Free The Fairy Letters: A FROST Series(TM) Novel by Kailin Gow Page A

is mixed with my love of Summer – love of the bright
fruits and the ripe nectars and the purple flowers and the ivy and vines that
trail up and down the sun-dappled rocks. I feel almost as much as a call for
the land that you love – rich and fertile and burning with life – as I do for
my own. It is my love for you, Breena, that calls me thus. It calls me to the
land that you love, for I cannot look upon Summer as an enemy – look upon its
lands and rotten and base – when I see them through your eyes. I see the land's
beauty and I dream of a day when Summer and Winter are united once again in a
single land of unsurpassed loveliness, when the smell of fir trees and the
smell of bougainvillea flowers mingle in the single fragrance of peace.
    I
have, once or twice, gone up against your father in war – he would lead a
regiment against one of mine. And I am grateful every day that neither of us
was the clear victor in these battles – that both of us were able to escape
alive. For although I was angry with Summer – and although I bore particular rancor
against Flametail for his role, however inadvertent, in exacerbating the war –
I nevertheless know what it is like...the pain of losing a father. I could not
bear to make you shoulder that burden, too.
     

 
    Letter 10
     
    My Dearest
Breena,
               
    Since
my last letter, you have been on my mind constantly. I have thought of little
but those attributes which so attracted me to you at first – your incomparable
beauty, your inflexible strength, your courage and love for this country which
has become your own. In you I see the best of Winter and Summer alike – the
power and willingness to sacrifice that I saw and admired in my mother, and the
power and willingness to love that I saw and admired in your father. You,
Breena, are the best of both worlds – the culmination of all fairy traditions.
The warmth of Summer and the cool of Winter – the passions of humanity and the
power of Feydom – all this do I think of when I think of you. Who but you could
be so lovely, so strong? Who but one such as you could be my bride?
    And
yet, thinking back to the stories that Raine once told my mother of the Summer
Court – I fear for you. I remember what she said of its intrigues, its terror.
Wort or no Wort, I know that there are several courtiers whom I imagine wish to
do you harm, for surely not all of those fairies have renounced their loyalty
to Redleaf and her treacherous ways! How can a place of such great beauty be a
place of such great danger? Do the two go hand in hand, do you think – must all
good things be twinned with bad? And, if that is the way of the world, then I
hope and will that the bad – our parting – will at last be twinned with the
good: this peace for which we both so tirelessly work.
    Yet
I find myself strangely grateful, thinking of you at the Summer Court without
me, for the presence of Logan the Wolf. Now I will not deny it, he and I have
had our differences. How could he resist, after all? Your beauty, your
kindness, the magic about you – how could anybody fail to fall in love with you
at first sight, let alone over a course of years spent together in the bounds
of friendship?
    I
have perhaps not served Logan well. What else can you expect, my dearest
Breena? He may be a good and strong Wolf Prince – in my less jealous hours I
find myself unable to deny that he is one of the bravest princes ever seen in
the Wolf clans of the North, able to live both in our world and in the human
world with incredible skill and intelligence. But simply because I acknowledge
his good qualities – indeed, precisely because I do acknowledge them – I
cannot forgive him the love he bears you, although I do understand it. I fear,
sometimes, that he will take you away from me – that your warm friendship, your
unhurried bond, forged over time together, will one day prove more attractive
to you than the torment and the turmoil that seems to