The Winter Queen Page 4

  A knock at the door prompted me to start my question, but I stopped when I saw it wasn’t Millie carrying the breakfast tray but Lord Rime.

  “Good morning,” he said with a smile far too big for his face, and which gave him the most ridiculously gorgeous dimples.

  “Morning,” I said, pulling the sheets up to cover me.

  “I thought that being you couldn’t come to breakfast I’d bring breakfast to you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, unable to stop the smile. “But aren’t you super busy doing…”

  He laughed. “Exactly. I’m totally free for the next couple of hours. Besides, we had staff briefing at six.”

  “Six! Why so early?”

  “There’s a lot to be done – especially now that the snow has given us a small reprieve. The boys want to get out to the sheep shelters today and replenish the food stocks. I’m worried they’ll find nothing but bones out there, but the weather has been so bad we’ve not been able to get the horses out there. Old man Benji tried to go out on foot a few days ago, but he didn’t get far. Ended up in bed with a chest infection for his efforts. Hopefully, we’re not too late and the flock can be saved.

  “How much longer can this all go on before...” I stopped, wishing I had thought through that question a little more carefully. It was hardly light chit-chat when you were asking someone how long they might live before starving.

  “It’s hard to tell,” he said, his smile fading. “For the time being, we just have to keep optimistic. We keep building up the little food stocks that we have, knowing that it’s better to have one less mouthful today rather than no mouthfuls in a month’s time.”

  The true impact of a country in famine began to manifest in my mind. There would be bloodshed and misery, there would be cruelty and survival. The true horror of it all lie just below the magical surface of the snow. It was amazing what a liar nature could be; how she could cover something so terrible in a blanket of beauty.

  “Is there nothing that might be done?”

  Lord Rime shrugged. “We are all at the mercy of the King, and trust me when I say that there has been effort after effort to enchant him into happiness. The most beautiful women in the lands have been brought to him in the hope that he might fall in love, that he might smile – but none of them have captured his heart.”

  “Maybe it’s not a woman he’s after?” I said, half-seriously. “Maybe you’re all looking for love in the wrong place?”

  Lord Rime’s brow folded together. “I don’t think I understand?”

  “Never mind,” I said, breathing in heavily and sighing. I guessed that wherever this world was with its strange kingdoms, dreams and castles that they weren’t quite so diverse or progressive as my own.

  “The thing is, the queen was quite a unique woman. She didn’t really fit the usual pattern of things. She was fun and clever and wilful – some say the king spoilt her, but I don’t think that was it, she was just so full of life that she wanted to experience everything, and of course, she was very beautiful.”

  “I’m sure there are a thousand other women like her.”

  “Well, you’d hope so but… well, you’ll see. What’s it like in your kingdom?”

  “Ha, we don’t really have a ‘kingdom’ as such, although we do have a queen, but it’s not quite like here. I live in a small village called Brayton, in Sussex. Our seasons aren’t dependent on how our queen feels, although if they were, I guess it would always be autumn,” I said, trying to connect my own world with his. “She’s not really in charge as we have a government who make decisions on behalf of the people.”

  “But they are her men?”

  “No, the men and women, are elected by the people, and the ideal is that they are like the people, but most all come from the same schools and universities, so it’s not quite like it should be, but it’s better than it could be.”

  Lord Rime took on this information and I could tell that it was about as fantastical to him as the world I had woken up in. “The people decide who rules them?” he asked, incredulously.

  “Aha – it’s called democracy.”

  “What a strange land you live in.”

  I could make a snippy comment, I could tell him how ridiculous it was that he lived in a world where people starved because their king was sad, but I didn’t.

  “Anyway,” he said removing the lid from the plate. “Scrambled eggs and toast,” he said with joy. “A feast fit for a princess,” he joked. “I’m sorry there’s nothing else to go with it. It’s a bit of a meagre offering, I’m afraid.”

  My stomach knotted. It felt so wrong to be taking even this amount of precious food from his household, but on the other hand, I was so hungry, and scrambled eggs were one of the finest foods in any world.

  “Thank you. It means a lot to me for you to give me this.”

  “You’re my guest. And besides, we have a good, healthy flock of chickens living down in the old dining room, who are warm and happy enough to at least keep us ticking over until the grain runs out.”

  I forked a mouthful of the eggs into my mouth and relished every morsel. They taste as good as they were precious.

  “Aren’t you eating?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious.

  He shook his head. “I ate supper, I’m good for a few hours.”

  I put my fork down and looked at him hard. “This can’t go on, someone has to do something.”

  “Yes,” he said as he stood and made his way to the window. “But what?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him but I had a question in my head, one that I didn’t dare ask out loud. I wondered what would happen if the King were to die and a new king placed on his throne – a happy king who was in love and who could make the land well again.

  “Tomorrow night we are meant to be having a ball to celebrate Yule,” he said distractedly.

  “Yes, Mille was telling me. She was quite excited.”

  “The truth is,” he said turning to look at me, his face cast in light grey shadows which fell on him like his sudden melancholic mood. “The truth is there will be no ball. I’m going to have to let all the staff go later today.”

