor child, I am here to remind you of what you have lost.” And the golden Goddess approached and drew her hand forward, reaching for her daughter’s black-gloved hand. “Come, child, accept my love and try to remember your true self and your place in the scheme of the world. . . .”
But Persephone drew her hand away. And suddenly, she started to change before their eyes. Her imperial garments of the Domain were replaced with a timeless antique chiton of silver fabric with an ebony shadow hue defining the folds. Persephone’s stylish fur hat and platinum wig faded, and in their place her natural hair streamed down her shoulders in rich flame-gold bounty. The winter boots about her feet had disappeared to be replaced by metal-trimmed sandals.
Persephone’s pale arms were bare despite the winter cold, and they were bound in braces of braided red and white gold. On her fingers sat rings with great, deep, light-hoarding gems—obsidian, agate, carnelian, rubies, black diamonds from the bowels of the earth, mined in the Underworld and given her many times over by her dark lover. . . .
“No, Mother,” Persephone said, her face expressionless stone, her voice issuing out of her in the slithering manner of a serpent, echoing in the silence of the expanse. With each moment, the quality of the light around her seemed to grow dim, while shadows congealed. “I refuse to accept my place in the old scheme of the world. For the old world is no longer!”
As she spoke, the sky overhead seemed to convulse, and slate clouds started to roll in and deepen the overcast, so that there was now an infinity of cotton layers of grey darkness above them, and the sun hidden deep somewhere beyond, had no hope of ever shining again. . . .
“Oh, Persephone. . . . Will you allow your grief to rule you thus and abandon the world entirely? Open your heart! Have pity for them, for these mortals who need you!” Demeter’s words sounded like warm balm in the freezing air, and her light grew to extend even farther around her in a radius of many feet. But her soothing golden light had no effect upon the cluster of shadows that stood about Persephone, or the thickness of the cloud cover overhead.
“Grief?” Persephone laughed. “Grief is far behind me, for I no longer waste my time on futile things when there is so much else to be done.”
“Is there no compassion within you who is Compassion Incarnate?”
“Come, Mother, enough of your sentimental nonsense!” the dark daughter cried suddenly, and turned her back on Demeter. With an empty face she looked up at Letheburg and its high walls and the tiny figures of the dead, and beyond the boundary all the living ones looking down at them, no doubt in disbelief and confusion and curiosity.
“Persephone! I beg you to cease this! You do not need to harm any more—”
“Be silent, Mother of Bright Harvest! If you choose to remain here, then you will stand witness to the last hours of this city!”
A sharp wind arose, tearing in gusts at everything around in the vicinity, sending clothing to billowing, and the Trovadii banners snapping wildly.
They who stood high above on the parapets of Letheburg were also buffeted by the onslaught.
Persephone, her orange-gold hair floating in the ice wind, observed everything around her with a faint smile.
Duke Hoarfrost was like a frost giant, motionless and stunned, unsure of what to do next, of how to proceed, of what to do with himself, for the balance of power had shifted entirely, casting him completely out of the running. . . .
“I have just come from Ulpheo,” Demeter said unexpectedly, her voice the only ray of warmth in this winter hellscape. “I have taken it back, you know. It is no longer fixed in your hold, my daughter, no longer bound between Above and Below. Ulpheo is once again fully mine, and Above it remains, with all the citizens and my shrine.”
At this, Persephone gifted her with a mocking look. “And what makes you think, Mother of mine, that I care? I’ve touched Ulpheo only because it pleased me to make you struggle after it. There is nothing there that I want—not any longer.”
“And you think Letheburg is yours for the taking?” Demeter’s compassionate demeanor hardened suddenly. “The city is warded, and none shall enter it, not even you.”
Persephone’s smile deepened, and her blue eyes were as cold as the edge of a knife. “I shall enter it within the hour.”
“No,” Demeter said. “Hecate will not allow it. None can enter where the Goddess of Passages and Entrances has shut the door.”
