The Winter King (23 page)

Something had been behind them, something
very large and indescribably quiet, since no matter how hard she
had tried, Poppy had not been able to hear it approach. But
Kristopher’s sword swung a single arc and stopped – and everything
came to a stand-still once more as the enormous brown figure that
had been behind them on the path shifted forms as well, and the tip
of Kristopher’s mighty weapon finally rested threateningly in the
hollow of a skinny young man.

Less than a full second had been all the
time it took for the ice to spread, for Kris to change, and for
this stranger before them to go from giant monster to small,
harmless looking man.

The first thing that went through Poppy’s
mind upon seeing the stranger was the word “brown.” He had thick
brown hair, large brown eyes, light brown skin, and wore plain
brown clothes, all of the same hue. His boots even managed to be
brown, and Poppy could not tell exactly what material they were
crafted from. She hadn’t really seen anything like them before.

“
Your majesty,” the man
greeted Kris, giving a very slight bow of just his head. He
couldn’t move much more than that, though he also seemed completely
unworried that there was a blade so close to his throat. “I
apologize for approaching in my natural form. I had not known you
were visiting.”

Kristopher relaxed, lowering his sword.
“Elmheart.” Relief washed over his handsome features. “No, I’m the
one who should apologize. I’m here without warning this time.” He
sheathed his sword of ice, and it made a wicked sound as it slid
into its scabbard. Then Kristopher’s form flashed once more, and he
was again dressed in his normal mortal-looking clothing. The ice on
the forest floor began to retreat from the nearby tree trunks,
shrinking back toward the stone path.

“
How do you fare?” Kris
asked conversationally.

“
Quite well, thank you,”
replied the small man. His brown eyes shifted from Kristopher to
Poppy. “Who might your lovely new companion be?”

“
Elmheart, this is Poppy
Nix.” He paused, just a beat. Then, with a big smile, he added,
“She is my queen.”

Elmheart’s eyes grew very
wide. Now he bowed with his entire body and not just his head. “My
lady. It is my undying pleasure to make your acquaintance.” He
looked up from his bent position, and a teasing gleam took his
eyes. “I had begun to believe Kris was lying about his prowess with
those of the female persuasion. He’s been
waiting for the right girl
for more
than a millennium, you know.”

Poppy sucked in her lips.

Kristopher crossed his arms over his
chest.

Elmheart stood back up and
grinned. “I’m so pleased you’ve proven me wrong for beginning to
doubt! I can’t wait to show you to the Dragon Council,” he said to
Poppy. “Eweness owes me thirty
seed
. You’ll be happy to hear,
Kristopher, I bet
on
you and not against you where this is concerned.”

“
You placed bets on whether
he would ever take a queen?” asked William, his smile quietly
bemused.

“
Oh yes,” nodded Elmheart
energetically.

“
It means nothing,” said
Kristopher darkly. “The Sapplings have a gambling problem. They bet
on everything.” He gave Elmheart a reprimanding look, then said,
“Speaking of seeds, I must talk with Dvalin. The matter is
urgent.”

Again, Elmheart took on a wide-eyed
expression, and he nodded. “Oh dear, of course! Follow me!” He
turned and began running down the path, further into the
forest.

“
Elmheart!” called
Kristopher.

The man skidded to a halt and turned to face
them. Kristopher shook his head. “Don’t you think it would be a lot
faster if you took us there in your true form?”

Elmheart’s face lit up. “Oh, yes! Right!” He
nodded.

Poppy gasped as the forest’s trees suddenly
shifted further away from the path. They actually seemed to move –
to just slide to the side, away from the stone trail. A second
later, she realized that the extra space had been necessary.

Elmheart’s small, skinny stature swelled,
and his figure morphed. Poppy stared in wonder as the tiny man that
had been standing before them a moment earlier grew by leaps and
bounds to become an honest to goodness dragon. Now she knew why so
much of him had been brown. In dragon form, he looked to be made
entirely of wood.

Kristopher looked down at Poppy; she could
see and feel him staring at her. But she couldn’t take her eyes off
Elmheart’s new form. Beside her, Kristopher chuckled. “This is
Elmheart Everwood,” he told her through that laughter. “The forest
dragon.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

I’m riding a dragon.

She forced herself to take another breath,
because she kept forgetting to do so and she kept not
breathing.

I’m freaking riding a freaking dragon!

What she’d thought earlier,
while she’d been walking on that path through the woods. What she’d
mused about life not getting better than that – well, she’d been
wrong. It could
totally
get better than that. And it just had!

She laughed out loud, barely refraining from
giving a massive whoop as Elmheart dipped beneath her, making her
stomach ride up a little into her throat. Her face was grinning so
hard, her cheeks were starting to hurt.

The wind whipped through her hair, her eyes
were watering, and her hands were clasped so tightly in Elmheart’s
fur, she didn’t know if she’d be able to get them unclenched again.
It was like being in an airplane with the dips making the seat
leave your ass and the rises making you sink further into it,
except there were no walls to protect you from the elements.

Oh yeah. And there was one
more very important difference. Whereas, it would take a syringe
filled with surgical anesthesia to get her on a plane, Poppy wasn’t
terrified of
this
. Magic, good and strong, kept her on the dragon, and there
were no engines that could suddenly give out on either side of her.
So there was no chance of her falling off and very little chance of
the plane falling out from under her. And that made all the
difference in the world.

Kris had even let her sit in the front. Of
course, that might have just been because he wanted to keep an eye
on her. His steely arms had yet to leave their places firmly
wrapped around her mid-section.

“
Let us down in the
courtyard!” Kris called, speaking over Poppy’s shoulder. The dragon
gave a nod of its enormous head and took another dip. Poppy gasped
as her stomach again took up brief residence in her throat and the
winged beast angled for the castle below. It was the same castle
she’d seen in the distance from their vantage point atop the hill
where they’d first come through the portal.

