The Winterglass Crown: The Sunheart Fragments

Moonlight cut across the gallery floor in pale ribbons, each one falling between the tall lancet windows like the teeth of a broken comb. Sera woke to the particular silence of the Solhart palace at the fourth watch, the hour when even the torches in the corridors burned low and the stones themselves seemed to hold their breath. She had grown accustomed, in the three moons since her summons from the northern exile, to waking at odd hours. The palace never quite slept. Its walls remembered too much.

She lay still beneath the coverlet, listening. The brazier in her chamber had burned down to a dull orange, and the air carried the dry mineral scent of old stone and the faint sweetness of beeswax candles left burning in the corridor beyond. Somewhere distant, a door clicked shut. Footsteps, perhaps. Or nothing. In this palace, every shadow moved twice.

Sera rose and drew on the wool overdress she had taken to wearing over her nightshift, the one embroidered at the cuffs with the pale blue thread that marked the Coldspring line. The fabric was rough against her fingers, familiar in a way the silk of her court garments never was. She did not light a candle. The moonlight was enough, and she had learned that darkness in unfamiliar places could unmake a person if they stared too long into it.

The gallery stretched along the eastern wing of the palace, a corridor of portraits and reliquaries that the house steward had called the Hall of Crowns. Sera had walked it twice in daylight and once by the light of a single tallow taper, and she had not yet decided which version she trusted less. The portraits watched from their gilded frames with the particular stillness of people who knew they would outlast the viewers. Some of them, she suspected, actually did.

She had not intended to come here. Her feet had carried her down the stairs from the Coldspring quarters and along the colonnade because she could not bear the four walls of her room and the way they leaned inward whenever she tried to think. The gallery, at least, offered distance. Its long perspective gave the eye somewhere to travel.

She rounded the corner near the alcove of the third Solhart king and saw him.

Prince Aedric Solhart stood barefoot on the cold marble, his nightshirt unlaced at the throat, his hair loose and disordered across his shoulders. He did not move as a waking man moves. He did not shift his weight or turn his head or show any awareness that the gallery existed at all. He stood with his right arm extended before him, the palm turned upward, the fingers slightly curled, as though he were about to receive something from the air itself. Or offer something to it.

Sera stopped where she was, one hand against the stone jamb of the archway. Her breath caught in the back of her throat. She knew what sleepwalking looked like. She had seen it once in her childhood, in the long northern house where the Coldspring heirs had been raised by a succession of aunts and cousins who did not always trouble to lock the doors at night. A kitchen boy had walked out into a snowbank in his shirtsleeves and been found at dawn standing in the drift with his arms outstretched, his lips blue, his eyes open to nothing. He had not survived the morning.

But this was different. The prince was not cold. He was not lost in the instinctive wandering of a mind adrift between sleeps. He was fixed. He was certain. He stood before the great portrait at the gallery's eastern end with the absolute concentration of a man who believes he is standing in the presence of something holy.

Sera moved closer, careful to keep her own steps quiet on the stone. The moonlight fell full upon the portrait now, and she saw what he was reaching toward.

It was a disc. Or rather, it had been a disc. The painting showed a golden roundel suspended against a field of deep ochre, and the disc was broken. Three clean fractures divided it into wedges, and the wedges themselves were cracked again, so that the whole shape gave the impression of something once whole that had been shattered by a careful and deliberate hand. The gold of the paint caught the moonlight and seemed almost to glow from within, a warm and living color that had no business being present in a portrait that must have been three centuries old. Around the broken disc, the painter had rendered a corona of rays, each one rendered in a different shade of yellow and amber and pale rose, so that the whole image pulsed with a kind of brittle radiance.

Sera had walked past this portrait in daylight. She had not stopped. She had not known it was anything more than another piece of royal iconography, another emblem of a house that had always been careful with its symbols.

"Sunheart," Aedric said.

The word came out of him in a voice she did not recognize. It was his voice, the same voice that had addressed her across the formal dinners of the previous week with its careful royal cadence, but it had been stripped of its cadence. It had been stripped of its formality and its caution. What remained was something younger, something unguarded, something that sounded as though it had been spoken from the bottom of a well.

