TITLE: AMID THE WINTER SNOW
AUTHORS: Grace Draven, Thea Harrison,
Elizabeth Hunter, Jeffe Kennedy
PUB DATE: 2017
As the snows fall and hearths burn, four stories of Midwinter
beginnings prove that love can fight its way through the chillest night…
THE DARKEST MIDNIGHT, by Grace Draven
The mark Jahna
Ulfrida was born with has made her a target of the cruel and idle all her life.
During the long, crowded festivities of Deyalda, there’s nowhere to escape.
Until a handsome stranger promises to teach her to save herself…
THE CHOSEN, by Thea Harrison
In her visions, Lily
sees two men fighting for her tiny country’s allegiance: the wolf and the
tiger, each deadly, each cunning. One will bring Ys chaos and death, one a
gentler path—but she’s destined to love whichever she chooses. The midwinter
Masque is upon them, and the wolf is at her door…
THE STORM, by Elizabeth Hunter
When her soul mate
died in a massacre of the half-angelic Irin people, Renata thought she’d never
feel happiness again. She’s retreated to the snowy Dolomites to remember her
hurts—until determined, irrepressible Maxim arrives to insist on joy, too. And
before she can throw him out, they discover a secret the Irin have to know…
THE SNOWS OF WINDROVEN, by Jeffe Kennedy
As a blizzard
threatens their mountain keep, the new Queen Amelia of the Twelve Kingdoms and
her unofficial consort Ash face their own storm. Ash knows a scarred, jumpy
ex-convict isn’t the companion his queen needs. But when a surprise attack
confines them together in their isolated sanctuary, the feast of midwinter
might tempt even Ash into childlike hope…
The Snows of Windroven Excerpt:
“If there is some fire-breathing
dragon beneath Windroven, maybe we won’t need much wood for the
fireplaces—natural heat!” Ami cast me a brilliant smile from the back of her
horse. Probably hoping I’d be so dazzled by her playfulness, the mischief of
her joke, that I wouldn’t notice she was bent on cozening me into being happy
about going to Windroven. I’d agreed—I had no choice, as there would be no
winning this argument with her—but I wouldn’t give in and let her charm me.
This was a bad idea, and we all knew it.
I glanced back at
the men-at-arms following in our compact procession, though Lieutenant Graves
could no more change Ami’s mind than I could. Even the twins, with terrible
timing, were docile for once, providing no distraction from Ami’s determined
flirtation. I’d argued for a carriage for Ami and the toddlers to ride in for
the journey from Castle Avonlidgh to Windroven, but Ami had dug in her heels.
On that and everything else.
She might be my
lover, but as the newly crowned Queen of Avonlidgh, she outranked me.
Stella rode in
front of her mother in the saddle, the two of them wrapped in matching furred
cloaks against the winter’s chill—though the little girl kept pushing the hood
back impatiently—and Astar rode in front of me, doing his best to drive my
horse crazy by pulling at his mane by the fistful. During my time in Annfwn,
the magic-filled homeland of my late father, who’d been full Tala, I’d learned
a little mind-magic. As a part-blood I wasn’t capable of much, but I had enough
ability—I was strongest with animals—to keep a thread of soothing control on
the horse’s mind, despite Astar’s worst efforts.
If only my
internal beast could be so easily calmed. And if only I were better at steeling
myself against Ami’s gift for persuasion. In truth, she did dazzle me—simply by
existing—much as I worked to toughen my hide against her charms. When she put
real effort into it, I was a lost man. Redundant, as I was a lost man
regardless.
Lost and broken
beyond repair, even before Ami danced her way from my fantasies into passionate
reality.
The old tales warn
of the dangers of a man obtaining his heart’s desire, how his fantasy should
never come true lest he find his tragic fate in it. I’d thought I’d been
careful, that I’d reminded myself enough times that Ami could never truly be
mine, not for more than a brief while. But clearly my heart hadn’t absorbed the
lesson of those cautionary tales.
The story of my
fucked-up life—I seemed to be determined to take the hardest road despite all
warnings and good sense, every time.
“Glorianna
willing,” Ami continued doggedly, now pursing her rose-petal lips with sensuous
intent, and sidling her steed closer to mine, “a dragon resident could melt all
the snows and we’d have no winter at all! Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
I resolutely
looked away from her and her fierce beauty. Ami possesses Tala blood, too,
though the royal kind, and though she can’t shapeshift or perform sorcery, her
magic manifests in her inhuman loveliness. She burns brighter than the sun, and
if I allowed myself to fall into admiring her, my hapless brain tended to be
seared of all rational thought.
“Good!” Ami
chirped, an edge beneath the music. “I take it from your non-response that
you’re in total agreement with my plan. I’m so glad to hear it.”
The Three curse
it, now she’d cornered me. I couldn’t leave it there.
“Going to
Windroven is a terrible idea and you know it,” I replied, studying the road
ahead. We’d had fair travel thus far, but with all the strange monsters
appearing around the Thirteen Kingdoms, it paid to keep alert. “Adequate
firewood and snowfall will be the least of our worries.”
She waved that off
with a flick of her gloved fingers. “You only say that because you’ve never
witnessed a Mornai storm at Windroven. They’re spectacular. They blow in off
the ocean, full of sea moisture. When the cold winds of the Northern Wastes hit
them, the clouds turn heavy-bellied as a nine-months-pregnant woman—and just
like that poor woman, they dump out snow in a torrent of afterbirth, deeper
than a man can stand.”
I swallowed the
laugh that wanted to rise and gave her a stern look. She wasn’t going to draw
me out that way. “That’s disgusting—and crude.”
She blinked at me
in contrived innocence, that practiced flutter of rose-gold lashes over the
deep twilight blue of eyes the poets never seemed to tire of describing. “This
from the man who taught me every crude word I know.”
I sighed for the
truth of that. “I’m well aware that I created a monster. But you’re not
distracting me. There’s no reason we couldn’t have stayed at Castle Avonlidgh,
spent the Feast of Moranu there. The whole winter, even.”
“Ugh. I hate that
place. I’m glad to be free of its gloomy walls. I handled the governmental
minutiae and now court is on hiatus. Everyone is going home to spend the Feast
of Moranu with their families and that’s what I want, too. Andi is in Annfwn
and Ursula is still off in the Nahanaun Islands, helping Dafne free her own
dragon and whatever else all those letters are so carefully not saying. I might
as well be in my own home.”
“Castle Avonlidgh
is as much your home now as Windroven.”
“That’s just not
true.” Ami’s voice had gone serious, steel in it that so belied her frivolous
exterior. “I don’t expect you to understand, but from the first time Hugh
brought me to Windroven, I felt at home there. He would have wanted the twins
to winter at Windroven. It’s their family’s ancestral home and if all had been
as it should, they would have spent their infancy there, taken their first
steps on her stones, as all Avonlidgh’s heirs have.” Ami turned her smile on
Stella, stroking the toddler’s wild, dark curls. “Hugh might be gone, but I owe
it to his memory to raise his children as he would have, had he lived.”
