Winter Solstice - Chapter Two *RE-EDITED* (sfw) (Patreon)

As with yesterday's post of a re-edited Chapter One, this isn't new content, per se, but it's been edited, and one or two details cleaned up. 

Chapter One is now in the masterlist, along with this one. 

The world hung quiet around her, and for a moment she thought she was waking in her bedroom on the morning of a fresh snowfall. The quiet pressed against her ears until she had to open her eyes. The house was too still. Her younger brothers should be scampering about and getting underfoot, her father should be in the workshop at the back of the house, the treadle lathe turning bowls and other goods to sell at market. Her mother should be hammering out new horse shoes in the small forge across the yard, and Teasel the dog should have been barking. 

And yet there was nothing but the silence of snow. 

Blinking dazedly, she tried to sit up, but everything hurt and ached when she moved, and she fell back with a gasp against a pillow that was much too soft to be her own. It was only then that she realised she was not in her own bedroom at all. 

The room was ornate as any she could imagine in the palace of the human kings. Pale, powder-blue walls rose to a delicately-patterned, plastered ceiling, and in the middle of it hung a chandelier that was anything but ordinary. It looked like a huge diamond had been shattered into a hundred fragments and then suspended in the pattern as it burst apart. Each shard of crystal glimmered with Fae light, a blue as pale as starlight, sending glittering sparks around the room to dance on the icy walls. 

While the temperature of the room was pleasant, the atmosphere held a frosty chill. No colour other than pale blue adorned any of the furnishings or the floor, and the stone grate in the fireplace sat cold and unwelcoming. Even the furniture was crafted from a white wood. 

The covers of her bed were softer than any fabric she had ever touched, and as she attempted to lever herself upright for a second time, her dark eyes went wide at the view beyond the leaded, mullioned windows. A snow-covered mountain slope, devoid of life, plunged away in one direction down into a wild and rugged valley and in the other it reared up into an impossibly high mountain whose peak was lost in wreaths of thick, white cloud. 

Clear, cold, fragile light flooded in through the windows, and as she pushed back the covers and her collarbone and shoulder ached, the horror of that creature’s jaw around her neck came flashing back in vivid, horrifying clarity. Screwing her eyes shut, as if that would have any effect on the images imprinted into her mind, she sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with her legs dangling down, gathering her scrambled, vague thoughts while her neck throbbed with the memory of it, when there came a knock at the door. 

Fae. 

She had stumbled upon something that had escaped from the Fae Realm, and it had nearly killed her. Scowling, she remembered vaguely begging someone for help. 

“Oh gods,” she groaned, bringing her fingertips to her temple as the memory of swirling, silver-blue filigree stitching on fine, supple boots, and long silver-white hair, and a face more handsome and more terrible than any human could ever be flashed across her mind. A strange, ever-shifting, quicksilver mask drifted into her mind as well, though she wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, and a tall, dark creature with the ragged stump of a wing protruding from the leather of their jerkin, the other hanging in tatters down their back. 

There hadn’t been just one Fae in those woods at all, and in all likelihood, she was now no longer in the Mortal Realm at all. 

“Are you awake yet?” a high, almost girlish voice asked softly from the other side of the door, and she jumped to her feet, staring wildly around for some kind of weapon, though the closest thing she found was a staggeringly expensive looking vase which held what looked like cut-glass flowers, though she suspected that here they could have been made of ice, or anything at all for that matter. Short of nothing, it might do, she thought, and stepped a little closer to the polished wood of the table on which the vase glittered innocently. 

When she didn’t reply, the door clicked open and an elegantly dressed Fae stepped in. 

“Oh,” she crooned. “You are awake. How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been chewed up and spat back out…” she croaked, biting back a snarl.

She was not wearing her own clothes any more, and her horror of her latest realisation must have shown on her face because the golden-haired beauty in the doorway smiled gently and said, “Your riding leathers were quite ruined, I’m afraid. Wraith venom will do that to almost anything. I’m sorry. Our healer is very discreet though. She only tended to your wounds and ignored the rest of you.” Her deadly smile said that the healer could have done all sorts of other secretive damage to the fragile human’s body, and she would never have known any different. 

Pushing that to one side with a shudder, she glowered across the room at the woman in the doorway. “Where am I?” she demanded, meeting the Fae’s honey eyes with her own fiercely dark gaze. 

“You are in the High House of Winter, human,” she said. “A guest of the Prince of Winter himself.”

She let that sink in for a moment before standing and meeting the Fae’s eye again. “I want some proper clothes,” she said, resisting the urge to pluck at the flimsy nightshift that came down to her knees, “And then I want to go home.”