"I see it, Aedric," he said to the portrait. "I see what they did."

Sera pressed her back against the stone. She did not want him to know she was there. Not yet. There was something in the quality of his voice that told her this was not a moment meant for interruption. This was a moment meant for witnessing.

He took a step closer to the portrait. His bare feet made no sound on the marble, and Sera realized, with a small cold jolt, that his feet were pale and bluish at the toes. He had been out of bed for some time. The gallery was not warm. The eastern wing, in the small hours, held the chill of the stone walls as though the building itself were exhaling.

"They told me it was whole," he said. His voice had taken on a kind of tender anger, the anger of a child being shown a thing he had been told did not exist. "They told me the Sunheart had never been broken. They told me it was safe in the deep vault under the temple. They told me." He repeated the phrase as though the repetition might flay the falsehood out of it. "They told me. They told me."

His outstretched hand trembled. The moonlight fell across his fingers and made them look almost translucent, the bones visible beneath the skin in a way that reminded Sera of the ice flowers that formed on the inside of the northern windows in deep winter, those delicate crystalline growths that vanished if you breathed on them.

"Three pieces," he murmured. "Three pieces. One for the crown. One for the consort. One for the heir. That is what they said. That is what the compact was. Three pieces. Three seals. Three winters kept safe by the broken covenant." He shook his head slowly, and his hair moved across his shoulders like dark water. "But they have lost one. They have lost the third piece. I can feel it. I can feel where it is not."

Sera did not move. Her lungs ached with the held breath, but she did not move. She had been raised by women who believed that to interrupt a vision was to shatter it, and to shatter it was to bring ruin upon the one who saw it and the one who broke it. The Coldsprings had not survived three generations of exile by being careless with the unseen world. They had survived by watching.

The prince's voice dropped to a whisper. "Mother knows. She has always known. She has kept me in the tower so I would not see. She has kept me in the tower so I would not feel where the missing Sunheart is."

He turned his head then, slowly, as though drawn by some sound too faint for Sera's ears. His eyes moved across the gallery, passing over the dark shapes of the other portraits, passing over the alcoves where the reliquaries stood like sleeping figures in their robes of dust, passing over the arches and the pillars and the places where the moonlight did not reach. They did not stop on her. She was certain they did not stop on her.

And yet, when he spoke again, she felt the words settle against her skin like the first frost of a season that had not yet decided to arrive.

"Coldspring girl," he said. "Are you there?"

Sera's heart struck once against her ribs, hard enough that she felt it in her teeth. She did not answer immediately. She had been taught, by the women of the northern house, that to answer a sleeper was to bind oneself to whatever truth the sleeper was living in. The bargain was not one to enter lightly.

But he was not looking at her. His eyes had drifted past her, and they had taken on that particular blank sheen of a man whose gaze is turned inward. He was speaking to someone who was not in the gallery. Or to someone who was in the gallery but could not be seen by anyone who had not been raised among the old covenants.

"I can smell the cold on you," he murmured. "Even here. Even in this house of perpetual summer, I can smell the cold."

Sera had not realized until that moment that the gallery was warm. It was warm in a way that the rest of the palace had not been. The eastern wing, which had felt chilled when she first entered, now felt close and airless, the warmth of a room that had been sealed too long against the outside. The braziers along the gallery walls, which had been banked for the night, glowed with a low and steady amber that could not have come from embers. The air carried a faint sweetness that was not beeswax and not incense and not any scent she had ever been taught a name for.

She thought of the painted Sunheart in its broken frame. She thought of the three wedges of gold divided into three again. She thought of the third piece that the prince had said was missing, and of the cold that she had been told she carried in her blood, the cold of the winterglass covenant that no one in the south had been willing to name aloud.

She took one step out of the archway. The marble was warm beneath her bare feet.

"Aedric," she said, and she kept her voice low, and she kept it even, and she made sure that it carried no more force than a single drop of water falling into a still cup. "Aedric. I am here. Come back."