“Maybe not in the old world. . . . But it is broken now, the old world and its framework. It is shattered and it is shrinking and fading quicker than a passing dream. In this new pattern, I shall do as I please, for I alone will rule it, Heaven and Sea and Underworld. Even he, my beloved dark lover, my sweet Black Husband, even he will cede to me the greater measure of his power, so that, even as my Consort, he will sit below me, and not as an equal at my side. . . . And thus, think you that if My Lord Hades will not stand against me that Hecate’s feeble ministrations on these walls can hold me back?”
The winter wind now howled around them in madness.
“Whatever will happen, the old world still stands, no matter how much damage it had incurred,” Demeter spoke, raising her powerful glorious voice through the wind. “And with it stands the old order, according to which, Hecate still rules all exit and entrance. You shall not pass beyond the walls or the gates, my poor broken daughter.”
In response, Persephone laughed. “Broken? You think I am broken? I am remade! Mother of mine, I am strong and new! But, very well!” she cried through the gale, in a manic parody of joy. “For the moment the old way is still here, but even the old way can be made to serve me now! A mortal or a god might not pass the boundary, but the wind can! And so can winter itself!”
And saying these words, Persephone approached the motionless shape of the Duke, and she reached out and touched him on the forehead. “Hoarfrost!” she cried, “Had I not promised you Eternity?”
Duke Hoarfrost had not expected to be noticed at all in this manner, and he could only reply gruffly, “Aye! Eternity, you say? You—whatever you are, Sovereign, Persephone Goddess—you have promised it indeed! For I have been robbed of my life, and it has been taken from me before my time! What will you do now to make it up to me?”
“This!” she replied. “Serve me, and you shall have it!”
“I serve you, strange Goddess!” Hoarfrost nodded, feeling the touch of her cold immortal fingers upon his brow—a touch more corporeal than anything he had felt in quite some time, since he had been made numb to all sensation by death.
“Give me your knife,” said the dark Goddess, keeping her hand upon him.
“Ah, no, do not do it—” Demeter spoke, to no avail.
The long dagger was produced from Hoarfrost’s belt. “If you must know, I have no blood, Goddess,” he remarked. “None left in this rotting corpse. So if you would have me pledge you an oath of service—”
“It is not your blood that is required.” Persephone laughed again, and aimed the point of the blade at herself and pricked her own finger, pale and perfect. Immediately a deep red bead welled, sweet immortal ambrosia, and she placed the droplet of blood upon the giant’s frozen lips, smearing it across his mouth, then held the finger against him.
“Breathe,” she said.
And as he inhaled the usual bellows-breath of broken ice and freezing air, the dark Goddess Persephone suddenly struck him on his chest with her fist, directly in the spot where was his stilled heart.
Duke Ian Chidair, known as Hoarfrost, dead for days, was struck by lightning.
The world faded in and out of focus, went dark, and then returned. And then, his heart was beating once again, and there was movement, strange, foreign movement that he had long forgotten, in every fiber of his flesh, every tiny cell, filling with energy, indeed pulling it forth from the air, from the snow and the wind and the cold earth below.
All of it, the living power of the world, passed through him, filling him to overflowing, and then it receded. . . . And he felt the pull of growing muscle and skin as his old wounds drew together and closed up and his damaged organs healed themselves and the cells renewed. . . .
When it was over, Duke Hoarfrost had grown warm for the first time in days, and there was sensation in all his limbs. But then the mortal warmth receded also, and a new brazen liquid coursed though his thawed veins.
He looked down at himself, at his own hale limbs and he was sparkling white. . . . His filthy knight’s armor and blue Chidair surcoat had been replaced by a long winter coat of magnificent white brocade lined with mink, embroidered in pale silver and encrusted with clear crystals of ice-diamonds. His matted hair, bushy brows, and beard were now grown long and smooth and flowing, sprinkled like sugar with snow radiance, and a lordly mink-trimmed hat covered his head, while his feet were shod in white leather boots with fur trim.