The tiniest of smiles played at the corner of the peachy mouth of the Fae in front of her, but she made no comment other than to say that there were clothes in the wardrobe, and that she would wait outside while she dressed. With that, she shut the door behind her with a click and left her alone again. 

The sound of voices rose beyond the door above the rustling of her clothes as she stepped into them. They were almost an exact match to the simple riding leathers and rough shirt that she had lost, but although they were unadorned, they were of a far finer quality than her former clothes had been. She shivered as she wondered what kind of Fae magic had been used to create them so quickly, and in her size, and what the cost of them would be when added to the tally already set against her life. Two male voices rumbled quietly in chorus with the already familiar female’s, but as she went still to try and listen to their conversation through the door, they all fell silent, and a few seconds later, the female called out, “I assume you’re decent?”

She didn't answer, but turned around to check her reflection in a disgustingly ornate, crystal mirror on the wall opposite the bed. 

The Fae woman returned, this time with two others who loomed behind her like bodyguards. With a chuckle as she watched her guest’s face change as she stared at the two of them, the Fae woman purred, “Meet my esteemed colleagues, human. That’s Ahrin. He doesn’t speak much til you get to know him,” she laughed softly, flicking a fond smile in the direction of the tall, powerfully-built Fae on her left. “And this is Raeth. He doesn’t speak much at all, even if you do know him,” she added with a giggle. 

If she looked closely enough, beneath the dark tips of Ahrin’s hair which just bushed the nape of his neck, she could see what looked like grey, twisting tattoos over his darkly tanned skin. They crawled like fingers of shadow up from beneath the black, high collar of his jerkin and around over the front of his throat to his jawline. She shuddered. 

His golden brown eyes flickered with some emotion before the mask of his stern expression slid into place. Behind him, the tattered remains of one, bat-like wing shifted slightly, and she didn’t dare think about the ragged stump of the other that she’d glimpsed poking through the slits in the back of his leathers.

“And you are?” she said, slanting an eyebrow upwards towards the beautiful woman who had begun the introductions. 

“Oh,” she trilled, turning back to face her, her lovely golden hair flashing in the sunlight. “You may call me Mirana. I'm the First lady of the Court, and Prince Círdan’s sister.”

She fought to remember the face of the Fae in the forest, the one with the simple crown around his silver-white head. “You don’t look much alike,” she muttered. 

“No, well,” she hedged, bringing a hand to flick away an imaginary speck of dust from her left cuff, as if the Fae’s appearance would ever be anything less than perfect. “Adopted siblings don’t tend to share many physical traits, do they?” she added with an icy inflection. 

Adopted; that was interesting. She stowed the information away for another time, and asked, “Why am I here?”

The second new figure then stepped forwards from his place beside Mirana, his tall, lean body moving like a spectral cat in the shadows. He was slim as a blade, and gave the same impression - freshly drawn off a whetstone, wicked, sharp, and ready to kill with a mere flick of his ghostly pale wrists. His irises were so pale that she initially thought he might be blind, but there was the faintest hint of blue to them, and his vision was clearly not impaired as he stared straight at her. The only lick of colour to him was the slight, dusky pink to his lips. The rest of him was white all over, from his long white hair to his skin, and even his robes were a pale grey, damasked with frost.

Mirana’s bright gold eyes tracked him as he moved, and she let out a surprisingly girlish giggle. “Now, now, Raeth,” she snickered. “Play nice…” 

“You’re here, human,” he said in a voice like broken glass, “Because you’d been bitten by a wraith. Our prince didn’t want you dying, for unfathomable some reason, so he brought you here.” He narrowed the distance between them so quickly and so smoothly that she almost didn’t notice until he was standing mere inches from her. A coldness emanated from him. It reminded her of holding her palm a hair’s breadth from the window panes in winter, and being afraid to touch it. “And he’s curious to know how you managed to kill that wraith, even with its foul poison pumping through your pathetic mortal body.”

“We all are,” Mirana cooed. Ahrin’s face remained impassive, but there was an intensity to his stare that spoke volumes of his own interest too.  

“You can’t know all that much about humans if you’re wondering about that,” she snorted, turning away from the stern, monumental beauty of his face. “We might not have magic but we’re not so easy to kill.”

If they thought that humans were pathetic, weak, and easily broken or intimidated because so few of them possessed magic, then Mirana would soon find out otherwise. The others remained silent as she turned away. She crossed the room to gaze out of the windows and give herself some space to think and breathe. With three of them standing in the room with her, their presence was almost chokingly intense. “And where the hell is ‘here’?”