He did not move. His hand remained outstretched. The portrait of the broken Sunheart continued to glow with its own light, the warm gold pulsing faintly against the dark wood of its frame.

Sera took another step. And another. She did not reach for him. She knew better than to touch a sleeper in the middle of a vision. She knew, because the women of the northern house had told her, and because the women of the northern house had always been right about such things, that the hand of a waking person laid upon a sleeping one could drag the sleeper back too quickly, and the cost of that dragging was never paid by the one who did the dragging.

So she stood beside him instead. She stood close enough that the warmth of his body, the thin heat of a young man in a thin shirt on a warm night, reached her through the sleeve of her overdress. She did not look at the portrait. She looked at him.

His face, in the moonlight and the strange amber glow, was younger than she had ever seen it. The royal composure that he wore like a coat of mail in the daylight hours had fallen away entirely, and what remained was the face of a boy who had been trained for a throne since before he could remember his own name. There was a small scar at the corner of his left eyebrow that she had never noticed before. There was a faint darkening beneath his eyes that spoke of sleep that had not come easily, night after night, for longer than the three moons of her own residence in the palace.

"You are not well," she said softly. "You have been walking in your sleep. You will take cold."

He did not answer. His lips moved, but the words were too quiet for her to hear. They might have been a prayer. They might have been a complaint. They might have been the first words of a language that had been forbidden in the south for three hundred years.

Sera thought of the northern house. She thought of the long rooms with their low ceilings and their windows that frosted over from the inside in the deep of winter. She thought of the aunts who had taught her, one by one, the names of the winds and the names of the cold and the names of the things that lived in the cold and were not always willing to be named in return. She thought of the compact that her mother had signed, the night before Sera had been sent south, in blood and in salt and in the particular ink that was made from the lichen that grew only on the north side of the standing stones.

The compact had said that the last heir of Coldspring would be sent to the house of Solhart when the third piece of the Sunheart was lost. It had said that the last heir would know the place where the third piece lay hidden, because the Coldsprings had been the keepers of that piece since the day the disc had been shattered.

The compact had not said what would happen if the last heir fell in love with the prince who was reaching, even in his sleep, for the portrait of the thing that had been broken to keep her family's cold from consuming the world.

Sera reached out, very slowly, and laid her hand upon the prince's wrist. She did not grip. She did not pull. She laid her hand there as one might lay a hand upon a sleeping child's brow, and she let the warmth of her own skin meet the warmth of his, and she let the cold that she carried in her blood, the cold that she had been told was a covenant and a burden and a birthright, rise through her palm and into his flesh.

The amber glow of the braziers dimmed. The moonlight in the gallery seemed to sharpen, each ribbon of it more distinct, more silver, more real. The painted Sunheart ceased its pulsing and became what it had always been: paint on linen, gold leaf on gesso, the work of a hand that had been dead for centuries.

Aedric drew a long breath. His eyes cleared. He blinked. He looked down at Sera's hand upon his wrist, and then he looked up at her face, and she saw the precise moment when the prince returned to the body of the prince and the boy who had been speaking to a broken golden disc retreated into whatever place such boys retreated to when they were forced back into the waking world.

"Coldspring," he said. His voice had its royal cadence again. It was smooth. It was clear. It was very slightly unsteady at the edges. "You should not be here."

"I know," she said. "And yet here I am."

His hand closed around hers. Not tightly. Not with intent. With the slow uncertain grip of a man who had woken in an unfamiliar place and was grateful for the first solid thing his fingers had found. His palm was cold. His fingers were colder. Whatever warmth the gallery had held, he had not been part of it.

"The Sunheart," he said. "You saw it."

"I saw the painting," she said carefully. "I did not hear you name it until just now."

"You know what it is."

It was not a question. Sera did not answer it as though it were one. She kept her hand where it was, and she kept her eyes upon his, and she measured the distance between what she had been taught to say in such moments and what she had been told, by the women of the northern house, she would one day have to say.