  I almost choked on the last spoonful of my egg. “You’re casting them out?” I asked.

  “I don’t have a choice. I’ve kept them all for as long as I possibly can. They’re like family to me, but I…” he turned back to face the window. “I just don’t have the resources to keep them here any longer.”

  “But where will they go? What will they eat? They’re going to leave here and die. The only difference will be that you don’t have to watch them suffer – are you really that selfish?”

  “Selfish?” he snapped. “What do you know of me? You’ve known me for a matter of hours, you’ve entered my world from goodness knows where, and you look at everything as if it’s just some child’s puzzle to be solved. Don’t you think that we’ve all searched for an answer; hoped and prayed to the old gods, down on our hands and knees, begging with every inch of our body, that a solution just drops into our lap?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you or be disrespectful, it’s just… they have nowhere else to go if you cast them out. Isn’t it better for them to die here, in their home, with their loved ones, than out there in the cold snow?”

  I watched the back of him as his chin fell to his chest. His shoulders shook with emotion.

  “Everything is such a mess. I thought I could make thing better, but I didn’t think this would happen”

  “What would happen?” I asked, setting the breakfast tray aside and making a pained effort to stand.

  He turned at my movement. “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing. The physcian will be here in a couple of hours. He’ll be able to fix you up. In the meantime, I guess I had better see what I can do to put together some kind of celebration for this evening,” he said smiling.

  “You’re not going to – ?

  “—No, you’re right. They’re family – and f
amily stays together to the end.”

  “Lord Rime?”

  “Yes, May?”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to find my way home?”

  He reached out his hand and placed it on my arm. “I hope so May. I really hope so.”

  The door clicked behind me and I limped over to the window to look out on the frozen world. As I stood there, I placed my own hand over the space Lord Rime had touched and breathed in the sensation. He had mistaken my flinch as a sign of discomfort, but it hadn’t been that. With his touch, the sensations I felt in my dreams the night before, came flooding over me and had almost overwhelmed me. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe in love at first sight, but I was certainly beginning to understand that my body had this way of making its mind up pretty damned quickly about what it wanted.

  Lord Rime was pure muscle and power and there was something else about him, something I didn’t quite understand, and that made it all the sweeter. I’d seen something of a promise in his dark brown eyes, a promise that he could help me learn who I truly was. I’d seen such a flash before, in Tom’s eyes, but it had only ever been so momentary that I hadn’t really been able to trust what I thought I saw, but Lord Rime was different. When he had touched my arm, he had fixed me with his eyes and there was no doubt that his body wanted mine.

  I wanted to go home so badly, but there was another thought thought starting to emerge. What if something had brought me here for a reason? I chastised my own arrogance. What could I, a teenage girl from another world, really do to save a whole people? This was nothing other than my own ego manifesting inside of my fantasy. A saviour complex gone wild. Tom had warned me about this in my other life. We had laughed because, as I pointed out, it wasn’t me who was volunteering at the animal shelter, trying to save all the poor abandoned animals that nobody wanted. We’d agreed that our desire to save people was a disease we both shared, and which was why we loved each other.

  And we did love each other – but how did that work alongside this strange new feeling Lord Rime had stirred in me? Or the way Tom had kissed and touched me in all those dreams before. Despite my pain, and the cold of the room, my blood was running through my veins like warm treacle causing the already fragile sense of reality to slip even more. I was caught in the middle of a storm of emotions. I reached out and pressed my hand to the cool, thin glass that separated me from the outside world. The snow had softened everything, turning the land a virgin white, and causing the trees to look like intricately woven bleached bones. The flat heavy sky bled gradients of ochre, violet and pale blue, and even from behind the glass, I knew the world was silent.

  I watched as a small party of men trudged out across the snow towards the nearby hills, where I guessed they’d hope they’d find some remaining sheep stock. Although the hills were only about a twenty-minute walk away on a good day, it was going to take them hours at the rate they were travelling. With each step they took, their leg plunged into snow up to their knee. The sledge behind them, which carried just two small bales of hay, hardly enough to feed a flock of sheep for a couple of days, not alone sustain them through several more weeks of bad weather, followed behind them.

  Tears fell down my cheeks at the sight of them. It was all so pointless. Everything was going to die.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MAGIC

  A knock at the door caused me to take control of my emotions and I offered a feeble, “Come in?” as I hurried as fast as I could to the bed.

  I really need to get out of the shirt, which I guessed belonged to Lord Rime, as it was doing little for either my body warmth or my dignity. I watched as a tall thin grey haired man came in. He was wearing a well-worn black velvet suit with elaborate silver thread embroidery. At one time, it would have been a sign of wealth and status, but now, like everything else in the Kingdom, it told its own story of decay.

  “My lady,” he said by way of introduction.

  “May. Please, call me May. All this ‘my lady’ business is just weird.”

  He smiled and tugged at his white moustache. “May.” He smiled. “I’m Doctor Yaratias. Physician to both Lord Rime and The King himself.

  That pricked my attention. The King’s physician must know him more than anybody else in the world. Surely he had an idea what might be done to make the King happy.

