Free The Winter King by Heather Killough-Walden

supposed that was one way of looking at
it. Another was that he was already beginning to lose his mind.
Because even as he was listening to Chief Ohthere in his mind, he’d
apparently begun swimming. He came into this awareness with a
terrible start that nearly broke his surface-bound stride. Not only
had he continued to hold his breath, and not only had he made it
through the ocean’s brutal attacks with life and limb intact, he’d
actually begun swimming upward.
    He overcame his initial shocking
realization, understood that he’d been in his head because he’d
simply been trying to escape the pain, and he kept moving up. His
ears screamed. His heart pounded. He felt his chest would explode,
for certain. Any moment now. He had to breathe. Any moment
now….
    Any… moment….
    Oh gods!
    Like a revelation, his head broke the
surface. He inhaled sharply, and cold, clean air slammed into his
lungs. It hurt like a knife, sharp and severe, and for just a
moment, as he coughed and ached and thrashed in the water, he
wondered if he might die after all. But then his lungs adjusted,
and the air filled him, and his raw, aching chest settled into a
rhythm it remembered and understood.
    His eyes adjusted to the lack of salted wet
and the new, dimmer light of early afternoon. As soon as he could
see clearly, he spun in the water, looking for any sign of the wave
or the damage it must have caused, fragments of his boat –
anything.
    But the day was peaceful.
The sky was clear, not the angry and dim sky he had seen over
Norway earlier, but blue. Blue . It had been so very long since
he’d seen a blue day, a light pure blue that reminded him of the
topaz his father had given to his mother for their wedding. And all
around him, in the water, rather than a distant shore, splinters of
wood, and the frothy aftermath of a rogue wave, Erikk saw more
blue.
    It was the blue of a calm, cold sea on a
bright, sunny day. It was the blue of his eyes.
    He had never seen the sea look like
that.
    When he could finally pull his gaze from the
sea and sky, Erikk looked out over the ocean distance to find the
shoreline.
    However, this was not the
shoreline he had left behind in Troms Ø . This was not a rocky cliff side,
sparse grass, and sturdy, lovely poppy. This was snow, pure and
white and cleanly fallen. It came thick and undisturbed directly to
the line of the sea.
    Beyond the snow, standing like rows of
sentries in the water, were two lines of icebergs, stretching out
toward him as if someone had rolled out an icy, wet carpet, and
they were the guards on either side.
    That carpet led up onto the pure, white
shore and up a set of equally icy steps, cut clean and straight out
of what appeared to be an entire island made out of a single
glacier. It wasn’t rare for the north, but it was not what he was
accustomed to.
    What the steps led to, he couldn’t see. They
seemed to lead literally nowhere; they stopped at the top of the
mountain and vanished altogether.
    “ Very well,” he muttered
through chattering teeth. He supposed he hadn’t made it after all.
He was dead. But
if he was lucky, Valhalla was on the other side of that ice
mountain.

Chapter Twelve
    Present Day - The Winter Kingdom
     
    Kristopher heard her words
as if she’d whispered them in his ear. The sound of them, so close,
so soft, froze him in place in the middle of the portal that
swirled around him. Take me
home .
    It was almost a plea, a
desperate whisper, beautiful . There was so much
yearning encompassed within it that Kristopher’s chest literally
ached. She was frightened. And instinctively, he wanted to protect
her. The crazy thing was, he knew it was him she needed protecting
from. The even crazier thing was, despite her obvious fear, the man
in him seized the sound of her voice – and the exact words it had
uttered – as the clue he needed to finish hunting her down. He knew
where she was going. The smart girl was doubling back to her
apartment. She was headed