"I know what it was," she said. "I know what it was broken into. And I know that you have been walking in your sleep for longer than this single night, my lord, and that you have been walking toward this particular wall for at least a week, because the servants have been finding the door to the gallery unlatched in the mornings even though they swear they latched it before they went to bed."

He looked at her. She saw, in the moonlight, the precise moment when he understood that she was not a guest in his house and not a ward of his mother and not a piece on the board that had been placed between two warring families to delay the opening of a game. She was the last heir of a line that had been entrusted, three centuries ago, with the keeping of a thing that could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

She saw, too, the precise moment when he understood that she knew he had been speaking in his sleep for longer than a week, and that he had been speaking, in those wanderings, of things that the south had forbidden to be spoken aloud.

"You should not have come south," he said quietly. "You should never have come south."

"My mother sent me," she said. "My mother, and the compact that she signed in blood the night before I left."

Something moved in his face. It might have been fear. It might have been recognition. It might have been the first stir of a feeling he had been trained, since birth, to suppress in the presence of anyone outside his own family.

Then he released her hand, and the gallery was only a gallery, and the moonlight was only moonlight, and the broken golden disc in its frame was only a painting that three centuries of palace visitors had passed without a second glance.

But Sera felt, against the skin of her palm where his fingers had been, a faint and fading warmth. And she knew, with the certainty that the Coldspring blood had carried in its veins for three hundred years, that the third piece of the Sunheart was no longer in the place where her family had hidden it on the day the disc had been broken.

It was here. In this palace. Under this roof. In the keeping of a prince who walked in his sleep and reached, even in his dreams, for the broken image of the thing he had been born to protect.

And he had just asked her, without knowing he had asked her, where it was.

Sera did not sleep.

She lay in her narrow bed beneath the high windows of the guest chamber and watched the moon traverse a long and silent arc across the unfamiliar southern sky. The warmth of Aedric's palm lingered against her skin like a brand that had been pressed there in another life. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the broken disc in its gilt frame, and the way his fingers had curled, even in his dreaming, around the shape of what had been taken from it.

She rose before the first bell.

The corridors of the palace were silver with the earliest light, the air still carrying the chill of the night. Her bare feet made no sound on the stone flags. She moved by memory now, the way she had learned to move through the frozen halls of Coldspring Keep as a child, when the wind off the northern icefields could carry a whisper for a mile. A single candle guttered in a wall sconce as she passed. The flame bowed toward her, then away, as though it could not decide whether she was friend or stranger.

She found Aedric in the small antechamber that connected the royal apartments to the older wing. He was already dressed, already armed with a look of careful, brittle composure, as though he had not slept at all, as though he had been waiting for her, as though he had known she would come. In his hand he held a cup of something that steamed.

"I could not sleep either," he said. "I thought perhaps you might come looking for answers."

"I need to see the archives," she answered.

His jaw tightened. A muscle worked beneath the skin of his cheek. She watched him swallow.

"The archives are sealed by the queen mother's order. No one enters without her seal. No one has entered in twenty years."

"Then we will need her seal," said Sera, "or we will need to be clever."

For a long moment he looked at her across the width of the antechamber. She saw the war in him, the duty he had been raised to honor, the curiosity he had been raised to suppress, the slow and terrible recognition that the two were no longer the same thing. He set down his cup. The saucer rattled against the wood of the side table, a tiny ceramic clatter that sounded enormous in the stillness.

"There is a passage," he said at last. "Behind the tapestry of the Second Solhart Victory. My grandfather used it to visit the kitchens when he was a boy. I do not believe anyone else knows of it."

"Then show me."

He led her through a series of corridors that grew narrower and older as they descended. The tapestries on the walls changed from hunting scenes to battle scenes to something older still, scenes of worship and offering, figures kneeling before a disc that blazed with unbroken light. Sera studied each one as they passed, memorizing.

The passage behind the Second Solhart Victory smelled of dust and old mortar and something faintly sweet, like dried lavender left too long in a drawer. She ran her fingers along the wall as they went, feeling the roughness of unfinished stone, the occasional slickness of ancient slime where moisture had found its way through. The air grew colder as they dropped below the level of the palace cellars, and her breath began to plume before her lips in pale, slow-moving clouds.