It really is made of
gemstones
. She’d thought it might have
been a trick of the light, like sequins under the sun. But there
was no trick. The castle was literally built out of what looked
like one gigantic single piece of multi-hued sapphire. It rainbowed
from green to blue, blue to purple, from purple to red and into
orange and yellow before starting the pattern all over again. She
wondered why she wasn’t going blind from some kind of glare until
she realized it was because the castle seemed to be absorbing light
rather than releasing it.

“
Amazing,” she whispered
aloud.

“
It’s alive,” Kris
whispered in her ear.

Poppy’s brow furrowed. “What?” she asked
over her shoulder.

He grinned. “You’ll see.”

Elmheart let them down with incredible
gentility. One second, he was hovering above the thick grass of the
courtyard, and the next, he was at a full stop and Kris and William
were sliding off. Kristopher got off first and reached up, taking
Poppy around the waist to ease her down. She let him. Sometimes it
was nice to be the girl.

“
Dvalin is in the inner
chambers,” said Elmheart. He shifted back into his human form and
began walking toward the glittering double doors of the castle.
Each door stood well over fifty feet high, and must have weighed
several hundred tons.

A man stood beside each door. As the party
approached, both men reached forward and took hold of the ring on
their side. They pulled, and the doors swung open.

“
They’re stronger than they
look,” Poppy muttered.

“
That’s rather what dragons
do,” William said. “Go around being stronger than they look.” She
shot him a look, and the three of them followed Elmheart into the
inner sanctum of the dragon castle.

Five minutes and ten thousand marvels later,
Poppy found her breathless self sitting at a crystalline table
beside a window in a veranda-style room high up at the top reaches
of the castle. The crystal table was apparently one more part of
one absolutely enormous but single crystal that grew and shifted
and changed in order to create the castle around them. That was how
it was alive. Like any crystal, it continued to grow over time. But
in this realm, the speed with which it did so was exaggerated, and
the shapes it made did not adhere to a strict symmetrical pattern.
There were rooms with crystal swimming pools… rooms with miniature
crystal forests… rooms with small streams flowing through them and
crystal flowers growing from the floor and even rooms with
countless dangling figurines dangling from the ceiling, each one a
prism cut into a different animal or plant, each one extraordinary
and unique and impossibly detailed. The castle was a living
treasure trove of absolute wonder.

Poppy sighed happily and gazed out the
window that spanned the length of the room they’d finally settled
down in. The view from this height made the one she’d originally
had atop that hill in the distance pale in comparison. Here, she
could see to the far reaches of the realm. Literally – the edges of
the realm shimmered with an iridescence, like the skin of a giant
bubble.

“
Dvalin is a beautiful
realm, but it’s a small one,” said the dragon they’d come there to
see. It just so happened the realm was named after him.
His
name was Dvalin too.
King Dvalin of the Dragon Realm.

“
I wonder what the Dragon
King back home would think about you,” Poppy said suddenly,
changing the subject. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, it was
just that she’d been
thinking
it. She’d been wondering whether the king who sat
at the table of the Thirteen even knew
this
dragon king existed.

All three kings looked at her. She felt
conspicuous at once. “What?”

Dvalin’s eyes twinkled.

“
She has a point,” said
William with a small smile. “Arach doesn’t even know Dvalin exists.
The land
or
the
king. I bet he’d blow a fuse.”

“
Short tempered, is he?”
asked Dvalin in an unusually high-pitched voice. He gently placed
his delicate, tiny tea cup back into its saucer and batted his long
eyelashes. Poppy never would have pegged the man for a king. A
queen, maybe.

Dvalin’s shoulder-length paper white hair
was striped with conspicuous blue streaks, massive stag antlers
rose from his skull to a height of at least three feet, and his
red-gold eyes possessed symbols of some sort floating through their
irises. But other than these three very obvious tells, the man
looked positively normal. Well… as normal as a cross-dressing
ash-blonde man of six-foot-something can look, anyway.

Okay, so there was nothing normal about him
whatsoever.

“
You’re
fascinating
,” Poppy
whispered.
Oh shit
. She hadn’t meant to say that either! It had just come right
out!
What the hell is wrong with
me?
she wondered as her cheeks grew hot
and she tried to sink into the crystal of her chair.
What’s with all the sudden
candor
?

Dvalin threw back his head and gave a
full-bodied laugh that utterly belied the femininity he was trying
so hard to convey. But when the laughter died down, he wiped his
eyes with a tissue, as a woman would, and cleared his throat. “My
dear, so are you.”

Kristopher laced his hands together on the
table top and squared the dragon king with a hard look. “What
Dvalin means to say, Poppy, is that people find it difficult to be
anything but outwardly honest around Dvalin. It’s one of his
powers. And he finds it refreshing that your honesty isn’t
judgmental or cruel, as it happens to be for so many humans.”

“
And I happen to think I
would make a wonderful queen too,” said Dvalin with a
wink.

Poppy’s blood now dropped right back out of
her cheeks, and she grew cold. “Can you read my mind?”

“
That’s
another
one of his powers,” said
Kristopher. His gaze narrowed on the Norse Dragon king, which
caused Dvalin to chuckle again.

“
Now, now,” said Dvalin.
“You’ve come here to discuss Yggdrasil. So let’s get down to
business and do so. As Mr. Solan would no doubt put it, the clock
is ticking.”

“
Ticking is what it does,”
said William quietly. There was a distinct note of weariness in his
tone, but servants came forward then to clear the table, and a
weathered piece of blank parchment was laid out between the four of
them, and Poppy forgot about it.