“But I didn’t touch anything!” Kham protested. The ice woman clearly didn’t care. She jabbed her spear, and only Kham’s swift reflexes spared her an impaling. As it was, the spear pierced the sleeve of Kham’s robe and froze it solid. Kham’s eyes widened. “Wait, is that one of Thorgyll’s spears?”

The woman lunged, moving far swifter than a block of ice should, aiming a lethal blow at the center of Khamsin’s chest.

Kham didn’t dare let that spear touch her again. She flung herself backward, bending like one of Vera Sola’s famed fire-stick dancers ducking beneath a flaming horizontal pole. The white spear missed Kham’s chest but scored a burning line across her jaw as momentum carried her back up. The side of her face went numb, then flamed with pain. She staggered back, stumbling against the blocks of ice surrounding Ice Heart. Tipped off-balance, Khamsin fell backward into the well.

Agony exploded across her nerve endings as the black liquid touched her exposed skin. If passing through the veil in the tunnel had felt like having the flesh flayed from her bones, this was like being submerged in a vat of acid. On her wrist, the red Rose of Summerlea flared with pain and power. Kham fought her way back to the surface and bobbed up, screaming, in time to see the ice creature jab her spear into the Ice Heart. Rippling black liquid froze at the point of contact, crusting over in midripple. The hardening ice spread rapidly out across the surface.

All Kham could do was suck down a gasp of air and dive into the freezing pool before the spreading surface ice closed around her. The error of that instinctive reaction became immediately apparent. The layer of ice now covering the well was thick and solid. She beat against it with bare hands, but it didn’t budge. There were a few tiny air pockets—small shallow spaces formed near the apex of the frozen ripples—but those precious breaths would not sustain her for more than a few minutes.

Assuming she survived this murderous cold long enough to drown.

The sword. Khamsin, get the sword.

The Sword of Roland had unfrozen the Ice Heart nine hundred years ago. The sword would be able to break through the surface ice now.

She pressed her lips to the air pockets, sucking in as much air as she could, then she rolled upside down and pushed off the ice, diving down into the Ice Heart.

The world went black and sightless. All that existed was burning cold and pain. The Rose on her wrist burned with a pain so terrible she would willingly cut off her own arm to make it stop. Instead, she kicked and clawed her way deeper into the Ice Heart, dragging herself through the thickening sludge towards the promise of warmth and light that called to her senses. Her lungs burned as fiercely as her flesh, growing tighter and tighter with each passing moment.

She fought the need to breathe until her body rebelled. Her mouth opened against her will, and the freezing black liquid of the Ice Heart poured into her lungs.

Lightning exploded across her cells. A storm like nothing she’d ever conjured roared through her body as her fearsome weathergift battled the bitter invasion of a dead god’s icy essence. Flesh and bone savaged one another with brutal claws and razor-sharp teeth, ripping and tearing in a frenzy of ravening hunger.

Kham screamed and screamed and screamed in soundless futility. Her body convulsed, twisting and writhing. The legs scissoring through the thick, oily liquid grew heavy. Each tiny motion became a heroic struggle, then an impossibility as the strength leached from her limbs. Pain faded as her drowning body sank towards the bottom of the well.

Wynter, my love, forgive me. I have failed you.

Was this death?

Khamsin floated in blackness. The pain ravaging her body remained, but it was distant, separated from her consciousness, as if she were a mere observer of another woman’s torment. She couldn’t see anything, hear anything, and feeling beyond that strangely distant pain seemed an impossibility.

A forgotten memory niggled at her, tugging, pulling, nibbling at the edges of her mind.

The sword, Khamsin. Get the sword.

The sword. Roland’s sword. That’s what she’d come for, why she was here.

She could feel its presence through the impenetrable darkness. A blossom of beckoning warmth. So near. She reached for it.

The second she did, agony returned full bore—flooding her body, making her writhe and scream in torment. She persevered, fighting to reach the sword with every remaining ounce of strength she possessed.

Please. Please. Please. She didn’t pray. She never begged. But for Wynter, she would do that and more. If there was any chance at all to save him, she needed Roland’s sword.

There! Numb fingers curled around the sword’s hilt. The moment she touched it, fiery heat roared up her arm, blasting its way through her body in a cleansing burn. With the heat came a flood of images, memories.

Helos the sun god, finding himself so enchanted with the mortal queen of Summerlea that he could not set her from his mind.

Helos pouring his divine essence into the mortal shell of his beloved’s husband. And in that husband’s skin, with that husband’s flesh, the god lay with the beautiful queen. And in the soft, sweet grass beside a still summer lake, with a profusion of red roses perfuming the air, the god gave the Summer queen a child.

Khamsin saw the birth of that child, who became known as Roland Soldeus. The child of Summerlea’s king but also the god’s divine being, he was the first Summer King to bear the red Rose birthmark on the inside of his right wrist—a mark given him in memory of the time the Queen of Summer had been loved by a god. As her dazed mind processed that, a new flood of memories swept her along like a swift current.