Mirana approached with no more than a slight rustle of her dress, and stood beside her at the carved, white marble window frame, her gaze as hard and distant as the mountain sky beyond. “This is the High House of Winter,” she repeated with a smile. 

“That just tells me ‘what’ this place is, not ‘where’,” she grumbled, laying her fingertips on the sill and staring at the bleak and beautiful scene before her. Ahrin – at least she thought it was him – gave a quiet snort from behind her that might have been approval, but he said nothing, leaving her to the privacy of her astonishment. 

Beyond the plunging, high walls of whatever the ‘High House of Winter’ was, there was nothing but empty, snow-blanketed, rocky valley for miles, until the far end of the glacially-carved dale where something glimmered. “The sea…” she whispered after another few moments. With her mother’s forge so far inland, she had never dreamed she would ever see the ocean in her entire life, and yet there it was; a different sea, to be sure, but still, the impact of it remained the same.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Mirana smiled as she joined the human, speaking almost whimsically before turning to look down at her. “Now, come on. Círdan won’t want to be kept waiting much longer.”

A thrill of fear plummeted through her, and she whipped around, eyes wide. 

The tall one, Raeth, stepped forwards and took her gently but firmly by the upper arm, steering her from the room. His hands were like claws of ice, digging in and manoeuvring her with the ease of a master puppeteer. He did let go of her once she was in the corridor, however, much to her relief. His skin was like winter, his grip hard and unyielding.

If she’d thought that her chambers had been ornate, with their carved ceilings and delicate, spun-sugar furniture, she gaped openly at the corridor beyond. 

The only colour in the whole palace came from the tapestries on the walls. They glimmered, as fresh as the day they were hung, though something about their style told her that their subjects had probably been staring down from their positions atop great griffins and warhorses, hunting stags, or sitting beside roaring, gold-embroidered fires, for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years. 

She kept silent as she moved through the gleaming palace, its seamless stonework the same hue as the snow outside. Flanked on each side by Raeth and Mirana, and followed behind like a terrible, hulking shadow by Ahrin, she allowed herself to be herded to the great hall, where a set of ice-blue, carved doors sported a snow scene of wind-blasted pines and craggy cliffs. Split across the centre of the two doors she saw a beautifully-rendered palace: the High House of Winter, she supposed; the centre of the Court of Winter’s expansive realm. 

Before she could admire it properly, the doors drew inward on silent hinges, and she saw the incredible hall beyond. 

The ceiling was made of shards of ice like a cavern, or perhaps even diamond. Jagged facets glittered and winked, throwing light off every surface so that she had to narrow her eyes against the fierceness of it. Overhead, descending from the ceiling like stalactites of ice and glass, encrusted chandeliers glimmered with unearthly, greenish blue foxfire. The sight of the incredible ceiling stole her breath and her feet faltered for a moment as she forgot to be afraid beneath the majesty and sheer craftsmanship of the hall. The smooth, white walls, like untouched snow, glittered faintly too, sweeping up into the vast vaults of the geode ceiling, and on the left side of the hall, slender, floor-to-vaulted-ceiling, crystal windows gazed out onto the bare mountainside beyond, the daylight shattering into a million shards as it hit the jewels of the hall. 

Finally, adorning a dais at the far end like a diamond in a crown, and seated on a throne made of what looked like more shards of ice, waited the Fae she remembered from the woods. 

His head was bowed slightly, and he sat slumped sideways in the throne, sharp chin resting idly on the back of his pale hand, elbow propped on the armrest, looking bored and tired. That mask still concealed the right hand side of his face, partly-covering his right eye and stretching down his cheek to his chin and covering the right side of his mouth. It really did look like it was made of quicksilver, moving like liquid as it rippled and shifted with the bones of his jaw as he licked his lips, straightened slightly, and called down the hall, “Finally… you’re here. What took you so long?”

“Apologies, my prince,” Raeth drawled, not really sounding contrite in the least. “Vitha’s healing took a little longer than we’d anticipated. Turns out humans really are entirely different from us, and what she tried first actually made the poison act more quickly.” He cast a sidelong look at her, his grey eyes dancing for a moment - the first expression she’d even glimpsed on that mask of stern coolness - and added, “She didn’t scream too much, but it took a while for her to regain consciousness after the procedure.”

