Claire Delacroix & Lynn Kurland & Sharon Shinn & Sarah Monette by The Queen in Winter

Author:The Queen in Winter [Winter, The Queen in]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Kiss of the

Snow Queen

CLAIRE DELACROIX

Chapter One

The stirring of shadows in the bronze mirror would have awakened Gerta, had she slept. She had been awake all the night, so she was immediately aware of the motion within it. She watched it warily, reluctant for once to heed its summons.

She had done wrong, and she knew it well. She had used the mirror against its purpose, against her mentor’s counsel, and it had been three days since her transgression.

Gerta feared to see what reckoning the mirror conjured. Such forces could be willful, perhaps as willful as she had been in trying to bend the mirror’s power beneath her own inexperienced hand. She had been warned, when the heirloom mirror had been entrusted to her care, that it could be capricious. Vengeful, even.

But what choice had she had?

The mirror in question was a bronze disk, one face of it polished highly. Most people saw their own reflection within it, but Gerta, as a seer, saw distant events and portents displayed upon it. Her gift was rare and, as soon as it had become evident, she had been apprenticed to another seer. Isold had been her mentor from childhood until that woman’s death five years past.

So much had changed with Isold’s demise. Gerta still yearned for the days before the arrival of the Cath Palug in her father’s realm, for that fiend was the root of all evil that had followed.

The mirror tickled her thoughts, persistent as it seldom was. Still Gerta lingered abed. Her training was not complete, but she had the wits to know trepidation.

Gerta’s chamber was at the summit of the sole tower in the abode of Gundobad, the king of Burgundy.

She had long thought its location befit a seer, for it would protect her chastity, but now she understood that her chastity had been protected for another reason.

Her chamber was still dark, for it was not yet dawn, and the hall below was blessedly quiet. She could have slept in her exhaustion, had she felt confident that she would not be assaulted in her slumber. The trunk pushed against her door was no guarantee, nor was the dismissal of all maids who might have betrayed her while she slept. Gerta rubbed her eyes, exhausted and hungry from three days secured here alone in her defiance. She looked toward the mirror, hoping fiercely that her summons would bring relief.

There was only one way to be certain. Gerta rose to heed the mirror. She had best know the worst of what she had done.

She was still dressed, wearing her favored plain robe, the one that did not look like the choice of a king’s only daughter. The robe was blue, the pale blue that came from woad, woven finely from wool and devoid of embroidery. It covered her from chin to toe, the sleeves hanging modestly over her hands. To leave her hair unbound but cover all of her skin, with the exception of her fingers and her face, was the

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