They emerged in a low corridor lined with iron-banded doors. Frost, Sera realized, was forming on the nearest door, crystalline and delicate, a tracery of ice flowers that bloomed and faded and bloomed again as she watched. High summer reigned above them. Down here, in the bones of the palace, winter had never lifted.

"You feel it," said Aedric quietly.

"I have felt it since I crossed the threshold of this palace," she said. "It has been calling to me since I came south. I thought it was the cold of my own exile

...I thought it was the cold of my own exile."

"You are not exiled now," Aedric said. His voice was careful, the way a man speaks when he is trying to hold something fragile. "You are here because my mother summoned you, and I would not have let her turn you away."

"Would you have stopped her?"

"I would have tried." He touched the nearest door with his fingertips. Ice bloomed outward from his hand and then receded, as if the door had tasted him and found him wanting. "It will not open for me. I tried, when I was a boy. Pell tried every key in the archives. Nothing has ever opened these doors since my great-grandmother's time."

Sera stepped closer. The frost on the iron thickened as she approached, spreading in slow, deliberate patterns, not the wild blooming of cold but something more like script, as if the metal were writing something in a language she could almost read. The door was cold enough to burn. She did not touch it.

"Where does this passage lead?" she asked.

"There are three doors," he said. "No one has opened them. Pell believes they were sealed during the Long Dusk, before the Solhart line took the throne. He believes the things inside were meant to stay inside."

"And what does he believe is inside?"

Aedric was quiet for a long moment. In the thin light of the passage, his face looked older than it had in the sunlit corridors above, the lines around his eyes deeper, his mouth set.

"He believes," Aedric said at last, "that the Sunheart was broken here."

The cold in the passage shifted, as if the air itself had leaned closer to listen. Sera felt it move along her skin, taste the winterglass in her blood, recognize what she carried.

"Broken," she repeated.

"Not shattered," he said. "Divided. The Sunheart was a single relic, he thinks, before the Long Dusk. A thing of warmth, of the old sun-deity who watched over this kingdom when it was only a valley of shepherds. When the Long Dusk came, when the winters grew long and the sun seemed to forget us, the keepers of the Sunheart broke it into pieces and hid them. One piece, he believes, is in the painted temple at the edge of the marsh. One piece is somewhere in the northern wastes, where the Coldspring line once held dominion. And one piece is behind one of these doors."

Sera looked at the frost on the nearest door. It had written itself into a shape now, a rough disc with rays radiating outward, the old symbol of unbroken sun. The symbol she had seen on the tapestries above, the one the kneeling figures had worshipped.

"And the winterglass," she said slowly. "What does the winterglass have to do with it?"

"Balance," said Aedric. "Pell says that when the Sunheart was whole, it held back the cold. When it was broken, the cold crept in. The Coldspring line was raised to be the keepers of that cold, so that it would not run unchecked. A covenant. Your family kept the winter in trust, and the Solhart line kept the sun. Until one of us forgot the arrangement."

She thought of the Coldspring manor in the north, the frost that never left the high windows, the long winters that had seemed to her in childhood the natural shape of the world. She had not known, then, that the cold she lived inside was a duty. She had not known she was a lock.

"Which door?" she asked.

He shook his head. "Pell could not tell. He believes the doors know who approaches. He believes they will open for the one who carries the matching piece."

Sera raised her hand. She did not decide to do it. Her hand rose as if the cold in her blood had reached up through her arm and taken hold of her fingers. She pressed her palm flat against the frozen iron.

The cold went through her like a bell struck, a single clear note that rang in her teeth, in her ribs, in the marrow of her bones. She heard Aedric cry out, heard him try to pull her back, and she felt his hands on her shoulders and could not feel them at all. The winterglass in her was singing.

The door opened.

Behind it was not a room but a kind of hollow, a space cut into the living rock of the hill on which the palace had been raised. The air inside was so cold that her breath fell from her lips in slow, heavy crystals that tinkled faintly when they struck the floor. Light came from nowhere and everywhere, a pale bluish glow that had no source she could find.