“And when she did,” Mirana interrupted, gazing down at her as well, “There was all the tedium of ‘where am I?’ ‘who are you?’ ‘what do you want with me?’ etcetera, etcetera…” 

Even though she was still only halfway down the grand hall, she could see that only one side of his lips smiled. Although the other, the right side, was masked by the strange, pooling, liquid, when he spoke there was a slur to his words that suggested his mouth didn’t move properly. She shuddered to think what might lie beneath that mask, and who could have done that to a Fae prince with all the power he must hold.

“Well. You’re here now,” he sighed, pushing himself to his feet and striding down the hall towards her on long, lean legs. Raeth and Mirana drew back a pace or two, and bowed their heads; a gesture which he ignored. 

He was over a foot taller than she was, and he snorted a slightly amused laugh as she inhaled deeply, begging the fleeting, scattered remnants of her courage to come crawling back into her heart, and finally looked up to meet his eyes. 

“Bold, aren’t you?” he sneered under his breath, his eyes still boring into hers. 

They were the silver grey of a snowy winter sky, of moonlight on water, and they transfixed her to the spot so utterly and completely that she forgot to breathe. All her life, she had been told that Fae were tricksy but weak; that the Fae were slaves; that, once caught and held iron collars, they were nothing more than the playthings of kings and nobles, who dangled them on chains of iron and made them dance and perform for their pleasure. Some could be used by rare human mages, their power acting as wells from which the humans could draw on; their blood fuelling certain rituals, but she knew nothing about that. Her skills lay in the forging of iron which, she thought in that moment, was rather ironic given her current predicament and its supposed use against the Fae. 

Now she was in their realm, and this Fae was anything but weak. 

With the grace of a dancer, he extended his glacially pale thumb and index finger to her chin and held her, appraising her as if she were a horse for sale. The urge to bite him, like the angriest, nastiest, bitterest chestnut mare she’d ever encountered, welled up in her, and a footstep on the marble floor behind her rang out a warning. 

Círdan’s eyes flickered to the figure standing behind her, to Ahrin’s face, and he smiled. Something wordless seemed to pass between them, and the prince nodded. 

“Well, you are clearly healed,” he said, sounding bored as he released his icy hold on her and turned away. She noticed a slight, rocking limp to his gait as he moved gracefully to the window and gazed out. His long silver-white hair spilled down his back, loose, free, and un-plaited. In a room surrounded by filigree and fantasy, he seemed almost plain, save for the ethereal mask that shrouded half his face. He sighed. “I suppose I should really send you back.”

She caught the way the others stiffened, tensing like wolves that sensed lurking danger. 

“Highness,” Raeth began but he cut off at an icy glare from the prince. 

“Círdan,” Mirana purred, stepping towards her brother like a lioness. “If you send her back, the shadow will sense her. Creatures in its sway will sense your healing magic on her and will be drawn to it.”

She frowned. His healing magic? Hadn’t they said that the court healer had been the one to tend to her injuries from the frantic fight in the snow? She warded off images as they flashed again across her mind of the terrible jaws of the wraith as it had clamped down on her neck, latching onto her like a leech while its slimy, shadowy body had writhed and flailed. Only when she’d managed to free the knife at her belt with ichor-slick fingers had she been able to stick it deep into the creature’s belly, even as her blood turned fire in her veins. 

“Are you seriously suggesting I should keep a human here, in my court?” he scoffed, turning to face her fully. The laugh that followed his question was hollow and cold. “Keep her as my little human pet in a mockery of what they do to us beyond the Veil?”

“I am advising you, my prince… brother…” she pressed carefully, “That if you loose her back into the human realm like a little rabbit that smells of us, she will lead the wolves right to us. Either the tainted creatures will follow her into the Mortal Realm and spread it there, or it will follow the trail back to us here. We do not know what the consequences will be.”

Raeth nodded. “The shadow may come for her. It may find her, and through her, it may find you. The Old Ways between Realms are more easily travelled in the wake of another. You know this.”

“The borders of my Court are well warded,” he snapped. As he turned sharply away, however, she caught a wince flash across his face, and his right knee buckled just a fraction. Had she not been working all her life with horses, studying with her mother, and had she not trained her eyes over the years to catch any stiffness, any irregularity in a gait, she might have missed it entirely. It was there though, plain as daybreak to her. 

“Highness,” Raeth reasoned gently, stepping closer to his prince’s retreating back. The two of them could have been brothers, she realised, with the paleness of their skin and the particular ghostly hue of their hair. There was even a similar sharpness to their bone structure like an echo or a reflection, though Raeth looked older, so he couldn’t be Círdan’s brother if Círdan was the ruler. 