  “I’m in good hands then,” I said, unable to hide the anxiety in my voice.

  “That you are, May. Now, let’s take a look at you. Lord Rime said that you’d had a nasty run in with a monster in the woods. Can you remember what happened?”

  I recounted what I could remember of the surreal incident, although it wasn’t a lot. As I told him what I knew, he began his head to toe assessment of my wounds and injuries.”

  “And where does it hurt the most?” he asked.

  I lifted my wrist, for him to inspect the place where the strange creature had bitten me. “Here. It’s hot, and I’m worried that it might have the beginnings of an infection.”

  Doctor Yaratias paused and looked at me hard. “An infection?” he asked. “You are a physician? A witch?”

  “No,” I blushed, suddenly feeling like I’d committed some terrible social faux pas. “It’s just, I’m studying biology at college and, well… I’ve had infections before. When I was little, I had a splinter that got infected and…”

  As I rambled on, he unravelled the bandage and started nodding. “Yes, May, you are quite right, it is indeed the beginnings of an infection. Lucky that I called in this morning rather than later – this looks like it could turn nasty quite quickly.”

  He dropped my hand back onto the sheet and turned to his bag, which he had left on the table by the window.

  “I have just the thing,” he said, returning with a small bottle of clear liquid.

  “Antibiotics?” I asked, half-seriously.

  He shook away my word as if I had just spoken complete twaddle. “Unicorn tears,” he said uncorking the bottle.

  Although I tried, I couldn’t help the laugh escape my lips. “Unicorn tears!” I asked disbelievingly.

  “Why, yes – that’s the standard application for infection. I would have thought that with your obvious medical knowledge, you would have known that,” he said tersely.

  “Unicorns?”

  “Yes. From the one in the King’s own private zoo, to be precise. One of the only creatures that has survived.”

  “Oh,” I said, fixing a serious look on my face. Maybe Unicorns weren’t that far-fetched in the relative scheme of things.

  Doctor Yaratias poured some of the tears onto a cotton pad and pressed it to the bite on my arm. The red, itchy pain was replaced with a cool and soothing sensation. It was instant relief. Whatever it truly was, it worked. He continued pressing the cotton pad to the wound for several minutes and when he removed it, all trace of the bite had gone.

  I gasped. “It’s gone!”

  “Well of course it’s gone. What did you expect?”

  “Not that,” I muttered.

  “Right. So how about we take a look at that smashed up knee of yours.”

  Half an hour later, all my wounds were healed and I felt better than I ever had. We had conducted the rest of my treatment in almost silence, which was mainly due to me being in a state of shock. Wherever this place was, true magic existed. As Doctor Yaratias was packing away the last of his potions and equipment, I asked,

  “If you are able to do such magic, why can’t you cure the King?”

  He glanced back at me over his shoulder but then continued to diligently pack away his bag. “There are some wound that cannot be healed so easily. You know this more than most, May. I know you are grieving, too.”

  I closed my eyes against his words. “How did you know that?”

  “When I listened to your heart, I could hear it. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry I can’t fix that, too. It’s the same with Robbie – I mean, Lord Rime. It’s the same with the King.”

  “They say that time heals. Do y
ou think that is true, Doctor Yaratias?”

  He clipped his bag and turned back to me. “I think it helps. I think it fades the pain to a dull ache, but no,” he shook his head sadly. “I don’t think you ever heal from the loss of someone you truly love. It redefines our future selves, it helps us evolve, and it helps us appreciate the sanctity of the life we still have left in our bones – but no, we don’t heal. And even if time did heal, that’s something we don’t have. A few more months of snow and even the emergency food stores will be empty.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ve thought long and hard about it May. I’ve thought about whether it is better to somehow speed up the inevitable, to offer a painless way to die, without all the suffering that is just around the corner – I could do it; there’s ways of poisoning the water system, of creating a plague that will spread swiftly through the villages, but –a”

  “—you just can’t do it?” I said, knowing in the short space of our time together that Doctor Yaratias was a good man in a bad place.

  “I wish I could. I wish I were strong enough – but I’ve already done things that I already regret, even though I know they were all with the very best of intentions.”

  Doctor Yaratias headed for the door but before he left, he hesitated and said, “I’m sorry, May. I really am. I don’t know if that will be of any consolation in the time to come, but it’s a truth.”

  With that, the door closed behind him and I was left completely bewildered by his strange parting. What was he apologising for? Did he know that I wouldn’t get home and that I was destined to die here alongside everybody else? Was he sorry that he couldn’t save us? I threw back the covers and got out of bed, relishing the long stretches of my limbs. I felt so fit that I thought I might even be able to fly. I headed to the armchair in the corner of the room that made a sorry wardrobe for my tattered and torn clothes. The jeans were just about salvageable, especially being as ripped jeans were all the rage, but the jacket and my shirt had had it. Using one of the rips in my favourite bird shirt, I tore a couple of long strips and knotted them together so that they would tie around my waist, making a make-shift belt which would at least give Lord Rime’s shirt a little better fit.