In the center of the hollow, on a plinth of black stone, rested a single fragment. It was no larger than her two hands cupped together. It was shaped like a shard of a broken disc, and even in that sourceless light it seemed to glow with a warmth that was almost painful after the long cold of the passage. It was the color of molten gold held just below the point of burning.

Sera did not move toward it. She stood in the doorway and let her eyes adjust, and she felt the thing on the plinth feel her in return. It knew her. It knew the winterglass in her blood and recoiled from it, and yet it reached for her, too, as if it could not decide whether she was kin or enemy.

"Aedric," she said. Her voice came out strange, layered, as if she were speaking and someone were speaking with her. "Do you see it?"

"I see it," he said from behind her. He had not crossed the threshold. He stood with one hand on the doorframe, and she saw that his fingers had left prints of melting frost on the iron. He was shivering, though he tried to hide it. "Sera. Do not touch it."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were thinking of it."

She was. The fragment called to something in her that was not the winterglass, something older and warmer that the Coldspring line had been raised to suppress. She had felt it once before, in the north, on the rare summer afternoons when the sun had seemed close enough to touch. She had felt it and turned away from it because her aunt had taught her that warmth was a kind of weakness.

"Pell was wrong," she said slowly. "About the doors knowing who approaches. This door did not open for me because I carry a piece of the Sunheart. It opened for me because I carry the cold that was meant to guard it."

"That is the same thing," Aedric said. "The covenant makes you both."

She looked at him over her shoulder. In the pale light of the hollow his face was all angles and shadows, and she thought, not for the first time, that he had been raised for a kind of kingship that asked him to be precise in places where precision was a kind of cruelty. He had been taught to weigh her. He had been taught to weigh everything.

"Step back," she said. "Please."

"Sera."

"Step back, Aedric."

He stepped back. She felt him withdraw from the doorway, felt the warmth of him retreat, and the cold in the hollow pressed in around her like a held breath.

She entered.

The floor of the hollow was smooth as glass beneath her boots, and each step left a print of white frost that lingered for a moment and then faded. She crossed the space slowly, counting her breaths, listening to the thin, crystalline music of the air. The fragment on the plinth grew brighter as she approached, and the cold in her grew heavier, as if the two were balancing on a scale.

When she was close enough to touch it, she stopped. The fragment hummed against her palms like a struck tuning fork, a single sustained note that seemed to be searching for harmony in her bones. She understood, then, what Pell had not understood. The Sunheart had not been broken into three equal pieces. It had been broken into one great warmth and many small safeguards, and the safeguards had been given to the northern line because the northern line could be trusted to live among the cold without breaking.

Her family had not been keepers of the cold. They had been keepers of the keeping.

"I cannot take it," she said, mostly to herself. "Not yet."

"Why?"

"Because if I take it now, before I understand what it wants, I will only break it again." She drew her hand back. The fragment dimmed, but it did not go dark. It watched her, the way all the things in the hollow watched her, with patience that had outlasted dynasties.

She turned and walked back to the doorway. Aedric stood waiting, and when she emerged he caught her elbow to steady her, because her legs were trembling and she had not noticed. The cold of the passage was warm after the hollow. The iron door swung shut behind her without a sound, and the frost on its surface rearranged itself into a different pattern, a single closed eye.

"We must speak to Pell," she said. "Tonight."

"He will already be awake," Aedric said. "He rarely sleeps when there is something to remember."

"Then we will not waste his worry." She looked at the closed door, at the eye that had been drawn into the frost, and she thought of the painted Sunheart in the marsh, and of the piece that waited somewhere in the northern wastes where she had been raised. "There are three pieces. There are three of us who must carry them. And we must decide, before the Long Dusk comes again, whether we are going to put the sun back together or learn to live in the dark."

She did not yet know what she would choose. But she knew, as Aedric led her back up through the narrow passages toward the lamps of the palace, that the choosing had already begun, and that whatever warmth or cold she carried in her blood, she would have to carry it into the open.

The painted eye on the door watched her go, and did not close.