The feathery patterns on the prince’s long, pale blue coat shifted as he moved, like frost on a window caught in the sun. She might have found him beautiful if the whole experience hadn’t been so terrifying and so utterly alien to her. They were deciding her fate and she could do nothing more than stand there like a mute puppet on a shelf. 

Círdan paused and glanced over his left shoulder to look back at Raeth. “What would you have me do?” he asked in a rasping whisper. “Keep her here as a prisoner? As little more than a beast on a chain? Would you have me be no better than a human ‘princeling’?” The vitriol in his voice stung to listen to. “Or perhaps you would rather I behave as my brethren in the Court of Summer do, and have her leashed with golden collars, and bedecked in gaudy jewellery and body paint, and not much else, for our ‘amusement’?”

The very idea of that repelled her and she fought off another snarl. Ahrin caught her eye briefly and something flickered across his rough-hewn features that might have been a quirk of the lips. It might just have been a passing shadow or a shift of the light. 

“It’s better than having her lead the shadow straight to our court,” Raeth countered flatly, not rising to the prince’s taunts. 

A fire that had been slowly kindling in her chest suddenly flared hot and she spoke up for the first time since entering the hall. “You saved my life from that thing in the woods,” she said, her voice sounding pitifully small and thin compared to the way theirs had filled the space like trained actors on stage. “You really think I’d betray you somehow? You think so little of humans?”

Círdan cocked his head slightly to one side and chuckled. Once again, it was an icy laugh, with no mirth, and it sent shivers running along the insides of her bones as he approached. He stared at her for a long time; expression blank, eyes cold. “I honestly don’t know,” he said, his voice no louder than the whisper of winter wind through bare branches. “Fine. You will remain here until I decide,” he said. “You may wander these halls freely. No one will harm you, but you are not to leave the palace, and you are not to pry about.”

“So I can wander freely, but I can’t get too curious?” she said, raising an eyebrow. 

A flicker of what might have been healthy amusement flitted over his cold expression, but it was gone as soon as she’d thought she’d seen it. “Precisely,” he said, carefully enunciating the word. As he did, he peeled his lips back into a lopsided smile that bared his teeth, and she gasped, seeing two sets of canines, the second, larger pair sitting in place of premolars. “Now get out before I change my mind and have you locked somewhere considerably colder than your guest rooms. Mira, see to her.”

Mirana bowed and turned to look at her. “Well,” she said patronisingly, “What would you like to do?”

“You don’t have to babysit me,” she said, following Mirana as she led the way back down the empty great hall, her voice dull and sullen. 

Ahrin snorted and stepped close to Mirana’s ear, leaning down and whispering something that was for her alone. 

Her human ears merely detected a rasping hiss, but no words. 

Mirana nodded, and in a rush of dark, roiling shadows, Ahrin simply vanished. “You’ll get used to it,” she laughed as the human stared at the spot where he’d just… disappeared. “He’s part Shadowborne, you know?” she smiled. “But it can be a bit disconcerting, I’m sure.” The words ‘for a human’ echoed unspoken, but she didn’t rise to the bait. “Now, first things first, what would you like me to call you?” she held up her hand swiftly and added, “I’m not asking you to give me your True Name, of course, but I can’t bear to keep calling you ‘human’, or ‘girl’ or something.”

Never tell the Fae your name; that was one of the first things every human learned as a child. They had few powers in the Mortal Realm, but once they knew your name, it was said that they could witch you and bring you back through the curtain that divided your world from theirs, and then you would be at their mercy. 

“‘Human’ is just fine,” she snarled through clenched teeth. 

“Oh come now,” Mirana pouted. “Fine, I shall give you a name.”

“No. I want nothing more from you than I have already accepted,” she said hotly, glancing back over her shoulder. 

At the far end of the hall, Círdan stood on his dais, one hand resting on the ice throne, long fingers drumming idly. His eyes bore into hers, even from that distance, blazing with some emotion she couldn’t read. 

Mirana sighed dramatically and threw up her hands. “Fine. ‘Human’ it is. But I don’t like it.”

“Nobody asked you to like it,” she snapped back, and she could have sworn she heard a softly amused chuckle ripple down the hall from the Prince of Winter at the far end. 

___

 Hope you enjoyed revisiting these characters! Don't forget that Ahrin's story went up on here (and then Tumblr a week later), if you want to read a pre-WS story with him!

Stay tuned for more updates in the next few days in preparation for the  rest of the story. It's currently 15 chapters long in the plan, but that  might change (increase!) as I actually write it all!